Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated)

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  I was a great deal too proud to let him perceive my resentment — I was just as usual — I trifled and laughed, read my Italian, and made blunders, and asked questions; and, in those intervals of which I have spoken, I listened to what he had to say, took the books he offered, and thanked him with a smile, but with no great fervour. The temperature of our town drawingroom was perceptibly cooler than that of Malory, and the distance between our two chairs had appreciably increased. Nevertheless, we were apparently, at least, very good friends.

  But terms like these are sometimes difficult to maintain. I was vexed at his seeming to acquiesce so easily in my change of manner, which, imperceptible to any one else, I somehow knew could not be hidden from him. I had brought down, and laid on the drawingroom table at which we sat, the only book which I then had belonging to Mr. Carmel. It was rather a dark day. Something in the weather made me a little more cross than usual. Miss Pounden was, according to her wont, flitting to and fro, and not minding in the least what we read or said. I laid down my Tasso, and laughed. Mr. Carmel looked at me a little puzzled.

  “That, I think, is the most absurd stanza we have read. I ought, I suppose, to say the most sublime. But it is as impossible to read it without laughing as to read the rest without yawning.”

  I said this with more scorn than I really felt, but it certainly was one of those passages in which good Homer nods. A hero’s head is cut off, I forget his name — a kinsman, I daresay, of Saint Denis; and he is so engrossed with the battle that he forgets his loss, and goes on fighting for some time.

  “I hope it is not very wrong, and very stupid, but I am so tired of the Gerusalemme Liberata.”

  He looked at me for a moment or two. I think he did not comprehend the spirit in which I said all this, but perhaps he suspected something of it — he looked a little pained.

  “But, I hope, you are not tired of Italian? There are other authors.”

  “Yes, so there are. I should like Ariosto, I daresay. I like fairy-tales, and that is the reason, I think, I like reading the lives of the saints, and the other books you have been so kind as to lend me.”

  I said this quite innocently, but there was a great deal of long-husbanded cruelty in it. He dropped his fine eyes to the table, and leaned for a short time on his hand.

  “Well, even so, it is something gained to have read them,” meditated Mr. Carmel, and looking up at me, he added, “and we never know by what childish instincts and simple paths we may be led to the sublimest elevations.”

  There was so much gentleness in his tone and looks that my heart smote me. My momentary compunction, however, did not prevent my going on, now that I had got fairly afloat.

  “I have brought down the book you were so kind as to lend me last week. I am sure it is very eloquent, but there’s so much I cannot understand.”

  “Can I explain anything?” he began, taking up the book at the same time.

  “I did not mean that — no. I was going to return it, with my very best thanks,” I said. “I have been reading a great deal that is too high for me — books meant for wiser people and deeper minds than mine.”

  “The mysteries of faith remain, for all varieties of mind, mysteries still,” he answered sadly. “No human vision can pierce the veil. I do not flatter you, but I have met with no brighter intelligence than yours. In death the scales will fall from our eyes. Until then, yea must be yea, and nay, nay, and let us be patient.”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Carmel, that I ought to read these books without papa’s consent. I have imperceptibly glided into this kind of reading. ‘I will tell you about Swedenborg,’ you said; ‘we must not talk of Rome or Luther — we can’t agree, and they are forbidden subjects,’ do you remember? And then you told me what an enemy Swedenborg was of the Catholic Church — you remember that? And then you read me what he said about vastation, as he calls it; and you lent me the book to read; and when you took it back, you explained to me that his account of vastation differs in no respect from purgatory; and in the same way, when I read the legends of the saints, you told me a great deal more of your doctrine; and in the same way, also, you discussed those beautiful old hymns, so that in a little while, although, as you said, Rome and Luther were forbidden subjects, or rather names, I found myself immersed in a controversy, which I did not understand, with a zealous and able priest. You have been artful, Mr. Carmel!”

  “Have I been artful in trying to save you?” he answered gently.

