Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  “Thanks,” said he, “I am a little knocked up. Two years since I shouldn’t have found that walk too much; I’m afraid I must acknowledge the hand of Time, and shorten my walks.”

  “Charming walks — a temptation always to do too much. But the air here is quite an elixir; I feel it so,” said Sir Roke, who ignored decay, and abhorred mortality, and was always disposed to be testy when those ideas were pressed into prominence.

  “That death is a stranger here,” said the vicar, “and the Bible so far justified, is I think in nothing more clear than in the difficulty we experience in presenting the event, as a fact, to our understandings; the great truth is written in awful characters in every churchyard; proclaimed in every hour’s retrospect by the broken and disappearing ranks of early friends; printed day by day, among all the vulgarities of life in every newspaper; every black-craped hat or bonnet we see is a signal that the dread event has happened recently and near us; all nature speaks by signs and allegories, and all our social relations, with a tremendous distinctness, of death; and yet how hard it is, for five consecutive minutes, to accept it as a certain incident of our position! so that we have reason to thank God for those other intimations of its approach, which are furnished in the evidences of decaying vigour and subsiding life.”

  “Isn’t it — surrounded as we are with blessings — an odd subject to select for thankfulness?” said Sir Roke, with a little shrug and a bitter smirk. “For. my part, I thank Heaven for quite other things.”

  “For other things, and for that, also, since die we must; well that we should have every help to keep it in mind, for judgment follows death, and here sit we three; and very trite it is, but true, that this time twelve months one of us may lie in the grave!”

  As I have said, Sir Roke hated death worse, I am afraid, than worse things, and he thought the vicar detestably illbred in pressing the topic as he did. The baronet, therefore, could brook this no longer, and he took up his parable, and said:

  “Quite on the cards, though I’m a great deal better than I was this time last year; and growing better, too, every week, thank God. I’m sorry you can’t give so good an account of yourself. But whatever happens we must bear it, you know, and there’s no good, that I can see, in plaguing one another about possible occurrences, which are certainly not meant to turn us from the business, and blessings, and — and duties of life, till they do come. Life’s our business, and meant to be our business, here, in my opinion. It’s no news, you’ll pardon me for saying so, to tell us we’re to die. Death’s no discovery: I’m to die, and you’ve to die. You’re to die as well as Mark there. I hope you think about it, if it does you good. Your death’s your own affair, whenever it comes, and mine’s mine; and I don’t want to plague you and Mark about it, and I won’t.” And Sir Roke took the claret, filled his glass, and looked across the table a little defiantly at the vicar, who sat under fire like a veteran.

  “When I want medical advice, I send for a doctor,” said Sir Roke, softening a little, and descending, as he did so, to a hackneyed parallel— “and when I want religion I’ll send for a clergyman, and for none would I more readily than for you. But I think for myself, you understand, upon these subjects. The genius of our Church is liberty, you know; that’s my view.”

  Thus Sir Roke wrested the conversation forcibly into another channel. Mark dropped in, and the vicar dropped out, and so for a while rather uncomfortably and with a sort of effort, of which they all soon tired, the discourse dragged on over their wine. Each had matters connected with the other to think over, and the conversation was often on the verge of subsiding into silence.

  As Sir Roke and the vicar walked into the drawingroom side by side, the baronet said in a low and friendly tone:

  “I read your note, my dear Temple, and you must pardon me for saying, I’ve seldom been so much puzzled, and so much amused; you’ve fallen into a most diverting mistake. I could not think, at first, what you meant; somebody has been mystifying you.” The vicar looked in his face with a very grave surprise, but made no answer, only bowed.

  “I’ll take an opportunity tomorrow; I’ll go over to see you, and I’ll make it as clear to you as daylight; there never was, you could not have conceived, anything more preposterous. I wished to say so much now; I don’t choose my friends to think worse of me than I deserve — even for an hour.”

  Sir Roke laid his hand in a friendly way on the arm of the vicar, who, however, looked down still without returning his friendly glance, and with the expression of a man who is distressed, and wishes an irksome subject at rest.

