Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  “It seems to me, women can hold their tongues sometimes, but always in the wrong places.”

  Here he shook the ashes of his cigar into the grate.

  “Old Granny’s a fool — isn’t she, Trixie, and a little bit vicious — eh?”

  Sir Jekyl put his question dreamily, in a reverie, and it plainly needed no answer. So Beatrix was spared the pain of making one; which she was glad of, for Lady Alice was good to her after her way, and she was fond of her.

  “We must ask her to come, you know. You write. Say I thought you would have a better chance of prevailing. She won’t, you know; and so much the better.”

  So as the Baronet rose, and stood gloomily with his back to the fire; the young lady rose also, and ran away to the drawingroom and her desk; and almost at the same moment a servant entered the room, with a letter, which had come by the late post.

  Oddly enough, it had the Slowton postmark.

  “Devilish odd!” exclaimed Sir Jekyl, scowling eagerly on it; and seating himself hastily on the side of a chair, he broke it open and read at the foot the autograph, “Guy Strangways.”

  It was with the Napoleonic thrill, “I have them, then, these English!” that Sir Jekyl read, in a gentlemanlike, rather foreign hand, a ceremonious and complimentary acceptance of his invitation to Marlowe, on behalf both of the young man and of his elder companion. His correspondent could not say exactly, as their tour was a little desultory, where a note would find them; but as Sir Jekyl Marlowe had been so good as to permit them to name a day for their visit, they would say so and so.

  “Let me see — what day’s this — why, that will be” — he was counting with the tips of his fingers, pianowise, on the table— “Wednesday week, eh?” and he tried it over again with nature’s “Babbage’s machine” and of course with an inflexible result. “Wednesday week — Wednesday,” and he heaved a great sigh, like a man with a load taken off him.

  “Well, I’m devilish glad. I hope nothing will happen to stop them now. It can’t be a ruse to get quietly off the ground? No — that would be doing it too fine.” He rang the bell.

  “I want Mrs. Gwynn.”

  The Baronet’s spirit revived within him, and he stood erect, with his back to the fire, and his hands behind him, and when the housekeeper entered, he received her with his accustomed smile.

  “Glad to see you, Donnie. Glass of sherry? No — well, sit down — won’t take a chair! — why’s that? Well, we’ll be on pleasanter terms soon — you’ll find it’s really no choice of mine. I can’t help using that stupid green room. Here are two more friends coming — not till Wednesday week though — two gentlemen. You may put them in rooms beside one another — wherever you like — only not in the garrets, of course. Good rooms, do ye see.”

  “And what’s the gentlemen’s names, please, Sir Jekyl,” inquired Mrs. Gwynn.

  “Mr. Strangways, the young gentleman; and the older, as well as I can read it, is Mr. Varbarriere.”

  “Thank ye, sir.”

  The housekeeper having again declined the kindly distinction of a glass of sherry, withdrew.

  In less than a week guests began to assemble, and in a few days more old Marlowe Hall began to wear a hospitable and pleasant countenance.

  The people were not, of course, themselves all marvels of agreeability. For instance, Sir Paul Blunket, the great agriculturist and eminent authority on liquid manures, might, as we all know, be a little livelier with advantage. He is short and stolid; he wears a pale blue muslin neck-handkerchief with a white stripe, carefully tied. His countenance, I am bound to say, is what some people would term heavy — it is frosty, painfully shaven, and shines with a glaze of transparent soap. He has small, very light blue round eyes, and never smiles. A joke always strikes him with unaffected amazement and suspicion. Laughter he knows may imply ridicule, and he may himself possibly be the subject of it. He waits till it subsides, and then talks on as before on subjects which interest him.

  Lady Blunket, who accompanies him everywhere, though not tall, is stout. She is delicate, and requires nursing; and, for so confirmed an invalid, has a surprising appetite. John Blunket, the future baronet, is in the Diplomatic Service, I forget exactly where, and by no means young; and lean Miss Blunket, at Marlowe with her parents, though known to be older than her brother, is still quite a girl, and giggles with her partner at dinner, and is very naïve and animated, and sings arch little chansons discordantly to the guitar, making considerable play with her eyes, which are black and malignant.

