She read the letter through again.
“What a piece of melodrama! The idea of trying to frighten a sane person with such rubbish!”
She examined the seal again and again, tried to make something of the little scribble in the corner, and, standing in her slippers and dressing-gown, read the whole thing through once more.
“It’s a mere hoax! Who can it be? It certainly is not Charles Mannering. There is no one but Ardenbroke,” she thought. “It must be he — but, oh no. I forgot the allusion to my sister and father. And this little locket — no; that’s quite out of the question.”
What a contemptible thing,” she murmured, sitting down in a great chair by the fireplace. “How ridiculous! What an idea the writer must have of me, to fancy I should be frightened or influenced by such a device.”
She looked down at, the slipper in which her tiny foot was tapping the floor; and then looking up, smiling, she said —
“And what a fool I am to think for a moment about it. I would tear it into little bits but that I may chance to trace the author by the writing, and I half doubt whether it is worth sparing till tomorrow morning.”
She was more interested by it, however, than she was quite aware, and more alarmed. It seemed, little by little, to her exaggerated fears, that the privacy of her life was gone, a secret eye watching her intensely, and an undetected and possibly potent influence interfering with her daily life. “Kind or malignant” — here, at all events, were evidences of an unaccountable interest in her doings, of the accuracy with which the writer was informed, and the malignant pretensions with which he or she affected to control her conduct. She was growing more uncomfortable.
When she lay down she could not sleep, but lay awake in excited conjecture. Every theory she framed broke down. Sometimes it seemed that her own servants were spies upon her; sometimes that the simple old clergyman had unwittingly made a confidant of some masked enemy of De Beaumirail’s.
But these conjectures gave place, and failed one after the other, and left her with the uneasy sense of being watched by an unseen eye — a vague suspicion and constraint that gathered strength as the minutes passed, and assured her that her solitude was false.
On the table by the fireplace lay the letter, and on it the locket, which, amid the dark thoughts that gathered about her, glimmered with a sinister brilliancy in the distant light which she had left burning on her dressing-table. In the obscure light, that little glimmering circle simulated to her fancy the steady eye that observed her, and associated with the relic of her dead sister, helped to wring her girlish imagination with a strange pain.
She was glad she had preserved the letter. She was resolved to find out who wrote it. She would consult her friends; she would charge Gryston with it; she would place it in the hands of the London detectives; she would lose her life but she would discover the author of the letter — and, what then?
“Well, it can’t be legal, for it is certainly cowardly and wicked to try and frighten poor creatures like me with anonymous letters. If the laws permit that sort of thing, pretty laws we live under!”
CHAPTER VII.
ROBERT LE DIABLE.
BEHOLD our little party installed in the box which had been promptly secured in the name of Miss Gray, Guildford House, Old Brompton.
“Something a little triste. I always thought, in the aspect of this great house — I mean, compared with a theatre; these little curtained pigeon-holes, real boxes, partitioned, and dim — very splendid, the coup d’úil, a sort of oriental richness — superb and luxurious, but also a little gloomy,” said Miss Gray.
She was leaning back in her chair, and making a cautious survey of the long sweep of boxes, which were beginning to be inhabited.
“I wish one could see without being seen. Have the Ardenbrokes a box?”
“Yes, over there; no one in it,” said Charles. “You have found out some one you know — haven’t you?”
“Have I? Where?” said Miss Gray, lowering her glasses, and looking at him.
“Somewhere over there; haven’t you?” said he.
“0h! Perhaps so,” she answered, with a smile and a little shrug. “I had better look again.”
And she did turn her glasses in the direction he indicated, and he saw them again linger, he fancied, at the same point in their circuit. It was at a box where sat two gentlemen, whose appearance had already struck him.
One was an elderly man, with a long, close-cropped, gray head, gray whiskers, and well-waxed moustache of the same colour, whose white-gloved hands, folded together, rested on the edge of the box, as, with a grave face, rather apathetic, and with features commonplace, insignificant, but on the whole grim, he looked steadily towards the stage. The other was a singularly handsome and elegant-looking young man, with dark hair moustache, and small peaked beard in the Italian style, an oval face, and large soft eyes, and delicately pencilled eyebrows. This face was very feminine. There was colour in the cheeks, and a soft lustre in those large eyes, with their long lashes, and a soft carmine touched the lips. The waving hair lay low upon a very white forehead. Altogether, the tints and formation of the face were feminine and delicate, and there was something of fire and animation, too, that gave it that kind of beauty that belonged to the great Italian tenor in his young days.
When Charles Mannering’s glasses rested on this face, it was with an unpleasant feeling — a little pang of scarcely conscious jealousy — an intuition of antagonism. He was standing behind Miss Gray, and, stooping as he lowered his glasses, he said with an unreasonably bitter feeling —
“There are two fellows over there. Did you observe them? An old gray man who seems to have come to hear the opera, and a young, man — such a specimen of a man-milliner! He seems to have painted under his eyelashes, and put on some rouge. He certainly has, and he has done nothing since he came in but stare at all the women in the house. He’ll get himself a precious good kicking if he doesn’t take care.” So spoke Charles, and affected a little laugh.
