Miss Drake did not deign to assist him.
“She does not seem to know so much about it as you do,” observed Aunt Dinah with an irony.
“Owing to my not thinking so much,” replied Miss Letty, sarcastically.
“Henbane?” murmured William again, in a puzzled horror.
“H’m! — yes! — Henbane? you seem to have forgotten; one of those — one of the spirits who have attached themselves to me,” and Aunt Dinah shot a quick glance at the doctor, who, though looking again at his crumpet, seemed to cower awfully under it.
“Oh — ay — Henbane?” exclaimed William in a tone of familiarity, which indicated anything but respect for that supernatural acquaintance. “Henbane, to be sure” And he looked on his aunt with a half amused recognition, which seemed to say, “Well — and what about that humbug?”
But Aunt Dinah said decisively —
“So much for the present; you shall hear more — everything, by-and-by.”
And there followed a silence.
“Did you remember the snuff, dear William?” inquired the doomed lady, with rather an abrupt transition. “Certainly; shall I fetch it?” said William, half rising. Miss Perfect nodded, and away he went, somehow vastly relieved, and with his bedroom candle in his hand, mounted the oak stairs, which were broad and handsome in proportion to the other dimensions of that snug old house.
CHAPTER IV.
VIOLET DARKWELL.
AT the head of the stairs, the topmost step of which had been their bench, there rose to him two female figures. He did not instantly recognise them, for one candle only was burning, and it was on the little table nearly behind them. One was old Winnie Dobbs, the other Violet Darkwell; she stood up slight and girlish still, but looking taller than he had expected, with an old faded silk quilted shawl of Aunt Dinah’s about her shoulders, and hoodwise over her head, for the night was frosty.
“Ha! Vi — little Vi, I was going to say; dear me! how you have grown! So glad to see you.”
He had the girl’s slim hand in his, and was speaking as he felt, very kindly.
“We’ve been waiting here, Winnie and I, to hear what you thought of dear grannie,” — (grannie was merely a pet name in this case, defining no relationship)— “and what do you think, William?”
“I really don’t understand it,” he answered. “I — I hope it’s all nonsense; I really think so. She says she is very well; and the doctor — Drake, you know — I really think he was laughing, and one thing I’m quite certain of — it is connected in her mind with that foolish spirit-rapping.”
“And you don’t believe in it?” inquired the young lady.
“All bosh and nonsense. Not a bit of it,” he replied.
“Oh, William, I am so delighted to hear you say so! “ the exclaimed, much relieved by the promulgation of so valuable an opinion. “And you’re quite right, I know, about grannie. It is, really — is not it, Winnie? — all, all about that awful spirit-rapping. Grannie never speaks of it to me; I believe she’s afraid of frightening me; but old Winnie, here — you must not tell of her — she tells me all about it — everything; and I am so afraid of it; and it is entirely that. Grannie thinks she has got a message! fancy! How awful! And Winnie does not know what the words were; for grannie writes down the letters with a pencil, and tells her only what she thinks fit; and I am so delighted — you can’t think.”
“You good little Vi, I’m so glad to see you!” She laughed a low little laugh — the first for several days — as he shook her hand again; and he said —
Winnie, do, like a dear old thing, open my pormanteau — here’s the key — and fetch me a canister you’ll see at the top, with a great paper label, blue and red, on it.” Away went Winnie Dobbs, with his key and candle, and he said to the pretty girl who stood leaning lightly against the banister —
“My old friend, Vi! When I went into the drawing room just now, I looked all round for you, and could not think what had become of you, and was really afraid you had gone away to London. I don’t think I should ever care to come to Gilroyd Hall again; I should prefer seeing my aunt anywhere else — it would not be like itself if you were gone.”
“So you really missed me, William!” she laughed “I should think so. And another thing — you are not to call me William. Why don’t you call me Willie, or old bear, as you used to do? If you change old names, I’ll begin and call you Miss Darkwell.”
“How awful!”
“Indeed I will, and be as formal as you please, and treat you like a young lady, and you’ll never be ‘wicked little Vi ‘ any more.”
