Mark clapped on his hat, and rifled the pocket of his paletot of his cigar-case and matches, and spluttered a curse or two, according to old Nollekins’ receipt for easing the mind, and on the doorsteps lighted his cheroot, and became gradually more philosophical.
In due time the brougham came round with its lamps lighted, and Mark, who was by this time placid, greeted Price on the box familiarly, after his wont, and asked him whom he was going to drive, as if he did not know, cunning fellow; and actually went so far as to give Price one of those cheap and nasty weeds, of which he kept a supply apart in his case for such occasions of good fellowship.
So Mark waited to put the lady into the carriage, and he meditated walking a little way by the window and making his peace, and there was perhaps some vague vision of jumping in afterwards; I know not. Mark’s ideas of ladies and of propriety were low, and he was little better than a sailor ashore, and not a good specimen of that class of monster.
He walked about the courtyard smoking, looking sometimes on the solemn front of the old palatial mansion, and sometimes breathing a white film up to the stars, impatient, like the enamoured Aladdin, watching in ambuscade for the emergence of the Princess Badroulbadour. But honest Mark forgot that young ladies do not always come out quite alone, and jump unassisted into their vehicles. And in fact not only did Lord Chelford assist the fair lady, cloaked and hooded, into the carriage, but the vicar’s goodhumoured little wife was handed in also, the good vicar looking on, and as the gay goodnight and leavetaking took place by the doorsteps, Mark drew back, like a guilty thing, in silence, and showed no sign but the red top of his cigar, glowing like the eye of a Cyclops in the dark; and away rolled the brougham, with the two ladies, and Chelford and the vicar went in, and Mark hurled the stump of his cheroot at Fortune, and delivered a fragmentary soliloquy through his teeth; and so, in a sulk, without making his adieux, he marched off to his crib at the Brandon Arms.
CHAPTER V.
IN WHICH MY SLUMBER IS DISTURBED.
The ladies had accomplished their ascension to the upper regions. The good vicar had marched off with the major, who was by this time unbuckling in his lodgings; and Chelford and I, tête-à-tête, had a glass of sherry and water together in the drawingroom before parting. And over this temperate beverage I told him frankly the nature of the service which Mark Wylder wished me to render him; and he as frankly approved, and said he would ask Larkin, the family lawyer, to come up in the morning to assist.
The more I saw of this modest, refined, and manly peer, the more I liked him. There was a certain courteous frankness, and a fine old English sense of duty perceptible in all his serious talk. So I felt no longer like a conspirator, and was to offer such advice as might seem expedient, with the clear approbation of Miss Brandon’s trustee. And this point clearly settled, I avowed myself a little tired; and lighting our candles at the foot of the stairs, we scaled that long ascent together, and he conducted me through the intricacies of the devious lobbies up stairs to my chamber-door, where he bid me goodnight, shook hands, and descended to his own quarters.
My room was large and oldfashioned, but snug; and I, beginning to grow very drowsy, was not long in getting to bed, where I fell asleep indescribably quickly.
In all old houses one is, of course, liable to adventures. Where is the marvellous to find refuge, if not among the chambers, the intricacies, which have seen the vicissitudes, the crimes, and the deaths of generations of such men as had occupied these?
There was a picture in the outer hall — one of those full-length gentlemen of George II.’s time, with a dark peruke flowing on his shoulders, a cut velvet coat, and lace cravat and ruffles. This picture was pale, and had a long chin, and somehow had impressed my boyhood with a singular sense of fear. The foot of my bed lay towards the window, distant at least five-and-twenty-feet; and before the window stood my dressing-table, and on it a large looking-glass.
I dreamed that I was arranging my toilet before this glass — just as I had done that evening — when on a sudden the face of the portrait I have mentioned was presented on its surface, confronting me like a real countenance, and advancing towards me with a look of fury; and at the instant I felt myself seized by the throat and unable to stir or to breathe. After a struggle with this infernal garotter, I succeeded in awaking myself; and as I did so, I felt a rather cold hand really resting on my throat, and quietly passed up over my chin and face. I jumped out of bed with a roar, and challenged the owner of the hand, but received no answer, and heard no sound. I poked up my fire and lighted my candle. Everything was as I had left it except the door, which was the least bit open.