  This family, though neither decorative nor entertaining, being highly respectable and ancient, make the circuit of all the good houses in the county every year, and are wonderfully little complained of. Hither also they had brought in their train pretty little Mrs. Maberly, a cousin, whose husband, the Major, was in India — a garrulous and goodhumoured siren, who smiled with pearly little teeth, and blushed easily.

  At Marlowe had already assembled several single gentlemen too. There was little Tom Linnett, with no end of money and spirits, very goodnatured, addicted to sentiment, and with a taste for practical joking too, and a very popular character notwithstanding.

  Old Dick Doocey was there also, a colonel long retired, and well known at several crack London clubs; tall, slight, courtly, agreeable, with a capital elderly wig, a little deaf, and his handsome high nose a little reddish. Billy Cobb — too, a gentleman who could handle a gun, and knew lots about horses and dogs — had arrived.

  Captain Drayton had arrived: a swell, handsome, cleverish, and impertinent, and, as young men with less reason will be, egotistical. He would not have admitted that he had deigned to make either plan or exertion with that object, but so it happened that he was placed next to Miss Beatrix, whom he carelessly entertained with agreeable ironies, and anecdotes, and sentiments poetic and perhaps a little vapid. On the whole, a young gentleman of intellect, as well as wealth and expectations, and who felt, not unnaturally, that he was overpowering. Miss Beatrix, though not quite twenty, was not overpowered, however, neither was her heart preoccupied. There was, indeed, a shadow of another handsome young gentleman — only a shadow, in a different style — dark, and this one light; and she heart-whole, perhaps fancy-free, amused, delighted, the world still new and only begun to be explored. One London season she had partly seen, and also made her annual tour twice or thrice of all the best county-houses, and so was not nervous among her peers.

  * * *

  CHAPTER IX.

  Dinner.

  Of the two guests destined for the green chamber, we must be permitted to make special mention.

  General and Lady Jane Lennox had come. The General, a tall, soldier-like old gentleman, who held his bald and pink, but not very high forehead, erect, with great grey projecting moustache, twisted up at the corners, and bristling grey eyebrows to correspond, over his frank round grey eyes — a gentleman with a decidedly military bearing, imperious but kindly of aspect, goodnatured, prompt, and perhaps a little stupid.

  Lady Jane — everybody knows Lady Jane — the most admired of London belles for a whole season. Golden brown hair, and what young Thrumly of the Guards called, in those exquisite lines of his, “slumbrous eyes of blue,” under very long lashes and exquisitely-traced eyebrows, such brilliant lips and teeth, and such a sweet oval face, and above all, so beautiful a figure and wonderful a waist, might have made one marvel how a lady so well qualified for a title, with noble blood, though but a small dot, should have wrecked herself on an old general, though with eight thousand a year. But there were stories and reasons why the simple old officer, just home from India, who knew nothing about London lies, and was sure of his knighthood, and it was said of a baronetage, did not come amiss.

  There were people who chose to believe these stories, and people who chose to discredit them. But General Lennox never had even heard them; and certainly, it seemed nobody’s business to tell him now. It might not have been quite pleasant to tell the General. He was somewhat muddled of apprehensi
on, and slow in everything but fighting; and having all the oldfashioned notions about hair-triggers, and “ten paces,” as the proper ordeal in a misunderstanding, people avoided uncomfortable topics in his company, and were for the most part disposed to let well alone.

  Lady Jane had a will and a temper; but the General held his ground firmly. As brave men as he have been henpecked; but somehow he was not of the temperament which will submit to be bullied even by a lady; and as he was indulgent and easily managed, that tactique was the line she had adopted. Lady Jane was not a riant beauty. Luxurious, funeste, sullen, the mystery and melancholy of her face was a relief among the smirks and simpers of the ball-room, and the novelty of the style interested for a time even the blazé men of twenty seasons.

  Several guests of lesser note there were; and the company had sat down to dinner, when the Reverend Dives Marlowe, rector of the succulent family living of Queen’s Chorleigh, made his appearance in the parlour, a little to the surprise of his brother the Baronet, who did not expect him quite so soon.

