Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated)

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  “‘You are not obliged to do this — you know you are not,’ I urged. ‘You have the power, that’s all, and you choose to exercise it.’

  “‘Amen, so be it; and now we’ve said enough,’ he replied.

  “‘No,’ I answered, warmly, for it was impossible to be diplomatic with a man like this. ‘I must say a word more. I ask you only to treat them as you describe them, that is as strangers. You would not put yourself out of your way to crush a stranger. There was a time when you were kind.’

  “‘And foolish,’ said he.

  “‘Kind,’ I repeated; ‘you were a kind man.’

  “‘The volume of life is full of knowledge,’ he answered, ‘and I have turned over some pages since then.’

  “‘A higher knowledge leads us to charity,’ I pleaded.

  “‘The highest to justice,’ he said, with a scoff. ‘I’m no theologian, but I know that fellow deserves the very worst. He refused to meet me, when a crack or two of a pistol might have blown away our feud, since so you call it — feud with such a mafflin!’ Every now and then, when he is excited, out pops one of these strange words. They came very often in this conversation, but I don’t remember them. ‘The mafflin! the coward!’

  “I give you his words; his truculent looks I can’t give you. It is plain he has not forgiven him, and never will. Your husband, we all know, did perfectly right in declining that wild challenge. All his friends so advised him. I was very near saying a foolish thing about you, but I saw it in time, and turned my sentence differently; and when I had done, he said:

  “‘I am going now — the shower is over.’ He took my hand, and said ‘Goodbye.’ But he held it still, and looking me in the face with his gloomy eyes, he added: ‘See, I like you well; but if you will talk of those people, or so much as mention their names again, we meet as friends no more.’

  “‘Think better of it, do, Harry,’ I called after him, but he was already clanking over the lobby in his cyclopean shoes. Whether he heard me or not, he walked down the stairs, with his big brute at his heels, without once looking over his shoulder.

  “And now, dear Mabel, I have told you everything. You are, of course, to take for granted those Northumbrian words and idioms which drop from him, as I reminded you, as he grows warm in discussion. This is a ‘report’ rather than a letter, and I have sat up very late to finish it, and I send it to the postoffice before I go to bed. Good night, and Heaven bless you, and I hope this gloomy letter may not vex you as much as its purport does me; disappoint you, judging from what you said to me when we talked the matter over, I scarcely think it can.”

  There is a Latin proverb, almost the only four words of Latin I possess, which says, Omne ignotum pro magnifico, for which, and for its translation, I am obliged to Mr. Carmel: “The unknown is taken for the sublime.” I did not at the time at all understand the nature of the danger that threatened, and its vagueness magnified it. Papa came in. He read the letter, and the deeper he got in it the paler his face grew, and the more it darkened. He drew a great breath as he laid it down.

  “Well, it’s not worse than you expected?” said mamma at last. “I hope not. I’ve had so much to weary, and worry, and break me down; you have no idea what the journey to the Golden Friars was to me. I have not been at all myself. I’ve been trying to do too much. Ethel there will tell you all I said to my aunt; and really things go so wrong and so unluckily, no matter what one does, that I almost think I’ll go to my bed and cry.”

  “Yes, dear,” said papa, thinking, a little bewildered. “It’s — it’s — it is — it’s very perverse. The old scoundrel! I suppose this is something else.”

  He took up a letter that had followed him by the same post, and nervously broke the seal. I was watching his face intently as he read. It brightened.

  “Here — here’s a bit of good luck at last! Where’s Mabel? Oh, yes! it’s from Cloudesly. There are some leases just expired at Ellenston, and we shall get at least two thousand pounds, he thinks, for renewing. That makes it all right for the present. I wish it had been fifteen hundred more; but it’s a great deal better than nothing. We’ll tide it over, you’ll find.” And papa kissed her with effusion.

  “And you can give three hundred pounds to Le Panier and Tarlton; they have been sending so often lately,” said mamma, recovering from her despondency.

  CHAPTER XXXV.

