Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  For a while he did not know where he was; he had sprung to his feet. The roar and darkness of the sinking room were still in his ears and eyes, and he distinguished nothing.

  Even after all this had vanished, the sense of danger remained, and he listened breathlessly, wondering whether those accursed London fellows could have sent down a bailiff after all.

  Mark, like other avowed sceptics, had a strong vein of superstition. One way or another, the instinct of belief in the unseen will assert itself. Out to the inn-door walked Mark, to shake off the lingering images of his evil dream, and to allow its influence to exhale in the free night air.

  An undercurrent of his thought had been busy for half the day with his own possible arrest, and he still held, crumpled between his finger and thumb, one of those reminders printed on a little square of paper, which good men drop about, on the chance that one seed in a thousand may strike root. He had picked it up on the chimneypiece of the inn room, and in the act of reading the words, so early heard and so accustomed, that their very meaning seems, like an aroma too long exposed to the air, to have quite exhaled, and spent itself; and we have but a residuum of sound.

  “But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up.”

  So his dream was accounted for; and Mark, somewhat better, returned, at the summons of the waiter, to partake of his good cheer. But as he rode home this dream, in spite of his reason, depressed his spirits with an ever-recurring sense of having witnessed, in reality, something dreadful; and his mind, every now and then, was busy with the fanciful problem — which he affected to despise — did this dream reflect, as it were, some approaching disaster.

  When he reached the gate of Raby, he was glad. The sombre outlines of the great house, and the towering trees which surrounded it, as a rule, gladdened few people, and him least of all. But he called up the image of the fireside and the lighted drawingroom, and his beautiful wife, no doubt uncomfortable by reason of his protracted stay. “Yes, the pretty little fool, she’ll be glad to see me. She don’t know what to think; and Clayton — will Clayton be still here?” He rather wished he might. He shouldn’t mind a game of écarté, or even a homely rubber of backgammon. And as these cheerful fancies crossed his mind, a thought struck him. Should he play them a little trick, and knock at the drawingroom window? So letting his sober horse find his way to the stables as best he might, he dismounted and walked round the side of the house, and on the grass under the windows, at the back, till he reached those of the drawing room, through the blinds of which he could see the glow transmitted from the inner light.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  A STORM.

  THIS drawingroom had three windows; a larger and drearier room beyond it was disused. The window-blind did not quite cover the lower end of the glass, and Mark stood and peeped in. His mood was instantly and sternly -changed.

  Clayton and his wife were standing beside a cabinet, very near the window. He was talking, holding her hand in his, and she looking down, her cheeks dyed with a brilliant blush.

  Could it be that they were talking of Rachel? No. It was the hope and agony of an instant. There is no mistaking the gaze of a lover who looks upon the object of his passion. With such eyes, Clayton, speaking low and earnestly, leaning over her, gazed; and, as if to preclude all doubt, stooping still nearer, he passionately kissed her unresisting lips.

  If Mark’s fury had been one degree under its acme, he would have dashed in the window, and, with his lacerated hands and ghastly face, have confronted his betrayers. He drew back, staring at the dull light of the blind that now interposed. But the picture was not in the room, but in his eyes. Backward he stepped and waited — and waited still — trying to understand and feel the whole of his appalling position. Freezing and stupefied, he saw the black image of the great old house stand up before and above him. All its hateful and dreadful associations were vaguely gathered in its shadow. He had dreamed of despair — talked of despair — fancied that he was intimate with despair for years. He had now, for the first time, met that tremendous stranger.

  Some one approached the window; he saw the shadow on the blind and he glided away into the dark, like a ghost, and was hid. Clayton raised it and looked out for a few moments, dropped it, and returned.

  For a long time Mark stood where he was; at last he was seized with a violent shivering. It was a crisis in his catalepsy. A doll dead light was breaking on his mind, and he began to walk swiftly away. It was a mild night, and yet he was pierced and shuddering with cold. Walking among the trees as fast as he could stride, he felt better, and the dreadful rigor subsided.

  The one idea present to his mind was his revenge. Immense it must be, orderly and complete. His mind must clear. He must see, quite, how the land lay. He must do nothing hand-over-head. It must be a comprehensive and methodical revenge. But something he must be doing. To be quite inactive was to go mad.

  He was now near the gate that opened on the silent highway, and the sight of the road to the little town of Raby suggested his first measure.

  The distance was trifling. He was now in the street of the quiet little town he had so recently trotted briskly through. It was still early, not nine o’clock. Lights were shining from the drawingroom windows of his attorney, Mr. Twinley.

  He knocked — sent up his message; and in a few moments more was seated in that gentleman’s office. The attorney, as he set the candles on the table, eyed him with a shrewd and grim scrutiny. He suspected some disaster. He feared the bailiff in charge of his person might be, at that moment, keeping ward in the hall; for Mark’s face looked as if he had stolen from his bed in the crisis of a fever.

  “Nothing from London — since — sir?” hesitated the attorney, seeing that Mark did not accost him. He had left him only two hours ago at Applebury.

  “No. You have that draft-deed, in favour of my wife, ready?”