“I don’t think I’ve seen anyone answering that description,” said she, indifferently.
“0h! you must have observed him. You wont deny it, you who hate anything that resembles — what shall I say? — a concealment.”
“I know whom you mean, perfectly, but you don’t describe him,” she laughed.
“How do you know, then?” he asked drily.
“A caricature is not a description, and yet it may indicate a person, and you forget that you have helped me by mentioning that old man with the long gray head. Well, tell me — what is it?”
“What is what?” inquired Charles.
“Weren’t you going to tell me something about them?”
“I? Story, Lord bless you, I have none to tell. Interesting subject, no doubt; but I was merely thinking how like a girl in masquerade he is.”
“I don’t agree with you. I think his figure so manly — manly and elegant.”
“Oh! I spoke of his face.”
“I think him very handsome — he is handsome — I don’t say exactly in the style I admire, but you must see that he is. Hush! We are going to have that divine tenor again. Oh! isn’t that voice angelic?”
This night there were selections from two operas. The scenes from “La Sonnambula” had closed. In the interval between it and those that followed from “Robert le Diable,” the people in Miss Gray’s box, who had talked now and then during the singing, grew perversely silent. Most persons whose spirits are, at all capricious have at times experienced in a theatre something like the sensation which that young lady on a sudden felt just now. A sudden air of desolateness seemed to overspread the stage; an idea of cavernous solitudes beyond, half-lighted and silent, made the scene joyless and unreal; the illusion failed; imagination and the spirits collapsed together; the music sounded jaded and forlorn; the lights grew less light, and fancy and enjoyment chilled.
The descent of the curtain did not dissipate this odd depression; she leaned back; the whole
scene had lost its interest. “It comes from over there — this influence comes from that singular looking person. Such strange beauty, such brilliant intelligence, and yet such a gleam of malevolence as sometimes looks half fiendish — he is the writer of that letter enclosing the locket with poor, darling Maude’s hair; and that horrid old man beside him, so stiff and apathetic, who has never turned his head once, or changed a muscle of his gray face, and whose arm moves as if it was made of wood, he looks as if he were dead, and just animated for this occasion. I wish so much I had not come.”
This young lady, looking apathetically forward over the heads of the distant people in the stalls, over the footlights, to the line where the gray boards and the curtain meet, is conscious of those images which disturbed her, reflected obliquely on her eye — that brilliant, malignant young man; that cadaverous old one. Had these two figures and faces in reality all that sinister character with which they seemed to present themselves to her? Not one particle, possibly. I can’t tell. Miss Laura Challys Gray had a fancy highly excitable, and sometimes sombre. An intuition, fancied or real, told her that the young man in the box at the other side was the author of that letter, which, in spite of every effort, troubled her more and more. And from this one speck, gradually rose and spread that darkness through which she saw all things changed.
This Robert le Diable did not find in that house a spectator so predisposed to receive in good faith the whole melodramatic impression of that great churchyard scene. The peaks and shafts of the ruined abbey, glimmering in moonlight, the terrible necromantic basso, and the sheeted phantoms, all but a moving picture — had yet a relation to real emotions which circumstances and fancy had already set in motion within her; and Miss Gray, to whom accident made the opera and all such scenic glamour still new, gazed on in the sort of eerie rapture with which she might have read, for the first time, in the solitude of her room, the ghostly scene in the “Lay of the last Minstrel” in the aisle of Melrose Abbey.
Had Charles suspected how rapt and thrilled she was, he would, no doubt, have smiled, notwithstanding his preoccupation. She was absorbed-music, scene, and figures, all blended in one solemn, supernatural impression that was for her quite genuine. Leaning back again, with a sigh, as if something drew her, without thinking, she turned her glasses unconsciously on the box where these people sat. The effect was startling.
Through her glasses she saw, it seemed but four feet removed, straight before her, the person of whom she had been thinking so disagreeably. That young man held his glasses on the edge of the box in both hands, as if he had but that moment lowered them. The sensation was as if their eyes at that short distance had met. His were directed on her with a steady, stern, and penetrating gaze, that seemed to hold her fixed for a moment — his face lighted with a faint smile of recognition.
With a kind of start she turned her glasses away, and carried them slowly on a feminine effort to conceal the effect of that accidental encounter over a space so wide. She felt her cheeks, her very throat and forehead flush intensely, and then a chill and pallor came. There seemed to her a character of menace in that smile, and she felt that she was detected, and probably her thoughtless look misinterpreted.
She could have cried with vexation and terror. She had not time to reflect what a fool she was. A vague suspicion, however, of the light in which others might view her uneasiness about the whole occurrence, and some other feelings, had made her lock the letter and the locket up, and evade good Mrs. Wardell’s inquiries in the morning. That was her first secret.
At this moment she felt so uncomfortable and disconcerted that she would gladly have got up and left her place. She did not wish to talk over her folly with other people; her reluctance to divulge to old Mrs. Wardell, and to Charles, the odd occurrence of yesterday evening, had grown upon her, and was now insurmountable; and Challys Gray had a scornful hatred of even the smallest and most harmless untruths, which unfitted her, a good deal, as she felt for the benevolences of the world.
