“I thought it might be that Kiffyn Verney — the uncle fellow — Honourable Kiffyn Verney — dis-honourable, I call him — that old dog, sir, he’s no better than a cheat — and I’d be glad of an opportunity to tell him so to his face, sir — you have no idea, sir, how he has behaved to me!”
“He has the character of being a very honourable, sir — I’m sorry you think so differently,” said honest Tom Sedley, who always stood up for his friends, and their kindred— “and Cleve, I’ve known from my childhood, and I assure you, sir, a franker or more generous fellow I don’t suppose there is on earth.”
“I know nothing about the jackanape, except that he’s nephew of his roguish uncle,” said the florid old gentleman with the short high nose and double chin. “He wants to take up Llanderis, and he shan’t have it. He’s under covenant to renew the lease, and the devil of it is, that between me and Wynne Williams we have put the lease astray — and I can’t find it — nor he either — but it will turn up — I don’t care twopence about it — but no one shall humbug me — I won’t be gammoned, sir, by all the Verneys in England. Stuff — sir!”
Then the conversation took a happier turn. The weather was sometimes a little squally with the Admiral — but not often — genial and boisterous — on the whole sunny and tolerably serene — and though he sometimes threatened high and swore at his servants, they knew it did not mean a great deal, and liked him.
People who lived all the year round in Cardyllian, which from November to May, every year, is a solitude, fall into those odd ways and little self-indulgences which gradually metamorphose men of the world into humorists and grotesques. Given a sparse population, and difficult intercommunication, which in effect constitute solitude, and you have the conditions of barbarism. Thus it was that Vane Etherage had grown uncouth to a degree that excited the amazement of old contemporaries who happened, from time to time, to look in upon his invalided retirement at Cardyllian.
The ladies and Tom Sedley, in the drawingroom, talked very merrily at tea, while old Vane Etherage, in his study, with the door between the rooms wide open, amused himself with a nautical volume and his terrestrial globe.
“So,” said Miss Agnes, “you admired the Malory young lady — Margaret, our maid says, she is called — very much to-day?”
“I did, by Jove. Didn’t you?” said Tom, well pleased to return to the subject.
“Yes,” said Agnes, looking down at her spoon— “Yes, I admired her; that is, her features are very regular; she’s what I call extremely handsome; but there are prettier girls.”
“Here do you mean?”
“Yes — here.”
“And who are they?”
“Well, I don’t say here now; but I do think those Miss Dartmores, for instance, who were here last year, and who used to wear those blue dresses, were decidedly prettier. The heroine of Malory, whom you have fallen in love with, seems to me to want animation.”
“Why, she couldn’t show a great deal of animation over the Litany,” said Tom.
“I did not see her then; I happened to be praying myself during the Litany,” said Miss Agnes, recollecting herself.
“It’s more than I was,” said Tom.
“You ought not to talk that way, Mr. Sedley. It isn’t nice. I wonder you can,” said Miss Charity.
“I would not say it, of course, to strangers,” said Tom. “But then, I’m so intimate here — and it’s really true, that is, I mean, it was to-day.”
“I wonder what you go to church for,” said Miss Charity.
“Well, of course, you know, it’s to pray; but I look at the bonnets a little, also; every fellow does. By Jove, if they’d only say truth, I’m certain the clergymen peep — I often saw them. There’s that little fellow, the Rev. Richard Pritchard, the curate, you know — I’d swear I’ve seen that fellow watching you, Agnes, through the chink in the reading-desk door, while the sermon was going on; and I venture to say he did not hear a word of it.”
“You ought to tell the rector, if you really saw that,” said Miss Charity, severely.
“Pray do no such thing,” entreated Agnes; “a pleasant situation for me!”
“Certainly, if Mr. Pritchard behaves himself as you describe,” said Miss Charity; “but I’ve been for hours shut up in the same room with him — sometimes here, and sometimes at the school — about the children, and the widows’ fund, and the parish charities, and I never observed the slightest levity; but you are joking, I’m sure.”