  “Yes, sir — and— “

  “And engrossed?”

  “Engrossed? Yes, sir, but— “

  “Put it on the table, please,” said Mark.

  “Certainly, sir; but will you permit me only one word?”

  “Do as I tell you, sir,” said Mark, sternly; “we can talk afterwards.”

  “Certainly, sir,” said the attorney, a little high and huffed; and, getting on a chair, he took down from shelves well stored with others like it, a mahogany-coloured tin-box, with “M. Shadwell, Esq., Raby,” in large yellow letters on the front; and drawing forth the deed, placed it before Mark, who opened the milk-white parchment folds, and displayed that handsome piece of engrossing with its blue stamps and silver foil, ready at the touch of his pen to become fixed and inflexible as those chemical fluids which solidify at the turning of a stopper.

  “You can get a couple of witnesses— “

  “Well, I” The attorney looked at his watch.

  “Oh! yes,” interrupted Mark, fiercely. “ Of course you can — and — I’m not going to sign this thing and he pushed the deed with the back of his hand a little from him. “I’ve changed my mind, and I want you to draw the shortest will you can, leaving everything I possess, without exception, to my daughter. I’ve made up my mind tonight, and she shall have it rather than a — a stranger.”

  By this time, Mark’s mind was clear, and his hand steady, and he wrote across the deed without a tremor these words to which the date was prefixed: “Having changed my mind this evening, I do not intend to execute this deed, and have countermanded my instructions, with the intention of dealing differently with my property in my will. M. SHADWELL.”

  Beneath them, at Shadwell’s request, the wondering and curious attorney wrote: “Present while Mr. Shadwell wrote and signed the above memorandum and at foot of this, the attorney himself signed his name.

  Mark Shadwell walked up and down the room, sometimes stopping to look out of the window with the same unchanged and stony face, whi
le the attorney copied a short form of a will, which Shadwell read, and perfected then and there, and, taking it and the deed with him, departed, leaving the attorney at the doorsteps, with his candle blown out in his courteous hand, bursting with wonder and surmise as he watched Mark’s tall, slight figure receding homeward.

  But Mark did not go home. A fitful melancholy wind had got up, and the moon was just showing its edges above the distant mountains and lighting the filmy streak of cloud that lay over them, as he entered the gate of Raby, and passing the great dark house, which no longer showed a gleam, but seemed to have closed its eyes, thinking of its secrets, he took the path to Wynderfel.

  A man who walks with one idea in his head, and in a high state of excitement, gets over the ground quickly. The moon was now up, and a mournful wind piped, through the roofless gables and open windows of the old Manor House of Wynderfel, under whose walls he already was. From the lady’s window an arm seemed wildly to wave him toward it. It was only that long ivy tendril, white in the moonlight, which had got a trick of beckoning when the wind was up.

  He passed by these haunted walls, and down the lonely path to the Vicarage — a solitary figure — in that region deserted of life. Below him lay that happier land without the circle of Wynderfel, where were farmsteads and hedgerows, and the snug and kindly Vicarage, from which he could dimly see a lonely light.

  The servant who opened the Vicarage door did not happen to know Mark Shadwell. So much the better for him. The cheery sounds of voices and laughter came through the little drawingroom door as the maid opened it to say that a gentleman, who would not give his name, was in the hall, and wanted to say a word to the vicar on particular business. The vicar’s “Show ‘ him into the study” followed instantly, and the vicar himself, with the pleasant radiance of the beloved faces he had just left still on his own thin features, entered, and looked with an uncertain gaze upon the figure, buttoned up in a loose coat, and imperfectly lighted.

  “It is I — Shadwell,” said Mark, in a low tone, as the vicar shut the door. “Just a word or two.”

  “Oh!” exclaimed the vicar, “I’m so glad. Won’t you come into the drawingroom? Do.”

  “Two documents that I want to leave with you,” continued Mark, whose speech went right on, like the chimes of a clock, “an odd hour; but I happened to be near this. You’ll’ take care of them — great care, I know; this is the deed I was thinking of executing; but that’s past. You’ll see what I have written across the face of it; and this is my will. You can read them — time enough when I’ve left you. You take an interest in Rachel. You’ll be glad when you see what I have done; and — I thank you, Temple, for your kindness to her, and you’d have been a good friend to me if I had allowed you. I must go,”

  “But it’s a very nasty night. Did you drive?”

  “I walked. Goodbye.”

  “You must take my cob; it’s no night for a walk over those uplands.”

  Mark had reached the hall-door, and without waiting opened it. The wind was not on the front of the house, but it had increased to something like the gusty beginnings of a gale. The vicar held the door open, and the glass bell in the hall, with its modest candle, swung in the unruly air that it admitted, and threw its flaring light on Mark’s pale face as, with the strangest smile the vicar ever saw, he nodded his farewell over his shoulder, while his loose coat flapped about him, and waving back his hand as if to forbid ceremony, he strode away.

  The vicar shut his door with some little exertion, and locked it and drew the bolts, and having indorsed in pencil the date at which Shadwell had placed the documents in his hands, he locked them up also, intending, by-and-bye, to read them as Mark seemed to wish. And he crossed the hall, anticipating the attack which the curious women were sure to make, and think how best to fence pleasantly with his intending examiners.