  “You would not, I think, practise the same arts with other people — you treat me like a fool,” I said. “You would not treat that Welsh lady so, whom you visit — I mean — I really forget her name, but you remember all about her.”

  He rose unconsciously, and looked for a minute from the window.

  “A good priest,” he said, returning, “is no respecter of persons. Blessed should I be if I could beguile a benighted traveller into safety! Blessed and happy were my lot if I could die in the endeavour thus to save one human soul bent on self-destruction!”

  His answer vexed me. The theological level on which he placed all human souls did not please me. After all our friendly evenings at Malory, I did not quite understand his being, as he seemed to boast, no “respecter of persons.”

  “I am sure that it is quite right,” I said, carelessly, “and very prudent, too, because, if you were to lose your life in converting me, or a Hottentot chief, or anyone else, you would, you think, go straight to heaven; so, after all, the wish is not altogether too heroic for this selfish world.”

  He smiled; but there was doubt, I thought, in the eyes which he turned for a moment upon me.

  “Our motives are so mixed,” he said, “and death, besides, is to some men less than happier people think; my life has been austere and afflicted; and what remains of it will, I know, be darker. I see sometimes where all is drifting. I never was so happy, and I never shall be, as I have been for a time at Malory. I shall see that place perhaps no more. Happy the people whose annals are dull!” he smiled. “How few believe that well-worn saying in their own case! Yet, Miss Ethel, when you left Malory, you left quiet behind you, perhaps for ever!”

  He was silent; I said nothing. The spirit of what he had said echoed, though he knew it not, the forebodings of my own heart. The late evening sun was touching with its slanting beams the houses opposite, and the cold grimy brick in which the dingy taste of our domestic architecture some forty years before delighted; and as I gazed listlessly from my chair, through the window, on the dismal formality of the street, I saw in the same sunlight nothing of those bricks and windows: I saw Malory and the church-tower, the trees, the glimmering blue of the estuary, the misty mountains, all fading in the dreamy quietude of the declining light, and I sighed.

  “Well, then,” he said, closing the book, “we close Tasso here. If you care to try Ariosto, I shall be only too happy. Shall we commence tomorrow? And as for our other books, those I mean that you were good enough to read — — “

  “I’m not afraid of them,” I said: “we shan’t break our old Malory custom yet; and I ought to be very grateful to you, Mr. Carmel.”

  His countenance brightened, but the unconscious reproach of his wounded look still haunted me. And after he was gone, with a confusion of feelings which I could not have easily analysed, I laid my hands over my eyes, and cried for some time bitterly.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  MY BOUQUET.

  I remember so vividly the night of my first ball. The excitement of the toilet; mamma’s and the maid’s consultations and debates; the tremulous anticipations; the “pleasing terror;” the delightful, anxious flutter, and my final look in the tall glass. I hardly knew myself. I gazed at myself with the irrepressible smile of elation. I never had looked so well. There are degrees of that delightful excitement that calls such tints to girlish cheeks, and such fires to the eyes, as visit them no more in our wiser afterlife. The enchantment wanes, and the flowers and brilliants fade and we soon cease to see them. I went down to
the drawingroom to wait for mamma. The candles were lighted, and whom should I find there but Mr. Carmel?

  “I asked your mamma’s leave to come and see you dressed for your first ball,” he said. “How very pretty it all is!”

  He surveyed me, smiling with a melancholy pride, it seemed to me, in my good looks and brilliant dress.

  “No longer, and never more, the Miss Ethel of my quiet Malory recollections. Going out at last! If any one can survive the ordeal and come forth scathless, you, I think, will. But to me it seems that this is a farewell, and that my pupil dies tonight, and a new Miss Ethel returns. You cannot help it; all the world cannot prevent it, if so it is to be. As an old friend, I knew I might bring you these.”

  “Oh, Mr. Carmel, what beautiful flowers!” I exclaimed.

  It was certainly an exquisite bouquet; one of those beautiful and costly offerings that perish in an hour, and seems to me like the pearl thrown into the cup of wine.

