So raved William, “pacing up and walking down” in his despair.
That night he had his old nightmare again, and was visited by what poor Miss Perfect used to call “the spirit key.” In a horror he awaked, and found his wrist grasped by a cold hand precisely as before. This time the gripe was maintained for a longer time than usual, and William traced the hand to its real owner of flesh and blood. Thus was there a gleam of light; but it served Mm no further. in the evening, still agitated by his discovery, he visited Doctor Drake, who listened first with surprise, and then with downcast thoughtful look, and a grim smile.
“I’ll think it over,” said he. “I must be off now,” and he poked his finger toward the window, through which were visible his cob and gig; “they don’t leave me much time; but I’ll manage to be with you by nine this evening, and — and — I don’t care if we try that old Tom,” and the doctor winked comfortably at William. “We’ll be more to ourselves, you know; our rector’s all for tea. Goodbye, and I’ll turn it over carefully in my mind. I have an idea, but — but I’ll consider it — and — nine o’clock tonight, mind.”
Thus said the doctor as he climbed into his gig, and nodding over his shoulder to William Maubray, away he drove.
Like a restless soul as lie was, William toiled hither and thither through the little town of Saxton with his hands in his pockets, and his looks on the pavement, more like an unfortunate gentleman taking his walk in a prison yard, than the proprietor of Gilroyd pacing the High Street of Saxton, where he ranked second only to Trevor, Prince of Revington.
Repose is pleasant, but that of Saxton is sometimes too much for the most contemplative man who is even half awake. There are in the town eleven shops, small and great, and you may often look down the length of the High Street, for ten minutes at a time, and see nothing in motion but the motes in the sunshine.
William walked back to Gilroyd, and paid himself as it were a visit there, and was vexed to and he had missed the rector, who had called only half an hour before. The loss of this little diversion was serious. The day dragged heavily. Reader, if you repine at the supposed shortness of the allotted measure of your days, reside at Saxton for a year or two, and your discontent will be healed.
Even Doctor Drake was half an hour late for his appointment, and William was very glad to see that pillar of Saxton society at last.
When they had made themselves comfortable by the fire, and the physician had adjusted his grog, and William had got his cup of tea by him, after a little silence the doctor began to ask him all sorts of questions about his health and sensations.
“I don’t think,” said William, “except perhaps my spirits a little, and my appetite perhaps, this thing has affected my health at all.”
“No matter, answer my questions,” said the doctor, who after a while fell into a mysterious silence, and seemed amused, and after a little time further, he expressed a great wish to remain and watch as on the former occasion.
“But,” said William, very glad of the offer, “the rector is not coming, and you would wish some one with you.”
“No — no one — I don’t mind,” said the doctor, smiling with half-closed eyes into his tumbler. “Or, yes, we’ll have your man up when you go to bed; that will do.”
“I missed Dr. Wagget to-day; he called here,” said William.
“Not after nightfall, though,” said the physician, with a screw of his lips and eyebrows. “I saw him early today; he’s awfully frightened, and spoke like a sermon about it.”
William looked sorely disquieted at this confirmation of his estimate of Dr. Wagget’s opinion of the case. He and Drake exchanged a solemn glance, and the doctor lowering his eyes sipped some grog, and bursting into a mysterious fit of laughter which rather frightened William, who helplessly stood at the tea-table, and gazed on the spectacle. Everything began to puzzle him now; the doctor was like an awful grotesque in a dream. How could a goodnatured and shrewd man laugh thus, amid suffering and horrors such as he had witnessed?
“I beg your pardon, but I could not help laughing when I thought of the rector’s long face to-day, and his long words, by Jove,” and in a minute or two more, the doctor exploded suddenly again, with the old apology on recovering his gravity, and William’s bewilderment increased.
The doctor insisted on William’s adhering strictly to his tea and his hours, precisely as if he were alone.
And Tom came in, and the doctor, who was in nowise ceremonious, made him sit down by the fire, and furnished him with a glass of the grog he so recommended.
He then delivered to Tom a brief popular lecture on the subject he desired him to comprehend, and, having thus charged him, silence reigned; and then the doctor, after an interval, smoked half a dozen pipes, and by the time the last was out it was past three o’clock.
The doctor had left the study door open. The moon. was shining through the great hall window.
Put off your shoes, make no noise, and follow me close, with the candle, wherever I go. Don’t stir till I do,” whispered the doctor, repeating the directions he had already given— “Hish!”
The doctor had seen a tall, white figure in the hall — in the shade beyond the window.
“Hish!” said the doctor again, Seizing Tom by the arm, and pointing, with a mysterious nod or two, towards the figure.
“Lawk! — Oh! oh! — law bless us!” murmured the man; and the doctor with another “Hish,” pushed him gently backward a little.
CHAPTER LXVII.
THE PHANTOM IS TRACKED.
As the doctor made this motion, the figure in white crossed the hall swiftly, and stood at the study door. It looked potentiously tall, and was covered with a white drapery, a corner of which hung over its face. It entered the room, unlocked William Maubray’s desk from which it took some papers; then locked the desk, carrying away which, it left the room.
