by Ellen Wood
Not only in sight was the steamer, but rapidly nearing the port. She had made a calm and quick passage. When at length she was in and about to swing round, and the two ladies were looking down at it, with a small crowd of other assembled spectators, the first passengers they saw on board were Nancy and Captain Fennel, who began to wave their hands in greeting and to nod their heads.
“Any way, Lavinia, it could not have been his ghost last night,” whispered Mary Carimon.
Far from presenting an evil countenance to Lavinia, as the days passed on, Captain Fennel appeared to wish to please her, and was all suavity. So at present nothing disturbed the peace of the Petite Maison Rouge.
“What people were they that you stayed with in London, Nancy?” Lavinia inquired of her sister on the first favourable opportunity.
Nancy glanced round the salon before answering, as if to make sure they were alone; but Captain Fennel had gone out for a stroll.
“We were at James Fennel’s, Lavinia.”
“What — the brother’s! And has he a wife?”
“Yes; a wife, but no children. Mrs. James Fennel has money of her own, which she receives weekly.”
“Receives weekly!” echoed Lavinia.
“She owns some little houses which are let out in weekly tenements; an agent collects the rents, and brings her the money every Tuesday morning. She dresses in the shabbiest things sometimes, and does her own housework, and altogether is not what I should call quite a lady, but she is very good-hearted. She did her best to make us comfortable, and never grumbled at our staying so long. I expect Edwin paid her something. James only came home by fits and starts. I think he was in some embarrassment — debt, you know. He used to dash into the house like a whirlwind when he did come, and steal out of it when he left, peering about on all sides.”
“Have they a nice house?” asked Lavinia.
“Oh, good gracious, no! It’s not a house at all, only small lodgings. And Mrs. James changed them twice over whilst we were there. When we first went they were at a place called Ball’s Pond.”
“Why did you remain all that time?”
Mrs. Edwin Fennel shook her head helplessly; she could not answer the question. “I should have liked to come back before,” she said; “it was very wearisome, knowing nobody and having nothing to do. Did you find it dull here, Lavinia, all by yourself?”
“‘Dull’ is not the right word for it,” answered Lavinia, catching her breath with a sigh. “I felt more lonely, Ann, than I shall ever care to feel again. Especially when I had to come home at night from some soirée, or from spending the evening quietly with Mary Carimon or any other friend.” And she went on to tell of the feeling of terror which had so tried her.
“I never heard of such a thing!” exclaimed Ann. “How silly you must be, Lavinia! What could there have been in the house to frighten you?”
“I don’t know; I wish I did know,” sighed Lavinia, just as she had said more than once before.
Nancy, who was attired in a bright ruby cashmere robe, with a gold chain and locket, some blue ribbons adorning her light ringlets, for she had made a point of dressing more youthfully than ever since her marriage, leaned back in her chair, as she sat staring at her sister and thinking.
“Lavinia,” she said huskily, “you remember the feeling you had the day we were about to look at the house with Mary Carimon, and which you thought was through the darkness of the passage striking you unpleasantly? Well, my opinion is that it must have given you a scare.”
“Why, of course it did.”
“Ah, but I mean a scare which lasts,” said Ann; “one of those scares which affect the mind and take very long to get rid of. You recollect poor Mrs. Hunt, at Buttermead? She was frightened at a violent thunderstorm, though she never had been before; and for years afterwards, whenever it thundered, she became so alarmingly ill and agitated that Mr. Featherston had to be run for. He called it a scare. I think the fear you felt that past day must have left that sort of scare upon you. How else can you account for what you tell me?”
Truth to say, the same idea had more than once struck Lavinia. She knew how devoid of reason some of these “scares” are, and yet how terribly they disturb the mind on which they fasten.
“But I had quite forgotten that fear, Ann,” she urged in reply. “We had lived in the house eighteen months when you went away, and I had never recalled it.”
“All the same, I think you received the scare; it had only lain dormant,” persisted Ann.