  “You won’t say you believe me, but I know you do, and I’ll make you confess it tomorrow, when I see you. In the meantime, although, upon my honour, you have been quite in the clouds upon this subject, I assure you, I respect and I like you, Temple, for having written as you did — I do indeed.”

  The Reverend Stour Temple bowed very gravely again. Sir Roke might as well have spared his flatteries. There was no response.

  CHAPTER II.

  A KNOCK AT SIR ROKE’S DOOR.

  MARK Shadwell talked a good deal with the vicar in the drawingroom. The ladies made music and sang at the piano. Sir Roke was smiling and agreeable, and flitted from Rachel to her mamma, and from her mamma to Rachel again. Mark Shadwell shaking himself now and then free of his perplexities, almost wondered why he was so disturbed, wondered with a feeling at once of ridicule and fear, half hated himself as he looked at Agnes Marlyn, who acquiesced with a cold unconscious pride in the neglect to which she seemed abandoned that night, half hated her, yet in his compassion, he was tempted to go over and tell her how sweet her music was, and rescue her from the prolonged insult of that neglect, but somehow his heart failed him. Mrs. Shadwell on a sudden perceived it, praised her music; and asked her the usual questions about it and its composer, and so forth; and shortly after, Miss Marlyn, with a few whispered words to Mrs. Shadwell, and a smile, glided from the room, happily unconscious, it seemed, of having been overlooked and forgotten.

  Ten minutes later the vicar took his leave, and the little party broke up. Mark Shadwell walked with him to the gate. They strode along silently for a good way.

  “Sir Roke seems to enjoy his visit very much,” said the vicar at last; but like a man rather asking a question than stating a fact. “Your quiet rational life must be a change to him.”

  “And you wonder how he can endure its dulness?” said Mark, with a laugh; “so do I, but anything may be endured for a day or two, and Roke does not mean to stay longer.”

  “Oh! has he said so?”

  “Yes — why?” asked Mark, struck by something in his companion’s tone. “I think he said he meant to go on the day after tomorrow.”

  “Have you any idea where he goes then?” asked the clergyman.

  “To Scarbrook, I think; you seem to take an interest in him, Temple; do you think of sending him a tract on death and judgment, or some little reminder of the sort? I’m sure he’ll read it.”

  “I sha’n’t trouble him with tracts, because I know he would not read them, and would think me a fool, and so any little chance that our conversation of tonight, or of any other time, might have, would be lost.”

  Mark smiled to himself, thinking that Stour Temple had actually thought over the tract, and been busy about Sir Roke’s spiritual concerns.

  “I’m afraid you may as well leave that erring and straying sheep to walk his own way, a perverse disciple like me, only I don’t think Roke has any philosophy, except the hand-to-mouth one of extracting from life, day by day, all the pleasure he can, a rule which, except indeed in coming to Raby, I don’t think I ever knew him offend against. I’ve some reason, however, to think that he begins to find that way of life a little tiresome, and he’s talking of a quieter one, but I don’t know; have you often known a man of that kind settle down and marry?”

  “Yes, I’ve known two or three; not that they all make good husbands,” answered the vicar.

  “I dare sa
y not; so have I, some,” said Mark.

  “They don’t always make good husbands,” he might have said, “but they do make good settlements sometimes and that I am afraid is what he was principally thinking of.

  “When will you be coming this way again, Temple?” asked Mark, who wished to ask him more closely about the story of Miss Marlyn’s school-days, and yet somehow could not this night.

  Temple smiled.

  “I wish you would look in a little oftener,” said Mark, who interpreted that smile aright, and felt the rebuke more than his pride would quite acknowledge.

  “Thank you very much, but my walks are very uncertain; their direction is often controlled by that most capricious, humanly speaking, of all influences, sickness.”

  “I’d ride over tomorrow or next day, if I thought I should find you, but you’re so uncertain, and I really want” — he lowered his voice unconsciously— “to hear anything more you may happen to know about that story you mentioned to-day.”

  “I don’t think I have anything to add,” said the vicar.

  “Well, I ain’t going to ask you tonight, but you’ll look in when you can, won’t you?” The vicar promised, and they shook hands and parted.