“Follow, with the light,” whiskered the doctor, himself pursuing on tiptoe.
Barefoot, the figure walked towards the kitchen, then turning to the left, it mounted the back stair; the doctor following pretty closely, and Tom with his candle in the rear.
On a peg in the gallery opposite to the door of William Maubray’s bedroom, hung an old dressing-gown of his, into the pocket of which the apparition slipped the papers it had taken from his desk. Then it opened William’s door, as easily as if he had not locked it upon the inside. The doctor and Tom followed, and saw the figure approach the bed and place the desk very neatly under the bolster, then return to the door, and shut and lock it on the inside. Then the figure marched in a stately way to the far side of the bed, drew both curtains, and stood at the bedside, like a ghost, for about a minute; after which it walked in the same stately way to the door, unlocked it, and walked forth again upon the gallery; the doctor still following, and Tom behind, bearing the light. Down the stairs it glided, and halted on the lobby, where it seemed to look from the window fixedly.
“Come along,” said the doctor to Tom; and down the stairs he went, followed by the torch-bearer, and, on reaching the lobby, he clapped the apparition on the back, and shook it lustily by the arm.
With the sort of gasp and sob which accompany sudden immersion in cold water, William Maubray, for the ghost was he, awakened, dropped the coverlet, which formed his drapery, on the floor, and stood the picture of bewilderment and horror, in his nightshirt, staring at his friends and repeating— “Lord have mercy on us!”
“It’s only Tom and I. Shake yourself up a bit, man Doctor Drake — here we are — all old friends.”
And the doctor spoke very cheerily, and all sorts of encouraging speeches; but it was long before William got out of his horror, and even then he seemed for a good while on the point of fainting.
“I’ll never be myself again,” groaned William, in his nightshirt, seating himself, half dead, upon the lobby table.
Tom stood by, holding the candle aloft, and staring in his face and praying in short sentences, with awful unction; while th
e doctor kept all the time laughing and patting William on the shoulder and repeating, “Nonsense! — nonsense! — nonsense!”
When William had got again into his room, and had some clothes on, he broke again into talk:
“Somnambulism! — walk in my sleep. I could not have believed it possible. I — I never perceived the slightest tendency — I — the only thing was that catching my own wrist in my sleep and thinking it was another person who held me; but — but actually walking in my sleep, isn’t it frightful?”
“I don’t think you’ll ever do it again — ha, ha, ha! said the doctor.
“And why not?” asked William “ The fright of being wakened as you were, cures it That’s the reason I shook you out of your doldrum,” chuckled the doctor.
“I’m frightened — frightened out of my wits.”
“Glad of it,” said the doctor. “Be the less likely to do it again.”
“Do you think I — I’m really cured?” asked William.
“Yes, I do; but you must change your habits a bit You’ve let yourself get into a dyspeptic, nervous state, and keep working your brain over things too much. You’ll be quite well in a week or two; and I really do think you’re cured of this trick. They seldom do it again — hardly ever — after the shock of being wakened. I’ve met half a dozen cases — always cured.”
The doctor stayed with him the greater part of that night, which they spent so cheerfully that Drake’s articulation became indistinct, though his learning and philosophy, as usual, shone resplendent.
It was not till he was alone, and the bright morning sun shone round him, that William Maubray quite apprehended the relief his spirits had experienced. For several days he had lived in an odious dream. It was now all cleared up, and his awful suspicions gone.
As HE turned from the parlour window to the breakfast table, the old Bible lying on the little book-shelf caught his EYE. He took it DOWN, AND laid IT beside HIM ON the table. Poor Aunt Dinah had kept it by her during her illness, preferring it to any other.
“I’ll read a chapter every day — by Jove, I will,” resolved William, in the grateful sense of his deliverance. “It’s only decent — it’s only the old custom. It may make me good some day, and hit or miss, it never did any man harm.”
So he turned over the leaves, and lighted on an open sheet of note paper. It was written over in poor Miss Perfect’s hand, with a perceptible tremble; and he read the following lines, bearing date only two days before her death: —
“DEAR WILLIE,
“To-day I am not quite so, but trust to be better; and wish you to know, that having conversed much with doctor, my friend, the rector, I make for future the Bible my only guide, and you are not to mind what I said about waiting five — only do all things — things — with prayer, and marry whenever you see goo, seeking first God’s blessing by pra — .
“So, lest anything should happen, to remove from your mind all anxiety, writes
“Your poor old fond
“AUNTIE.”
Thus ended the note, which William, with a strange mixture of feelings, kissed again and again, with a heart at once saddened and immensely relieved.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
SOME SMALL EVENTS AND PLANS.