  LADY MARDYKES’S BALL.

  The autumn deepened, and leaves were brown, and summer’s leafy honours spread drifting over the short grass and the forest roots. Winter came, and snow was on the ground, and presently spring began to show its buds, and blades, and earliest flowers; and the London season was again upon us.

  Lady Lorrimer had gone, soon after our visit to Golden Friars, to Naples for the winter. She was to pass the summer in Switzerland, and the autumn somewhere in the north of Italy, and again she was to winter in her old quarters at Naples. We had little chance, therefore, of seeing her again in England for more than a year. Her letters were written in varying spirits, sometimes cheery, sometimes de profundis. Sometimes she seemed to think that she was just going to break up and sink; and then her next letter would unfold plans looking far into the future, and talking of her next visit to England. There was an uneasy and even violent fluctuation in these accounts, which did not exactly suggest the idea of a merely fanciful invalid. She spoke at times, also, of intense and exhausting pain. And she mentioned that in Paris she had been in the surgeons’ hands, and that there was still uncertainty as to what good they might have done her. This may have been at the root of her hysterical vacillations. But, in addition to this, there was something very odd in Lady Lorrimer’s correspondence. She had told mamma to write to her once a fortnight, and promised to answer punctually; but nothing could be more irregular. At one time, so long an interval as two whole months passed without bringing a line from her. Then, again, she would complain of mamma’s want of punctuality. She seemed to have forgotten things that mamma had told her; and sometimes she alluded to things as if she had told them to mamma, which she had never mentioned before. Either the postoffice was playing tricks with her letters, or poor Lady Lorrimer was losing her head.

  I think, if we had been in a quiet place like Malory, we should have been more uneasy about Lady Lorrimer than, in the whirl of London, we had time to be. There was one odd passage in one of her letters; it was as follows: “Send your letters, not by the post, I move about so much; but, when you have an opportunity, send them by a friend. I wish I were happier. I don’t do always as I like. If we were for a time together — but all I do is so uncertain!”

  Papa heard more than her letters told of her state of health. A friend of his, who happened to be in Paris at the time, told papa that one of the medical celebrities whom she had consulted there had spoken to him in the most desponding terms of poor Lady Lorrimer’s chances of recovery, I do not know whether it was referable to that account of her state of health or simply to the approach of the time when he was to make his début in the House; but the fact is that papa gave a great many dinner-parties this season; and mamma took her drives in a new carriage, with a new and very pretty pair of horses; and a great deal of new plate came home; and it was plain that he was making a fresh start in a style suited to his new position, which he assumed to be certain and near. He was playing rather deep upon this throw. It must be allowed, however, that nothing could look more promising.

  Sir Luke Pyneweck, a young man, with an estate and an overpowering influence in the town of Shillingsworth, had sat for three years for that borough, not in the House, but in his carriage, or a Bath-chair, in various watering-places at home and abroad — being, in fact, a miserable invalid. This influential young politician had written a confidential letter, with only two or three slips in spelling and grammar, to his friend the Patronage Secretary, telling him to look out for a man to represent Shillingsworth till he had recovered his health, which was not returning quite so quickly as he expected, and promising his stren
uous support to the nominee of the minister. Papa’s confidence, therefore, was very reasonably justified, and the matter was looked upon by those sages of the lobbies who count the shadowy noses of unborn Houses of Commons as settled. It was known that the dissolution would take place early in the autumn.

  Presently there came a letter to the “whip,” from his friend Sir Luke Pyneweck, announcing that he was so much better that he had made up his mind to try once more before retiring.

  This was a stunning blow to papa. Sir Luke could do without the government better than the government could do without him. And do or say what they might, no one could carry the borough against him. The Patronage Secretary really liked my father; and, I believe, would have wished him, for many reasons, in the House. But what was to be done? Sir Luke was neither to be managed nor bullied; he was cunning and obstinate. He did not want anything for himself, and did not want anything for any other person. With a patriot of that type who could do anything?

