Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  Toward morning the gale subsided; a sullen calm succeeded, and the leaves that had danced in such mad circles, whirling up kin columns nearly to the summit of the precipitous glen, now slept without a stir, on the soft grass by the tomb of lonely Mildred, and by the margin of the tarn that looked up to the cold morning sky with a surface as dead and black as if it had never been agitated. A broken bough, floating with its sear leaves upward, alone gave token of the recent fury of the storm. Over it broke the cold wild dawn; the pale sun glittered across the landscape as it might over a field of battle; many a tall tree lay low, and great drifts of yellow leaves were huddled together in clefts and hollows, to dance on forest boughs, in air and sun, no more.

  No tidings meanwhile at Raby were heard of Mark Shadwell.

  Again the attorney was called up to see the perplexed lady at Raby. This time she sent the taxcart for him, and he came in better temper. He had asked the servant, and already learnt that Mark had not been heard of. She had sent to inquire at the Vicarage. He had left that last night at about ten o’clock, as the vicar supposed at the time, intending to return direct to Raby. But he could not say what direction he took.

  There was an agent at Chester, with whom Mark often had business. He must be telegraphed to. It would not do to publish far and wide, however, that Mr. Shadwell of Raby had absconded without apprising his wife of his intention. The message therefore said: “If Mr. Shadwell should call, telegraph instantly to me, as a message awaits him here.”

  In the same terms messages were sent to the hotel at which, in his unfrequent visits to London, he was accustomed to put up; and also to the office of his London attorney.

  Two hours passed — three hours — four hours — and brought no answer. At about twelve o’clock Captain Clayton arrived, as usual, having heard nothing of the alarm and perplexity that prevailed at Raby. He came straight into the drawingroom, where Agnes was talking to the attorney, and was struck by a certain pallor in her face, and by the intense coldness of her smile, and her manner to him as she greeted him.

  The attorney, as he entered, was taking his leave, and Mrs. Shadwell, who stood on no forms that day, accompanied him into the hall to say a last word.

  “That is Mr. Clayton, you know” (she preferred saying Mr to calling him Captain)— “my husband’s particular friend — can we make any use of him. May I ask him to call on you just now? perhaps you can devise some employment for him: he would be horridly in the way here, you know.”

  And having seen him out of the house, she returned to the drawingroom, and, without waiting for question, she placed her hands on his shoulders, looking with her deep eyes into his handsome but apathetic face, at that moment full of stolid wonder, and said:

  “Oh! Alfred! — he’s gone. I have never seen Mark since: what can it be?”

  And though she spoke interrogatively, her eyes suggested dreadful, positive suspicions.

  “I — I assure you, I haven’t heard from him; if you are apprehensive of anything of that kind. I haven’t, darling, really — upon my honour!” he answered, in great bewilderment.

  “You remember when I made you look out of the window last night, and you said you saw nothing?”

  “Well — I swear there was nothing; I think so. In fact, I’m nearly certain,” he hesitated.

  “It must have been just about that time his horse came home. They found it in the yard, at the stable-door. I — I don’t know what to think: he’s probably with his London lawyers by this time. Alfred — Alfred! My God! Alfred, what has your madness involved me in!”

  “No — now, my darling, you’re talking the most arrant nonsense, I do assure you; now just you be quiet; you must not talk so, for fifty reasons. I’ll just consider it a little: I’ll think what’s best to be done, and come back and talk it over with you. Isn’t that the best way?”

  And so he went; but he did not come back any more than Mark Shadwell. She drove down in her miniature brougham — an acquisition on which she had insisted some months before — to the attorney’s office. Captain Clayton had been there. He had run up to London to make inquiries, and having scarcely time to catch the train, had requested the attorney to inform Mrs. Shadwell that he would exert himself to the uttermost to make the inquiry effectual, and let her know the result forthwith. Mrs. Shadwell concealed her anger.

  Next evening’s post, however, brought a letter from Clayton to the attorney, which said: “I was on the point of sending the enclosed note direct to Mrs. Shadwell, but reflected that if the uncertainty still continues, her agitation may have increased since yesterday, and knowing the very confidential position occupied by you in Mr. Shadwell’s family, I thought I had better leave the note open, that you might use your discretion as to the best manner of apprising Mrs. Shadwell of its purport.”

  The open note enclosed in this, said:

  “MY DEAR MRS. SHADWELL,

  “I have ventured to make inquiry at all the places usually frequented by Mr. Shadwell in town, and have failed to learn anything. When his solicitors last heard from him, he had no intention of coming to town. Deeply regretting that I have not been fortunate enough to learn anything positive, I can only add, that anything that may strike you or Mr. Twinley as being in my power to aid further in this anxious affair, I shall be only too happy to undertake.

  “Believe me,

  “My Dear Mrs. Shadwell,

  “Yours very truly,

  “A. L. CLAYTON.”

  This cavalier treatment incensed Mrs. Shadwell, and one of her intense, sarcastic notes replied. But it did not reach him till next spring, for Captain Clayton had gone abroad; and it lay upon the hall-porter’s table, with a row of similarly neglected letters, of all shapes and sizes, that awaited there the return of their careless owners.