In my shirt, candle in hand, I looked out into the passage. There was nothing there in human shape, but in the direction of the stairs the green eyes of a large cat were shining. I was so confoundedly nervous that even ‘a harmless, necessary cat’ appalled me, and I clapped my door, as if against an evil spirit.
In about half an hour’s time, however, I had quite worked off the effect of this nightmare, and reasoned myself into the natural solution that the creature had got on my bed, and lay, as I have been told they will, upon my throat, and so, all the rest had followed.
Not being given to the fear of larvae and lemures, and also knowing that a mistake is easily committed in a great house like that, and that my visitor might have made one, I grew drowsy in a little while, and soon fell asleep again. But knowing all I now do, I hold a different conclusion — and so, I think, will you.
In the morning Mark Wylder was early upon the ground. He had quite slept off what he would have called the nonsense of last night, and was very keen upon settlements, consols, mortgages, jointures, and all that dry but momentous lore.
I find a note in my diary of that day:— ‘From halfpast ten o’clock until two with Mark Wylder and Mr. Larkin, the lawyer, in the study — dull work — over papers and title — Lord Chelford with us now and then to lend a helping hand.’
Lawyer Larkin, though he made our work lighter — for he was clear, quick, and orderly, and could lay his hand on any paper in those tin walls of legal manuscripts that built up two sides of his office — did not make our business, to me at least, any pleasanter. Wylder thought him a clever man (and so perhaps, in a certain sense, he was); Lord Chelford, a most honourable one; yet there came to me by instinct an unpleasant feeling about him. It was not in any defined way — I did not fancy that he was machinating, for instance, any sort of mischief in the business before us — but I had a notion that he was not quite what he pretended.
Perhaps his personnel prejudiced me — though I could not quite say why. He was a tall, lank man — rather long of limb, long of head, and gaunt of face. He wanted teeth at both sides, and there was rather a skull-like cavity when he smiled — which was pretty often. His eyes were small and reddish, as if accustomed to cry; and when everything went smoothly were dull and dovelike, but when things crossed or excited him, which occurred when his own pocket or plans were concerned, they grew singularly unpleasant, and greatly resembled those of some not amiable animal — was it a rat, or a serpent? It was a peculiar concentrated vigilance and rapine that I have seen there. But that was long afterwards. Now, indeed, they were meek, and sad, and pink.
He had an ambition, too, to pass for a highbred gentleman, and thought it might be done by a somewhat lofty and drawling way of talking, and distributing his length of limb in what he fancied were easy attitudes. If the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel, so are the elegances of a vulgar man; and his made me wince.
I might be all in the wrong — and was, no doubt, unreasonable — for he bore a high character, and passed for a very gentlemanlike man among the villagers. He was also something of a religious light, and had for a time conformed to Methodism, but returned to the Church. He had a liking for long sermons, and a sad abhorrence of amusements, and sat out the morning and the evening services regularly — and kept up his dissenting connection too, and gave them money — and appeared in pri
nt, in all charitable lists — and mourned over other men’s backslidings and calamities in a lofty and Christian way, shaking his tall bald head, and turning up his pink eyes mildly.
Notwithstanding all which he was somehow unlovely in my eyes, and in an indistinct way, formidable. It was not a pleasant misgiving about a gentleman of Larkin’s species, the family lawyer, who become viscera magnorum domuum.
My duties were lighter, as adviser, than I at first apprehended. Wylder’s crotchets were chiefly ‘mare’s nests.’ We had read the draft of the settlement, preparatory to its being sent to senior counsel to be approved. Wylder’s attorney had done his devoir, and Mr. Larkin avowed a sort of parental interest in both parties to the indentures, and made, at closing, a little speech, very high in morality, and flavoured in a manly way with religion, and congratulated Mark on his honour and plain dealing, which he gave us to understand were the secrets of all success in life, as they had been, in an humble way of his own.