She was laughing as she leaned back, and he could see her small teeth, and he bethought him that she was looking really quite lovely; so with two fingers he picked up her little hand again, as it lay at her side, and he said —
“And we are always to be good friends, you know — great friends; and although you’ve no more dolls to mend, I’ll still be of use. I’m going to the bar, and I’ll manage all your law suits, if you let me; and when you are going to be married, I’ll draw your settlements, and you are to have me always for your counsel.”
She was still smiling, but said nothing, and looked wonderfully pretty, with the old gray silk hood wrapped all about her, so that sober old William was on the very point of kissing the slender hand he held in his. But a new feeling of shyness prevented, and he only shook her hand gently once more, and laid it by her side again, as you replace some precious thing you have been admiring where you found it.
“And you really think we may be happy about dear old grannie again?” she said.
The sound of Winnie’s footsteps was heard approaching. “Yes; certainly. I’ll try to get a word with Doctor Drake. I can’t imagine anything serious. Won’t you come to the drawingroom now?”
“No; not tonight; not while those people are there.
I was so wretched about dear grannie, I could not bear to go in at first; and now it would be odd, I think, going down when tea is over.”
“As if I had brought you down from the nursery, as I often did, Vi, on my back. Well, old Winnie, have you got it?”
“Here, I think, Master William,” answered Winnie.
“Yes; all right. So you won’t come, Vi?”
“No.”
“Quite made up your mind?”
“Quite, Willie.”
“That’s right — Willie.” said he, with a smile, and a nod of approbation. “I should so like to stay here a little longer, as you won’t come, and hear all the news, and tell you mine; but Aunt Dinah would lose patience — I’m afraid she has.”
“Yes, indeed; you had better go. Goodnight, bear.”
“Goodnight, wicked little Vi. Remember we meet at breakfast — shan’t we?”
“Oh, certainly. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
And so the gray silk hood vanished, with a smile, prettily, round the corner, and William Maubray descended with his snuff to the drawingroom, with the pretty oval portrait of that young face still hovering before him in the air.
Miss Letty Drake, whose countenance was unpleasantly long in proportion to her height, and pallid, and her small figure bony, and who was dressed on this sad occasion in her silk “half-mourning,” a sad and, it was thought, a dyed garment, which had done duty during many periods of affliction, as William entered the room, was concluding a sentence with a low and pointed asperity, thus— “which seems to me hardly compatible with Saint Paul’s description of Christian charity,” and a short silence followed these words.
“I was going to ring the bell, William,” said the doomed lady of the house. “One would have thought you were making that snuff. Let me see it — h’m. See, get off this cover. Ho! what is this? A lead wrapper!”
“You said, Aunt Dinah, you wished it.”
“Did I? Well, no matter. Get it open. Thanks. Yes; that’s it. Yes; very good. You take snuff, doctor, don’t you?”
“Aw — yes, certainly, nothing like it, I do
believe — where a man is obliged to work his head — aw haw — a stimulus and a sedative.”
The doctor, it was averred, “worked” his occasionally with brandy and water, and not a great deal otherwise.
“No, many thanks; don’t care for perfumes; high toast is my snuff.” And Doctor Drake illustrated the fact by a huge pinch, which shed another brown shower over the wrinkles of his waistcoat.
“Letty, dear,” said Aunt Dinah, turning suddenly to Miss Drake, “we won’t quarrel; we can’t agree, but I won’t quarrel.”
“Well, dear, I’m glad to hear you say so. I’m sure, for my part, I never quarrel. ‘ Be ye angry, and let not the sun go down on your wrath.’”
CHAPTER V.
AUNT DINAH IS IN THE HORRORS, AND DOCTOR DRAKE PUTS HIS NIGHTCAP IN HIS POCKET.
“I WISH to say goodbye to you very kindly,” said Aunt Dinah, quite sadly and gently, and somehow not like herself, “and — and I’ve tried to keep up; I know it must happen, and I’m sure it is for the best, but— “
“I hope and expect, my dear Dinah,” interposed Miss Letty, sharply — she was pulling on her worsted “wrists.”
