Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  “Maximilla? Is she an old lady?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Thin?”

  “She is, sir.” And Mrs. Fisher begins to wonder at the ardour of his inquiries, and to look at him very curiously.

  “Has she been from home lately?”

  “I think she was.” (Here she again consults her unseen adviser.) “Yes, sir; she returned only last night.”

  “And where does she live, pray? In the town here — near this?” he pursues.

  “In the Hermitage, please, sir; any one you meet will show it you. It is just at the end of the town. But she’ll be in church at present.”

  “And how soon do you think it will be over — how soon will the people be coming out?”

  “In about half an hour, sir.”

  And so, with many acknowledgments on his part, and no little surprise and conjecture on that of sedate Mrs. Fisher, who wondered what could have fired this young gentleman so about old Miss Medwyn, the conference ends, and in ten minutes more, in a somewhat less dusty state, he presents himself at the open gate of the churchyard, and reconnoitres.

  Over the graves in faint gusts peals the muffled swell of the organ, and the sound of voices, sweetly and sadly, like psalmody from another world. He looks up to the gilded hand of the clock in the ivied tower, and conjectures that this must be the holy song that precedes the sermon. Devoutly he wishes the pulpit orator a quick deliverance.

  He, on the whole, wisely resolves against going into the church, and, being provided with a seat, perhaps in some corner of difficult egress, whence, if he should see the objects of his pursuit, he might not be able to make his way out in time without a fuss.

  At length, with a flutter at his heart, he sees the hats and bonnets begin to emerge from the porch. Taking his stand beside the gate, he watches. Not a single Christian in female garb escapes him. He sees the whole congregation pour itself out, and waits till the very dregs and sediment drop forth. Those who pray, in forma pauperis, and draw a weekly dividend out of the poors’ box: old Mrs. Milders, with the enormous black straw bonnet, and the shaking head and hand; Bill Hopkins, lame of a leg, who skips slowly down on a crutch; and Tom Buzzard, blind of both eyes, a pock-marked object of benevolence, with his chin high in the air, and a long cudgel in his hand, with which he taps the curbstone, and now and then the leg of a passenger who walks the street forgetful of the blind.

  The clerk comes forth demurely with a black bag, such as lawyers carry their briefs in. There is no good, Mr. Marston thinks, in waiting for the sexton.

  He joins the clerk, compliments him on his church and organ, asks whether Miss Maximilla Medwyn was in church — (yes, she was) — and where the house called the Hermitage is to be found.

  “You may go by the road, sir,” said the clerk, “or by the path, which you’ll find it shorter. Take the first stile to your right, when you turn the corner.”

  Alas! what is the meaning of this walk to the Hermitage? Miss Medwyn was in church; and could he not swear that, in the review just ended, he had seen distinctly every female face and figure in the congregation as it “marched past?” His Miss Max was assuredly not among them; and she and Miss Medwyn, therefore, were utterly distinct old women — ah, well-a-day!

  He crosses the stile. The path traverses a narrow strip of meadow, the air is odorous with little dishevelled cocks of hay, mown only the day before; the spot cloistered in by very old and high hawthorn hedges, is silent with a monastic melancholy.

  He sighs more pleasantly as he enters this fragrant solitude; beyond the stile at the other side, is the gloom of tall old trees. He is leaving the world behind him.

  Butterflies are hovering up and down, along the hedge, at the sunny side of the field. A bee booms by as he stands on the second stile; it is the only sound he hears except the faint chirp of the grasshopper. He descends upon that pleasant dark-green grass that grows in shade.

  Here is another field, long and narrow, silent and more gloomy than the first. Up the steep, a giant double row of lime-trees stretches, marking the line of the avenue, now carpeted over with thick grass, of the old manorhouse of Wybourne, some walls and stone-shafted windows of which, laden with ivy, and canopied by ancient trees, crown the summit. The western sun throws long dim shadows down the slope. A thick underwood straggles among the trunks of the lordly timber, and here and there a gap leaves space, in which these patriarchal trees shake their branches free, and spread a wider shadow.