In the meantime Charles, whom the handsome unknown had also impressed as disagreeably, though quite in a different way, again looked at him from his less prominent post of observation.
The young man who had excited the contempt of Charles still occupied more of his attention than the opera. He fixed his glasses on him for a moment, with a stern countenance. He was, indisputably, in a certain style, the handsomest fellow he had ever seen; the outline was, as he said himself, almost feminine. The tints were those of a rich enamel; and, to crown all, not only had Challys Gray observed him, but he had detected the glasses of the unknown in her direction more than once. It was very provoking. The thought that he had been the person to persuade his fair kinswoman to come here also soured him.
“I don’t know how it is,” he thought, “that fellow has the air of an adventurer — a charlatan.”
As he opened this vein of suspicion, however, he saw Lord Ardenbroke enter the box of the unknown, place his hand with a kind smile gently on the young man’s arm, and shake him by the hand, as he turned about smiling, also. So that suspicion was exploded.
It certainly was Lord Ardenbroke, there could be no mistake about that, and they were chatting together, as it seemed, in a very friendly way.
CHAPTER VIII.
ALFRED DACRE.
“YOU are now pretty sure to be found out,” said Charles.
“Has any one come in?” asked Miss Gray.
“Over there,” said Charles, with a glance and a little nod, indicating the box at the opposite side.
“Why — what do you mean?” asked Miss Gray, with a slight change of colour.
“Your cousin, Lord Ardenbroke, has just made his appearance, and he’s talking to that ladylike young gentleman about whom we so nearly quarrelled just now.”
“I don’t remember the quarrel, but is Ardenbroke really there?”
She was resolved not to look again in that direction.
“He is really in high chat, and they seemed very glad to see one another.”
“If I am to be discovered, there’s no one I should rather be found out by; he’s so goodnatured, and so pleasant.”
She almost hoped he might see her and come across, so intensely curious had she become to learn something about that young man. If she could only be certain that he was not the writer of the anonymous letter which made her so restless, she would never think of him more. It was that fanciful association that connected him with that disguised communication, that made him so interesting.
In the meantime what had passed between Lord Ardenbroke and the charlatan of Charles’s dream, and the avenger of Miss Challys Gray’s?
“It’s an age since we met,” said Lord Ardenbroke.
“Five years — six years, so it is. I did not think you could have known me. I hadn’t this” — he touched his small peaked beard as he spoke— “and wore my hair long — do you remember — like young France, and I fancied I was so changed.”
“I never forget a face,” said Lord Ardenbroke. “And how long have you been in this part of the world, and what have you been doing these hundred years?”
“I’ve been all over the world, and doing everything, and I’m here in London upon a very secret affair — diplomatic, shall I say? I can’t tell you yet, I’ll call it a — what? — a secret mission” — he laughed a little— “and I know you’ll not be vexed, but I must ask you to do me this kindness, not to mention that I’ve been here, I mean in this town of yours, to any living creature. I might, I’m quite serious, get into a very awkward scrape, if it were known, and you’ll promise.”
“Certainly; no one shall hear a word of it from me,” said Lord Ardenbroke.
“I see, you don’t know what to make of me,” said this young man, with a smile, perhaps the least degree in the world embarrassed, “but you shall, no one before you; I only wish I could tell you all about it now, you could give me counsel well worth having, but the truth is, the secret isn’t mine — it is quite other people’s.”<
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“I shan’t say I saw you,” said Lord Ardenbroke, with a grave and quiet decision, “but would there be the least use in asking you to come to us tomorrow?”
“No,” said the young man, with a smile and a shake of the head, “nothing would give me greater pleasure, but I can’t go anywhere.”
“Well, I was afraid you couldn’t, from what you said; but you’ll be coming back, I hope, soon, more your own master, and then I’ll not let you off.”
The young man smiled and thanked him.
“I’ve given up music, except my own miserable singing, for my private entertainment (he laughed), for years. I used to live in the opera, but one changes.”
“You draw, and paint still, of course?”
“No, I’ve given that up also; one tires of everything at last, except — there’s one pursuit I still do enjoy. I studied Lavater, you remember, or you forget, but I did, and I think it an inexhaustible science, and I’ve been exercising my craft on a face this evening, and it has rather interested me.”
“Oh! and where is this face?”
“Over there.”
“By Jove!” exclaimed Lord Ardenbroke, looking in the direction of Miss Gray’s box, I’m so glad! why that’s — — “
“Don’t tell me who, pray, just for a moment; she’s good-looking, as we all see.”
“Very.”
“She’s agreeable.”
“Yes.”
“And altogether, you’d say of her, She’s — — “
“Charming.”
“Ha! she’s worth punishing,”
“How? What do you mean?”
“Am I to speak quite plainly, in my character as philosopher, physiognomist, psychologist?”
“By all means.”
“Well, that girl’s a devil.”
“Isn’t that very strong?” and Lord Ardenbroke laughed a little.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 442