— — “to see you in the enjoyment of many years of your accustomed health and spirits, and I have no doubt, humanly speaking, that I shall.”
Miss Letty was quiet and peremptory, but also a little excited. And the doctor, for want of something better to do, cleared his voice, in a grand abstraction, and wound up his watch slowly, and held it to his ear, nobody knew exactly why.
“You won’t believe me, but I know it, and so will you — too late; tomorrow night at twelve o’clock I shall be dead. I’ve tried to keep up — I have; I’ve tried it; but oh! Ho, ho, hoo, ooh,” and poor Aunt Dinah quite broke down, and cried and hooted hysterically.
Dr. Drake had now before him an intelligible case, and took the command accordingly with decision. Up went the window; cold water was there, and spirit of hartshorn. And when she had a little recovered, the doctor, who was a goodnatured fellow, said —
“Now, Miss Perfect, Ma’am, it won’t do, I tell you; it’s only right; you may want some assistance; and if, as an old friend, you’ll allow me to return and remain here for the night, a sofa, or an armchair, anything, I’ll be most happy, I do assure you.”
But Aunt Dinah, with many thanks, said, “No,” peremptorily, and wilful man or woman, who will contend with?
So, like the awful banquet in Macbeth, Miss Dinah Perfect’s tea-party broke down and up, and the guests, somewat scared, got into their walking wrappers, rather silently, and their entertainer remained behind unstrung and melancholic. ‘
But William Maubray, who came down to assist in the rummage for cloaks and umbrellas, asked leave, in his blunt modest way, to accompany Miss Letty and her brother, the doctor, to Saxton.
Now there seemed something real and grisly in Aunt Dinah’s terror, which a little infected William Maubray; and the little party marched in silence along the frost-hardened road, white in moonlight, with the bare switchlike shadows of the trees across it, on their way to the pretty old town of Saxton.
At last the doctor said —
“She won’t miss you, do you think?”
“She told me she’d like to be quiet for half an hour, and I should be so much obliged if you could tell me, whether you really, that is, still think that she ought to have a medical man in attendance tonight.”
“Why, you know what hysteria is. Well, she is in a highly hysterical state. She’s a woman who resists it would be safer, you see, if she gave way and cried a bit now and then, when nature prompts, but she won’t, except under awful high pressure, and then it might be serious; those things sometimes run off into fits.”
And so the doctor lectured William upon his aunt’s nerves, until they had arrived at the door of his snug house in the High Street.
Here they shook hands; but William Maubray, who was unhappy about Aunt Dinah, after Miss Letty had mounted to her chamber, very urgently entreated the doctor to return and see how it might end.
With a bottle of valerian, his slippers, and a nightcap in his pocket, Doctor Drake did consent to return, and be smuggled into Gilroyd Hall.
“I don’t know what to make of that spirit-rapping quite,” said the doctor, as side by side they approached the Hall. “There’s a quantity of books published on it — very unaccountable if half what they say is true. I suppose you’ve read it all. You read a lot, Miss Perfect tells me.”
“I’ve read very little about it, except in the papers. She fancies she has had a message, telling her she is to die sometime tomorrow. I can’t believe there’s really anything more than self-deception; but is there not a danger?”
“How?” asked the doctor.
“I mean, being so nervous as you suppose, and quite convinced that she is to die at a particular time; might not her own mind — you know Lord Lyttelton died in consequence of such a persuasion.”
William paused, Doctor Drake lowered, between his fingers, the cigar he was smoking, and they came to a halt, with a little wheel to the left, and the doctor, with his head aside, blowing the smoke up in a thin stream, looked with a thoughtful scrutiny up at the clear bright moon; perhaps a not unsuitable source of inspiration upon their crazy theme.
“I forget which Lord Lyttelton that was,” said the doctor, wisely. “Isn’t it Lyttelton, you say? But the thing is quite possible. There’s a spirit you know she’s always talking about. She calls him Henbane. Egad, Sir, I was devilish near laughing at tea when she named him so suddenly that time; I’d have been up a tree if I had, you know. You did not see what she was at, but I did. That Henbane’s her gospel, egad, and she thinks it was he who told her — d’ye see? Come along. She’ll be wondering where you are.”
