Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Without stopping to think of the strangeness of his appearance in my room; without wondering at the fact of his having entered the house unknown either to Lucy or myself; without one thought but joy and relief of mind in seeing him once more, — I ran forward to him, crying out, “Laurence, Laurence, I am so glad you have come back!”

  He — Laurence, my lover, as I thought — the man, the horrible shadow — rose from his chair, snatched up some papers that lay loosely on the table by his side, crumpled them into a ball with one fierce gesture of his strong hand, and flung them at my feet; then, with a harsh dissonant laugh that seemed a mocking echo of the joyous music I loved so well, he stalked out of the door opening on the gallery. I tried to scream, but my dry lips and throat could form no sound. The oak-panelling of the room spun round, the walls and ceiling contracted, as if they had been crushing in upon me to destroy me. I fell heavily to the floor; but as I fell I heard the phaeton-wheels upon the carriage-drive below, and Laurence Wendale’s voice calling to the servants.

  I can remember little more that happened upon that horrible night. I have a vague recollection of opening my eyes upon a million dazzling lights, which slowly resolved themselves into the one candle held in Lucy Wendale’s hand, as she stood beside the bed upon which I was lying. My aunt, wrapped in her dressing-gown, sat by my pillow. My face and hair were dripping with the vinegar-and-water they had thrown over me, and I could hear Laurence, in the corridor outside my bedroom door, asking again and again, “Is she better? Is she quite herself again?”

  But of all this I was only dimly conscious; a load of iron seemed pressing upon my forehead, and icy hands seemed riveted upon the back of my head, holding it tightly to the pillow on which it lay. I could no more have lifted it than I could have lifted a ton weight. I could only lie staring with stupid dull eyes at Lucy’s pale face, silently wishing that she and my aunt would go, and leave me to myself.

  I suppose I was feverish and a little light-headed all that night, acting over and over again the brief scene of my meeting with the weird shadow of my lover. All the stories I had laughed at might be true, then. I had seen the phantom of the man I loved, the horrible duplicate image of that familiar figure, shaped perhaps out of impalpable air, but as terribly distinct to the eye as if it had been a form of flesh and blood.

  Lucy was sitting by my bedside when I awoke from a short sleep which had succeeded the long night of fever. How intensely refreshing that brief but deep slumber was to me! How delicious the gradual fading-out of the sense of horror and bewilderment, with all the hideous confusions of delirium, into the blank tranquillity of dreamless sleep! When I awoke my head was still painful, and my frame as feeble as if I had lain for a week on a sick bed; but my brain was cleared, and I was able to think quietly of what had happened.

  “Lucy,” I said, “you do not know what frightened me, or why I fainted.”

  “No, dearest, not exactly.”

  “But you can know nothing of it, Lucy. You were not with me when I came into this room last night. You did not see—”

  I paused, unable to finish my sentence.

  “Did not see whom — or what, dear Isabel?”

  “The shadow of your brother Laurence.”

  My whole frame trembled with the recollection of my terror of the night before, as I said this; yet I was able to observe Lucy’s face, and I saw that its natural hue had faded to an ashen pallor.

  “The shadow, Isabel!” she faltered; not as if in any surprise at my words, but rather as if she merely spoke because she felt obliged to make some reply to me.

  “Yes, Lucy,” I said, raising myself upon the pillow, and grasping her wrist, “the shadow of your brother Laurence. The living, breathing, moving image of your brother, with every lineament and every shade of colouring reflected in the phantom face as they would be reflected in a mirror. Not shadowy, transparent, or vanishing, but as distinct as you are to me at this very moment. Good heavens! Lucy, I give you my solemn word that I heard the phantom footsteps along that gallery as distinctly as I have ever heard the steps of Laurence himself; the firm heavy tread of a strong man.” Lucy Wendale sat for some time perfectly silent, looking straight before her, — not at me, but out at the half-open window, round which the ivy-leaves were fluttering, to the dim moorland melting into purple distance above the tree-tops in the park. Her profile was turned towards me; but I could see by her firmly-compressed lips and fixed eyes that she was thinking deeply.

