Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated)

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  “We can’t find out tonight, darling, and there is no good in losing your sleep. Perhaps we may make out something from old Pritchard in the morning,” said Miss Max.

  “Yes, yes, perhaps so. All I know is, it is making me quite miserable,” said the girl, and she kissed the old lady, and went to her room. And Miss Max, having seen that the fire was nearly out, retired also to hers.

  As neat and as quaint as their drawingroom, was Miss Max’s bedroom. But though everything invited to rest, and Miss Max rather stiff from her long walk, and a little drowsy and yawning, she was one of those fidgety old ladies who take a prodigious time to get into bed.

  Nearly an hour had passed, during which she had stuck armies of pins in her pincushion, and shut and opened every drawer in her room, and walked from one table to another oftener, and made more small dispositions about her room and her bed, than I could possibly reckon, and, being now arrayed in slippers and dressing-gown, she bethought of something to be adjusted in the sitting-room, which might just as well have waited till the morning, and so she took her candle and descended the old oak stairs.

  On the solid plank of that flooring, the slippered footfall of the thin old lady made no sound. The moon was high, and her cold blue light fell slanting through the window upon the floor of the little lobby. Within and without reigned utter silence; and if Miss Max had been a ghost-seeing old lady, no scene could have been better suited for the visitation of a phantom than this dissociated wing of a house more than three hundred years old.

  Miss Max was now at the drawingroom door, which she opened softly and stepped in. It was neither without a tenant nor a light.

  At the far corner of the table, with a candle in his hand, which he instantly blew out, she saw the slim figure and sly lean face of Elihu Lizard, his white eyeball turned towards her, and his other eye squinting with the scowl of alarm, fiercely across his nose, at her.

  Mr. Lizard was, with the exception of his shoes and his coat, in full costume. His stockings and his shirtsleeves gave him a burglarious air, which rather heightened the shock of his ugly leer, thus unexpectedly encountered.

  He stepped back into a recess beside the chimney almost as she entered!

  For a moment she was not quite sure whether her frequent discussions with Maud respecting this repulsive person had not excited her fears and fancies, so as to call up an ugly vision. Mr. Lizard, however, seeing that the extinction of his candlelight was without effect, Miss Max’s candle shining full upon him, stepped forward softly, and executed his guileless smile and lowly reverence.

  Miss Max had recovered her intrepidity; and she said sharply:

  “What do you mean, sir? what on earth brings you to our private sitting-room?”

  “I have took the liberty,” he said, in his quavering tones, inclining his long face aside with a plaintive simper, nearly closing his eyelids, and lifting one skinny hand — it was the tone and attitude in which the good Elihu Lizard was wont to expound, the same in which he might stand over a cradle, and pronounce a blessing on the little Christian in blankets, with whose purity the guileless heart of the good man sympathised— “being a-thirst and panting, so to speak, as the hart for the water-brooks, as I lay in my bed, I arose, and finding none where I looked for it, I thought it would not be grudged me even in the chambers of them that go delicately, and therefore am I found here seeking if peradventure I might find any.”

  Elihu Lizard, upon all occasions on which worldly men, of his rank in life, would affect the language of ceremony, glided from habit into that with which he had harangued from tables and other elevations at Greenwich Fair and similar assemblies, before he had engaged in his present peculiar occupation.

  There was something celestial in the suavity of this person that positively exasperated Miss Max.

  “That’s all very fine. Water, indeed! There you were, over Miss Maud’s and my letters and papers, in our private sitting-room, and you show, sir, that you well knew you were about something nefarious, for I saw you put out your candle — there it is, sir, in your hand. How disgusting! How dare you! And I suspect you, sir, and your impious cant; and I’ll find out all about you, or I’ll lose my life! How can Mr. Pritchard allow such persons into his house? I’ll see him in the morning. I’ll speak to the police in Cardyllion about you. I’ll come to the bottom of all this. I’ll consult a lawyer. I’ll teach you, sir, be you who you may, you are not to follow people from place to place, and to haunt their drawingrooms at dead of night. I’ll turn the tables upon you; I’ll have you pursued.”