So on they went towards Gilroyd Hall, whose outline, black and sharp, against the luminous sky, was relieved at one point by the dull glow of candlelight through the red curtains of what William Maubray knew to be Aunt Dinah’s bedchamber window.
“She is in her room, I think — there’s light in her window,” said William. The doctor nodded, chucking his cigar stump far away, for he knew Aunt Dinah’s antipathy to tobacco, and they were now on the doorstep. He was thinking, if the case were to end tragically, what a capital paper he would make of it, beside the interesting letter he would send to the editor of the Spatula.
“Winnie’s bin a callin’ over the stairs for you, Master Willie. Missis wants ye to her room,” said Tom, who awaited them on the doorsteps.
“I’ll sit by the fire in the study,” whispered the doctor. “I don’t mind sitting up a night now and then. Give me a cloak or something. There’s a sofa, and I’ll do very well.”
The principle of life was strong in Aunt Dinah, and three hours later that active-minded lady was lying wide awake on her bed, with a variety of topics, not all consisting with the assumed shortness of her hours, drifting in succession through her head. The last idea that struck her was the most congruous, and up she jumped, made a wild toilet, whose sole principle was warmth, tied a faded silk handkerchief over her nightcap, across her ears, and with her long white flannel dressing-gown about her, and a taper in her hand, issued, like the apparition of the Bleeding Nun, upon the gallery, and tapped sharply on William Maubray’s door.
“William, William!” she called as she tapped, and from within William answered drowsily to the summons.
“Wait a moment,” said the lady, and
“In glided Margaret’s grimly ghost, And stood at William’s feet.”
“We must have a séance, my dear boy; I’m going to wake up old Winnie. It certainly has a connexion with your arrival; but anything like the cracking, knocking, and creaking of everything, I’ve never yet heard. I have no doubt — so sure as you sit there” — (William was sitting up in his bed with glazed eyes, and senses only half awake)— “that your poor dear mother is here tonight. We’re sure of Henbane; and — just get your clothes on — I’m going for Winnie, and we meet in t
he study, mind, in five minutes.”
And Aunt Dinah, having lighted William’s candle, disappeared, leaving him with a fund of cheerful ideas to make his yawning and bewildered toilet
CHAPTER VI.
IN WHICH THE WITCHES ASSEMBLE.
A FEW minutes later she glided into the study, overthrowing a small table, round which her little séances were accustomed to be made, and which the doctor had providently placed against the door.
Aunt Dinah held under her arm the 8vo “Revelations of Elihu Bung, the Pennsylvanian Prophet,” a contribution to spiritual science which distanced all contemporary competition; and the chapter which shows that a table of a light, smart build, after having served a proper apprenticeship to ‘ rapping,’ may acquire the faculty of locomotion and self-direction, flashed on her recollection as she recognised prostrate at her feet, in the glimmer of her taper, the altar of their mysteries, which she had with reverent hands herself placed that evening in its wonted corner, at the opposite end of the room.
Such a manifestation was new to her. She looked on it, a little paler than usual, and bethought her of that other terrible chapter in which Elihu Bung avers that spirits, grown intimate by a long familiarity, will, in a properly regulated twilight — and her light at the moment was no more — make themselves visible to those whom they habitually favour with their advices.
Therefore she was strangely thrilled at sight of the indistinct and shadowy doctor, who, awakened by the noise, rose at the opposite end of the room from the sofa on which he had fallen asleep. Tall and thin, and quite unrecognisable by him, was the white figure at the door, with a taper elevated above its head, and which whispered with a horrid distinctness the word “Henbane!” — the first heard on his awakening, the last in his fancy as he dropped asleep, and which sounded to him like the apparition’s considerate announcement of its name on entering the room; he echoed “Henbane” in a suppressed diapason, and Aunt Dinah, with an awful ejaculation, repeated the word from the distance, and sank into a chair.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 309
