Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  Had no one at Raby eyes or brains till this young lady arrived among them? No doubt there was no lack of either. But the attorney only knew the state of things in glimpses and patches, as isolated cases came before him, and Carmel Sherlock, clever and rapid at accounts, had no turn for other business, and Mark Shadwell — though not deficient, perhaps, in talents of a different kind — was indolent and incapable in this.

  The result was an immediate improvement in Mark Shadwell’s income, and a prospect of a much larger one to be effected in the course of some half-dozen years. So Mark began to hold up his head, and it is not wonderful if he built castles in the air, or if his clever wife constructed several for his habitation. For she was resolved to get her husband on in the world, and was not a person to allow the grass to grow under her feet.

  In his library, in the lower part of his escritoire, lay a square parcel of books, papered and corded, which Carmel Sherlock, a few days before his death, had himself made up and directed to him.

  It was a heavy parcel, for some of Sherlock’s few books were folios. Mark fancied that there were papers in it beside. He had often weighed it in his hand, and every time he opened the part of the escritoire where it lay, he read the address.

  A faint curiosity each time prompted him to open it, and a reluctance, intuitive and superstitious, restrained him. Carmel Sherlock was such an odd fellow. There was probably one of his mystical letters there. They amused Mark, it is true, but in those follies there was a half-defined second meaning that teazed and depressed him. In his fun was a gout de revers, and his laughter and derision sounded with an echo like the mirth in old Red Gauntlet’s spectral hall, and scared him secretly. He had come to look on this parcel with a sort of helpless dislike and suspicion.

  This day it caught his eye, as usual. He was tired of its silent upbraidings. So, yielding to the momentary temptation to know the worst, he pulled it out of its hiding-place and put it on the table. Carmel Sherlock was about to speak. Mark Shadwell cut the string.

  Some rubbishy old folios, as he had expected, emerged. He opened and shook them with their backs upward, but no letter dropped out.

  A few papers remained. One contained some valuable hints as to how to make use of two ledgers in his room, so as to facilitate the keeping of the Raby estate accounts.

  A smaller one was folded in blank paper, and contained a large closed envelope addressed to “Miss Agnes Marlyn, — Private.”

  Mark did not hesitate to open this, and he found this note addressed, in Carmel Sherlock’s hand, to the lady who was now his wife:

  “Miss AGNES MARLYN, — I return hereby the note you asked me to give to Sir Roke Wycherly on the night when he lost his life. That being impracticable, I now return it unopened, as you gave it to me. Your messenger was faithful — but the other messenger, Death, outstripped

  “Yours, “CARMEL SHERLOCK.”

  “The d — d fool!” said Mark, between his set-teeth, but whether he meant Carmel or his wife, I can’t say.

  Enclosed was a tiny note, sealed and addressed “Sir Roke Wycherly,” but the writing was so disguised, that Mark could not recognise a resemblance to that of his wife. It was rather a dark day, and Mark drew toward the window, and carefully opened and read this little note.

  It contained but three or four lines. Here was his wife’s handwriting without any disguise. It would not, probably, have done to leave Sir Roke at all in doubt as to its identity, and it had the initials “A. M.” at its foot.

  These lines were very significant. Mark looked pale with anger as he read them. He thrust the little note into his coatpocket, sneering. The servant crossing the hall saw his pale face over the banister, as he came down, and knew that something had gone wrong.

  “Your mistress in the drawingroom?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, well, that will do,” said Mark, as if he would have sent him anywhere else.

  His beautiful young wife sat at her writing-table, deep in a letter, when Mark entered. In the isolation of that drawingroom, never now entered by a female visitor, she sat. She looked up at Mark with a rather bored expression, and turned her letter with its face downward.

  “Oh, I’ve interrupted you!” he said, a little dryly.

  “Not much — what is it?”

  “It is only a letter like that, which was intended to turn its face downward when I came near,” he answered.

  “I don’t care if you read it from beginning to end,” said she, carelessly; “but what’s the matter?”

  “Oh, nothing; — you’ll think it nothing, of course — women have their own code of honour, it is not ours, that’s all,” said Mark.

  Agnes made a hurried mental survey of liabilities and blots that might be hit, but felt pretty safe.

  “I really don’t know what you mean, Mark; I wish you would speak plainly.”