CHAPTER VI.
IN WHICH DORCAS BRANDON SPEAKS.
In answer to ‘the roaring shiver of the gong’ we all trooped away together to luncheon. Lady Chelford and Dorcas and Chelford had nearly ended that irregular repast when we entered. My chair was beside Miss Brandon; she had breakfasted with old Lady Chelford that morning, and this was my first meeting that day. It was not very encouraging.
People complained that acquaintance made little way with her. That you were, perhaps, well satisfied with your first day’s progress, but the next made no head-way; you found yourself this morning exactly at the point from which you commenced yesterday, and tomorrow would recommence where you started the day before. This is very disappointing, but may sometimes be accounted for by there being nothing really to discover. It seemed to me, however, that the distance had positively increased since yesterday, and that the oftener she met me the more strange she became. As we went out, Wylder enquired, with his usual good taste: ‘Well, what do you think of her?’ Then he looked slily at me, laughing, with his hands in his pockets. ‘A little bit slow, eh?’ he whispered, and laughed again, and lounged into the hall. If Dorcas Brandon had been a plain woman, I think she would have been voted an impertinent bore; but she was so beautiful that she became an enigma. I looked at her as she stood gravely gazing from the window. Is it Lady Macbeth? No; she never would have had energy to plan her husband’s career and manage that affair of Duncan. A sultana rather — sublimely egotistical, without reverence — a voluptuous and haughty embodiment of indifference. I paused, looking at a picture, but thinking of her, and was surprised by her voice very near me.
‘Will you give me just a minute, Mr. De Cresseron, in the drawingroom, while I show you a miniature? I want your opinion.’
So she floated on and I accompanied her.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘you mentioned yesterday, that you remembered me when an infant. You remember my poor mamma, don’t you, very well?’
This was the first time she had yet shown any tendency, so far as I had seen, to be interested in anything, or to talk to me. I seized the occasion, and gave her, as well as I could, the sad and pretty picture that remained, and always will, in the vacant air, when I think of her, on the mysterious retina of memory.
How filmy they are! the moonlight shines through them, as through the phantom Dane in Retzch’s outlines — colour without substance. How they come, wearing for ever the sweetest and pleasantest look of their earthly days. Their sweetest and merriest tones hover musically in the distance; how far away, how near to silence, yet how clear! And so it is with our remembrance of the immortal part. It is the loveliest traits that remain with us perennially; all that was noblest and most beautiful is there, in a changeless and celestial shadow; and this is the resurrection of the memory, the foretaste and image which the ‘Faithful Creator’ accords us of the resurrection and glory to come — the body redeemed, the spirit made perfect.
On a cabinet near to where she stood was a casket of ormolu, which she unlocked, and took out a miniature, opened, and looked at it for a long time. I knew very well whose it was, and watched her countenance; for, as I have said, she interested me strangely. I suppose she knew I was looking at her; but she showed always a queenlike indifference about what people might think or observe. There was no sentimental softening; but her gaze was such as I once saw the same proud and handsome face turn upon the dead — pale, exquisite, perhaps a little stern. What she read there — what procession of thoughts and images passed by — threw neither light nor shadow on her face. Its apathy interested me inscrutably.
At last she placed the picture in my hand, and asked —
‘Is this really very like her?’
‘It is, and it is not,’ I said, after a little pause. ‘The features are true: it is what I call an accurate portrait, but that is all. I dare say, exact as it is, it would give to one who had not seen her a false, as it must an inadequate, idea, of the original. There was something naïve and spirituel, and very tender in her face, which he has not caught — perhaps it could hardly be fixed in colours.’
‘Yes, I always heard her expression and intelligence were very beautiful.
It was the beauty of mobility — true beauty.’