  Presently she said, slowly and deliberately, without once looking at me as she spoke, “You must be fully aware, my dearest Isabel, that these delusions are of common occurrence with people of an extremely sensitive temperament. You may be one of these delicately-organised persons; you had thrown yourself last night into a very nervous and hysterical state in your morbid anxiety about Laurence. With your whole mind fall of his image, and tormented by all kinds of shadowy terrors about danger to him, what more likely than that you should conjure up an object such as that which you fancy you saw last night?”

  “But so palpable, Lucy, so distinct!”

  “It would be as easy for the brain to shape a distinct as an indistinct form. Grant the possibility of optical delusion, a fact established by a host of witnesses, — and you cannot limit the character of the delusion. But I must get our doctor, Mr. Arden, to talk to you about this. He is something of a metaphysician as well as a medical man, and will be able to cure your mental ills and regulate this feverish pulse of yours at the same time. Laurence has ridden over to York to fetch him, and I daresay they will both be here directly.”

  “Lucy, remember you must never tell Laurence the cause of my last night’s fainting-fit.”

  “I never shall, dear. I was about to make the very same request to you. It is much better that he should not know it.”

  “Much better; for O, Lucy, do you remember that in all ghost-stories the appearance of the shadow, or double, of a living person is a presage of death to that person? The thought of this brings back all my terror. My Laurence, my darling, if anything should happen to him!”

  “Come, Bella, Mr. Arden must talk to you. In the mean time, here comes Mrs. Porson with your breakfast. While you are taking it, I will go to the library, and look for Sir Walter Scott’s Demonology. You will find several instances in that book of the optical delusions I have spoken of.”

  The housekeeper came bustling into the room with a breakfast-tray, which she placed on a table by the bed. When she had arranged everything for my comfort, and propped me up with a luxurious pile of pillows, she turned round to speak to Lucy.

  “O, Miss Lucy,” she said, “poor Beck is so awfully cut up. If you’d only just see him, and tell him—”

  Lucy silenced her with one look; a brief but all-expressive glance of warning and reproval. I could not help wondering what possible reason there could be for making a mystery of some little trouble of James Beck’s.

  Mr. Arden, the York surgeon, was the most delightful of men. He came with Lucy into my room, and laughed and chatted me out of my low spirits before he had been with me a quarter of an hour. He talked so much of hysteria, optical delusions, false impressions of outward objects, abnormal conditions of the organ of sight, and other semi-mental, semiphysical infirmities, that he fairly bewildered me into agreeing with and believing all he said.

  “I hear you are a most accomplished horsewoman,” Miss Morley,” he said, as he rose to leave us; “and as the day promises to be fine I most strongly recommend a canter across the moors, with Mr. Wendale as your cavalier. Go to sleep between this and luncheon; rise in time to eat a mutton-chop and drink a glass of bitter ale; ride for two hours in the sunniest part of the afternoon; take a light dinner, and go to bed early; and I will answer for your seeing no more of the ghost. You have no idea how much indigestion has to do with these things. I daresay if I were to see your bill of fare for yesterday I should discover that Lady Adela’s cook is responsible for the phantom, and that he made his first appearance
among the entrées. Who can wonder that the Germans are a ghost-seeing people, when it is remembered that they eat raspberry-jam with roast veal?”

  I followed the doctor’s advice to the letter; and at three o’clock in the afternoon Laurence and I were galloping across the moorland, tinged with a yellow hazy light in the September sunshine. Like most impressionable people, I soon recovered from my nervous shock; and by the time I sprang from the saddle before the wide stone portico at Fernwood I had almost forgotten my terrors of the previous night.

  A fortnight after this my aunt and I left Yorkshire for Brighton, whither Laurence speedily followed us. Before leaving I did all in my power to induce Lucy to accompany us, but in vain. She thanked my aunt for her cordial invitation, but declared that she could not leave Fernwood. We departed, therefore, without having won her, as I had hoped to have done, from the monotony of her solitary life; and without having seen Mr. Wend ale’s invalid dependent, the mysterious occupant of the west wing.

