“Well?” she said.
“I don’t know what devilry is at the root of it, but the face on the back of the portrait is the face that came to me in the night.”
For a minute, she hid her eyes. Then she spoke in a voice which pain had made apathetic.
“It is the end of our love.”
He would have uttered a fierce protest, but she silenced him with a commanding gesture.
“It is the end, and nothing you can ever say or do will make it otherwise. The man on the wall, whose evil spirit still haunts that room, was an ancestor—Sir Anthony Gray. He was a bad man, and after a wicked life he died raving mad. Whether the second portrait of him in his madness was painted cynically or seriously none of us know. Its existence is only known to ourselves.
“Unhappily, Sir Anthony left us his madness. Now and then it skips a generation; my father escaped, but our only brother is a dangerous madman, and at any time the curse may seize upon Alison or me. I was wicked when I thought I could marry you and keep this from you, but not wicked enough to do it with a light heart. You will some day be grateful for the night of terror that saved you from a worse thing. I shall never marry now, and I only hope that you will be able to forgive me, because I loved you and was sorely tempted.”
“I will not give you up,” said the man with an oath.
“You will,” she said sadly. “You will be sad for a little while, but presently you will realize what an escape you have had, and be glad.”
“Millicent, Millicent, are you in earnest? Am I really to go away out of your life, and you out of mine?”
There was despair in his cry, but there was also acquiescence, and she caught the sound. She looked at his imploring face with a maternal pity.
“It must be, my dear,” she said.
“I will wait for you,” he cried. “I shall never marry, and I shall always be ready to come to you. Oh, Millicent, Millicent, is there no help?”
But even as he said it, he knew there was none. The reeling shock of the thing, corning upon him after his night of terror, had scarcely left him the power of thinking clearly, but somewhere at the back of his mind he was conscious that what she had told him was irrevocable. However, his wounded passion cried out for her, he felt that her most unhappy doom had set her as far beyond man’s love as though she were already dead.
“Goodbye,” she said mournfully; but she did not offer to kiss him or to touch his hand. “The carriage will be round for you presently, and you will wait here till it comes. I shall explain to my father, for you will not care to see him.”
She left him standing there, dumb, and glided like a ghost from the room. A few minutes later the servant brought him his coffee on a tray, with a message that the carriage was ready. He drank the coffee half-consciously, thinking to himself that she had not been so lost in her bitter trouble as to forget his material wants. Millicent had always been kind; he remembered that her kindness was one of the qualities he had loved in her.
A minute later, the carriage had swept him into the depths of the forest. Millicent Gray, unseen herself, watched it depart, and noticed that his head was bowed and his shoulders drooped. It was her last sight of him. As the forest took him, she turned away to accept the burden of her lonely life, and the terrible possibilities it held.
THE BANSHEE’S WARNING, by Charlotte Riddell
Originally published in London Society, Christmas 1867.
Many a year, before chloroform was thought of, there lived in an old rambling house, in Gerrard Street, Soho, a clever Irishman called Hertford O’Donnell.
After Hertford O’Donnell he was entitled to write M.R.C.S. for he had studied hard to gain this distinction, and the older surgeons at Guy’s (his hospital) considered him one of the most rising operators of the day.
Having said chloroform was unknown at the time this story opens, it will strike my readers that, if Hertford O’Donnell were a rising and successful operator in those days, of necessity he combined within himself a larger number of striking qualities than are by any means necessary to form a successful operator in these.
There was more than mere hand skill, more than even thorough knowledge of his profession, then needful for the man, who, dealing with conscious subjects, essayed to rid them of some of the diseases to which flesh is heir. There was greater courage required in the manipulator of old than is altogether essential at present. Then, as now, a thorough mastery of his instruments, a steady hand, a keen eye, a quick dexterity were indispensable to a good operator; but, added to all these things, there formerly required a pulse which knew no quickening, a mental strength which never faltered, a ready power of adaptation in unexpected circumstances, fertility of resource in difficult cases, and a brave front under all emergencies.