  “I am so grateful. It was so kind of you. It is too splendid a great deal. It is quite impossible that there can be anything like it in the room.”

  I was really lost in wonder and admiration, and I suppose looked delighted. I was pleased that the flowers should have come from Mr. Carmel’s hand.

  “If you think that the flowers are worthy of you, you think more highly than I do of them,” he answered, with a smile that was at once sad and pleased. “I am such an old friend, you know; a month at quiet Malory counts for a year anywhere else. And as you say of the flowers, I may say more justly of my pupil, there will be no one like her there. It is the compensation of being such as I, that we may speak frankly, like good old women, and no one be offended. And, oh, Miss Ethel, may God grant they be not placed like flowers upon a sacrifice or on the dead. Do not forget your better thoughts. You are entering scenes of illusion, where there is little charity, and almost no sincerity, where cruel feelings are instilled, the love of flattery and dominion awakened, and all the evil and enchantments of the world beset you. Encourage those good thoughts; watch and pray, or a painless and even pleasant death sets in, and no one can arrest it.”

  How my poor father would have laughed at such an exhortation at the threshold of a ball-room! No doubt it had its comic side, but not for me, and that was all Mr. Carmel cared for.

  This was a ball at an official residence, and besides the usual muster, Cabinet and other Ministers would be there, and above all, that judicious rewarder of public virtue, and instructor of the conscience of the hustings, the patronage secretary of the Treasury. Papa had at last discovered a constituency which he thought promised success, he had made it a point, of course, to go to places where he had opportunities for a talk with that important personage. Papa was very sanguine, and now, as usual, whenever he had a project of that kind on hand, was in high spirits.

  He came into the drawingroom. He always seemed to me as if he did not quite know whether he liked or disliked Mr. Carmel. Whenever I saw them together, he appeared to me, like Mrs. Malaprop, to begin with a little aversion, and gradually to become more and more genial. He greeted Mr. Carmel a little coldly, and brightened as he looked on me; he was evidently pleased with me, and talked me over with myself very goodhumouredly. I took care to show him my flowers. He could not help admiring them.

  “These are the best flowers I have seen anywhere. How did you contrive to get them? Really, Mr. Carmel, you are a great deal too kind. I hope Ethel thanked you. Ethel, you ought really to tell Mr. Carmel how very much obliged you are.”

  “Oh! she has thanked me a great deal too much; she has made me quite ashamed,” said he.

  And so we talked on, waiting for mamma, and I remember papa said he wondered how Mr. Carmel, who had lived in London and at Oxford, and at other places, where in one kind of life or another one really does live, contrived to exist month after month at Malory, and he drew an amusing and cruel picture of its barbarism and the nakedness of the town of Cardyllion. Mr. Carmel took up the cudgels for both, and I threw in a word wherever I had one to say. I remember this laughing debate, because it led to this little bit of dialogue.

  “I fortunately never bought many things there — two brushes, I remember; all their hairs fell out, and they were bald before the combs they sent for to London arrived. If I had been dependent on the town of Cardyllion, I should have been reduced to a state of utter simplicity.”

  “Oh, but I assure you, papa, they have a great many very nice things at Jones’s shop in Castle Street,” I remonstrated.

  “Certainly not for one’s dressing room. There are tubs at the regattas, and sponges at their dinners, I daresay,” papa began, in a punning vein.

  “But you’ll admit that London supplies no such cosmetics as Malory,” said Mr. Carmel, with a kind glance at me.

  “Well, you have me there, I admit,” laughed papa, looking very pleasantly at me, who, no doubt, was at that moment the centre of many wild hopes of his.

  Mamma came down now; there was no time to lose. My heart bounded, half with fear. Mr. Carmel came downstairs with us, and saw us into the carriage. He stood at the doorsteps smiling, his short cloak wrapped about him, his hat in his hand. Now the horses made their clattering scramble forward; the carriage was in motion. Mr. Carmel’s figure, in the attitude of his last look, receded; he was gone; it was like a farewell to Malory, and we were rolling on swiftly towards the ball-room, and a new life for me.