  He placed his hand on her shoulder, not caressingly, and looked down in her face.

  “You remember that evening when you swore to me that my — my idea about that man — was false?”

  “What man? — whom do you mean?”

  “You know, very well.”

  “Roke Wycherly?” she said, and turned away a little contemptuously.

  “Well, well, don’t look away, look here — at that!” He laughed coldly, as he held the note before her eyes for a minute.

  A brilliant scarlet coloured her cheeks as she said it, but she tossed her head a little, and said, looking askance on it, “Well?”

  “Upon my soul, that’s cool!” he said, bitterly, and with a very savage eye.

  “My foolish little note to Roke Wycherly?” she said. “I see it — well?”

  “Well!” he echoed, growing paler; “reconcile that with your oath, if you can.”

  Agnes had recovered her nerve.

  “Reconcile that! I’m not going, if you can’t. No harm ever came of that note; don’t be a great old fool, Mark Shadwell! I think it’s agreed to let bygones be bygones. Let us understand one another. What have I gained by marrying you? Simply a share in the solitude and mortifications of an excluded man. I never see a creature here. It would be insulting, but that I know it was so before, and is meant not for me, but for you. As your wife, however, I am simply avoided, as you are, and here I sit under the insult of that neglect and avoidance, merely to be a drudge over your accounts and letters, which you can’t understand or write yourself — to try to save you, and to retrieve your ruined property. I don’t care if that note were stuck up at Raby postoffice, for every squire, and boor, and woman — you have no ladies — in the county to read. I’m sick of this place already, and tired of its secrets, and I should not mind bidding you goodbye any morning, my good sir. Your note indeed! What a discovery!”

  She shut her desk with a clap, down upon the letter she had half written.

  “I sha’n’t show you my letters. I shan’t tell you anything; we know quite enough of one another. If you want to see my letters, I suppose you can break my desk, as usual. I’m afraid of no discovery. I have no atrocious secrets.”

  And thus speaking, she walked out of the room with an air of defiance, and even menace, in which was no trace of vulgarity; it was perfectly graceful.

  Mark Shadwell stared after her, his ears tingling as if he had received a blow; the tremor of fury was in his hand. Upon a vain man, proud, full of the egotism of solitude, an insult which tears alike his vanity and his dignity, tells with a power of which men in a less morbid state know nothing.

  He hardly breathed; he did not even curse — that relief vouchsafed to squires. His lips were closed, and he sighed once or twice, and going to the table, he turned over the leaves of a book of prints slowly, seeing dark pictures of quite another kind all the time.

  Then, perhaps for the first time, his heart was wrung with a sudden and great remorse. Poor Amy, that adored him, in spite of the cold decay of his love, through all his dark and unreasonable moods, with an unchanging worship: who had nev
er given him one ungentle look or word. The remembrance came with a vivid pang. He was not a man to confess himself wrong. Even in the solitude of that room he would not have spoken all he felt; but he missed her.

  Mark, in his slow and lonely walk, met the messenger returning from Raby with the letters. There was one for him from Captain Clayton. It was not very long. He was coming to Raby to see him. He had been ailing, and his physician hinted that he must winter at Naples.

  Not a word about Rachel! Was all that cooling? Mark would soon see. There was no absolute need, however, that he should say anything upon that subject in his letter, coming as he intended so soon.

  The autumnal sun had set, and the sky clouded with faded gold and crimson, piled and floating in seas of faintest yellow and pale green, rose sad and solemn before him, and toned the lightest minds to melancholy, and others, sad already — with a profounder gloom. Mark was leaning by the window, and looking over the dimly glowing undulations of sward and woodland toward haunted Wynderfel. Dreams of the dead and lost; of Carmel Sherlock and his crazy visions and inalienable fidelity; of the predestinated decay of his family, and the legend of the angry spirit — the lady of Feltram hollow — with the star of Bethlehem on her left hand, — when he felt the fingers of a little hand playfully pluck his ear, and a soft, sweet voice said:

  “Come, Mark, we can’t afford to quarrel; you remember the two companions in the Eddystone lighthouse? don’t let us imitate them. I dare say I was very cross, and I beg your pardon” (she made him a little comic, plaintive curtsey). “But wasn’t it you who began? — Mark, you know it was — and now we’ll make it up, and we understand one another ever so much better, and we’ll never quarrel again.”