  The Rector was a tall man and stalwart, who had already acquired that convex curve which indicates incipient corpulence, and who, though younger than his brother, looked half a dozen years his senior. With a broad bald forehead, projecting eyebrows, a large coarse mouth, and with what I may term the rudiments of a double chin — altogether an ugly and even repulsive face, but with no lack of energy and decision — one looked with wonder from this gross, fierce, clerical countenance to the fine outlines and proportions of the Baronet’s face, and wondered how the two men could really be brothers.

  The cleric shook his brother’s hand in passing, and smiled and nodded briefly here and there, right and left, and across the table his recognition, and chuckled a harsher chuckle than his brother’s, as he took his place, extemporized with the quiet legerdemain of a consummate butler by Ridley; and answered in a brisk, abrupt voice the smiling inquiries of friends.

  “Hope you have picked up an appetite on the way, Dives,” said the Baronet. Dives generally carried a pretty good one about with him. “Good air on the way, and pretty good mutton here, too — my friends tell me.”

  “Capital air — capital mutton — capital fish,” replied the ecclesiastic, in a brisk, businesslike tone, while being a man of nerve, he got some fish, although that esculent had long vanished, and even the entrées had passed into history, and called over his shoulder for the special sauces which his soul loved, and talked, and compounded his condiments with energy and precision.

  The Rector was a shrewd and gentlemanlike, though not a very pretty, apostle, and had made a sufficient toilet before presenting himself, and snapped and gobbled his fish, in a glossy, single-breasted coat, with standing collar; a ribbed silk waistcoat, covering his ample chest, almost like a cassock, and one of those transparent muslin dog-collars which High Churchmen affect.

  “Well, Dives,” cried Sir Jekyl, “how do the bells ring? I gave them a chime, poor devils” (this was addressed to Lady Blunket at his elbow), “by way of compensation, when I sent them Dives.”

  “Pretty well; they don’t know how to pull ‘em, I think, quite,” answered Dives, dabbing a bit of fish in a pool of sauce, and punching it into shape with his bit of bread. “And how is old Parson Moulders?” continued the Baronet, pleasantly.

  “I haven’t heard,” said the Hector, and drank off half his glass of hock.

  “Can’t believe it, Dives. Here’s Lady Blunket knows. He’s the aged incumbent of Droughton. A devilish good living in my gift; and of course you’ve been asking how the dear old fellow is.”

  “I haven’t, upon my word; not but I ought, though,” said the Rev. Dives Marlowe, as if he did not see the joke.

  “He’s very severe on you,” simpered fat Lady Blunket, faintly, across the table, and subsided with a little cough, as if the exertion hurt her.

  “Is he? Egad! I never perceived it.” The expression was not clerical, but the speaker did not seem aware he had uttered it. “How dull I must be! Have you ever been in this part of the world before, Lady Jane?” continued he, turning towards General Lennox’s wife, who sat beside him.

  “I’ve been to Wardlock, a good many years ago; but that’s a long way from this, and I almost forget it,” answered Lady Jane, in her languid, haughty way.

  “In what direction is Wardlock,” she asked of Beatrix, raising her handsome, unfathomable eyes for a moment.

  “You can see it from the bow-window of your room — I mean that oddly-shaped hill to the right.”

  “That’s from the green chamber,” said the Rector. “I remember the view. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes. They have put Lady Jane in the haunted room,” said Beatrix, smiling and nodding to Lady Jane.

  “And what fool, pray, told you that,” said the Baronet, perhaps just a little sharply.

  “Old Gwynn seems to think so,” answered Beatrix, with the surprised and frightened look of one who fancies she has made a blunder. “I — of course we know it is all folly.”

  “You must not say that — you shan’t disenchant us,” said Lady Jane. “There’s nothing I should so like as a haunted room; it’s a charming idea — isn’t it, Arthur?” she inquired of the General.

  “We had a haunted room in my quarters at Puttypoor,” observed the General, twiddling the point of one of his moustaches. “It was the store-room where we kept pickles, and olives, and preserves, and plates, and jars, and glass bottles. And every night there was a confounded noise there; jars, and bottles, and things tumbling about, made a devil of a row, you know. I got Smith — my servant Smith, you know, a very respectable man — uncommon steady fellow, Smith — to watch, and he did. We kept the door closed, and Smith outside. I gave him half-a-crown a night and his supper — very well for Smith, you know. Sometimes he kept a light, and sometimes I made him sit in the dark with matches ready.”