  The good man turned up his effective eye, till nothing but its white was seen, and it would have been as hard to say which of the two had a pupil to it, as under which of his thimbles, if thimble-rigger he be, the pea actually lies. He smiled patiently, and bowed lowly, and with his palm raised, uttered the words, “Charity thinketh no evil.”

  The measure of Miss Max’s indignation was full. With her brown silk handkerchief swathed tightly about her head, and looking somewhat like a fez, in her red cloth slippers, and white flannel dressing-gown, that, I must allow, was rather “skimpy,” showing a little more of her ankle than was quite dignified, she was a rather striking effigy of indignation. She felt that she could have hurled her candlestick at the saintly man’s head, an experiment which it is as well she did not hazard, seeing that she and her adversary would have been reduced to instantaneous darkness, and might have, without intending it, encountered in the dark, while endeavouring to make their retreat. Instead, therefore, of proceeding to this extreme measure, with kindling eyes, and a stamp on the floor, she said:

  “Leave this room, this moment, sir! How dare you? I shall call up Mr. Pritchard, if you presume to remain here another moment.”

  I dare say that Mr. Lizard had completed whatever observations he intended to make, and his reconnaisance accomplished, he did not care to remain a moment longer than was necessary under fire. He withdrew with the smiling meekness of a Christian enduring pagan vituperation and violence.

  In the morning, when, at their early breakfast, the ladies made inquiry after him, they learned that he had taken his departure more than an hour before.

  “More evidence, if it were needed, of a purpose, in tracking us as he does, which won’t bear the light!” exclaimed Miss Max, who was now at least as strong upon the point as the handsome girl who accompanied her. “I don’t understand it. It is some object connected with you, most positively. Who on earth can be his employer? I confess, Maud, I’m frightened, at last.”

  “Do you think it can be old Mr. Tintern?” asked the girl, after a silence, looking curiously in the face of her companion. “That old man may well wish me dead.”

  “It may interest possibly a good many people to watch you very closely,” said the elder lady.

  They both became thoughtful.

  “You will now believe,” said the young lady, with a sigh, “that the conditions of my life are not quite usual. I tell you, cousin, I have a presentiment that some misfortune impends. I suppose there is a crisis in every one’s life; the astrologers used to say so. God send me safely through mine!”

  “Amen, darling, if there be a crisis,” said Miss Max, more gravely than she usually spoke. “But we must not croak any more. I have great confidence, under God, in energy, my dear, and you were always a spirited girl. What, after all, can befal you?”

  “Many things. But let us think of today and Cardyllion and Llanberris, and let tomorrow take care of itself. What a beautiful day!”

  CHAPTER VI.

  THEY MEET A FRIEND.

  “Won’t you wait, and see Mr. Marston?” said Miss Max, a little later, when the young lady came down in her walking-dress.

  “No, dear, I’m going to the castle. I have planned three drawings there, and two in the town, and then we set out on our drive to Llanberris, where I shall still have daylight, perhaps, to make one or two more.”

  “Very industrious, upon my word! But don’t you think you might afford
a little time to be civil?” said Miss Max.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Mr. Marston said most pointedly, I mean, particularly, that he would call this morning, and you allowed him to suppose we should be at home.”

  “Did I? Well, that’s past mending now,” said the girl.

  “And he’ll come and see no one,” said Miss Max, expanding her hands.

  “He’ll see the Pritchards,” said Miss Maud.

  “I think it extremely rude, going out so much before our usual time, as if it was just to avoid him.”

  “It is to avoid him. Put on your things and come,” said the girl.

  “And what reason on earth can there be?” insisted Miss Max.

  “I’m not in a Marston mood this morning, that’s all. Do, like a darling, put on your things and come; everything is packed, and the people here know when the fly is coming to take our boxes, and I’ll walk slowly on, and you will overtake me.”