  The wind gradually increased in violence. It became a storm. Even in the sheltered Vicarage its fury was heard, on high, loud and awful, and Miss Barbara was up twice in the night in her dressing-gown and slippers patrolling the lobbies, and with great disgust and terror wondering at the apathy of the other human occupants of the house.

  At midnight Mark had not returned to Raby. Agnes did not know what to think. His horse, without a rider, had found his way to his stable door. In such sinister conjunctures of doubt and alarm, what a magic mirror does, the imagination hold up! Happy those who, in a spirit of prayer, can lift the veil and look in. She could not look with pure eyes, and in its depths saw only phantoms that appalled her.

  At halfpast twelve she sent down a frightened note to the attorney, who, she knew, had accompanied him to Applebury. Mr. Twinley scrawled a line in pencil from his bed to say he had seen him at nine o’clock, when he called, after his return from Applebury, for a few minutes, and here the note stopped.

  What had he called about? Whither had he gone? Had bad news come from London? Was he a prisoner? Was he forced to fly? Or — or — and she dropped the veil over the spectres that were astir upon the speculum.

  Mr. Twinley had turned upon his other side, and was deep in the peaceful sleep of a robust attorney, when he was again awakened by an energetic note from the lady of Raby. It called on him to come up to Raby and see her, otherwise she would come down to his office and see him.

  Mr. Twinley might admire the new Mrs. Shadwell, but he did not like her. If he had been sure that the Squire would stick to his resolution of the evening before, he would have taken this message very coolly. But human passion is transitory — amantium iræ proverbially so, and wills are revocable. The queen might enjoy her own again, and the Raby connection was worth preserving.

  So, though rather peevishly, the attorney did get up, and dress in haste, and walked down to Raby, where the lady received him awfully pale, and thoughtful, and inquisitive. He wisely kept the subject of his conference with Mark that evening strictly to himself, and wondered intensely what the secret could be. It plainly was not a quarrel. Mark had spoken to him in the morning about the deed, and had not seen his wife since.

  “He must have heard news, however,” said the pale lady, with decision, “or he is consulting with Mr. Temple at the Vicarage, and they don’t know how late it is. He’ll turn up immediately, or they have made him stay there, it is such an awful night.”

  “Yes, indeed — a frightful night it is, ma’am,” said the attorney, with feeling.

  “Won’t you take a glass of sherry, Mr. Twinley,” said the lady, thoughtfully.

  “No, thank you, ma’am.”

  “You think he’ll be here soon?” urged the eager wife, holding the candle at the dining room door, as the attorney entered the hall where the servant waited to let him out.

  “Oh! yes, ma’am, I’m sure you’re right about his waiting at the Vicarage. Slates were flying, I assure you, in the street of Raby as I came, and I should not be surprised if some of the trees here were blown down before morning.” And the attorney’s countenance darkened as, with this idea in his mind, he thought of his walk under the huge trees that line the avenue.

  CHAPTER XX.

  A KNOCKING AT THE DOOR.

  NOT that night did Mark Shadwell return to Raby. Various were the moods that lightened or darkened the soul of Agnes Shadwell through these long hours as the flying scud above the wild and agitated landscape. Where was Mark? What had become of him? What was he meditating?

  From the summit of the sylvan uplands that overlook Wynderfel there opens, gradually, descending toward that ruined mansion, a ravine which expands into a dark glen. This glen at one spot widens into an amphitheatre, walled darkly up at its southern side by a precipice, over whose stained front brambles hang and thick ivy grows; and over its upper edge the old trees stoop and gather, deepening the solemn shadow which makes the tarn that washes its base look black as ink. The tiny stream that feeds this sombre lake steals out from the rocks at its foot, and makes its way deviously through the glen, which narrows again at the other end of the tarn, leaving howev
er a level carpet of grass.

  Of all that lonely region this is the most entirely lonely spot. The overshadowed tarn looks smooth as ice, and black as ink, and there are fabulous stories of its depth at some points. On the green floor of soft sward that lies on the eastern side of the sheet of water stands the kyst-shaped black tomb of the suicide, Lady Mildred of Wynderfel. There is inscription neither of name nor of date. In rude bass-relief reposes a female figure, life-size, with the left hand raised above the shoulder, and in the centre of the palm a five-rayed star, such as heralds term a star of Bethlehem.

  In this solitude of solitudes repose the outcast bones of the suicide. If she pined for quiet and oblivion, never did mortal drink deeper of both. From a silence like the grave, from an abyss into whose depths scarcely at highest summer noon does the sun ever peep, at night you may look up, through masses of wild trees and clambering underwood, to the glimmering face and moonlighted peaks of the precipice, and see the narrow disk of dark-blue sky and stars that roof in this solemn, hall of silence. Over it the scud was flying and the storm roaring, and now and then a huge gust broke in, whirling the withered leaves, and tossing the boughs frantically in the dark, and lashing the deep pool into sudden eddies.