  In this conventual obscurity, scarcely fifty steps up the gentle slope, he sees Miss Maud, Maud Guendoline, or whatever else her name may be, standing in her homely dress. She is looking toward him, no doubt recognises him, although she makes no sign. His heart thumps wildly once or twice. He is all right again in a moment. He quickens his pace. He is near enough to see her features distinctly. She looks a little grave, he thinks, as he raises his hat.

  Here is a tall fellow, great in a town-and-gown row, full of pluck, cool as marble in danger, very much unnerved at this moment, and awfully afraid of this beautiful and slender girl.

  CHAPTER IX.

  THE YOUNG LADY SPEAKS.

  “I’m so glad, I’m so charmed — how extremely lucky I am! I had not the least hope of this. And you have made your journey quite safely?”

  As he makes this little confession and inquiry, his brown handsome face and large eyes are radiant with happiness.

  “Safely! oh, yes, my cousin and I are old travellers, and we never lose our way or our luggage. I am waiting here for her; she is paying a visit to — I really forget his name, farmer something or other, an old friend of hers, down there; you can see the smoke of his chimney over the hedge,” said the young lady, indicating the direction.

  “And you’re not fatigued?”

  “Oh, no! thanks.”

  “And Miss Max quite well, I hope?” he adds, recollecting her right to an inquiry.

  “Miss Max is very well, thanks,” said the young lady.

  Had she blushed when she saw him? Was there not a gentle subsidence in the brilliant tint with which she met him? He thought her looking more beautiful than ever.

  “I dare say you are glad to find yourself at home again?” says he, not knowing what exactly to say next.

  She glanced at him as if she suspected a purpose in his question.

  “Some people have no place they can call a home, and some who have are not glad to find themselves there. I’m not at home, and I’m not sorry,” she said, ever so little bitterly.

  “There is a great deal of melancholy in that,” he said, in a lower tone, as if he would have been very glad to be permitted to sympathise. “Away from home, and yet no wish to return. Isn’t it a little cruel, too?”

  “Melancholy or cruel, it happily concerns no one but myself,” she said, a little haughtily.

  “Everything that can possibly concern your happiness concerns me,” said the young man, audaciously.

  She looked for a moment offended and even angry, but “a change came o’er the spirit of her dream,” and she smiled as if a little amused.

  “You seem, Mr. Marston, to give away your sympathy on very easy terms — you must have mistaken what I said. It was no confidence. It was spoken, as people in masks tell their secrets, and further because I don’t care if all the world knew it. How can you tell that I either desire or deserve pity; yours, or any other person’s? You know absolutely nothing of me.”

  “I’m too impetuous; it is one of my many faults. Other fellows, wiser men, get on a thousand times better, and I have laid myself open to your reproof, and — and — disdain, by my presumption, by my daring to speak exactly as I feel. It is partly this, that the last three days — they say that happy days seem very short — I don’t know how it is, I suppose I’m different from every one else; but this day, yesterday, and today, seem to me like three weeks; I feel as if I had known you ever so long — — “

  “And yet you know nothing about me, not even my name,” said the young lady, smil
ing on the grass near her pretty foot, and poking at a daisy with the tip of her parasol, and making its little head nod this way and that.

  “I do know your name — I beg pardon, but I do; I heard Miss Max call you Maud, and I learned quite accidentally your second name yesterday.”

  Miss Maud looks at him from under her dark lashes suddenly. Her smile has vanished now; she looks down again; and now it returns darkly.

  “I do upon my honour, I learned it at Llanberris yesterday,” he repeated.

  “Oh! then you did go to Llanberris; and you did not disdain to cross-examine the people about us, and to try to make out that which you supposed we did not wish to disclose?”

  “You are very severe,” he began, a good deal abashed.

