Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated)

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  “It’s ‘ansom, sir, very,” acquiesced Clewson, solemnly.

  “‘Ansom! why, there’s not a dook but might be proud to lie in that, sir.”

  And so forth did they converse.

  Two of Mr. Clothey’s gentlemen remained at the inn at Raby, awaiting the orders of Mr. Pepys Adderly next morning. One of these gentlemen drank tea that evening obligingly with the servants at Raby, the other being entertained by old Mrs. Wyndle with the same beverage in the housekeeper’s room, and with a great collection of anecdotes of the late Sir Roke Wycherly’s boyhood, and two of the servants came over from the vicarage, and several neighbours also, who were brought up quietly by the back stairs, and had a peep at the handsome upholstery provided by the tasteful house of Clothey and Clamp, and also at the forlorn baronet simpering fixedly through the thick satin and eider-down in which he reposed.

  The next morning Sir Roke was gone. He set out in the grey of the dawn for the railway station, more than ten miles away. He was to make the journey up to London attended by Clewson, who was in charge of the luggage, and under the special care of the two gentlemen from Messrs. Clothey and Clamp, at whose establishment he was to pass the night on tressles, and thence in the morning to proceed to his destination in the dry and quiet vault where his grandfather and some contemporary kinsmen had been awaiting him for fifty years.

  Sir Roke being gone, and Mr. Clewson gone, the obliteration proceeds. Beds and bedding are removed, bedsteads are taken down and transported to other places. The curtains unhung, the carpets dragged off the floor. That one with the great black stain upon it goes I know not where, but the stain has gone through, and dyes the floor itself in a wide black blotch with a map-like outline, which will not wash out. Three different days has the charwoman been at work upon it with hot water, and sand, and soap; but when the floor dries the stain comes forth to witness, and won’t be put away or got rid of. And now these rooms are locked up. Mrs. Wyndle has the keys, and I suppose in course of time they will be haunted.

  No news of Carmel Sherlock. A reward for his apprehension had been offered. The newspapers reprinted the description of his person; the police were vigilant, the telegraph transmitted scraps of information, and sent people on vain quests. Twice already had wrong persons been arrested on suspicion, examined, remanded, and discharged.

  The winter was already heralding its march with gusts and storms, that roared through the tossing boughs of the forest, and began to strip the yellow leaves from their holdings, and scatter them impatiently over the sward. More wild and sombre grew the scene. Sometimes came a still and sunny day — a saddened remembrance of summer — throwing a melancholy lustre over the thinning and discoloured foliage.

  The chilled air, and red sunsets, and shortened days betokening the decline of autumn, seemed to deepen the gloom of Mark Shadwell. More than three weeks had passed since the inquest, and still nothing was heard of Carmel Sherlock.

  Mark had taken no step to secure a successor. He was making no exertion to supply by his own diligence the loss of his strange, but, on the whole, efficient steward. He was much more silent than ever, and looking ill.

  When his newspapers came, he used to take them into the recess of one of the windows, and there con them over, every column, every paragraph; and after he had made his search, he would call to his daughter, if she happened to be in the room, and say:

  “Look through it carefully, child, and try if you can find a line — anywhere — about Carmel Sherlock and when there was nothing, I think he seemed better pleased and more at his ease for the rest of the day.

  In one of those red sunsets, wild and stormy, that have a character at once sad and threatening, Shadwell stood at the window, looking along the undulating plain studded with noble timber, and shut in on the left by the wooded uplands, towards Wynderfel, hidden by an intervening undulation, but showing in the red west the tufted tops of the old trees that stand among its ruins. He had been making his fruitless search as usual, in the newspaper which had just reached him — among reports, and facetiae, and notices, and the other lumber that impeded him — for the missing and concealed Carmel Sherlock, and having failed, handed it to his daughter with the words:

  “Run your eye carefully over this, and see if you can find anything about Sherlock.”

  He had almost forgotten that she was in the room, when Rachel said: “Oh! here’s something!”

  Shadwell turned sharply. “What is it? Read it.”