WILLIAM MAUBRAY heard from Trevor, who affected boisterous spirits and the intensest enjoyment of his town life, though there was not a great deal doing just then to amuse anybody. He had been thinking of running over to Paris to the Sourburys, who had asked him to join their party, but thought he must go first to Kincton for a week or two, as the ladies insisted on a sort of promise he had made, and would not let him off. He hinted, moreover, that there was a perfectly charming Lady Louisa Sourbury, of whom he spoke in a rapture; and possibly all this, and a great deal more in the same vein, was intended to reach the ear of Miss Violet Darkwell, who was to learn that “there are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far, who would gladly,” &c., &c., and also, that young Lochinvar was treading his measures and drinking his cups of wine with remarkable hilarity, notwithstanding the little scene which had taken place.
But Vane Trevor was not a topic which William would have cared to introduce, and it was in relation to quite other subjects that he was always thinking of Violet Darkwell.
“So,” said the old rector, walking into the hall at Gilroyd, shaking his head, and smiling as he spoke, “We’ve found you out — the merry devil of Edmonton — hey? I don’t know when I was so puzzled. It was really — a-ha! — a most perplexing problem — and — and Doctor Drake has been our Matthew Hopkins, our witch-finder, and a capital one he has proved. I dare say, between ourselves,” continued the rector, in a low tone, like a man making a concession, “that several cases of apparently well authenticated apparitions are explicable — eh? — upon that supposition;” and, indeed, good Doctor Wagget devoted time and research to this inquiry, and has written already to two publishers on the subject of his volume, called “The Debatable Land;” and when, last summer, I passed a week at the Rectory, my admirable friend read to me his introduction, in which he says, “If apparitions be permitted, they are no more supernatural than water-spouts and other phenomena of rare occurrence, but, ipso facto, natural. In any case a Christian man, in presence of a disembodied spirit, should be no more disquieted than in that of an embodied one, i e., a human being under its mortal conditions.”
And the only subject on which I ever heard of his showing any real impatience is that of his night-watch in the study at Gilroyd, as slily described by Doctor Drake, who does not deny that he was himself confoundedly frightened by William Maubray’s first appearance, and insinuates a good deal about the rector, which the rector, with a dignified emphasis, declares to be “unmeaning travesty.”
In the meantime, Mr. Sergeant Darkwell made a flying visit to the Rectory, and Maubray had a long walk and a talk with him. I do not think that a certain shyness, very hard to get over where ages differ so considerably, permitted the young man to say that which most pressed for utterance; but he certainly did talk very fully about the “bar,” and its chances, and William quite made up his mind to make his bow before the world in the picturesque long robe and whalebone wig, which everyone of taste admires.
But the sergeant, who remained in that part of the world but for a day, when he donned his coif, and spread his sable winks for flight towards the great forensic rookery, whither instinct and necessity called him, carried away his beautiful daughter with him, and the sun of Saxton, Gilroyd, and all the world around was darkened.
In a matter like love, affording so illimitable a supply of that beautiful vaporous material of which the finest castles in the air are built, and upon which every matchmaker — and — and what person worthy to live is not a matchmaker? — speculates in a spirit of the most agreeable suspense and the most harmless gambling, it would be hard if the architects of such chateaux, and the “backers” of such and such events, were never in their incessant labours to light up a prophetic combination. Miss Wagget was a freemason of the order of the “Castle in the Air.”
Her magical trowel was always glittering in the sun, and her busy square never done adjusting this or that block of sunset cloud. She had, some little time since, laid the foundations in the firmament of such a structure for the use and occupation of William Maubray and Violet Darkwell; and she was now running it up at a rate which might have made sober architects stare. The structure was even solidifying, according to the nebulous theory of astronomers. —
And this good lady used, in her charity, to read for WILLIAM IN his almost daily visits to the Rectory, ALL such passages in Violet’s letters as she fancied would specially interest him.
Her love for the old scenes spoke very clearly in all these letters. But — and young ladies can perhaps say whether this was a good sign or a bad one — she never once mentioned William Maubray; no, no more than if such a person did not exist, although certainly she asked vaguely after the neighbours, and I venture to think that in her replies, Miss Wagget s
elected those whom she thought most likely to interest her correspondent All this time good Miss Wagget wrote constantly to remind the barrister in London of his promise to allow Violet to return to the Rectory for another little visit. It was so long delayed that William grew not only melancholy, but anxious. What might not be going on in London?
Were there no richer fellows than he, none more — more — what should he say? — more that style of man who is acceptable in feminine eyes?
Was not Violet peerless, go where she might? Could such a treasure remain long unsought? and if sought, alas! who could foresee the event?
And here he was alone, at Gilroyd, well knowing that distance, silence, absence, are sure at last to kill the most vigorous passion; and how could a mere fancy, of the flimsiest texture — such as his best hopes could only claim, by way of interest in her heart or in her head — survive these agencies of decay and death?
“Next week I think I shall run up to town. I must arrange about attending an equity draughtsman’s. I’m determined, Sir, to learn my business thoroughly,” said William.
“Right, Sir! I applaud you,” replied the rector, to whom this was addressed. “I see you mean work, and are resolved to master your craft. It’s a noble profession. I had an uncle at it who, everybody said, would have done wonders, but he died of smallpox in the Temple, before he had held a brief, I believe, though he had been some years called; but it would have come. Macte Virtute. I may live to see you charge a jury. Sir.”
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 335
