The sounds in Sir Richard’s room had ceased for two hours or more; and the piping wind and the deep-mouthed thunder still roared and rattled. The Neapolitan was too much excited to slumber. He continued, therefore, to pace the floor of his chamber — sometimes gazing through his window upon the black stormy sky and the blue lightning, which leaped in blinding flashes across its darkness, revealing for a moment the ivied walls, and the tossing trees, and the fields and hills, which were as instantaneously again swallowed in the blackness of the tempestuous night; and then turning from the casement, he would plant himself by the door, and listen with eager curiosity for any sound from Sir Richard’s room.
As we have said before, several hours had passed, and all had long been silent in the baronet’s apartment, when on a sudden Parucci thought he heard the sharp and well-known knocking of his patron’s ebony stick upon the floor. He ran and listened at his own door. The sound was repeated with unequivocal and vehement distinctness, and was instantaneously followed by a prolonged and violent peal from his master’s hand-bell. The summons was so sustained and vehement, that the Italian at length cautiously withdrew the bolt, unlocked the door, and stole out upon the lobby. So far from abating, the sound grew louder and louder. On tip-toe he scaled the stairs, until he reached to about the midway; and he there paused, for he heard his master’s voice exerted in a tone of terrified entreaty, —
“Not now — not now — avaunt — not now. Oh, God! — help,” cried the well-known voice.
These words were followed by a crash, as of some heavy body springing from the bed — then a rush upon the floor — then another crash.
The voice was hushed; but in its stead the wild storm made a long and plaintive moan, and the listener’s heart turned cold.
“Malora — Corpo di Pluto!” muttered he between his teeth. “What is it? Will he reeng again? Santo gennaro! — there is something wrong.”
He paused in fearful curiosity; but the summons was not repeated. Five minutes passed; and yet no sound but the howling and pealing of the storm. Parucci, with a beating heart, ascended the stairs and knocked at the door of his patron’s chamber. No answer was returned.
“Sir Richard, Sir Richard,” cried the man, “do you want me, Sir Richard?”
Still no answer. He pushed open the door and entered. A candle, wasted to the very socket, stood upon a table beside the huge hearse-like bed, which, for the convenience of the invalid, had been removed from his bedchamber to his dressing-room. The light was dim, and waved uncertainly in the eddies which found their way through the chinks of the window, so that the lights and shadows flitted ambiguously across the objects in the room. At the end of the bed a table had been upset; and lying near it upon the floor was something — a heap of bedclothes, or — could it be? — yes, it was Sir Richard Ashwoode.
Parncci approached the prostrate figure: it was lying upon its back, the countenance fixed and livid, the eyes staring and glazed, and the jaw fallen — he was a corpse. The Italian stooped down and took the hand of the dead man — it was already cold; he called him by his name and shook him, but all in vain. There lay the cunning intriguer, the fierce, fiery prodigal, the impetuous, unrelenting tyrant, the unbelieving, reckless man of the world, a ghastly lump of clay.
With strange emotions the Neapolitan gazed upon the lifeless effigy from which the evil tenant had been so suddenly and fearfully called to its eternal and unseen abode.
“Gone — dead — all over — all past,” muttered he, slowly, while he pressed his foot upon the dead body, as if to satisfy himself that life was indeed extinct— “quite gone. Canchero! it was ugly death — there was something with him; what was he speaking with?”
Parucci walked to the door leading to the great staircase, but found it bolted as usual.
“Pshaw! there was nothing,” said he, looking fearfully round the room as he approached the body again, and repeating the negative as if to reassure himself— “no, no — nothing, nothing.”
He gazed again on the awful spectacle in silence for several minutes.
“Corbezzoli, and so it is over,” at length he ejaculated— “the game is ended. See, see, the breast is bare, and there the two marks of Aldini’s stiletto. Ah! briccone, briccone, what wild faylow were you — panzanera, for a pretty ankle and a pair of black eyes, you would dare the devil. Rotto di collo, his face is moving! — pshaw! it is only the light that wavers. Diamine! the face is terrible. What made him speak? nothing was with him — pshaw! nothing could come to him here — no, no, nothing.”