  And she read:

  “PLYMOUTH POLICE. — A man answering the description of the villain Carmel Sherlock was arrested at Plymouth yesterday, on board the William Ford, bound for New York. As the vessel was only waiting for the tide to weigh anchor, the arrest was made necessarily with great promptitude. On being brought before Mr. Truefit, the magistrate, his worship asked him— “

  “Look on, do, and find — was it Sherlock? Here — here, child, give me the paper.”

  He spoke so harshly, and looked so pale and angry, that the girl was startled, and, as he snatched it from her hand, her eyes filled with tears.

  “Where?” he said, with an impatient stamp. She pointed to the place.

  He, as we say, devoured the news, and in a few seconds more, with a kind of sneer, exclaimed, pitching the paper aside: “Such rot!”

  “It wasn’t he?” she inquired.

  “No; another blunder. I hope the fellow will bring his action, if he lost his passage: those fellows should be taught their business.

  This is the third time, by — , they have pulled up a wrong person.”

  Though he spoke bitterly and with vehemence, there seemed a sort of satisfaction too in his air. Was there a lingering regard for Carmel Sherlock, which excited a concealed sympathy with his stratagems, and exulted in his escape?

  Mark Shadwell continued in silence to look toward the distant prospect, to which the red clouds of an autumn sunset formed a background, His thoughts were no doubt running in the same channel, for he repeated the name of Carmel Sherlock once or twice to himself, and then he said in a low tone:

  “Wynderfel — that was his favourite haunt;” and he looked vacantly at his daughter.

  “I should not be surprised if he were to come here,” said Rachel. Perhaps she would not have spoken had he not looked at her so steadfastly, that she grew nervous, and felt constrained to say something.

  “Who?” he asked suddenly.

  “I meant Carmel Sherlock,” she answered, half-frightened at her own audacity in speaking on a subject which seemed so much to disturb her father, of whom she stood so much in awe.

  “You talk like a fool,” said he, and looked again from the window.

  She was in hopes that the dialogue had ended with that sharp speech, but she was deceived; suddenly he asked her:

  “What makes you fancy that — who said it?” and he looked at her with eyes angry and earnest.

  “The last time I saw him — the evening before— “

  “I know — before he left; go on!”

  “He took a kind of leave of me, as I sat in the window, and he talked as if he had a wonderful love for this place.”

  “Wonderful, indeed!” sneered Shadwell, dismally.

  “And he spoke of a return, as if he would revisit it after death.”

  “Ho? That he may safely do.”

  “But it left an idea in my mind — I have been thinking ever since — that he would feel something like that home sickness that the Swiss are said to feel, and would be sure to return.”

  “I see; you are a very romantic young lady. Men, however, with constables and the hue-and-cry in pursuit of them, don’t run into the lion’s mouth in search of the picturesque. Sherlock is mad, I dare say; but he has the shrewdness of a madman. Come back here, indeed!” he muttered, still with a sneer, and an impatient shrug.

  And Mark Shadwell turned from the window, and walked moodily to the fireplace, where he leaned with his arm on the chimneypiece; and once or twice again he looked at her
in dark meditation, and she fancied he was about to question her further, but he turned instead and left the room gloomily.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  A STRANGE MEETING.

  THAT night, with a message from her mother, Rachel timidly entered the library, and found Mark Shadwell at an open cabinet. He turned suddenly towards her, and she saw that he had a pistol in his hand. He looked angry and embarrassed, but said only, with an odd smile on his pale face:

  “You see, I’ve been thinking of what you said, and am looking up my pistols; prudent, eh?”

  There was, I suppose, something between fear and perplexity in her countenance, for he added:

  “You need not be afraid; they’re not loaded. Don’t you know what I mean? Suppose Sherlock should come back here, as you said — quite mad, and want to murder me? Don’t be afraid, I tell you; I don’t believe anything of the sort. But people are sometimes made nervous by dreams; and your dream about Sherlock — for such it is — has made me a little bit fidgetty — contrary to reason, contrary to belief; but this miserable month has unstrung me, and I’m growing like an old woman or a child.”