  “The most officious fellow in England! Well-intentioned, no doubt; but he’s always making me uncomfortable, and I suppose other people also. I wish Roke would present him to Scarbrook. I wish he could keep his scandals to himself. I don’t think he’d come all that way to tell me anything pleasant — delight some fellows take in tormenting their neighbours!” Thinking of many things, he sauntered back towards the house, and was surprised to find himself so soon again on the steps.

  The little game of piquet in his dressing-room amused Sir Roke, and soothed his nerves for bed.

  “Well, what do you think of Temple?” inquired Mark, as he shuffled the cards.

  A hard shrewd glance Roke shot at him, but Mark’s countenance had nothing alarming in it, and his eyes were upon the cards.

  “Oh! Temple’s very well, if he wasn’t always talking shop, you know. He’s very well, but too much shop,” replied Sir Roke, cutting the cards. “He used to be clever — sang very nicely, didn’t he? And he wrote verses, I think, and was an accomplished fellow before he grew so dismal. Everything good in its place; let him preach in his pulpit, I’ve no objection, but I do object to — I lead, don’t I? — I object to sermons, and d — d disagreeable sermons after dinner.”

  And with this remark Sir Roke entered on his game; they played as usual; the baronet lost, and, when he had played enough, he thanked Mark, paid his losses, and yawned gently behind his hand.

  “Very good of you, Mark, to get my nerves in tone, and enable me to sleep, by this little game. You’ll come tomorrow night? I’m afraid it must be my last — what the devil’s that?”

  Some one had pushed open Sir Roke’s door a little bit, and closed it again softly.

  It was near one o’clock by this time.

  “Some one at the door,” said Mark, getting up and opening it.

  “No one there,” said Mark; and he listened. “No, it was a mistake.”

  “No mistake,” said Sir Roke, testily.

  “I mean that some one mistook the door, and got away again on finding out his mistake,” replied Mark Shadwell; “who on earth could it have been, though?” He bethought him, and again he looked out and listened. “Whoever it was, all’s quiet now!” and he closed the door on the gallery, bid Roke “goodnight,” and went out the other way.

  Sir Roke Wycherly was not in a pleasant mood that night, as Mr. Clewson was made aware. It was a phase of exasperation that tried that gentleman’s politeness severely, a sort of dumb madness as to all utterances but revilings and curses — in which he indicated his orders by signs, and resented a misapprehension in such terms as would make a good curate’s hair stand on end, and suggested the prudence of some such fumigation as that potent one we read of in the Book of Tobit.

  These tempers excited Mr. Clewson’s curiosity, for they were seldom wholly capricious, when they reached that pitch of intensity; but depended for the most part on some exterior cause.

  He wrote a letter at last. A curious observer of the human countenance would have noted an unpleasant flickering; the ironical lights and dismal shadows of an angry and malicious face, as he penned it, and read it over. It ended, however, by his putting it into the fire. It did not satisfy him, and looking woefully tired, he at length got himself into his bed, toned and tranquillised by his tinctures or drops; and looking like the corpse of a man arrested by death in the moment of revenge, he lay worn out and bleak on his pillow.

  This letter may have been to the Reverend Stour Temple, or to quite another person. I don’t know. It will never be known till all secrets, great and little, are proclaimed.

  It was three o’clock and the house quite still, when on a sudden Sir Roke was wakened, he fancied, by a noise. His nerves were jarred upon, and his heart thumping at his ribs as he wakened, as will happen with irritable men under the imperfect action of laudanum. He had just collected his wits, and remembered where he was, when he heard the handle of his door tried again from the outside.

  Up jumped Sir Roke with the nimbleness of anger, resolved to clear this matter up; stealthily he got into his dressing-gown, lighted his bedroom candle, and drew near the door, and exactly as he again heard the handle of it cautiously turned from without, he turned the key in it, and candlestick in hand, with his head a little stooped, and features peaked and corrugated with anger, he confronted Carmel Sherlock, who stood before him, very pale and haggard, in his ordinary careless costume.

  Like a somnambulist wakened, he recoiled in a kind of horror a pace or two, and then stood with his great dark eyes gleaming back the light of Sir Roke’s candle upon the baronet.