“Well, well; you are back again now, and it is over,” said Lavinia. “Let us forget it. Do not speak of it again at all to any one, Nancy love.”
VIII.
Winter that year had quite set in when Sainteville found itself honoured with rather a remarkable visitor; one Signor Talcke, who descended, one morning at the beginning of December, at the Hôtel des Princes. Though he called himself “Signor,” it seemed uncertain to what country he owed his birth. He spoke five or six languages as a native, including Hindustani. Signor Talcke was a professor of occult sciences; he was a great astronomer; astrology he had at his fingers’ ends. He was a powerful mesmerist; he would foretell the events of your life by your hands, or your fortune by the cards.
For a fee of twenty-five francs, he would attend an evening party, and exhibit some of his powers. Amidst others who engaged him were the Miss Bosanquets, in the Rue Lamartine. A relative of theirs, Sir George Bosanquet, K.C.B., had come over with his wife to spend Christmas with them. Sir George laughed at what he heard of Signor Talcke’s powers of reading the future, and said he should much like to witness a specimen of it. So Miss Bosanquet and her sisters hastily arranged an evening entertainment, engaged the mystical man, and invited their friends and acquaintances, those of the Petite Maison Rouge included.
It took place on the Friday after Christmas-Day. Something that occurred during the evening was rather remarkable. Miss Preen’s diary gives a full account of it, and that shall be transcribed here. And I, Johnny Ludlow, take this opportunity of assuring the reader that what she wrote was in faithful accordance with the facts of the case.
From Miss Preen’s Diary.
Saturday morning. — I feel very tired; fit for nothing. Nancy has undertaken to do the marketing, and is gone out for that purpose with her husband. It is to be hoped she will be moderate, and not attempt to buy up half the market.
I lay awake all night, after the evening at Miss Bosanquet’s, thinking how foolish Ann was to have had her “future cast,” as that Italian (if he is Italian) called it, and how worse than foolish I was to let what he said worry me. “As if there could be anything in it!” laughed Ann, as we were coming home; fortunately she is not as I am in temperament — nervously anxious. “It is only nonsense,” said Miss Anna Bosanquet to me when the signor’s predictions were at an end; “he will tell some one else just the same next time.” But I did not think so. Of course, one is at a loss how to trust this kind of man. Take him for all in all, I rather like him; and he appears to believe implicitly in what he says: or, rather, in what he tell us the cards say.
They are charming women, these three sisters — Grace, Rose, and Anna Bosanquet; good, considerate, high-bred ladies. I wonder how it is they have lived to middle life without any one of them marrying? And I often wonder how they came to take up their residence at Sainteville, for they are very well off, and have great connections. I remember, though, Anna once said to me that the dry, pure air of the place suited her sister Rose, who has bad health, better than any other they had tried.
When seven o’clock struck, the hour named, Nancy and I appeared together in the sitting-room, ready to start, for we observe punctuality at Sainteville. I wore my black satin, handsome yet, trimmed with the rich white lace that Mrs. Selby gave me. Nancy looked very nice and young in her lilac silk. She wore a white rose in her hair, and her gold chain and locket round her neck. Captain Fennel surprised us by saying he was not going — his neuralgia had come on. I fancied it was
an excuse — that he did not wish to meet Sir George Bosanquet. He had complained of the same thing on Christmas-Day, so it might be true. Ann and I set off together, leaving him nursing his cheek at the table.
It was a large gathering for Sainteville — forty guests, I should think; but the rooms are large. Professor Talcke exhibited some wonderful feats in — what shall I call it? — necromancy? — as good a word, perhaps, as any other. He mesmerized some people, and put one of them into a state of clairvoyance, and her revelations took my breath away. Signor Talcke assured us that what she said would be found minutely true. I think he has the strangest eyes I ever saw: grey eyes, with a sort of light in their depths. His features are fair and delicate, his voice is gentle as a woman’s, his manner retiring; Sir George seemed much taken with him.