  And so saying, he fell into a dreary little laugh, and locking the pistol up again, resumed that sterner gravity that had grown habitual with him, and heard her message and answered it.

  Mark Shadwell, alone in his library, was not reading, nor writing. He was darkly dreaming away his hours in vague schemes of change and self-banishment. A Canadian farm — a flock in Australia — a clearing in the back settlements. To sell Raby and the Wynderfel estates to some rich clothier, and thus scuttle the vessel that had been so long labouring and foundering in hopeless stress of weather, and let the rolling ocean of oblivion roar over the old name of the Shadwells of Wynderfel. Such was the staple of those vague thoughts which were always rising and revolving over the cauldron of his divination.

  How was even his present painful position to be maintained? The huge, creaking, decayed machine — worked with a perpetual strain and increasing difficulty — had just sufficed to keep the deck of the used-up vessel above water; and who was to work it now that its engineer, Carmel Sherlock, whose screws and hammer and oil were needed every hour to prevent its coming to pieces, was gone?

  Yes, there was one clever person — and diligent, too, when diligence was needed — who might do much, but of course not all to stay the threatened ruin: his secretary. But she was not to be thought of. Under sentence; with just a reprieve until more urgent distractions were allayed; and then, she, like Carmel Sherlock, should depart into darkness. Still he put it off, and off. And though his wounded vanity was sometimes stung almost to the pitch of hatred, and his arm lifted to strike, the blow was deferred and the sacrifice lived on.

  This night, at the corner of the great gallery, unexpectedly, Mark Shadwell met Miss Marlyn. They had each their candles in their hands, and met face to face, with only two or three steps between.

  Their eyes encountered for less than a moment, and Miss Marlyn’s were lowered to the ground. Mark’s gaze was fixed uncertainly upon her. His thoughts had been elsewhere. In such surprises a quarrel slips sometimes out of mind, like a loose page from a book; and it required an effort to recover the parenthesis. Mark did, in time to save him from the familiar sentence that was on his lips. He remembered all on a sudden the awful distance that was between them. Silently he drew a little aside to let her pass, and as silently, with eyes still lowered, but looking not abashed, but sad and proud — yes, very proud — she glided by and disappeared. Mark Shadwell felt oddly — a little chill, a regret, a pang; but, with a scornful smile and a frown, he turned and pursued his way.

  He had not seen her; no, not since that dreadful night, which made the old house ghastly. No, not once. He had lived so entirely to himself, and his walks had been so remote.

  He had forgotten how very beautiful she was, or rather how that beauty always impressed him. He shut his door sullenly, and as he set his candle down upon the table, he thought:

  “So much beauty is funeste and ominous. It never was granted to the heroine of a common or a happy story. To me to look at her is pain. Ever again to suffer that d — d delusion to steal into my heart is impossible. That is the kind of person whom it is impossible not to love, or not to hate. Indifference is not imaginable. Well for me she chose to make me hate her. Yes, I shall settle that matter. She shall go. Let her play out the tragedy or burlesque which fate allots her in another theatre. Raby has seen the first act. My God! If she had never entered these doors he would not have come.”

  Mark Shadwell left the house next day alone at about noon. There are agitations of mind for which instinct seems to prescribe bodily labour and extreme fatigue. Mark walked rapidly. He chose the upland forest for his march. Its brakes, its steeps, and rocks enforced exertion, and its vast seclusion secured him against interruption.

  The sun was near the horizon when, by a circuitous and lonely route, Mark found himself at last before the ruined walls and roofless gables of Wynderfel.

  The level light glittered on grass and nettles, and on the ivy upon the walls with a tremulous splendour, flooding the sharp grey angles and nodding trees, now stript of half their foliage, with a sad and mellow glory that deepened by contrast the cold grey shadows stretching far over the slopes.

  Not two months had passed since he had sat on the same stone bench, looking on the same lonely picture of bygone greatness and earthly mutability, under the same sunset glow and shadow, and he was no longer the same Mark Shadwell. He looked years older, and turned towards these ruins a thinner, paler, sterner face.