If I refrain from adding that a hard as well as a courageous heart was an important item in the programme, it is only out of deference to general opinion, which, amongst other strange delusions, clings to the belief that courage and hardness are antagonistic qualities.
Hertford O’Donnell, however, was hard as steel. He understood his work, and he did it thoroughly; but he cared no more for quivering nerves and shrinking muscles, for screams of agony, for faces white with pain, and teeth clenched in the extremity of anguish, than he did for the stony countenances of the dead, which so often in the dissecting room appalled younger and less experienced men.
He had no sentiment, and he had no sympathy. The human body was to him, merely an ingenious piece of mechanism, which it was at once a pleasure and a profit to understand. Precisely as Brunel loved the Thames Tunnel, or any other singular engineering feat, so O’Donnell loved a patient on whom he had operated successfully, more especially if the ailment possessed by the patient were of a rare and difficult character.
And for this reason he was much liked by all who came under his hands, since patients are apt to mistake a surgeon’s interest in their cases for interest in themselves; and it was gratifying to John Dicks, plasterer, and Timothy Regan, labourer, to be the happy possessors of remarkable diseases, which produced a cordial understanding between them and the handsome Irishman.
If he had been hard and cool at the moment of hacking them to pieces, that was all forgotten or remembered only as a virtue, when, after being discharged from hospital like soldiers who have served in a severe campaign, they met Mr. O’Donnell in the street, and were accosted by that rising individual just as though he considered himself nobody.
He had a royal memory, this stranger in a strange land, both for faces and cases; and like the rest of his countrymen, he never felt it beneath his dignity to talk cordially to corduroy and fustian.
In London, as a Calgillan, he never held back his tongue from speaking a cheery or a kindly word. His manners were pliable enough, if his heart were not; and the porters, and the patients, and the nurses, and the students at Guy’s were all pleased to see Hertford O’Donnell.
Rain, hail, sunshine, it was all the same; there was a life and a brightness about the man which communicated itself to those with whom he came in contact. Let the mud in the Borough be a foot deep or the London fog as thick as pea-soup, Mr. O’Donnell never lost his temper, never muttered a surly reply to the gatekeeper’s salutation, but spoke out blithely and cheerfully to his pupils and his patients, to the sick and to the well, to those below and to those above him.
And yet, spite of all these good qualities, spite of his handsome face, his fine figure, his easy address, and his unquestionable skill as an operator, the dons, who acknowledged his talent, shook their heads gravely when two or three of them in private and solemn conclave, talked confidentially of their younger brother.
If there were many things in his favour, there were more in his disfavour. He was Irish—not merely by the accident of birth, which might have been forgiven, since a man cannot be held accountable for such caprices
of Nature, but by every other accident and design which is objectionable to the orthodox and respectable and representative English mind.
In speech, appearance, manner, taste, modes of expression, habits of life, Hertford O’Donnell was Irish. To the core of his heart he loved the island which he declared he never meant to re-visit; and amongst the English he moved to all intents and purposes a foreigner, who was resolved, so said the great prophets at Guy’s, to rush to destruction as fast as he could, and let no man hinder him.
“He means to go the whole length of his tether,” observed one of the ancient wiseacres to another; which speech implied a conviction that Hertford O’Donnell having sold himself to the Evil One, had determined to dive the full length of his rope into wickedness before being pulled to that shore where even wickedness is negative—where there are no mad carouses, no wild, sinful excitements, nothing but impotent wailing and gnashing of teeth.
A reckless, graceless, clever, wicked devil—going to his natural home as fast as in London anyone possibly speed thither; this was the opinion his superiors, held of the man who lived all alone with a housekeeper and her husband (who acted as butler) in his big house near Soho.
Gerrard Street—made famous by De Quincey, was not then an utterly shady and forgotten locality; carriage-patients found their way to the rising young surgeon—some great personages thought it not beneath them to fee an individual whose consulting rooms were situated on what was even then considered the wrong side of Regent Street. He was making money, and he was spending it; he was over head and ears in debt—useless, vulgar debt—senselessly contracted, never bravely faced. He had lived at an awful pace ever since he came to London, a pace which only a man who hopes and expects to die young can ever travel.