  So saying, she ran downstairs, and took a very friendly leave of the Pritchard family.

  She was not afraid of meeting Mr. Marston. For Anne Pritchard had told her that he had inquired at what hour the ladies usually went out to walk, and that hour was considerably later than it now was. Miss Max overtook her.

  “It’s plain, we don’t agree,” said that lady, as if their talk had not been suspended for a moment. “I like that young man extremely, and I do think that it is rather marked, our leaving so unnecessarily early. I hate rudeness — wanton rudeness.”

  The girl smiled pleasantly on her companion.

  “Why do you like him?” she said.

  “Because I think him so extremely nice. I thought him so polite, and there was so much deference and delicacy.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve interrupted a very interesting acquaintance,” said Miss Maud, laughing.

  “But tell me why you have changed your mind, for you did seem to like him?” said Miss Max.

  “Well, don’t you think he appeared a little more assured of his good reception than he would have been if he had thought us persons of his own rank — I mean two great ladies such as he is in the habit of seeing; such as the people he knows? People like the Marstons — if he is one of them, as you suppose — make acquaintance with persons dressed in serge, like us, merely for amusement. Their affected deference seems to me insulting; it is an amusement I shan’t afford him. From this point of view we can study human nature, because we can feel its meanness.”

  “You are a morbid creature,” said Miss Max.

  “I am trying to discover truth. I am trying to comprehend character,” said the girl.

  “And making yourself a cynic as fast as you can,” said the old lady.

  “It matters little what I am. We shan’t see to-day a person so reckless of the future, a person with so little hope, a person who sees so little to live for, as I, and is so willing to die.”

  “Look round, my dear, and open your eyes. You know nothing of life or of God’s providence,” said Miss Max. “I have no patience with you.”

  “You were born free,” said the girl, more gently than before, “I, a slave. Yes, don’t smile; I call things by their names. You walk in the light, and I in darkness. The people who surround you, be they what they may, are at all events what they seem. When I look round, do I see images of candour? No; shadows dark and cold. I can trust no one — assassins in masquerade.”

  “Every one,” said Miss Max, “has to encounter deceit and hypocrisy in this world.”

  “It won’t do; no, it won’t do. You know very well that the cases are quite different,” said the girl. “I have no one to care for me, and many that wish me dead; and, except you, I can trust no one.”

  “Well, marry, and trust your husband.”

  “I’ve too often told you I never shall, never. I need say so no more. How well the castle looks! I suppose it is from the rain last night; how beautifully the tints of the stone have come out!”

  It was a brilliant, sunny morning. The grey walls, with patches of dull red and yellow stones, and cumbrous folds of ivy, looked their best, and towers, and arch, and battlement looked, in the soft summer air, all that the heart of an artist could desire.

  Going to and fro from point to point, sometimes beyond the dry castle moat, sometimes within its grass-grown court, Miss Maud sketched industriously for some hours, and from her little tin colour-box threw in her tints with a bold and delicate brush, while Miss Max, seated beside her, read her book — for she loved a novel — and, through her spectacles, with glowing eyes, accompanied the heroine through her flirtations and agonies, to her final meeting with the man of her choice, at the steps of the altar.

  For a little time, now and then, pretty Miss Maud would lower her pencil, and rest her eye and hand, and think, looking vaguely on the ruins, in a sad reverie.

  By this time Mr. Marston had, it was to be supposed, made his visit at the old farmhouse, had sustained his disappointment, and perhaps got over it, and was, possibly, consoling himself in his jack-boots, with his rod, in the channel of some distant trout-stream.

  I can’t say whether her thoughts ever wandered to this Mr. Marston, who was so agreeable and good-looking. But I fancy she did not think of him quite so hardly as she spoke. Whatever her thoughts were, her looks, at least, were sad.

  “Whose epitaph are you writing, my dear?” inquired Miss Max, who had lowered her book, and, glancing over her spectacles, observed the absent and melancholy looks of the girl.