  Rapid walking is not conducive to thought. In fact, it is next to impossible while walking quickly to think in train at all. One reason, no doubt, why nature points to that expedient for relief in high mental excitement.

  Now Mark’s walk was over for a while; he was sitting on the old stone bench, looking upon the low-arched doorways, the mullioned windows, and those tall chimneys of Wynderfel, up which the ivy tendrils were creeping.

  Quietude had hardly succeeded to his long and rapid walk when the image of that strangely beautiful girl, as she stood for a moment before him, like a lovely statue of shame and pride, suddenly, in the lonely gallery of Raby, rose before his memory, and furnished the theme of a long, passionate, and bitter meditation.

  She haunted him, and yet he hated her — hated her for having used and deceived him. Was ever man so fooled and mortified? And yet there was that beautiful image, the fascination of which at times overpowered his vindictive rage. Wounded pride and passion mingling resulted in that malignant idolatry which we know as jealousy. Hardly conscious of the passions that entered into his agitation, he was, literally, wildly jealous. Jealous of whom? Of that bloodstained, cold, smirking shadow whom he hated to think of. Yes, a profitable conspiracy! Let them keep their tryst. If Carmel Sherlock were here, he would say, “Let her go to him, or let him come for her.” A sort of chill stole over him with this mockery, and at the same moment, like an apparition summoned by his evil thoughts, Carmel Sherlock stepped through the arched doorway of the ruin, and stood before him.

  Travelsoiled and wild was the figure. Famine-stricken he looked. He extended his emaciated fingers, and directed his woebegone eyes towards Mark Shadwell.

  As a spirit rises, Mark Shadwell was standing upright, he knew not how, and freezing with a horror he had never known before.

  “My good God!” repeated Mark, slowly, twice or thrice, in a tone scarcely above a whisper, gazing with wide eyes, and fixed as if he were cut out of stone.

  Carmel Sherlock was equally motionless, and stood still with a countenance indescribably piteous; his lean hand extended towards him, palm upward, like a mendicant’s. With a sudden gasp, Mark Shadwell stamped upon the ground, and cried:

  “Murderer! miscreant!”

  And at the same moment, with a step back, he lifted his hand from his pocket and discharged a pistol full at Carmel Sherlock. The explosion rang sharply among the echoing wal
ls, and startled into a general flutter the sparrows in the ivy.

  Carmel Sherlock staggered a step or two, as his arm dropped by his side.

  Before the film of smoke projected from the pistol had ceased rolling in the air, almost simultaneously with the report, a cheery voice close by shouted, and steps were heard approaching on the narrow old road, which, just where it winds by the angle of the building, shows its pavement above the grass. It was plain from the tone that whoever cheered had no notion of the deadly intention, with which the shot had been discharged.

  Mark’s hand was already in his pocket, on another pistol. But he did not raise it. The challenge that had just reached his ear arrested him. If he had seen the spectre of Roke Wycherly, he could not have turned on him a more horror-stricken scowl than he did on Carmel.

  Sherlock’s face winced with pain; with his left hand he caught the angle of the doorway, and a cold moisture shone over his forehead.

  “Do, through the head, and let me die,” said Carmel Sherlock, faintly. “I came, sir, for that, to be taken, to die — anything to end it.”

  “Hallo!” panted Roger Temple, now within a step or two of Mark Shadwell, and amazed, as well he might:

  “By Jove!” exclaimed Charles Mordant, his companion, equally astonished.

  “Glad you came up,” said Shadwell, with a very pale face, and an attempt to laugh. “Rather a surprise, isn’t it? Here he is — Sherlock. I don’t believe a word he says.”

  With this false and agitated smile he glanced from them to Sherlock, and from Sherlock to them again, and the smile quickly subsided, and darkened into a careworn scowl.

  “What do you wish, Mr. Shadwell? Shall we take him?” said Charles Mordant, who had advanced within a step of Carmel Sherlock.

  “The d — d fool!” said Shadwell, between his teeth.