  Another idea now visited the anxious brain of Mrs. Shadwell. Could Mark have made away with himself? No; Mark was not mad. There was no aptitude for inflicting on himself any avoidable pain or privation. He was vindictive; he was violent; he was, from long isolation, careless what people might say or think. Heaven alone knew what he might be about.

  She went down to Raby and saw Twinley, and cross-questioned him about the deed, and, on hearing that her husband had taken away the engrossed copy, as yet unexecuted — Twinley took care to tell no more about that than he was strictly obliged — she demanded the draft-deed, which, taking her receipt for it, he gave her.

  Mrs. Shadwell was suffering. She did not know what to think. Ominous as everything looked, it was still possible that Mark was. merely complying with a necessity, and concealing himself till some special danger — which he had no time to communicate to others — had blown over.

  Miss Barbara came over to see her, and found her rather silent, fierce and odd: but looking miserably. She told her brother, Stour, that if he had seen her he could not help pitying her. To which he replied, that: “Suspense is torture, and of course she is suffering; but I confess I pity our poor Rachel a great deal more, because there can be no doubt that her misery is unselfish.”

  I don’t know what was passing in honest Roger’s mind during the period of Mark Shadwell’s disappearance. He originated no conjectures, but listened earnestly to those of others. His spirits recovered, not their gaiety — that would not have been decent — but their energy, and his attention to his toilet mysteriously revived. He was sorry on Rachel’s account. He was shocked even. Mark might be in Prance, or in the Fleet — who could tell where? But he might also have killed himself, or been killed; and, in that case, might it not be reserved for honest Roger to comfort his widow? He had heard of the course of true love, diverted similarly from its proper channel, and returning thus circuitously to reward patient fidelity, after an interval of despair. He knew, as many men do, cases precisely in point. The nature of his suspense, therefore, was somewhat affected by these secret considerations.

  Four days had now passed, and brought no tidings of Mark Shadwell.

  The night had closed: serene moonl
ight silvered the wooded landscape. The air was still and frosty. It was a night of utter silence, and now twelve o’clock. Agnes could not sleep: nervously listening, she lay, still with her dress on, awake upon her bed, the coverlet thrown over her. Her maid was sleeping in the same room: Agnes could not bear to be alone.

  Leaning on her elbow, she had been for a minute listening, and fancying a distant sound. But she had listened in vain, and placed her sleepless head again upon the pillow, and fell into dismal speculations and reveries, that frightened her; and, in the midst of these silent communings, a loud and long doubleknock suddenly thundered at the hall-door, and the bell rang shrilly.

  “Dorothy! — Dorothy!” shrieked Agnes, starting upright in the bed. “My God! It’s your master’s knock!”

  CHAPTER XXI.

  CONCLUSION.’

  “Get your things on as fast as you can — any way, no matter — you can throw a cloak over you.”

  And as the half-awakened maid obeyed, Agnes hurried to the window; but she had forgotten that it did not command a view of the hall-door. Before the shutters were well opened, the knocking and ringing were repeated.

  “Quick, Dorothy! I can’t go without you — do, for Heaven’s sake!”

  Expecting to see Mark in a few moments — not knowing what story he might have to tell, or in what spirit or character he might appear — her heart, which all this while was beating as if it would choke her, suddenly, with a deadly faintness, felt as if it stopped still.

  But Agnes was not a lady to swoon easily. There is some truth in the theory of effort. When she and her maid had reached the head of the great staircase, a servant had already opened the hall-door, and she heard a voice; it was not her husband’s, talking in-the hall with the old butler, who was still retained.

  Agnes descended, stopping now and then, for a moment, to listen. When she came into the hall, the old servant, in slippers, and without a necktie, in déshabille, with a solitary candle on the table, was talking to a stranger who had not removed his hat. They were talking earnestly, it seemed, and in tones little above a whisper.

  Disappointed, and also relieved, she came forward more boldly, and the men looked round. The stranger removed his hat, and advanced to meet her. He was the vicar. Strange was the countenance of Agnes — the light of her candle so close to her face, and that face so pale, and contracted with the peculiar frown of pain.

  “Tell me quickly? you need not fear,” she said, very low, in a voice thin and cold, that thrilled Stour Temple.

  She read instantly the dark look in the vicar’s earnest eyes — she knew there was news of Mark, bad news for her, at least, she saw it must be.

  “Yes — I’ve learned something about Mr. Shadwell — there has been an accident — a very bad one — fatal — I’m grieved to say.”

  He was led on to say this by the gaze that was fixed on him. He felt that the least delay would not soften but protract her agony.

  She made an attempt to speak, it was but a contortion, her voice did not come; but she was pulling at his hand quiveringly, and he knew she wanted to hear the whole story, be it what it might, and he told it.

  I will not relate it in his words, but these were the facts.

  Two cows of the vicar’s were pastured in Wynderfel park. One of these that evening had strayed away, and a man was sent in quest of it, but in vain.

  About eight o’clock, favoured by the moonlight, he resumed his search. Having failed in other quarters, he meant to try the woods near Hazelden, which are approached through a glen. He missed his way, however, and found himself, on a sudden, by the awful tarn of Feltram.