  He looked at her, with the odd lights of Wynderfel upon her strangely beautiful face. Her words and manner were playful, but her face was cold and even cruel.

  “I don’t know, Agnes,” said he, surprised by the suddenness of her speech, “in what mood you are talking, but I accept it as in earnest, and I agree. It is too late for me to think of making new friends, Agnes; and if I lose you, I lose my last.”

  She smiled. The odd, wild lights reflected from the sky distorted that smile. It looked arch and sinister. Her right hand was round his neck, and still in gentle play plucked at his ear. Her left he had taken in both his, and fondled it caressingly; its palm was up, with the little star-like scar, five-rayed, in its centre. She kissed his cheek, and whispered something in his ear, and he smiled in his turn.

  So the little quarrel was made up, but each remembered it. It had scarred a deep line in Mark’s heart; it had opened in their nuptial chamber, for a moment, a closet where he saw a whip of scorpions hissing on the wall. It had swelled the soft, clear tones of Agnes to a piercing yell of thunder, at sound of which the sky blackened, and the earth trembled under his feet.

  Was that proud man to live henceforward under a threat?

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  MARK AT APPLEBURY.

  So the apple leaf grew yellow, and the hawthorn tree was brown, at Raby. October had arrived, and at no season of the year does that melancholy old place, with its fine forest vistas, and its vast stretch of wooded hill, look so grand.

  In this becoming costume did Captain Clayton, on his arrival at his inn in the pretty little town, find the ancient seat of Raby; and if he had been blessed with a sense of the picturesque, one might have supposed that he had made his arrangements — and it would have been well worth his while — so as to make his visit at that sad and glorious crisis in the forest world, when decay and maturity — its death and glory — are blended with a funereal splendour.

  Clayton went up at once, and paid his respects at the great house. When Mark returned from the Mills, he found him established in the drawingroom.

  “You’ve promised to come to us, mind, just as you did last time — every day to luncheon, and to stay dinner,” urged Mark, hospitably; and only too happy was Clayton to accept the frank invitation.

  He had a good deal to tell about people whom, or, at all events, their fathers or mothers or uncles or aunts, Mark had known long ago; and though his manner of relating was not particularly brilliant, yet the stories were more or less amusing, and afforded him glimpses into a world that had been closed for him for ever so many years. But Rachel’s name he never once mentioned!

  When a silence came, as they sat together by the spluttering wood-fire, Mark sometimes stole a glance at his handsome apathetic face, as his large azure eyes gazed indolently on the burning logs, and the lingering smile left by his last story still showed the edges of his even teeth. But the long expected re-introduction of the subject on which he desired to hear him, came not.

  “He seems to think all quite at an end, and I can’t blame him,” said Mark peevishly.

  “I’m certain,” answered his wife, cheerily, “that he does not think we think so.”

  “I don’t see how that affects the case, except in making us appear excessively absurd.”

  “So it would, if Captain Clayton were a different sort of person. But he would not wish us to think he has behaved ill; and, you may depend upon it, he will speak to you.”

  “But I don’t say that he’s obliged to say any more about it. Why should he?”

  “It was a great pity.”

  “What?” said he.

  “Poor Rachel sacrificing herself to vex you,” said Agnes, with a shrug. “You’re going to Applebury to-day, ain’t you?”

  “Yes. I can’t be here for luncheon; tell Clayton so, when he comes. Rachel’s a fool — a greater fool than she thinks, as she will find, by-and-bye.”

  “I don’t blame her for hating me,” said Mrs. Shadwell, “although I have never been anything but kind to her, according to my poor opportunities. But she ought not to speak of you — her father — as she does.”

  “Oh! of course, she hates me! Every miss who fancies she is to rule her father’s house and himself, by Jove! hates him, as a matter of course, if he marries,” said Mark, affecting to think nothing of it.

  “Yes, but I don’t think the Temples should encourage that kind of thing. Even before servants, she and they talk us over — you particularly.”

  “Well, I’m going to Applebury now, and I sha’n’t be back till near dinner-time, and I don’t care a farthing what they say.”

  And with this magnanimous speech, looking, nevertheless, very much annoyed, as she could see by every line of his face, he took his departure.