  It was a pity the “whip” did not know this before every safe constituency was engaged. A pity papa did not know it before he put an organ into Shillingsworth church, and subscribed six hundred pounds towards the building of the meeting-house. I never saw papa so cast down and excited as he was by this disappointment. Looking very ill, however, he contrived to rally his spirits when he was among his friends, and seemed resolved, one way or other, to conquer fortune.

  Balls, dinners, concerts, garden-parties, nevertheless, devoured our time, and our drives, and shopping, and visits went on, as if nothing had happened, and nothing was impending.

  Two notable engagements for the next week, because they were connected, in the event, with my strange story, I mention now. On Tuesday there was Lady Mardykes’s ball, on that day week papa had a political party to dinner, among whom were some very considerable names indeed. Lady Mardykes’s balls were always, as you know, among the most brilliant of the season. While dancing one of those quadrilles that give us breathing time between the round dances, I saw a face that riveted my attention, and excited my curiosity. A slight old gentleman, in evening costume, with one of those obsolete under-waistcoats, which seemed to me such a pretty fashion (his was of blue satin), was the person I mean. A forbidding-looking man was this, with a thin face, as brown as a nut, hawk’s eyes and beak, thin lips, and a certain character of dignified ill-temper, and even insolence, which, however, did not prevent its being a very gentlemanlike face. I instantly recognised him as the old man, in the chocolate-coloured coat, who had talked so sharply, as it seemed to me and poor Nelly, with Laura Grey on the Milk-walk, in the shadow of the steep bank and the overhanging trees.

  “Who is that old gentleman standing near the door at the end of the room, with that blue satin about his neck? Now he’s speaking to Lady Westerbroke.”

  “Oh! that’s Lord Rillingdon,” answered my friend.

  “He does not go to many places? I have seen him, I think, but once before,” I said.

  “No, I fancy he does not care about this sort of thing.”

  “Doesn’t he speak very well? I think I’ve heard — — “

  “Yes, he speaks only in Indian debates. He’s very well up on India — he was there, you know.”

  “Don’t you think he looks very cross?” I said.

  “They say he is very cross,” said my informant, laughing: and here the dance was resumed, and I heard no more of him.

  Old Lord Rillingdon had his eyes about him. He seemed, as much as possible, to avoid talking to people, and I thought was looking very busily for somebody. As I now and then saw this old man, who, from time to time, changed his point of observation, my thoughts were busy with Laura Grey, and the pain of my uncertainty returned — pain mingled with remorse. My enjoyment of this scene contrasted with her possible lot, upbraided me, and for a time I wished myself at home.

  A little later I thought I saw a face that had not been seen in London for more than a year. I was not quite sure, but I thought I saw Monsieur Droqville. In rooms so crowded, one sometimes has so momentary a peep of a distant face that recognition is uncertain. Very soon I saw him again, and this time I had no doubt whatever. He seemed as usual, chatty, and full of energy; but I soon saw, or at least fancied, that he did not choose to see mamma or me. It is just possible I may have been doing him wrong. I did not see him, it is true, so much as once glance towards us; but Doctor or Monsieur Droqville was a man who saw everything, as Rebecca Torkill would say, with half an eye — always noting everything that passed; full of curiosity, suspicion, and conclusion, and with an eye quick and piercing as a falcon’s.

  This man, I thought, had seen, and was avoiding us, without wishing to appear to do so. It so happened, however, that some time later, in the tea-room, mamma was placed beside him. I was near enough to hear. Mamma recognised him with a smile and a little bow. He replied with just surprise enough in his looks and tones to imply that he had not known, up to that moment, that she was there.

  “You are surprised to see me here?” he said; “I can scarcely believe it myself. I’ve been away thirteen months — a wanderer all over Europe; and I shall be off again in a few days. By-the-bye, you hear from Lady Lorrimer sometimes: I saw her at Naples, in January. She was looking flourishing then, but complaining a good deal. She has not been so well since — but I’ll look in upon you tomorrow or the next day. I shall be sure to see her again, immediately. Your friends, the Wiclyffs, were at Baden this summer, so were the D’Acres. Lord Charles is to marry that French lady; it turns out she’s rather an heiress; it is very nearly arranged, and they seemed all very well pleased. Have you seen my friend Carmel lately?”

