Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated)

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  So Maud, disappointed and a little offended, returned with a slower step to the place from whence she came, wondering whether she was ever to meet Lady Mardykes again.

  Her guests certainly did not seem to trouble her a great deal and, so far as Maud could see, she was pleased to leave them very much to amuse and take care of themselves. Well, it was disappointing; but, after all, Lady Mardykes was sure to be home for luncheon, possibly an hour before it. In the mean time, other people might introduce themselves, as had happened yesterday, and so her acquaintance might grow.

  Her anticipations were quickly justified, for as she was walking down, by this time pretty well resigned to her disappointment, toward the yew-hedge walk, a singular-looking person accosted her.

  He was almost a pigmy in stature, and his air was ineffably pompous; his face was long and pallid, with a turn-up nose, and he wore an expression of conceit and scorn as he eyed passers-by, such as Miss Vernon could not have believed in except perhaps in the caricature of a pantomime. He walked slowly, rising on his toes as he did so, and carried a big portfolio and a small shagreen case under his arm, and a quadrant strapped across his back. To Miss Vernon he made a slight bow and a smile, so transitory that it amounted to little more than a momentary grimace, the effect of which was rather odd than alluring.

  His long chin terminated in a lank white beard, unaccompanied by either whisker or moustache. A solemn gloom overspread his countenance, and an habitual look of surprise made his small eyes round, except when a smirk of contempt or of self-esteem lighted his face.

  It seemed to be the rule in this house not to wait for introduction. The appearance of this dwarfish sage aroused Miss Vernon’s curiosity, and she was rather glad that she had so quickly found some one willing to entertain her.

  “You have heard, madam,” said he, walking at her side, “of Laplace, of Newton, you have heard of Watt, you have heard of Davy. I see, by your head and eye, that you have an intellect and an interest for the physical sciences, and, I need scarcely add, you have heard of Sidebotham, and the perpetuum mobile. He is at present a guest at this place, and of course he comes and goes as he pleases.”

  “Oh? Indeed!” said Miss Vernon, affecting a greater interest in the worthies of science than perhaps she felt, and ashamed to admit that she had never before heard of Sidebotham in that brilliant muster-roll. “Lady Mardykes has so many distinguished guests that one is scarcely surprised to meet any great name among them.”

  He simpered with gratified self-complacency and made his bow, and in an instant was more solemn than ever.

  “The individual who has the honour of addressing you,” he continued, “is Sidebotham, the mechanist, the mechanical genius of this, and all ages, as I have had the honour of being termed.”

  At this moment a sweet voice inquired:

  “Well, Mr. Sidebotham, how goes on the perpetual motion?”

  And raising her eyes, Maud saw the Duchess of Falconbury before her, smiling.

  “That is a question that answers itself,” said the professor, slowly averting his face with upturned nose and a sublime sneer. “How goes on the perpetuum mobile? Why it goes on for ever? Ha, ha, ha!”

  And he laughed, as demons do in melodramas, in three distinct “Ha’s.”

  Her grace was not in the least ruffled, for her attention was engaged by a melancholy but gentlemanlike looking man who was approaching.

  “You see that man,” whispered the duchess in Maud’s ear; her eyes looking down the shady walk, which they had now entered.

  “The Spanish ambassador?” inquired Maud, who saw that minister, in the antique costume which he affected, approaching with toes turned out, at a slow and grand pace, in the rear of the melancholy man.

  “Ambassador! He’s no ambassador, my dear; he has lost his head a little; he’s a Mr. Ap-Jenkins, who has a slate quarry in Carnarvonshire; but it is not about him. You see this man in black who walks towards us, looking down on the gravel over his shoulder. Did you ever see such a comically miserable face? When he comes up we’ll talk to him; he’ll amuse you.”

  Maud thought that such pining misery and malignity as were expressed in that dark face, could not have been conveyed in the human countenance.

  The duchess said, as he was passing by, unheeding:

  “I hope, Mr. Poinders, you find that boiling sensation a little better to-day?”

  “Sensation?” he repeated, stopping suddenly, and raising his dreadful face. “Heat and motion tell pretty plainly, when water, much less blood, is bubbling at a boil? No, not better, worse. My blood boils; as yesterday, so to-day, and so for ever and ever, amen!”