  Applebury is a cheerful, quaint, little place, as I have said, with an antique coziness and a wonderful variety of aspect within so small a compass. But of all places on earth, except one, Applebury was to Mark Shadwell the most repulsive. What was he to do, however, when people, whom he wanted to see, fixed that spot — the most convenient halfway trysting place — for a meeting?

  I sha’n’t trouble any one with the particulars of the business that brought Mark here. It was an anxious one. His attorney from Raby was here to aid him with advice and documents. Mark hated business as much as every rational man, who has nothing to gain by it, does. Besides, in his case, it too generally meant danger. He had sat up late the night before, over it, and had been wakeful and feverish by reason of it, almost till day broke.

  It was past six o’clock that evening, when Agnes received a note from him in these terms:

  “Applebury, 4 o’clock.

  “MY OWN BEAUTIFUL LITTLE WITCH, — Pity your poor old fellow, shut up in this vile little town. A telegram says that the people from London won’t be here till next train, six o’clock. I can’t be home till eight or nine, at soonest; awkward, isn’t it? Make my apologies to Clayton. I had no notion such an awkward delay could happen; but I shall break away from my tormentors as early as possible. Already my life darkens — my star of Bethlehem shines too far away. I did not know how much every hour of my life depended on my enchantress. For the world I would not have left you alone; but here I am on compulsion. Looking for light, I remain here; in exile, stil
l the captive of my beautiful witch.

  “P.S. — I fear I shan’t be home till nine.”

  This was a sufficiently ardent love-letter from a fellow of Mark Shadwell’s years; and what is more, in great measure genuine; which is more than can be said for all such performances. It might not have been quite so long, however, if Mark had not found his young wife a little exacting, as brides are, at least, while they continue to be in love with their husbands! and also there was this, that Agnes was a precisian in her ideas of what she owed to prudence. She worried him sometimes with scruples, and compelled him to go to places with her, where he thought she might perfectly well have gone alone. These little exactions vexed him sometimes; but, on the whole, it was a fault on the side of the virtues, and pleased him. So he wisely cultivated those nun-like ideas, and laid more stress on his regret for his absence from dinner than he thought the accident quite deserved.

  Another disappointment awaited him. By the six o’clock train no one arrived for him; but, half an hour after, another telegram told of an unavoidable delay in London, and the postponement of the meeting until next day.

  It was dark now. Across the market-square of Applebury you could not distinguish any longer, windows or doors, except where candle or firelight shone through them. You could only see the gables against the, as yet, moonless sky, like the shoulders of gigantic sentries. The sounds of the little town had died out; Mark was peevish, hungry, and tired. His attorney had taken his leave, and ridden home to Raby half an hour ago. While the good people of the inn were getting ready a beefsteak for the exhausted Squire, he, with his feet on the fender, fell into a nap, troubled, after a while, by a confused and ugly dream.

  He fancied himself in a strange room; how he came there he could not remember; and, with the anticipation of danger which sometimes overpowers one in a dream, he was listening to a heavy tread, approaching on the lobby, and under which the floor on which he stood trembled. While he listened in suspense, from the further side of the room, on a sudden, the voice of Carmel Sherlock scared him, crying, “Beware, sir! it’s the beak.” At the same time the door seemed to open, and a huge gaunt figure, with a black crape over his face, and a parchment process in his hand, entered. At his elbow was Sir Roke Wycherly, with a white malignant face, peering by his side, and with a long hand, the fingers of which were grimed with old bloodstains, extended towards Mark — he continued crying, “Tonight’s your time! you have the warrant, there’s your man.” The big-boned figure, in the black mask, was close to him, and Mark, in his agony, seized a knife; it was the dagger of Roke Wycherly — an image always present to his eye — which seemed to lie on the table before him. The room and its belongings were growing like the fatal room at Raby. But it seemed to him that his endeavours to defend himself were frustrated by his young wife, who from behind clung wildly about his arms, screaming with a terrifying laugh in his ear, “The knife, Mark, defend yourself! the knife — or he’ll have you!” At the same time a dreadful roar of waters was drowning all the voices, and the room seemed to topple and roll like a sinking ship. And with a struggle, like strangulation, he suddenly awoke with a cry of “God!” repeated fearfully.