  “My own,” said she, with a little laugh. “But we have talked enough about that — I mean my life — and I suppose a good epitaph should sum that up. What do you think of these?” and she dropped her sketches on her cousin’s lap. “If I finish them as well as I have begun, they will be worth three shillings each, I dare say.”

  “Yes; dear me! It is very good indeed. And this — how very pretty!” and so on, as she turned them over.

  “But not one among them will ever be half so good as our dear old farmhouse, that was so comfortable and so uncomfortable — so nearly intolerable, and yet so delightful; such a pleasant adventure to remember. I am very glad to have it, for we shall never see its face again.”

  At these words, unexpectedly, Miss Max rose, and showed by her countenance that she saw some one approaching whom she was glad to greet. Her young companion turned also, and saw Mr. Marston already very near.

  He was so delighted to see them. He had been to the old house, and was so disappointed; and the people there could not tell where they had gone. He had hoped they had changed their minds about leaving Cardyllion so soon. He had intended going to Llanberris that day, but some of his people were coming to Cardyllion. He had received orders from home to engage rooms at the Verney Arms for them, and must stay that day. It was too bad. Of course he was very glad to see them; but he might just as well have seen them in a week. Were they (Miss Max and her companion) going to stay any time at Llanberris?

  “No. They would leave it in the morning.”

  “And continue their tour? Where?”

  “Nowhere,” said Miss Max. “We go home then.”

  He looked as if he would have given worlds to ask them where that home was.

  “My cousin returns to her home, and I to mine,” said the girl, gravely. “We are very lucky in our last day; it would have been so provoking to lose it.”

  “She has made ever so many drawings to-day,” said Miss Max; “and they are really so very good, I must show them to you.”

  “There is not time,” said the girl to her cousin. “It is a long drive to Llanberris; it is time we were at the Verney Arms. We must ask after our boxes, and order a carriage. It is later than I fancied,” she said, turning to Mr. Marston; “how time runs away when one is really working.”

  “Or really happy,” said the young man.

  He walked with them down Castle-street to the Verney Arms, talking with them like an old friend all the way.

  They all went together into the
room to which the waiter showed them. And Miss Max, who had the little portfolio in her charge, said:

  “Now, Maud, we must show Mr. Marston to-day’s drawings.”

  And very glad he was of that privilege.

  Then she showed him the sketch of the old farmhouse.

  “Oh! How pretty! What a sweet thing that is! What a beautiful drawing it makes!”

  And so he descanted on it in a rapture.

  “There is a place here where they do photographs; and I am going to have that old house taken.” He said to the young lady, as Miss Max was giving some orders at the door: “I like it better than anything else about here. I feel so grateful to it.”

  Miss Max was back again in a moment.

  “Well, I do think they are very pretty indeed,” she said. “We’ll take the portfolio inside, dear. I’ll take charge of it,” she said to Maud. “And I hope none of our boxes were forgotten. I must count them. Five altogether.”

  And she ran out again upon this errand; and Mr. Marston resumed:

  “I shall never forget that thunderstorm, nor that pretty little room, nor my good fortune in being able to guide you home. I shall never forget yesterday evening, the most delightful evening I ever passed in my life.”

  He was speaking in a very low tone.

  Miss Maud looked embarrassed, almost vexed, and a beautiful colour flushed her cheeks, and gave a fire to her dark eyes.

  Mr. Marston felt instinctively that he had been going a little too fast.

  “Good Heavens!” he thought, “what a fool I am! She looked almost angry. What business had I to talk so?”

  There was a little silence.

  “It is a misfortune, I believe, being too honest,” he said at length.

  “A great one, but there are others greater,” said the girl, with eyes still vexed and fiery.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean being ever so little dishonest, and ever so little insolent. I hope I’m not that, at least to people I suppose to be my inferiors, though I may plead guilty to the lesser fault; perhaps I am too honest.”