  “I’m so sorry,” said the duchess, pressing her hand ever so little on Maud’s arm, by way of showing her enjoyment of what was passing.

  The sufferer, about to resume his walk, added:

  “And I am subject, to-day, to violent shocks of electricity.”

  He ground his teeth, and muttered to himself, and so passed on. The duchess was laughing quietly, as she turned again to Maud, who was anything but amused; she was very much shocked, on the contrary.

  “The poor man is perfectly mad,” whispered the duchess.

  Miss Vernon felt a hand laid softly on her shoulder, before she could speak; and looking round, saw that frightful face.

  He said rapidly, with his eyes close to hers:

  “I am beyond the hope of salvation!”

  And he turned and pursued his slow, solitary walk through the valley of the shadow of death. What on earth could induce Lady Mardykes to permit a madman to walk about these grounds? A filmy suspicion was stealing over Maud, too terrific for utterance.

  The Spanish ambassador, in full fig, arrived. There was an opening just here in the yew-hedge, and a low hedge of sweetbriar, running for some yards, at the edge of the walk, made the air at this spot fragrant.

  His excellency, the Spanish minister, having arrived, the little party came to a halt, here commanding a view of the house and the croquet-ground, as well as one of the long and sequestered alleys in both directions.

  The minister made his kinglike greeting. They were standing on the grass, that with a broad belt skirts the walk; the croquet-ground before them, the little sweetbriar hedge in the rear.

  His excellency, notwithstanding the sultry weather, wears, as before, the skirt of his black mantle flung across his breast, over his shoulder. He is speaking loud, throwing his chest well out; his head is thrown back, his dark eyes half-closed. His clear brown complexion and black moustache, white, even teeth, and handsome features, lend a cavalier-like grace to the contemptuous smile with which he surveys the pigmy of perpetual motion, and flouts him with a lofty irony.

  The dialogue grows a little more spirited, as the ambassador with folded arms persists in his lofty vein of banter. The homunculus becomes more fiercely voluble on his perpetual motion, and treats his excellency with a good deal less ceremony than he likes. Both parties are waxing fiery.

  “Mechanic! perpetuum mobile! Professor! Philosopher!” said his excellency, smiling on, and quite closing his eyes for a short time. “A great European name. Sidebotham and Co., grocers, Cheapside. Why, no one who lives near you can fail to discover the perpetual motion. It exists in your tongue, ha, ha! your tongue — it is nowhere else about you — and it never ceases.”

  The sage gasped; sprang back two or three steps; and rose, as usual, to his toes, with his fists clenched, trembling all over, his teeth set, and his eyes starting from their sockets.

  “You have no business talking so,” said the duchess, haughtily, “if we spare you all inquiry into the authenticity of your diploma, or whatever you please to call it, I think you might, at least, remember what is due to rank; you can hardly suppose that it can be an agreeable pastime to the Duchess of Falconbury to witness a low quarrel between two such persons as Mr. Sidebotham and Mr. Ap-Jenkins.”

  But the minister, nothing moved from his faith in his own representative dignity, smiled superbly, wi
th folded arms, his black cane, tipped with its golden crown, held gracefully in his French-gloved hand, and with his chin high in air, he observed, in a tone of cold ridicule:

  “Duchess of Falconbury! Ha! Ha! ha! How charmingly that comes from the lips of Mrs. Fish, of New York!”

  And he made the lady a satirically ceremonious bow.

  The eyes of the duchess gleamed actual fire; her face, her very lips grew white. She stood open-lipped and breathless. It was hard to say whether the great lady or the pigmy was most furiously agitated.

  To the latter his excellency turned again with a haughty wave of his white-gloved hand, and observed:

  “As for you, you illiterate dwarf and grocer, I shall order my secretary to take you by the cocked-nose, and jerk you over that wall, like one of your own bad red-herrings.”

  The lady uttered a sudden scream of fury, and the philosopher jumped in the air, and slapped his forehead, with a roulade of blasphemies, yelling still more shrilly, “Let me — let me — I’ll annihilate him! I’ll annihilate him!” and they rushed nearly together upon his excellency the Spanish ambassador, who smiled in haughty scorn, as well he might, of such an attack.