Later, when the evening was passing, he asked if any one present would like to have their future cast, for he had cards which would do it. Three of his listeners pressed forward at once; two of them with gay laughter, the other pale and awestruck. The signor went into the recess in the small room, and sat down behind the little table there, and as many as could crowd round to look on, did so. I don’t know what passed; there was no room for me; or whether the “Futures” he disclosed were good or bad. I had sat on the sofa at a distance, talking with Anna Bosanquet and Madame Carimon.
Suddenly, as we were for a moment silent, Ann’s voice was heard, eager and laughing:
“Will you tell my fortune, Signor Talcke? I should like to have mine revealed.”
“With pleasure, madame,” he answered.
We got up and drew near. I felt vexed that Ann should put herself forward in any such matter, and whispered to her; but she only shook her curls, laughed at me, and persisted. Signor Talcke put the cards in her hands, telling her to shuffle them.
“It is all fun, Lavinia,” she whispered to me. “Did you hear him tell Miss Peet she was going to have money left her?”
After Ann had shuffled the cards, he made her cut them into three divisions, and he then turned them up on the table himself, faces upwards, and laid them out in three rows. They were not like the cards we play with; quite different from those; nearly all were picture-cards, and the plain ones bore cabalistic characters. We stood looking on with two or three other people; the rest had dispersed, and had gone into the next room to listen to the singing.
At first Signor Talcke never spoke a word. He looked at the cards, and looked at Nancy; looked, and looked again. “They are not propitious,” he said in low tones, and picked them up, and asked Nancy to shuffle and cut them again. Then he laid them as before, and we stood waiting in silence.
Chancing at that moment to look at Signor Talcke, his face startled me. He was frowning at the cards in so painful a manner as to quite alter its expression. But he did not speak. He still only gazed at the cards with bent eyes, and glanced up at Ann occasionally. Then, with an impatient sweep of the hand, he pushed the cards together.
“I must trouble you to shuffle and cut them once more, madame,” he said. “Shuffle them well.”
“Are they still unpropitious?” asked a jesting voice at my elbow. Turning, I saw Charley Palliser’s smiling face. He must have been standing there, and heard Signor Talcke’s previous remark.
“Yes, sir, they are,” replied the signor, with marked emphasis. “I never saw the cards so unpropitious in my life.”
Nancy took up the cards, shuffled them well, and cut them three times. Signor Talcke laid them out as before, bent his head, and looked attentively at them. He did not speak, but there was no mistaking the vexed, pained, and puzzled look on his face.
I do not think he knew Nancy, even by name. I do not think he knew me, or had the least notion that we were related. Neither of us had ever met him before. He put his hand to his brow, still gazing at the cards.
“But when are you going to begin my fortune, sir?” broke in Nancy.
“I would rather not tell it at all, madame,” he answered.
“Cannot you tell it? — have your powers of forecasting inconveniently run away?” said she incautiously, her tone mocking in her disappointment.
“I could tell it, all too surely; but you might not like to hear it,” returned he.
“Our magician has lost his divining-rod just when he needed it,” observed a gentleman with a grey beard, a stranger to me, who was standing opposite, speaking in a tone of ill-natured satire; and a laugh went round.
“It is not that,” said the signor, keeping his temper perfectly. “I could tell what the cards say, all too certainly; but it would not give satisfaction.”
“Oh yes, it would,” returned Nancy. “I should like to hear it, every bit of it. Please do begin.”
“The cards are dark, very dark indeed,” he said; “I don’t remember ever to have seen them like it. Each time they have been turned the darkness has increased. Nothing can show worse than they do now.”
“Never mind that,” gaily returned Ann. “You undertook to tell my fortune, sir; and you ought not to make excuses in the middle of it. Let the cards be as dark as night, we must hear what they say.”
He drew in his thin lips for a moment, and then spoke, his tone quiet, calm, unemotional.
“Some great evil threatens you,” he began; “you seem to be living in the midst of it. It is not only you that it threatens; there is another also — —”
“Oh, my goodness!” interrupted Nancy, in her childish way. “I hope it does not threaten Edwin. What is the evil? — sickness?”