“I’m not, upon my honour. I don’t say it’s the least harm. I don’t see how he can help it; I know if I were up in the air — in a reading-desk, with a good chink in the door, where I thought no one could see me, and old Doctor Splayfoot preaching his pet sermon over my head — wouldn’t I peep? — that’s all.”
“Well, I really think, if he makes a habit of it, I ought to speak to Doctor Splayfoot. I think it’s my duty,” said Miss Charity, sitting up very stiffly, as she did when she spoke of duty; and when once the notion of a special duty got into her head, her inflexibility, as Tom Sedley and her sister Agnes knew, was terrifying.
“For mercy’s sake, my dear Charry, do think of me! If you tell Doctor Splayfoot he’ll be certain to tell it all to Wynne Williams and Doctor Lyster, and Price Apjohn, and every creature in Cardyllian will know everything about it, and a great deal more, before two hours; and once for all, if that ridiculous story is set afloat, into the church door I’ll never set my foot again.”
Miss Agnes’ pretty face had flushed crimson, and her lip quivered with distress.
“How can you be such a fool, Aggie! I’ll only say it was at our seat — and no one can possibly tell which it was at — you or me; and I’ll certainly tell Dr. Splayfoot that Mr. Sedley saw it.”
“And I’ll tell the Doctor,” said Sedley, who enjoyed the debate immensely, “that I neither saw nor said any such thing.”
“I don’t think, Thomas Sedley, you’d do anything so excessively wicked!” exclaimed Miss Charity, a little fiercely.
“Try me,” said Tom, with an exulting little laugh.
“Every gentleman tells the truth,” thrust she.
“Except where it makes mischief,” parried Tom, with doubtful morality and another mischievous laugh.
“Well, I suppose I had better say nothing of Christianity. But what you do is your own affair! my duty I’ll perform. I shall think it over; and I shan’t be ruffled by any folly intended to annoy me.” Miss Charity’s thin brown cheeks had flushed to a sort of madder crimson. Excepting these flashes of irritability, I can’t charge her with many human weaknesses. “I’ll not say who he looked at — I’ve promised that; but unless I change my present opinion, Dr. Splayfoot shall hear the whole thing tomorrow. I think in a clergyman any such conduct in church is unpardonable. The effect on other people is positively ruinous. You, for instance, would not have talked about such things in the light you do, if you had not been encouraged in it, by seeing a clergyman conducting himself so.”
“Mind, you’ve promised poor little Agnes, you’ll not bring her into the business, no matter what I do,” said Sedley.
“I have, certainly.”
“Well, I’ll stay in Cardyllian tomorrow, and I’ll see Doctor Splayfoot.” Sedley was buttoning his coat and pulling on his gloves, with a wicked smile on his goodhumoured face. “And I’ll tell him that you think the curate ogles you through a hole in the reading-desk. That you like him, and he’s very much gone about you; and that you wish the affair brought to a point; and that you’re going to appeal to him — Doctor Splayfoot — to use his authority either to affect that, or to stop the ogling. I will, upon my honour!”
“And I shall speak to papa to prevent it,” said Miss Charity, who was fierce and literal.
“And that will bring about a duel, and he’ll be shot in his Bath chair, and I shall be hanged” — old Vane Etherage, with his spectacles on, was plodding away serenely at the little table by the fire, over his Naval Chronicle— “and
Pritchard will be deprived of his curacy, and you’ll go mad, and Agnes will drown herself like Ophelia, and a nice little tragedy you’ll have brought about. Good night; I’ll not disturb him” — he glanced toward the unconscious Admiral— “I’ll see you both tomorrow, after I’ve spoken to the Rector.” He kissed his hand, and was gone.
* * *
CHAPTER VI.
MALORY BY MOONLIGHT.
When Tom Sedley stepped out from the glass door on the gravel walk, among the autumn flowers and the evergreens in the pleasant moonlight, it was just nine o’clock, for in that primitive town and vicinage people keep still wonderfully early hours.