‘There is a beauty of another stamp, equally exquisite, Miss Brandon, and perhaps more overpowering.’ I said this in nearly a whisper, and in a very marked way, almost tender, and the next moment was amazed at my own audacity. She looked on me for a second or two, with her dark drowsy glance, and then it returned to the picture, which was again in her hand. There was a total want of interest in the careless sort of surprise she vouchsafed my little sally; neither was there the slightest resentment. If a wafer had been stuck upon my forehead, and she had observed it, there might have been just that look and no more. I was ridiculously annoyed with myself. I was betrayed, I don’t know how, into this little venture, and it was a flat failure. The position of a shy man, who has just made an unintelligible joke at a dinner-table, was not more pregnant with self-reproach and embarrassment.
Upon my honour, I don’t think there was anything of the roué in me. I own I did feel towards this lady, who either was, or seemed to me, so singular, a mysterious interest just beginning — of that peculiar kind which becomes at last terribly absorbing.
I was more elated by her trifling notice of me than I can quite account for. It was a distinction. She was so indescribably handsome — so passively disdainful. I think if she had listened to me with even the faintest intimation of caring whether I spoke in this tone or not, with even a flash of momentary resentment, I might have rushed into a most reprehensible and ridiculous rigmarole.
In this, the subtlest and most perilous of all intoxications, it needs immense presence of mind to conduct ourselves always with decorum. But she was looking, just as before, at the miniature, as it seemed to me, in fancy infusing some of the spirit I had described into the artist’s record, and she said, only in soliloquy, as it were, ‘Yes, I see — I think I see.’
So there was a pause; and then she said, without, however, removing her eyes from the miniature, ‘You are, I believe, Mr. De Cresseron, a very old friend of Mr. Wylder’s. Is it not so?’
So soon after my little escapade, I did not like the question; but it was answered. There was not the faintest trace of a satirical meaning, however, in her face; and after another very considerable interval, at the end of which she shut the miniature in its case, she said, ‘It was a peculiar face, and very beautiful. It is odd how many of our family married for love — wild love-matches. My poor mother was the last. I could point you out many pictures, and tell you stories — my cousin, Rachel, knows them all. You know Rachel Lake?’
‘I’ve not the honour of knowing Miss Lake. I had not an opportunity of making her acquaintance yesterday; but I know her brother — so does Wylder.’
‘What’s that?’ said Mark, who had just come in, and was tumbling over a volume of ‘Punch’ at the window.
‘I was telling Miss Brand
on that we both know Stanley Lake.’ On hearing which, Wylder seemed to discover something uncommonly interesting or clever in the illustration before him; for he approached his face very near to it, in a scrutinising way, and only said, ‘Oh?’
‘That marrying for love was a fatality in our family,’ she continued in the same low tone — too faint I think to reach Mark. ‘They were all the most beautiful who sacrificed themselves so — they were all unhappy marriages. So the beauty of our family never availed it, any more than its talents and its courage; for there were clever and witty men, as well as very brave ones, in it. Meaner houses have grown up into dukedoms; ours never prospers. I wonder what it is.’
‘Many families have disappeared altogether, Miss Brandon. It is no small thing, through so many centuries, to have retained your ancestral estates, and your pre-eminent position, and even this splendid residence of so many generations of your lineage.’
I thought that Miss Brandon, having broken the ice, was henceforth to be a conversable young lady. But this sudden expansion was not to last. Ovid tells us, in his ‘Fasti,’ how statues sometimes surprised people by speaking more frankly and to the purpose even than Miss Brandon, and straight were cold chiselled marble again; and so it was with that proud, cold chef d’oeuvre of tinted statuary.
Yet I thought I could, even in that dim glimpse, discern how the silent subterranean current of her thoughts was flowing; like other representatives of a dynasty, she had studied the history of her race to profit by its errors and misfortunes. There was to be no weakness or passion in her reign.
The princess by this time was seated on the ottoman, and chose to read a letter, thus intimating, I suppose, that my audience was at an end; so I took up a book, put it down, and then went and looked over Wylder’s shoulder, and made my criticisms — not very novel, I fear — upon the pages he turned over; and I am sorry to say I don’t think he heard much of what I was saying, for he suddenly came out with —
Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu Page 163