  The homunculus, strung to double his natural strength by fury, was first to reach the object of assault, and grasping the Goliath in his arms below the knees, and, nothing daunted by the untoward interference of his own quadrant, which, in the feat, swung over his head, and hit him a smart blow over the nose, lifted the minister fairly off his feet; and this superb personage, in spite of a frantic effort to recover his equilibrium, fell backward, with an undignified souse, and a grunt, through the tangled hedge of sweetbriar, so that half his person lay on the grass, at the other side, and his shapely legs were struggling wildly for escape, at this.

  With the acumen and promptitude of her sex, the enraged duchess caught up the jet-black cane with its head of gold, that had flown from his hand, and with immense rapidity discharged a shower of whistling cuts, right and left, on the silken calves of the ambassador, who kicked right and left, shrieking horrible threats and wild appeals to his sovereign, to heaven, to the laws of nations, to his servants, in the vain endeavour to struggle through the thick fence, while the professor of mechanics, who had transferred himself to the other side, seized his hair and moustache in both hands, and with his heels against his shoulders, tugged as hard as if it had been to tear his last beefsteak from the jaws of a tiger. The ambassador was roaring “murder” by this time, and the shrieks and gabble of the executioners rose horribly over his roars of panic, while his mouth was dragged upward at the corners by the moustache into a monstrous caricature of a smile.

  The uproar, wilder and fiercer, alarmed the loungers and the croquet players. Mallets were dropped and balls abandoned. Some whooped and threw up their hats in saturnine ferocity. Others broke into screeching laughter. A frightful and contagious excitement ran swiftly through the strange throng.

  At this moment, however, several strong, grave-looking men, who acted unobserved as a patrol in those pleasure-grounds, came running up at the top of their speed to quell the outbreak.

  Professor Sidebotham let go the moustache and dropped the ambassador’s head on the ground, as an Irishman would say, like a hot potato; rearranged his quadrant and recovered his hat, concealed his bleeding nose with one hand, and affected to be a sedate professor and an ornament to society, and highly to disapprove of the mysterious riot.

  Not so the duchess. She had tasted blood, and plied the supple cane with shrieks and Billingsgate, resolutely, and even ferociously, resisting all interference. She turned now upon the men who had caught her wrists and disarmed her; she scratched, she stamped, she kicked, she bit.

  Darkdale emerged from the house in the midst of this struggle. He had a strange, short garment in his hand with enormously long sleeves. The duchess seemed to recognise this, for at sight of it she redoubled her struggles, she became quite furious. By a kind of magic, in spite of all, without violence, by a sinister dexterity, Darkdale with the aid of the other men got it on her. The arms were drawn across her breast, and the long sleeves crossed and tied behind, so that no force or skill which she could exert could in the least avail to extricate her.

  All her struggles could effect nothing. She was quietly and completely overpowered and hurried, now uttering long despairing screams, but no longer offering active resistance, swiftly across the grass to the terrace, and so disappeared into the door through which she had lately emerged in so different a mood.

  “What is that you have just put upon that lady?” Maud, who was horribly agitated, inquired of a broad-shouldered, dark-faced man in a short fustian-coat. He looked at her silently for a minute, and smiled cynically.

  “It is a thing we calls a strait-waistcoat,” he answered.

  “But that is for people who are quite mad,” said Maud.

  “Well, I take it,” he replied, “you don’t want to see no one madder than that.”

  CHAPTER LXX.

  CAGED.

  It seemed to Maud Vernon that she did not breathe once, from the time she left the scene of the too significant buffoonery she had just witnessed, until she found herself, she could not tell how, in her own dressing-room.

  It seemed as if she awoke there.

  She saw Mercy Creswell standing with her back against the wall, pale as a ghost, with a dark stare, and the corners of her mouth screwed down hard as she gazed at her. She looked scared and guilty, and as if she expected she did not know what; her hands she held folded together as tightly as the joints could clasp, and was as motionless as the wooden door-case behind her, and never took her frightened, watchful eyes off her young mistress.

  There was something in the look and mien of the young lady, you may be sure, to account for the panic of the maid.