  The moon being high, lighted the opposite side of the precipitous amphitheatre, and those peaked, grey rocks, projecting through the trees here and there, to which Doré, drawing such a scene, would have given the outlines of sheeted grotesques, with upraised arms, stooping from mid-air over the black oval of the pool.

  The man looked round, and saw the black tomb of the unhappy Mildred — like a patch of shadow on the grass, and “winter’s tales” which he had heard of the “gaze-lady” which, as I have said, local antiquaries tell us is truly “ghaist-ladye,” came crowding horribly on his memory; and these scaring fancies were brought suddenly to their climax by his seeing, just emerging above the smooth surface of the tarn, a human figure, floating face upwards.

  It was not till he looked hard at it for some seconds, that he became certain that the white object which he saw was a half-submerged human face, looking upwards against that streak of moonlight which, wavering and flickering in the shadow of nearly leafless branches, yet so sharply defined it, that there could remain no doubt in his mind — except that the appearance might be one of the delusions practised by the goblin of that haunted glen.

  Forgetting the cow, and everything but the ghost of the Lady Mildred, the man got away as fast as he could, and by the time he got quite out of that haunted territory, he began to reflect that the figure he had seen floating in the tarn might have been not a ghost, but a corpse. He made haste to the Vicarage, and there saw Stour Temple, who, though it was by this time past ten, got men together, and with his brother Roger, and proper appliances for drawing the body, if such it should prove to be, from the water and carrying it away, set off for the Glen of Feltram.

  The vicar was very silent during the march. He had a presentiment — so had others — which no one uttered. Through the narrow glen, bearing their ropes and poles for an extemporized bier, silent and awed, like men passing into a cathedral at a midnight funeral, they entered that dark hall where stands the solitary tomb, and the tarn reflects the stars.

  Taking their stand upon that patch of sward on which fell a narrow strip of light from the moon, now high in the heavens, they got the rope in a long loop round the object which floated at the surface, and drew it slowly to the margin.

  Slowly, with a sort of undulation, sometimes under, sometimes over the water, it glided to the bank. With hardly a word, spoken under breath, they drew it up, with a trail of water streaming after, and laid it, a few yards on, in the patch of moonshine. It was the tall, slender figure, and proud face of Mark Shadwell, on which the moonlight fell!

  The vicar looked down upon the familiar features of the man with whom so much of the past of his secluded existence was associated, with a vague mingling of deep emotion and deep thought. Every face is sublime in death. The whole case is there; the weakness and the fate. It awes and it softens us. We see, for the first time, how much was excusable, how tremendous is the penalty. The tale is told, to which words can be added never more, and it lingers still in our ears. We remember things we might have said, but which can never now, be said. The writing is finished, and rolled up, and sealed, till the tremendous day breaks over all.

  Having given his men orders to convey the body to Raby, and left that matter in charge of his brother, he himself walked on to Raby, whose inmates were startled, as I have said, by his late knocking.

  “Very rash,” thought the vicar, struggling to get rid of a conviction that haunted him, as he rapidly trod the Wynderfel path to Raby, “very mad of him to take that devious and dangerous way on such a night!”

  The truth is, there was no way of accounting reasonably for Mark Shadwell’s having taken the Feltram path, if his object was to reach Raby either safely, in such a storm, or expeditiously. Stour Temple was trying to exclude the hypothesis, at which other people arrived, unanimously — I mean, that the Squire’s death was not accidental. Knowing all I do of the circumstances, and of that impulsive, violent, and hypochondriac man, as well as of the intense agitation in which he took his leave of the vicar that night, and of the legal measures he had taken to secure the disposition of his property, I have myself no doubt whatever, that Mark Shadwell made away with himself, in his despair, deliberately.

  In the mind of every man who wilfully ends his life, there are, I have no doubt, fluctuations, waverings, horrible recoils, and then relapses into suicidal frenzy, before t
he irrevocable plunge, or pistol-shot, or razor-gash. Human nature takes fright, and cries, No! with all its might; and morality pleads, and the whole man shudders and protests; and he thinks, and thanks God — the danger is over; but the mysterious temptation recurs — importunes, bewitches, transforms him, — and he is gone!

  The body lay that night at Raby. A coroner’s jury pronounced his death accidental, following strictly such evidence as was before them, though every man of them had his misgivings, and afterwards his convictions.

  Time has passed — with many disturbances and adjustments, demolishing and repairing, obliterating and creating, and carrying on the great story of human passion, vanity, and sorrow, since then.

  The beautiful Agnes — like a spirit in possession — was not easily to be feast out. She was active, truculent, unscrupulous; and seemed resolved to contest the rights of the heiress of Raby to the last. But Rachel had no intention of turning one who had been her father’s wife — undeserving as she was — adrift upon the world with absolutely no provision. She knew nothing of that paroxysm of jealousy, and its cause, which had produced the catastrophe.

  Perhaps Mark Shadwell’s construction of what he saw was too nearly absolute and extreme, considering how strangely perfidious that woman was, and how capable of deception within deception, and of merely beguiling Clayton and befooling him for a purpose.