It is a dark and lonely walk, down the steep Hazelden Road, by the side of the wooded glen, from whose depths faintly rises the noise of the mill-stream. The path leads you down the side of the glen, with dense forest above and below you; the rocky steep ascending at the left hand, the wooded precipice descending into utter darkness at your right, and beyond that, rising black against the sky, the distant side of the wooded ravine. Cheery it was to emerge from the close overhanging trees, and the comparative darkness, upon the high road to Cardyllian, which follows the sweep of the estuary to the high street of the town, already quiet as at midnight.
The moon shone so broad and bright, the landscape looked so strange, and the air was so frosty and pleasant, that Tom Sedley could not resist the temptation to take a little walk which led him over the Green, and up the steep path overhanging the sea, from which you command so fine a view of the hills and headlands of the opposite side, and among other features of the landscape, of Malory, lying softly in its dark and misty woodlands.
Moonlight, distance, and the hour, aided the romance of my friend Tom Sedley, who stood in the still air and sighed toward that antique house.
With arms folded, his walking-cane grasped in his right hand, and passed, sword-fashion, under his left arm, I know not what martial and chivalric aspirations concerning death and combat rose in his goodnatured heart, for in some temperaments the sentiment of love is mysteriously associated with the combative, and our homage to the gentler sex connects itself magnanimously with images of wholesale assault and battery upon the other. Perhaps if he could have sung, a stave or two might have relieved his mind; or even had he been eloquent in the language of sentiment. But his vocabulary, unhappily, was limited, and remarkably prosaic, and not even having an appropriate stanza by rote, he was fain to betake himself to a cigar, smoking which he at his leisure walked down the hill toward Malory.
Halfway down, he seated himself upon the dwarf wall, at the roadside, and by the ivied stem of a huge old tree, smoked at his ease, and sighed now and then.
“I can’t understand it — it is like some confounded witchcraft,” said he. “I can’t get her out of my head.”
I dare say it was about the same time that his friend Cleve Verney was performing, though not with so sublime an enthusiasm, his romantic devotions in the same direction, across the water from Ware.
As he stood and gazed, he thought he saw a figure standing near the water’s edge on the shingle that makes a long curve in front of Malory.
If a living figure, it was very still. It looked gray, nearly white, in the moonlight. Was there an upright shaft of stone there, or a post to moor the boats by? He could not remember.
He walked slowly down the road. “By Jove! I think it’s moving,” he said aloud, pulling up all at once and lowering his cigar. “No, it isn’t moving, but it did move, I think — yes, it has changed its ground a little — hasn’t it? Or is it only my stand-point that’s changed?”
He was a good deal nearer now, and it did look much more like a human figure — tall and slight, with a thin gray cloak on — but he could not yet be quite certain. Was there not a resemblance in the proportions — tall and slight? The uncertainty was growing intense; there was a delightful confusion of conjecture. Tom Sedley dropped his cigar, and hastened forward with an instinctive stealthiness in his eagerness to arrive before this figure — if such it were — should be scared away by his approach.
He was now under the shadow of the tall trees that overhang the outer wall of Malory, and cast their shadows some way down upon the sloping shore, near the edge of which a tall female figure was undoubtedly standing, with her feet almost touching the ripple of the water, and looking steadfastly in the direction of the dim headland of Pendillion, which at the far side guards the entrance of the estuary.
In the wall of Malory, at some three hundred yards away from the gate, is a small door, a little sally-port that opens a nearly direct access from the house to the rude jetty where the boats are sometimes moored. This little door stood now wide open, and through it the figure had of course emerged.
Tom Sedley now for the first time began to feel a little embarrassed. The general privacy of the place, the fact that the jetty, and in point of law the strand itself, here, belonged to Malory, from which the private door which still stood open, showed that the lady had emerged — all these considerations made him feel as if he were guilty of an impertinence, and very nearly of a trespass.
The lady stood quite still, looking across the water. Tom Sedley was upon the road that skirts the wall of Malory, in the shadow of the great trees. It would not have done to walk straight across the shingle to the spot where the lady stood, neither could he place himself so as to intercept her return to the doorway, directly so, as a less obvious stratagem, he made a detour, and sauntering along the water’s edge like a man intent solely on the picturesque, with a beating heart he approached the female, who maintained her pose quite movelessly until he approached within a few steps.