  Miss Vernon sat down trembling, and then got up, pressing her hands to her temples, with a terrible look of helplessness, and she walked round and round the room, with long stifled moans. After a time she stopped, and looked slowly about her.

  “My God!” she gasped, “I’m terrified! Did it all happen?”

  She glided over to the window, and looked out on the gaily dressed and busy crowd, and, with a cry of despairing terror, she covered her eyes with her hands.

  Now she is passed swiftly from one room to another, back and forward; and thus she ran toward Mercy Creswell, and standing fixed, like an apparition, before her, cried:

  “I see it all; I understand it now! Mercy Creswell, help me to think. Do you know what has happened? My God! they have inveigled me into a madhouse! Oh, you wretch — you have led me into a madhouse!” The sentence broke into a shriek at the close.

  “Now don’t, Miss Maud, don’t, now; there’s a darling!” cried Mercy Creswell, as quick and shrill as the words could fly from her lips, and with her hands extended towards her. “Ye’ll take a parrokism, ye will, indeed; indeed ye will; ye’ll take a parrokism, if ye don’t be quiet; ye will, ye’ll have it.”

  “You have done it; and mamma; and Lady Mardykes; and cousin Max. Merciful God! All my friends! And cousin Maximilla! There’s no one left — I have none to help me! Oh! where shall I hide? Help me to think of something, Mercy Creswell, my old friend; you could not forsake me — you would not. Poor Miss Maud. Oh, think of long ago, at Roydon; if ever you hope for God’s forgiveness, get me out of this horrible place.”

  “It wasn’t me, miss, so it wasn’t; so ‘elp me, miss; ’twas your mamma. I’ve no more to do with it, as God’s my ‘ope, than the hinfant babe unborn,” protested Mercy Creswell, in a shrilly whine.

  “I’ll not stay in this dreadful place,” cried Maud, “I’ll lose my life, or I’ll get out of it. Oh! mamma — mamma — how could you — could you — could you? I shall go mad. I can’t stay here! I’ll not eat or drink here; I’ll find a way, some way, a short way. Oh, mamma! you’ll be sorry, then.”

  Again she was walking swiftly from room to room. Now up and down the floor of one; now to and fro acros
s the floor of another, shifting her hands across her forehead with an uncertain movement.

  “I can’t be imprisoned here; I’m not a slave. Where is the nearest posting-house? I’ll have advice; I’ll write to Mr. Coke; that can’t be prevented; I’ll escape from this house now.”

  And she ran to the bedroom door. Mercy Creswell knew that it was secured, and running into the dressing-room, she adroitly bolted the door of communication between the two apartments.

  Maud now found herself a prisoner in her room. She tried both doors with growing impetuosity, but they resisted her utmost efforts.

  Her own maid had locked her in, by a trick, and she was securely imprisoned in her room. This outrage fired her resentment so as, for the moment, to displace her panic.

  “Open the door,” she cried, shaking the lock with all her strength; “Mercy Creswell, open the door,” she repeated again and again; and she heard the creak of the servant’s shoe, faintly, as she stood holding her breath, close to the other side of the door.

  “Open the door; how dare you treat me so? Am I to be insulted by my own servant? Let me out.”

  Mercy heard her run to the window, and throw it up. More cadaverous than ever her face looked, as, in a momentary hesitation, she extended her dumpy fingers, that trembled visibly, to the bolt, but she changed her mind, and withdrawing her hand, ran, instead, to the brass handle that was fixed in the wall, pulled it, and a deep-toned bell sounded all down the gallery. She had remembered that the window as it went up, drew with it a strong wire grating, which made it safe against all attempts at escape, or worse.

  She stood on the gallery, and almost instantly two of those firmly-knit, hardy women, whom we may call housemaids, emerged from a room at its further end, which formed a sort of guardroom for the detachment in charge of that wing of the house, and up they came at a jog-trot; and almost at the same instant, for the alarm sounded also in the opposite direction, the iron door across the passage opened, and a keeper, a powerful man, in barragan jacket, with a white scar across his brown forehead and nose, telling of old service, entered, clanging the door behind him. Beckoning them on, and waiting till they were ready to enter, Mercy unlocked the door of Maud’s room, keeping herself in the rear.