  “I’m very merciful, on the contrary,” she said bitterly; “if I were not — but no matter. I think I can conjecture who was your informant. You made the acquaintance of a person blind of one eye, who is a detective, or a spy, or a villain of some sort, and you pumped him. Somehow, I did not think before that a gentleman was quite capable of that sort of thing.”

  “But, I give you my honour, I did nothing of the kind.” He pleads earnestly. “I saw no such person, I do assure you.”

  “You shall answer my questions, then,” she said as imperiously as a spoiled child; “and, first, will you speak candidly? Will you be upon honour, in no one particular, wilfully to deceive me?”

  “You are the last person on earth I should deceive, upon any subject, Miss Guendoline — I hope you believe me.”

  “Well, why did you go to Llanberris?”

  “I had hopes,” he answered with a little embarrassment, “of overtaking you and Miss Max — and I — I hoped, also, that perhaps you would permit me to join in your walk — that was my only reason.”

  “Now, tell me my name?” said the young lady, suddenly changing her line of examination.

  “Your name is, I believe — I think, you are, Miss Maud Guendoline,” he answered.

  She smiled again darkly at the daisy she was busy tapping on the head.

  “Miss Maud Guendoline,” she repeated very low; and she laughed a little to herself.

  “Maud and Guendoline are two christian names,” she said. “Do you really believe that I have no surname; or perhaps you believe that either of these is my surname? I need not have told you, but I do, that neither of these is the least like it. And now, why have you come here? Have you any real business here?”

  “You are a very cruel inquisitor,” he says, with a very real wince. “Is there any place where an idle man may not find himself, without well knowing why? Is your question quite fair?”

  “Is your answer quite frank? Do you quite remember your promise? If we are not to part this moment, you must answer without evasion.”

  This young lady, in serge, spoke as haughtily as if she were a princess in a fairy-tale.

  “Well, as you command me, I will, I will, indeed. I — I believe I came here, very much — entirely, indeed, from the same motive that led me to Llanberris. I could not help it, I couldn’t, upon my honour! I hope you are not very angry.”

  It is not usual to be constrained to speak, in matters of this kind, the literal truth; and question if the young man was ever so much embarrassed in all his days.

  “Mr. Marston,” she said, very quietly, he fancied a little sadly, “you are, I happen to know, a person of some rank, and likely to succeed to estates, and a title — don’t answer, I know this to be so, and I mention it only by way of preface. Now, suppose I pull off my glove, and show you a seamstress’s finger, dotted all over with the needle’s point; suppose I fill in what I call my holiday by hard work with my pencil and colour-box; suppose, beside all this, I have troubles enough to break the spirits of the three merriest people you know; and suppose that I have reasons for preventing any one, but Miss Max, from knowing where I am, or suspecting who I am, don’t you think there is enough in my case to make you a little ashamed of having pried and followed as you are doing?”

  “You wrong me — oh, indeed, you wrong me! You won’t say that; I did, perhaps, wrong. I may have been impertinent; but the meanness of prying, you won’t think it! All I wanted was to learn where you had gone: my crime is in following you. I did not intend that you should think I had followed. I hoped it might appear like accident. If you knew how I dread your contempt, and how I respect you, and how your reproof pains me, I am sure you would think differently, and forgive me.”

  I don’t think there could have been more deference in his face and tones if he had been pleading before an empress.

  The young lady’s dark eyes for a moment looked full at him, and again down upon the little daisy at her foot; and she drew some odd little circles round it as she looked, and I think there was ever so slight a brightening of her colour while the end of her parasol made these tiny diagrams.

  If a girl be only beautiful enough, and her beauty of the refined type, it is totally impossible, be her position, her dress, her associates what they may, to connect the idea of vulgarity with her. There is nothing she does or means that is not elegant. Be she what she may, and you the most conceited dog on earth, there is a superiority in her of which your inward nature is conscious, and if you see her winnowing barley, as honest Don Quixote said of his mistress, the grains are undoubtedly pearls.