As he thus spoke, the wind swept vehemently upon the windows with a sound as if some great thing had rushed, against them, and was pressing for admission, and the gust blew out the candle; the blast died away in a lengthened wail, and then again came rushing and howling up to the windows, as if the very prince of the powers of the air himself were thundering at the casement; then again the blue dazzling lightning glared into the room and gave place to deeper darkness.
“Pah! that lightning smells like brimstone. Sangue d’un dua, I hear something in the room.”
Yielding to his terrors, Parucci stumbled to the door opening upon the great lobby, and with cold and trembling fingers drawing the bolt, sprang to the stairs and shouted for assistance in a tone which speedily assembled half the household in the chamber of death.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE CRONES — THE CORPSE, AND THE SHARPER.
Haggard, exhausted, and in no very pleasant temper, Henry Ashwoode rode up the avenue of Morley Court.
“I shall have a blessed conference with my father,” thought he, “when he learns the fate of the thousand pounds I was to have brought him — a pleasant interview, by —— . How shall I open it? He’ll be no better than a Bedlamite. By —— , a pretty hot kettle of fish this — but through it I must flounder as best I may — curse it, what am I afraid of?”
Thus muttering, he leaped from the saddle, leaving the well-trained steed to make his way to the stable, and entered at the half open door. In the hall he encountered a servant, but was too much occupied by his own busy reflections to observe the earnest, awestruck countenance of the old domestic.
“Mr. Henry — Mr. Henry — stay, sir — stay — one moment,” said the man, following and endeavouring to detain him.
Ashwoode, however, without heeding the interruption, hastened by him, and mounted the stairs with long and rapid strides, resolved not unnecessarily to defer the interview which he believed must come sooner or later. He opened Sir Richard’s door, and entered the chamber. He looked round the room for the object of his search in vain; but to his unmeasured astonishment, beheld instead three old shrivelled hags seated by the hearth, who all rose upon his entrance, except one, who was warming something in a saucepan upon the fire, and each and all resumed respectively the visages of woe which best became the occasion.
“Eh! How is this? What brings you here, nurse?” exclaimed the young man, in a tone of startled curiosity.
The old lady whom he addressed thought it advisable to weep, and instead of returning any answer, covered her face with her apron, turned away her head, and shook her palsied hand towards him with a gesture which was meant to express the mute anguish of unutterable sorrow.
“What is it?” said Ashwoode. “Are you all tongue-tied? Speak, some of you.”
“Oh, musha! musha! the crathur,” observed the second witch, with a most lugubrious shake of the head, “but it is he that’s to be pitied. Oh, wisha — wisha — wiristhroo!”
“What the d —— l ails you? Can’t you speak out? Where’s my father?” repeated the young man, with impatient perplexity.
“With the blessed saints in glory,” replied the third hag, giving the saucepan a slight whisk to prevent the contents from burning, “and if ever there was an angel on earth, he was one. Well, well, he has his reward — that’s one comfort, sure. The crown of glory, with the holy apostles — it’s he’s to be envied — up in heaven, though he wint mighty suddint, surely.�
��
This was followed by a kind of semi-dolorous shake of the head, in which the three old women joined.
With a hurried step, young Ashwoode strode to the bedside, drew the curtain, and gazed upon the sharp and fixed features of the corpse, as it leered with unclosed eyes from among the bedclothes. It would not have been easy to analyze the feelings with which he looked upon this spectacle. A kind of incredulous horror sate upon his compressed features. He touched the hand, which rested stiffly upon the coverlet, as if doubtful that the old man, whom he had so long feared and obeyed, was actually dead. The cold, dull touch that met his was not to be mistaken, and he gazed fixedly with that awful curiosity with which in death the well-known features of a familiar face are looked on. There lay the being whose fierce passions had been to him from his earliest days a source of habitual fear — in childhood, even of terror — henceforth to be no more to him than a thing which had never been. There lay the scheming, busy head, but what availed all its calculations and its cunning now! No more thought or power has it than the cushion on which it stiffly rests. There lies the proud, worldly, unforgiving, violent man, a senseless effigy of cold clay — a grim, impassive monument of the recent presence of the unearthly visitant.