  Early in November Laurence was summoned from Brighton by the arrival of a black-bordered letter, written by Lucy, and telling him of his father’s death. Mr. Wendale had been found by his servant, seated in an easy-chair in his study, with his head lying back upon the cushions, and an open book on the carpet at his feet, dead. He had long suffered from disease of the heart.

  My lover wrote me long letters from Yorkshire, telling me how his mother and sister bore the blow which had fallen upon them so suddenly. It was a quiet and subdued sorrow rather than any tempestuous grief, which reigned in the narrow circle at Fernwood. Mr. Wendale had been an invalid for many years, giving very little of his society to his wife and daughter. His death, therefore, though sudden, had not been unexpected, nor did his loss leave any great blank in that quiet home. Laurence spent Christmas at Fernwood, but returned to us for the new year; and it was then settled that we should go down to Yorkshire early in February, in order to superintend the restoration and alteration of the old place.

  All was arranged for our journey, when, on the very day on which we were to start, Laurence came to Onslow-square with a letter from his mother, which he had only just received. Lady Adela wrote a few hurried lines to beg us to delay our visit for some days, as they had decided on removing Mr. William, before the alterations were commenced, to a cottage which was being prepared for him near York. His patron’s death did not leave the invalid dependent on the bounty of Laurence or Lady Adela. Mr. Wendale had bequeathed a small estate, worth three hundred a-year, in trust for the sole use and benefit of this Mr. William Wendale.

  Neither Laurence nor I understood why the money should have been left in trust rather than unconditionally to the man himself. But neither he nor I felt deeply interested in the subject; and Laurence was far too careless of business matters to pry into the details of his succession. He knew himself to be the owner of Fernwood and of a handsome income, and that was all he cared to know.

  “I will not hear of this visit being delayed an hour,” Laurence said impatiently, as he thrust Lady Adela’s crumpled letter into his pocket. “My poor foolish mother and sister are really too absurd about this first or fifth con sin of ours, William Wendale. Let him leave Fernwood, or let him stay at Fernwood, just as he or his nurse or his medical man may please; but I certainly shall not allow his arrangements to interfere with ours. So, ladies, I shall be perfectly ready to escort you by the eleven-o’clock express.”

  Mrs. Trevor remonstrated, declaring that she would rather delay our visit according to Lady Adela’s wish; but my impetuous Laurence would not hear a word, and under a black and moonless February sky we drove up the avenue at Fernwood.

  We met Mr. Arden in the hall as we entered. There seemed something ominous in receiving our first greeting from the family doctor; and Laurence was for a moment alarmed by his presence.

  “My mother — Lucy!” he said anxiously; “they are well, I hope?”

  “Perfectly well. I have not been attending them; I have just come from Mr. William.”

  “Is he worse?”

  “I fear he is rather worse than usual.”

  Our welcome was scarcely a cordial one, for both Lucy and Lady Adela were evidently embarrassed by our unexpected arrival. Their black dresses half-covered with crape, the mourning liveries of the servants, the vacant seat of the master, the dismal winter weather, and ceaseless beating of the rain upon the window-panes, gave a more than usually dreary aspect to the place, and seemed to chill us to the very soul.

  Those who at any period of their lives have suffered some terrible and crushing affliction, some never-to-be-forgotten trouble, for which even the hand of Time has no lessening influence, which increases rather than diminishes as the slow course of a hopeless life carries us farther from it, so that as we look back we do not ask ourselves why the trial seemed so bitter, but wonder rather how we endured even as we did, — those only who have sunk under such a grief as this can know how difficult it is to dissociate the period preceding the anguish from the hour in which it came. I say this lest I should be influenced by after-feelings when I describe the dismal shadows that seemed to brood over the hearth round which Lady Adela, my aunt, Laurence, and myself gathered upon the night of our return to Fernwood.