  “Was not he very much frightened?” asked Beatrix, who was deeply interested in the ghost.

  “I hope you gave him a smelling-bottle?” inquired Tom Linnett, with a tender concern.

  “Well, I don’t suppose he was,” said the General, smiling goodhumouredly on pretty Beatrix, while he loftily passed by the humorous inquiry of the young gentleman. “He was, in fact, on dooty, you know; and there were occasional noises and damage done in the store-room — in fact, just the same as if Smith was not there.”

  “Oh, possibly Smith himself among the bottles!” suggested Linnett.

  “He always got in as quick as he could,” continued the General; “but could not see anyone. Things were broken — bottles sometimes.”

  “How very strange,” exclaimed Beatrix, charmed to hear the tale of wonder.

  “We could not make it out; it was very odd, you know,” resumed the narrator.

  “You weren’t frightened, General?” inquired Linnett.

  “No, sir,” replied the General, who held that a soldier’s courage, like a lady’s reputation, was no subject for jesting, and conveyed that sentiment by a slight pause, and a rather alarming stare from under his fierce grey eyebrows. “No one was frightened, I suppose; we were all men in the house, sir.”

  “At home, I think, we’d have suspected a rat or a cat,” threw in the Rector.

  “Some did, sir,” replied the General; “and we made a sort of a search; but it wasn’t. There was a capital tiled floor, not a hole you could put a ramrod in; and no cat, neither — high windows, grated; and the door always close; and every now and then something broken by night.”

  “Delightful! That’s what Mrs. Crowe, in that charming book, you know, “The Night Side of Nature,” calls, I forget the name; but it’s a German word, I think — the noisy ghost it means. Racket — something, isn’t it, Beet?” (the short for Beatrix). “I do so devour ghosts!” cried sharp old Miss Blunket, who thought Beatrix’s enthusiasm became her; and chose to exhibit the same pretty fanaticism.

  “I didn’t say it was a ghost, mind ye,” interposed the General, with a grave regard for
his veracity; “only we were puzzled a bit. There was something there we all knew; and something that could reach up to the high shelves, and break things on the floor too, you see. We had been watching, off and on, I think, some three or four weeks, and I heard one night, early, a row in the store-room — a devil of a row it was; but Smith was on dooty, as we used to say, that night, so I left it to him; and he could have sung out, you know, if he wanted help — poor fellow! And in the morning my native fellow told me that poor Smith was dead in the store-room; and, egad! so he was, poor fellow!”

  “How awful!” exclaimed Beatrix.

  And Miss Blunket, in girlish horror, covered her fierce black eyes with her lank fingers.

  “A bite of a cobra, by Jove! above the knee, and another on the hand. A fattish fellow, poor Smith, the natives say they go faster — that sort of man; but no one can stand a fair bite of a cobra — I defy you. We killed him after.”

  “What! Smith?” whispered Linnett in his neighbour’s ear.

  “He lay in a basket; you never saw such a brute,” continued the General; “he was very near killing another of my people.”

  “So there was your ghost?” said Doocey, archly.

  “Worse than a ghost,” observed Sir Paul Blunket.

  “A dooced deal,” acquiesced the General gravely.

  “You’re very much annoyed with vermin out there in India?” remarked Sir Paul.

  “So we are, sir,” agreed the General.

  “It’s very hard, you see, to meet with a genuine ghost, Miss Marlowe; they generally turn out impostors,” said Doocey.

  “I should like to think my room was haunted,” said Lady Jane.

  “Oh! dear Lady Jane, how can you be so horribly brave?” cried Miss Blunket.

  “We have no cobras here, at all events,” said Sir Paul, nodding to Sir Jekyl, with the gravity becoming such a discovery.

  “No,” said Sir Jekyl, gloomily. I suppose he was thinking of something else.

  The ladies now floated away like summer clouds, many-tinted, golden, through the door, which Doocey held gracefully open; and the mere mortals of the party, the men, stood up in conventional adoration, while the divinities were translated, as it were, before their eyes, and hovered out of sight and hearing into the resplendent regions of candelabra and mirrors, nectar and ambrosia, tea and plumcake, and clouds of silken tapestry, and the musical tinkling of their own celestial small-talk.