“It’s a beautiful corpse, if the eyes were only shut,” observed one of the crones, approaching; “a purty corpse as ever was stretched.”
“The hands is very handsome entirely,” observed another of them, “and so small, like a lady’s.”
“It’s himself was the good master,” observed the old nurse, with a slow shake of the head; “the likes of him did not thread in shoe leather. Oh! but my heart’s sore for you this day, Misther Harry.”
Thus speaking, with a good deal of screwing and puckering, she succeeded in squeezing a tear from one eye, like the last drop from an exhausted lemon, and suffering it to rest upon her cheek, that it might not escape observation, she looked round with a most pity-moving visage upon her companions, and an expression of face which said as plainly as words, “What a faithful, attached, old creature I am, and how well I deserve any little token of regard which Sir Richard’s will may have bequeathed me.”
“Ah! then, look at him,” said the matron of the saucepan, gazing with the most touching commiseration upon Henry Ashwoode, “see how he looks at it. Oh, but it’s he that adored him! Oh, the crathur, what will he do this day? Look at him there — he’s an orphan now — God help him.”
“Be off with yourselves, and leave me here,” said Henry (now Sir Henry) Ashwoode, turning sharply upon them. “Send me some one that can speak a word of sense: call Parucci here, and get out of the room every one of you — away!”
With abundance of muttering and grumbling, and many an indignant toss of the head, and many a dignified sniff, the old women hobbled from the room; and Henry Ashwoode had hardly been left alone, when the small private door communicating with Parucci’s apartment, opened, and the valet peeped in.
“Come in — come in, Jacopo,” said the young man; “come in, and close the door. When did this happen?”
The Neapolitan recounted briefly the events which we have already recorded.
“It was a fit — some sudden seizure,” said the young man, glancing at the features of the corpse.
“Yes, vary like, vary like,” said Parucci; “he used to complain sometimes that his head was sweeming round, and pains and aches; but there was something more — something more.”
“What do you mean? — don’t speak riddles,” said Ashwoode.
“I mean this, then,” replied the Italian; “something came to him — something was in the room when he died.”
“How do you know that?” inquired the young man.
“I heard him talking loudly with it,” replied he— “talking and praying it to go away from him.”
“Why did you not come into the room yourself?” asked Ashwoode.
“So I did, Diamine, so I did,” replied he.
“Well, what saw you?”
“Nothing bote Sir Richard, dead — quite dead; and the far door was bolted inside, just so as he always used to do; and when the candle went out, the thing was here again. I heard it myself, as sure as I am leeving man — I heard it — close up with me — by the body.”
“Tut, tut, man; speak sense. Do you mean to say that anyone talked with you?” said Ashwoode.
“I mean this, that something was in the chamber with me beside the dead man,” replied the valet, doggedly. “I heard it with my own ears. Zucche! I moste ‘av been deaf, if I did not hear it. It said ‘hish,’ and then again, close up to my face, it said it— ‘hish, hish,’ and laughed below its breath. Pah! the place smelt of brimstone.”
“In plain terms, then, you believe that the devil was in the room; is that it?” said Ashwoode, with a ghastly smile of contempt.
“Oh! no,” replied the servant, with a sneer as ghastly; “it was an angel, of course — an angel from heaven.”
“No more of this folly, sirrah,” said Ashwoode, sharply. “Your own d —— d cowardice fills your brain with these fancies. Here, give me the keys, and show me where the papers are laid. I shall first examine the cabinets here, and then in the library. Now open this one; and do you hear, Parucci, not one word of this cock-and-bull story of yours to the servants. Good God! my brain’s unsettled. I can scarcely believe my father dead — dead,” and again he stood by the bedside, and looked upon the still face of the corpse.