  Mr. Marston, in the influence of this beauty, was growing more and more wild and maudlin every moment.

  “The world’s all wrong,” he said, vehemently; “it is always the best and the noblest that suffer most; and you say you have troubles, and you don’t disdain to work, and are not ashamed of it; and I admired and respected you before, and I’ve learned to honour you to-day. You talk of rank: of course, there are things in its favour — some things; but there are ever so many more against it. I have little to boast even of that, and I never was so happy as when I knew nothing about it. People are always happy, I am sure, in proportion as the idea of it fades from their minds. There is but one thing worth living for — and, oh, Heaven, how I wish I were worthy of you!”

  “Now, Mr. Marston, you are talking like a madman. There must be no more of that,” she said, in earnest.

  “I spoke the truth, straight from my heart. I believe that is always madness.”

  “I like truth pretty well. I speak it more boldly than most girls, I believe. But I quite agree with you, whenever one is noble one is inevitably foolish. I’m not very old, but I have heard a good deal of romantic talk in my time, as every girl does, and I despise it. It doesn’t even embarrass me. If we are to talk till my cousin, Miss Max, comes back, do let it be reasonably; I shall tire of it instantly on any other terms.”

  “When you told me to speak truth, just now, you did not think so,” says he, a little bitterly.

  “Why can’t you speak to me, for a few minutes, as you would to a friend? You talked just now about rank as if it should count for nothing. I don’t agree with you. It is no illusion, but a cruelly hard fact. If I were the sort of girl who could like any one — I mean, make a fool of myself and fall in love — that person must be exactly of my own rank, neither above nor below it. The man who stoops is always sorry for it too late; and if he is like me, he would always think he was chosen, not for himself, but for his wealth or his title. Now, if I suspected that, it would make my house a jail, every hour of my life ghastly, my very self odious to me. It would make me utterly wicked; bad enough to be jealous of a human rival, though death may remove that. But to be jealous of your own circumstances, to know that you were nothing in the heart of your beloved, and they everything; that they had duped you; that your wooing was an imposture, and your partner a phantom. That anything like that should be my lot, Heaven forbid! It never shall. But were I a man, and found it so, I should load a pistol, and lie, soon enough, in my last straight bed.”

  “Only think how cruel and impossible this is,” he said, gently, looking into her face. “I ask you to be reasonable, and consider the consequences of your pi
tiless theory. As to wealth, isn’t there always some inequality — and do you mean that an artificial social distinction should throw asunder for ever two people — — “

  “I mean to say this — I ought to beg your pardon for interrupting you, but I speak for myself — if I were a man, I could never trust the love of the woman who, being immensely poorer than I, and in an inferior place in life, consented to marry me. I never could; and the more I loved her the worse it would be.”

  “We are all lawgivers and law-breakers,” says he.

  “I’m not, for one; I observe, at least, my own precepts; and so resolved, I shall never either love or marry.”

  He looked at her sadly; he looked down. Even this was more tolerable than if she had said she could neither love nor marry him.

  “I wish, God knows, that I could rule my heart so,” he said, sadly.

  “Every one who pleases can. There are good nuns and good monks. It is a matter of will and of situation. Man or girl, it is all the same; if they know they can’t marry, and have a particle of reason, they see that liking and loving, except in the way of common goodwill, is not for them. They resist that demon Asmodeus, or Cupid, or call him how you please, and he troubles them no more.”

  “How can you talk so cruelly?” he says.

  There is pain in every line of his handsome face, in the vexed light of the eyes that gaze so piercingly on her, in the uneasy grasp of his hand that leans upon the rough bark of the great tree which her shoulder touches lightly.

  CHAPTER X.

  FAREWELL.

  As men who, in stories, have fallen in love with phantoms, Marston feels, alas! he is now in love with a beautiful image of apathy. Is the great gulf really between them, and he yearning for the impossible?

  “If by any sacrifice I could ever make myself the least worthy of you; if you could even like me ever so little — — “