  CHAPTER III.

  MORITURUS.

  Neither spoke for a while. At length, raising his candle a little, so as to disclose those odd confronting portraits more sharply, Sir Roke said, with a pallid grimace which sarcastically travestied a smile:

  “I’ve been obliged to you, sir, I think, more than once for this kind of attention?”

  “Very likely, very certainly,” said Sherlock, just above his breath. “It must be that you lock your door.”

  “Pray, sir, do you want anything in my room?” repeated Sir Roke, in the same constrained tone, and with the same angry smirk.

  “No, sir, no. I’ve no business, certainly. It’s a happy thing, sir, you wakened me,” said Sherlock, looking full at him as before, and with a sort of shudder he went back another step.

  “Then you’ve been walking in your sleep, sir, I suppose?” said Sir Roke, intent on mentioning the case to his host, with whom he felt very angry for having such a person in his house.

  “Walking in my sleep, sir? Oh, no! that’s double life; no, never, sir. Lock your door. I hope you will — do, sir — double lock and bolt.”

  “Your advice, sir, is immensely obliging,” said the baronet, with the same sneer, but somehow fascinated by the sublime impudence and unintelligibility of his visitor, and unable to break away at the moment.

  “No, don’t fail; every man changes his theories from time to time, and looking among the ancients, I think the Sadducees were wrong, and there is some place like hell— “

  “And I should say a likely way to settle one’s mind upon that question would be going about to people’s bedrooms at this hour of night, and getting yourself mistaken for a robber. Pray, sir, don’t come here any more. Good night.” And so saying, with a burst of auger at himself for having played the fool for so long, he shut the door in Carmel’s face, and locked it; and he cursed his audacious disturber with intensity, and rang up Clewson; and blew him up, not reasonably, for allowing every d — d fellow that had nothing better to do to hammer upon his door for half the night, and ruin his health; and he demanded of Mr. Clewson what the devil he was good for, and whether he fancied he would go on keeping him for nothing, and so for
th.

  So in his wrath he marched and countermarched Mr. Clewson, put him on fatigue duty, made him get on his clothes, and mount guard in the gallery outside his door. He made him share the bitterness of his own involuntary vigil, and strained his patience very nearly to the cracking point, and did not permit him to revisit his bed until sleep began to approach his own, and he wished him out of his way.

  Sir Roke was one of those gentlemen who utterly pooh-pooh the idea of hell. He cultivated vague ideas of his Creator’s beneficence, which had been unconsciously his epicurean comfort in many an incipient qualm about futurity.

  “Hell, indeed! vastly good of him to call me out of my quiet sleep to tell me his ideas on that agreeable chimera; d — n the mad brute!”

  Many fat goodhumoured fellows smile at hell, if they do not sneer. And many bad men class it with Styx and Tartarus — a bugbear and a fable. Eating, drinking, dozing, comfortable friend! Willing to take a luxurious view of your Creator, and to make the day of judgment a goodnatured sham. God is good, you say; it cannot fare so ill with us. He is the God of love and of mercy, and of every good and pleasant thing. Alas! most certainly He is also the God of every evil thing — the God of pain, of madness, and of death. Look around on the gloom of this transitory world. If here and there is a broken light of heaven, are there no glimmerings and shadows of hell? Are there not the hospitals, the madhouses, the prisons, the graveyards?

  Is there no such word as incorrigible? Are there not criminals whom no punishment and no fear can cause to cease from troubling, whom nothing but final loss of liberty, or of life, the completest loss of liberty, can render harmless? Persons who have educated themselves into a systematic and irrevocable enmity to their race, to fair play, to God — persons to whom we award imprisonment for life, and leave them, at the end of it, morally where we found them — not to be trusted with liberty? There we leave them, and there we should find them, if life lasted twice or twenty times as long, or through eternity. We see this in our own economy, and can we not understand the possible necessity of “spirits in prison” for ever, by the committal of God? If a perverted man be here so immutable, and will, with his limited powers and opportunities, inflict so much upon his fellows, how would it be with the opportunities of an everlasting life, and the magnified faculties of a being raised in power?