“We must send for Craven at once,” said Ashwoode, turning from the bed; “I must confer with him; he knows better than anyone else how all my father’s affairs stand. There are some d —— d bills out, I believe, but we’ll soon know.”
Having despatched an urgent note to Craven, the insinuating attorney, to whom we have already introduced the reader, Sir Henry Ashwoode proceeded roughly to examine the contents of boxes, escritoires, and cabinets filled with dusty papers, and accompanied and directed in his search by the Italian.
“You never heard him mention a will, did you?” inquired the young man.
The Neapolitan shook his head.
“You did not know of his making one?” he resumed.
“No, no, I cannot remember,” said the Italian, reflectively; “but,” he added quickly, while a peculiar meaning lit up the piercing eyes which he turned upon the interrogator— “but do you weesh to find one? Maybe I could help you to find one.”
“Pshaw! folly; what do you take me for?” retorted Ashwoode, slightly colouring, in spite of his habitual insensibility, for Parucci was too intimate with his principles for him to assume ignorance of his meaning. “Why the devil should I wish to find a will, since I inherit everything without it?”
“Signor,” said the little man, after an interval of silence, during which he seemed absorbed in deep reflection, “I have moche to say about what I shall do with myself, and some things to ask from you. I will begin and end it here and now — it is best over at once. I have served Sir Richard there for thirty-four years. I have served him well — vary well. I have taught him great secrets. I have won great abundance of good moneys for him; if he was not reech it is not my fault. I attend him through his sickness; and ‘av been his companion for the half of a long life. What else I ‘av done for him I need not count up, but most of it you know well. Sir Richard is there — dead and gone — the service is ended, and now I ‘av resolved I will go back again to Italy — to Naples — where I was born. You shall never hear of me any more if you will do for me one little thing.”
“What is it? — speak out. You want to extort money — is it so?” said Ashwoode, slowly and sternly.
“I want,” continued the man, with equal distinctness and deliberateness, “I want one thousand pounds. I do not ask a penny more, and I will not take a penny less; and if you give me that, I will never trouble you more with word of mine — you will never hear or see honest Jacopo Parucci any more.”
“Come, come, Jacopo, that were paying a little too dear, even for such a luxury,�
�� replied Ashwoode. “A thousand pounds! Ha! ha! A modest request, truly. I half suspect your brain is a little crazed.”
“Remember what I have done — all I have done for him.” rejoined the Italian, coolly. “And above all, remember what I have not done for him. I could have had him hanged up by the neck — hanged like a dog — but I never did. Oh! no, never — though not a day went by that I might not ‘av brought the house full of officers, and have him away to jail and get him hanged. Remember all that, signor, and say is it in conscience too moche? — rotta di collo! It is not half — no, nor quarter so moche as I ought to ask. No, nor as you ought to give, signor, without me to ask at all.”
“Parucci, you are either mad or drunk, or take me to be so,” said Ashwoode, who could not feel quite comfortable in disputing the claims of the Italian, nor secure in provoking his anger. “But at all events, there is ample time to talk about these matters. We can settle it all more at our ease in a week or so.”
“No, no, signor. I will have my answer now,” replied the man, doggedly. “Mr. Craven has money now — the money of Miss Mary’s land that Sir Richard got from her. But though the money is there now, in a week or leetle more we will not see moche of it, and my pocket weel remain aimpty — corbezzoli! am I a fool?”
“I tell you, Parucci, I will give you no promises now,” exclaimed the young man, vehemently. “Why, d —— it, the blood is hardly cold in the old man’s veins, and you begin to pester me for money. Can’t you wait till he’s buried?”
“Ay — yees — yees — wait till he’s buried — and then wait till the mourning’s off — and then wait for something more,” said the Neapolitan, with a sneer, “and so wait on till the money’s all spent. No, no, signor — corpo di Bacco! I will have it now. I will have my answer now, before Mr. Craven comes — giuro di Dio, I will have my answer.”
“Don’t talk like a madman, Parucci,” replied the young man, angrily. “I have no money here. I will make no promises. And besides, your request is perfectly ridiculous and unconscionable.”
Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu Page 22