  “About three weeks ago; he was going to North Wales,” she said.

  “He is another of those interesting people who are always dying, and never die,” said Monsieur Droqville.

  I felt a growing disgust for this unfeeling man. He talked a little longer, and then turned to me and said:

  “There’s one advantage, Miss Ware, in being an old fellow — one can tell a young lady, in such charming and brilliant looks as yours tonight, what he thinks, just as he might give his opinion upon a picture. But I won’t venture mine; I’ll content myself with making a petition. I only ask that, when you are a very great lady, you’ll remember a threadbare doctor, who would be very glad of an humble post about the court, and who is tired of wandering over the world in search of happiness, and finding a fee only once in fifty miles.”

  I do not know what was in this man’s mind at that moment. If he was a Jesuit, he certainly owed very little to those arts and graces of which rumour allows so large a share to the order. But brusque and almost offensive as I thought him, there was something about him that seemed to command acceptance, and carry him everywhere he chose to go. He went away, and I saw him afterwards talking now to one great lady, and now to another. Lord Rillingdon, who looked like the envious witch whom Madame D’Aulnois introduces sometimes at the feasts of her happy kings and queens, throwing a malign gloom on all about them, had vanished.

  That night, however, was to recall, as unexpectedly, another face, a more startling reminder of Malory and Laura Grey.

  CHAPTER XXXVI.

  NEWS OF LADY LORRIMER.

  Old Lord Verney, of all persons in the world, took a fancy to take me down to the tea-room. I think he believed, as other wiser people did, that papa, who was certainly clever, and a very shrewd club-house politician, might come to be somebody in the House, in time.

  As usual, he was telling an interminable story, without point or beginning or end, about himself, and all mixed up with the minister, and the opposition leader, and an amendment, and some dismal bill, that I instantly lost my way in. As we entered the tea-room, a large room opening from the landing, he nodded, without interrupting his story, to a gentleman who was going downstairs. My eye followed this recognition, and I saw a tall, rather good-looking young man. I saw him only for a moment. I was so startled that I involuntarily almost stopped Lord Verney as we
passed; but I recovered myself instantly. It was tantalising. He always talks as if he were making a speech; one can’t, without rudeness, edge in a word; he is so pompous, I dare not interrupt him. He did that office for himself, however, by taking an ice; and I seized the transitory silence, and instantly asked him the name of the gentleman to whom he had bowed; I thought he said, “Mr. Jennings,” and as a clever artist of that odd name had lately painted a portrait of Lord Verney, I was satisfied that I had heard him aright.

  This was to be a night of odd recognitions. I was engaged to Lord John Roxford, who came up, and saying, “I think this is our dance, Miss Ware?” took me away, to my great relief, from Lord Verney. Well, we danced and talked a little; and I learned nothing that I remember, except that he was to return to Paris the next day. Before he took me to mamma, however, he said:

  “A very dear friend has asked me, as the greatest favour I can do him, to introduce him to you, Miss Ware; you will allow me?”

  He repeated, I thought — for he was looking for him, and his face at that moment was turned a little away, and the noise considerable — the same name that Lord Verney had mentioned. As Rebecca Torkill used to say, “my heart jumped into my mouth,” as I consented. A moment more, and I found myself actually acquainted with the very man! How strange it seemed! Was that smiling young man of fashion the same I had seen stretched on the rugged peat and roots at Plas Ylwd, with white face and leaden lips, and shirt soaked in blood? He was, with his white-gloved hand on the pier-table beside me, inquiring what dance I could give him. I was engaged for this; but I could not risk the chance of forfeiting my talk with my new acquaintance. I gave it to him, and having the next at my disposal, transferred it to the injured man whom I had ousted.