  Lucy had left us; and when her brother inquired about her, Lady Adela said she was with Mr. William.

  As usual, Laurence chafed at the answer. It was hard, he said, that his sister should have to act as sick-nurse to this man.

  “James Beck has gone to York to prepare for William,” answered Lady Adela, “and the poor boy has no one with him but his nurse.”

  The poor boy! I wondered why it was that Lady Adela and her stepdaughter always alluded to Mr. William as a young man.

  Early the next morning, Laurence insisted upon our accompanying him on a circuit of the house, to discuss the intended alterations. I have already described the gallery, running the whole length of the building, at one end of which was situated the suite of rooms occupied by Mr. William, and at the other extremity those devoted to Aunt Trevor and myself. Lady Adela’s apartments were nearest to those of the invalid, Lucy’s next, then the billiard-room, and opening out of that the bed-and dressing-room occupied by Laurence. On the other side of the gallery were servants’ and visitors’ rooms, and a pretty boudoir sacred to Lady Adela.

  Laurence was in very high spirits, planning alterations here and renovations there — bay-windows to be thrown out in one direction, and folding-doors knocked through in another — till we laughed heartily at him on finding that the pencil-memorandum he was preparing for the architect resolved itself into an order for knocking down the old house and building a new one. We had explored every nook and corner in the place, with the one exception of those mysterious apartments in the left wing. Laurence Wendale paused before the green-baize door, but after a moment’s hesitation tapped for admittance.

  “I have never seen Mr. William, and it is rather awkward to have to ask to look at his rooms while he is in them; but the necessity of the case will be my excuse for intruding on him. The architect will be here to-morrow, and I want to have all my plans ready to submit to him.”

  The baize-door was opened by Lucy Wendale; she started at seeing us.

  “What do you want, Laurence?” she said.

  “To see Mr. William’s rooms. I shall not disturb him, if he will kindly allow me to glance round the apartments.”

  I could see that there was an inner half-glass door behind that at which Lucy was standing.

  “You cannot possibly see the rooms to-day, Laurence,” she said hurriedly. “Mr. William leaves early to-morrow morning.”

  She came out into the gallery, closing the baize-door behind her; but as the shutting of the door reverberated through the gallery, I heard another sound that turned my blood to ice, and made me cling convulsively to Laurence’s arm.

  The laugh, the same dissonant laugh that I had heard from the spectral lips of my lover’s shadow!

  “Lucy,” I said, “d
id you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “The laugh, the laugh I heard the night that—”

  Laurence had thrown his arm round me, alarmed by my terror. His sister was standing a little way behind him; she put her finger to her lips, looking at me significantly.

  “You must be mistaken, Isabel,” she said quietly.

  There was some mystery, then, connected with this Mr. William — a mystery which for some especial reason was to be concealed from Laurence.

  Half an hour after this, Lucy Wendale came to me as I was searching for a book in the library.

  “Isabel,” she said, “I wish to say a few words to you.”

  “Yes, dear Lucy.”

  “You are to be my sister, and I have perhaps done wrong in concealing from you the one unhappy secret which has clouded the lives of my poor father, my stepmother, and myself. But long ago, when Laurence was a child, it was deemed expedient that the grief which was so heavy a load for us should, if possible, be spared to him. My father was so passionately devoted to his handsome light-hearted boy that he shrank day by day from the thought of revealing to him the afflicting secret which was such a source of grief to himself. We found that, by constant care and watchfulness, it was possible to conceal all from Laurence, and up to this hour we have done so. But it is perhaps better that you should know all; for you will be able to aid us in keeping the knowledge from Lawrence; or, if absolutely necessary, you may by and by break it to him gently, and reconcile him to an irremediable affliction.”

  “But this secret — this affliction — it concerns your invalid relation, Mr. William?”

  “It does, Isabel.”

  I know that the words which were to reveal all were trembling upon her lips, — that in one brief moment she would have spoken, and I should have known all. I should have known — in time; but before she could utter a syllable the door was opened by one of the women-servants.