Then she turned, suddenly, revealing an old and almost agonized face, that looked, in the intense moonlight, white, and fixed as if cut in stone. There is something ludicrous in the sort of shock which Tom Sedley experienced. He stood staring at the old lady with an expression which, if she had apprehended it, would not have flattered her feminine self-esteem, if any of that good quality remained to her.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the old woman, with a nervous eagerness, drawing near. “But pray, can you see a sail in that direction, a yawl, sir, they call it, just there?” — she pointed— “I fancied about two miles beyond that vessel that lies at anchor there? I can’t see it now, sir, can you?”
She had come so close that Sedley could see not only the deep furrows, but the finely etched wrinkles about the large eyes that gazed on him, and from him to the sea, with an imploring stare.
“There’s no sail, ma’am, between us and Pendillion,” said Sedley, having first raised his hat deferentially; for did not this strange old lady with her gray mantle drawn over her head, nevertheless, represent Malory, and was not Malory saddened and glorified by the presence of that beautiful being whom he had told himself a thousand times since morning service, he never, never could forget?
“Ha, ha! I thought I saw it, exactly, sir, in that direction; pray look more carefully, sir, my old eyes tire, and fail me.”
“No, ma’am, positively nothing there. How long ago is it since you first saw it?”
“Ten — twenty — minutes, it must be.”
“A yawl will run a good way in that time, ma’am,” said Tom with a little shake of his head, and a smile. “The yawl they had at Ware last year would make eight knots an hour in this breeze, light as it is. She might have been up to Bryll by this time, or down to Pendrewist, but there’s no sail, ma’am, either way.”
“Oh! sir, are you very sure?”
“Quite sure, ma’am. No sail in sight, except that brig just making the head of Pendillion, and that can’t be the sail you saw, for she wasn’t in sight twenty minutes since. There’s nothing more, ma’am, except boats at anchor.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the lady, still looking across the water, and with a deep sigh. “No, I suppose there’s none. It sometimes happens to me — fancy, I suppose, and long expectation, from my window, looking out. It’s a clear view, between the
trees, across the bay to Pendillion; my eyes tire, I think; and so I fancy I see it. Knowing, that is, feeling so very sure, it will come again. Another disappointment for a foolish old woman. I sometimes think it’s all a dream.” She had turned and was now stumbling over the large loose stones toward the door. “Foolish dreams — foolish head — foolish old head, yet, sir, it may be that which goes away may come back, all except life. I’ve been looking out that way,” and she turned and moved her hand towards the distant headlands. “You see nothing?”
“No sail, ma’am,” answered Tom.
“No, no sail,” she repeated to the shingle under her feet, as she picked her steps again homeward.
“A little longer — another wait; wait patiently. Oh! God, how slowly years and months go over!”
“May I see you to the door, ma’am?” asked Tom Sedley, prosaically. The old lady, thinking, I dare say, of other things, made him no answer — a silence which he accepted as permission, and walked on beside her, not knowing what to say next, and terribly anxious to hit upon something, and try to found an acquaintance. The open door supplied him.
“Charming place this Cardyllian, ma’am. I believe no one ever was robbed in it. They leave their doors open half the night, just like that.”
“Do they, indeed?” said she. I think she had forgotten her companion altogether in the interval. “I don’t remember. It’s fifteen years and upwards since I was there. I live here, at Malory.” She nodded, and raised her eyes to his face as she spoke.
Suddenly she stopped, and looked at him more earnestly in silence for some seconds, and then said she —
“Sir, will you forgive me? Are you related to the Verneys?”
“No, I haven’t that honour,” said he, smiling. “I know Cleve Verney very well, and a very good fellow he is; but we’re not connected; my name is Sedley — Thomas Sedley.”
“Sedley!” she repeated once or twice, still looking at him, “I recollect the name. No — no connection, I dare say, Cleve; and how is Cleve?”
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 340