“Worse than that. It — is — —” Signor Talcke’s attention was so absorbed by the aspect of the cards that, as it struck me, he appeared hardly to heed what he was saying. He had a long, thin black pencil in his long, thin fingers, and kept pointing to different cards as if in accordance with his thoughts, but not touching them. “There is some peculiar form of terror here,” he went on. “I cannot make it out; it is very unusual. It does not come close to you; not yet, at any rate; and it seems to surround you. It seems to be in the house. May I ask” — quickly lifting his eyes to Ann— “whether you are given to superstitious fears?”
“Do you mean ghosts?” cried Ann, and Charley Palliser burst out laughing. “Not at all, sir; I don’t believe in ghosts. I’m sure there are none in our house.”
Remembering my own terror in regard to the house, and the nervous fancy of having seen Captain Fennel in it when he was miles away, a curious impression came over me that he must surely be reading my fortune as well as Nancy’s. But I was not prepared for her next words. Truly she has no more reticence than a child.
“My sister has a feeling that the house is lonely. She shivers when she has to go into it after night-fall.”
Signor Talcke let his hands fall on the table, and lifted his face. Apparently, he was digesting this revelation. I do not think he knew the “sister” was present. For my part, disliking publicity, I slipped behind Anna Bosanquet, and stood by Charley Palliser.
“Shivers?” repeated the Italian.
“Shivers and trembles, and turns sick at having to go in,” affirmed Nancy. “So she told me when I arrived home from England.”
“If a feeling of that sort assailed me, I should never go into the house again,” said the signor.
“But how could you help it, if it were your home?” she argued.
“All the same. I should regard that feeling as a warning against the house, and never enter it. Then you are not yourself troubled with superstitious fears?” he broke off, returning to the business in hand, and looking at the cards. “Well — at present — it does not seem to touch you, this curious terror which is assuredly in the house — —”
“I beg your pardon,” interrupted Ann. “Why do you say ‘at present’? Is it to touch me later?”
“I cannot say. Each time that the cards have been spread it has shown itself nearer to you. It is not yet very near. Apart from that terror — or perhaps remotely connected with it — I see evil threatening you — great evil.
”
“Is it in the house?”
“Yes; hovering about it. It is not only yourself it seems to threaten. There is some one else. And it is nearer to that person than it is to you.”
“But who is that person? — man or woman?”
“It is a woman. See this ugly card,” continued he, pointing with his pencil; “it will not be got rid of, shuffle as you will; it has come nearer to that woman each time.”
The card he pointed to was more curious-looking than any other in the pack. It was not unlike the nine of spades, but crowded with devices. The gentleman opposite, whom I did not know, leaned forward and touched the card with the tip of his forefinger.
“Le cercueil, n’est-ce-pas?” said he.
“My!” whispered an English lad’s voice behind me. “Cercueil? that means coffin.”
“How did you know?” asked Signor Talcke of the grey-bearded man.
“I was at the Sous-Préfect’s soirée on Sunday evening when you were exhibiting. I heard you tell him in French that that was the ugliest card in the pack: indicating death.”
“Well, it is not this lady the card is pursuing,” said the signor, smiling at Ann to reassure her. “Not yet awhile, at least. And we must all be pursued by it in our turn, whenever that shall come,” he added, bending over the cards again. “Pardon me, madame — may I ask whether there has not been some unpleasantness in the house concerning money?”
Nancy’s face turned red. “Not — exactly,” she answered with hesitation. “We are like a great many more people — not as rich as we should wish to be.”
“It does not appear to lie precisely in the want of money: but certainly money is in some way connected with the evil,” he was beginning to say, his eyes fixed dreamily on the cards, when Ann interrupted him.
“That is too strong a word — evil. Why do you use it?”
“I use it because the evil is there. No lighter word would be appropriate. There is some evil element pervading your house, very grave and formidable; it is most threatening; likely to go on to — to — darkness. I mean that it looks as if there would be some great break-up,” he corrected swiftly, as if to soften the other word.