  I am not going to describe this particular ball, nor my sensations on entering this new world, so artificial and astonishing. What an arduous life, with its stupendous excitement, fatigues, and publicity! There were in the new world on which I was entering, of course, personal affections and friendships, as among all other societies of human beings. But the canons on which it governs itself are, it seemed to me, inimical to both. The heart gives little, and requires little there. It assumes nothing deeper than relations of acquaintance; and there is no time to bestow on any other. It is the recognised business of every one to enjoy, and if people have pains or misfortunes they had best keep them to themselves, and smile. No one has a right to be ailing or unfortunate, much less to talk as if he were so, in that happy valley. Such people are “tainted wethers of the flock,” and are bound to abolish themselves forthwith. No doubt kind things are done, and charitable, by people who live in it. But they are no more intended to see the light of that life than Mr. Snake’s goodnatured actions were. This dazzling microcosm, therefore, must not be expected to do that which it never undertook. Its exertions in pursuit of pleasure are enormous; its exhaustion prodigious; the necessary restorative cycle must not be interrupted by private agonies, small or great. If that were permitted, who could recruit for his daily task? I am relating, after an interval of very many years, the impressions of a person who, then very young, was a denizen of “the world” only for a short time; but the application of these principles of selfishness seemed to me sometimes ghastly.

  One thing that struck me very much in a little time was that society, as it is termed, was so limited in numbers. You might go everywhere, it seemed to me, and see, as nearly as possible, the same people night after night. The same cards always, merely shuffled. This, considering the size and wealth of England and of London, did seem to me unaccountable.

  My first season, like that of every girl who is admired and danced with a great deal, was glorified by illusions, chief among which was that the men who danced with me as they could every night did honestly adore me. We learn afterwards how much and how little those triumphs mean; that new faces are liked simply because they are new; and that girls are danced with because they are the fashion and dance well. I am not boasting — I was admired; and papa was in high goodhumour and spirits. There is sunshine even in that region; like winter suns, bright but cold. Such as it is, let the birds of that enchanted forest enjoy it while it lasts; flutter their wings and sing in its sheen, for it may not be for long.

  CHAPTER XXX.

  THE KNIGHT OF THE BLACK CASTLE.

 
My readings with Mr. Carmel totally ceased; in fact, there was no time for any but that one worship which now absorbed me altogether. Every now and then, however, he was in London, and mamma, in the drawingroom, used at times to converse with him, in so low a tone, so earnestly and so long, that I used to half suspect her of making a shrift, and receiving a whispered absolution. Mamma, indeed, stood as it were with just one foot upon the very topmost point of our “high church,” ready to spread her wings, and to float to the still more exalted level of the cross on the dome of St. Peter’s. But she always hesitated when the moment for making the aërial ascent arrived, and was still trembling in her old attitude on her old pedestal.

  I don’t think mamma’s theological vagaries troubled papa. Upon all such matters he talked like a goodnatured Sadducee; and if religion could have been carried on without priests, I don’t think he would have objected to any of its many forms.

  Mamma had Mr. Carmel to luncheon often, during his stay in town. Whenever he could find an opportunity, he talked with me. He struggled hard to maintain his hold upon me. Mamma seemed pleased that he should; yet I don’t think that she had made up her mind even upon my case. I daresay, had I then declared myself a “Catholic,” she would have been in hysterics. Her own religious state, just then, I could not perfectly understand. I don’t think she did. She was very uncomfortable about once a fortnight. Her tremors returned when a cold or any other accident had given her a dull day.

  When the season was over, I went with papa and mamma to some country houses, and while they completed their circuit of visits Miss Pounden and I were despatched to Malory. The new world which had dazzled me for a time had not changed me. I had acquired a second self; but my old self was still living. It had not touched my heart, nor changed my simple tastes. I enjoyed the quiet of Malory, and its rural ways, and should have been as happy there as ever, if I could only have recovered the beloved companions whom I missed.