Life was good, was it? Death, was he a child, or a woman, or a coward, to be afraid of that hereafter? God knew all about the trifle which had upset his coach, better than the dons at Guy’s.
Hertford O’Donnell understood the world pretty thoroughly, and the ways thereof were to him as roads often traversed; therefore, when he said that at the Day of Judgment he felt certain he should come off as well as many of those who censured him, it may be assumed, that, although his views of post-mortem punishment were vague, unsatisfactory and infidel, still his information as to the peccadilloes of his neighbours was such as consoled himself.
And yet, living all alone in the old house near Soho Square, grave thoughts would intrude into the surgeon’s mind—thoughts which were, so to say, italicised by peremptory letters, and still more peremptory visits from people who wanted money.
Although he had many acquaintances he had no single friend, and accordingly these thoughts were received and brooded over in solitude—in those hours when, after returning from dinner, or supper, or congenial carouse, he sat in his dreary rooms, smoking his pipe and considering means and ways, chances and certainties.
In good truth he had started in London with some vague idea that as his life in it would not be of long continuance, the pace at which he elected to travel could be of little consequence; but the years since his first entry into the Metropolis were now piled one on the top of another, his youth was behind him, his chances of longevity, spite of the way he had striven to injure his constitution, quite as good as ever. He had come to that period in existence, to that narrow strip of tableland, whence the ascent of youth and the descent of age are equally discernible—when, simply because he has lived for so many years, it strikes a man as possible he may have to live for just as many more, with the ability for hard work gone, with the boom companions scattered, with the capacity for enjoying convivial meetings a mere memory, with small means perhaps, with no bright hopes, with the pomp and the circumstance and the fairy carriages, and the glamour which youth flings over earthly objects, faded away like the pageant of yesterday, while the dreary ceremony of living has to be gone through today and tomorrow and the morrow after, as though the gay cavalcade and the martial music, and the glittering helmets and the prancing steeds were still accompanying the wayfarer to his journey’s end.
Ah! my friends, there comes a moment when we must all leave the coach, with its four bright bays, its pleasant outside freight, its cheery company, its guard who blows the horn so merrily through villages and along lonely country roads.
Long before we reach that final stage, where the black business claims us for its own special property, we have to bid goodbye to all easy, thoughtless journeying, and betake ourselves, with what zest we may, to traversing the common of reality. There is no royal road across it that ever I heard of. From the king on his throne to the labourer who vaguely imagines what manner of being a king is, we have all to tramp across that desert at one period of our lives, at all events; and that period usually is when, as I have said, a man starts to find the hopes, and the strength, and the buoyancy of youth left behind, while years and years of life lie stretching out before him.
The coach he has travelled by drops him here. There is no appeal, there is no help; therefore, let him take off his hat and wish the new passengers good speed, without either envy or repining.
Behold, he has had his turn, and let whosoever will, mount on the box-seat of life again, and tip the coachman and handle the ribbons—he shall take that pleasant journey no more, no more for ever.
Even supposing a man’s springtime to have been a cold and ungenial one, with bitter easterly winds and nipping frosts, biting the buds and retarding the blossoms, still it was spring for all that—spring with the young green leaves sprouting forth, with the flowers unfolding tenderly, with the songs of the birds and the rush of waters, with the summer before and the autumn afar off, and winter remote as death and eternity, but when once the trees have donned their summer foliage, when the pure white blossoms have disappeared, and the gorgeous red and orange and purple blaze of many-coloured flowers fills the gardens, then if there come a wet, dreary day, the idea of autumn and winter is not so difficult to realise. When once twelve o’clock is reached, the evening and night become facts, not possibilities; and it was of the afternoon, and the evening, and the night, Hertford O’Donnell sat thinking on the Christmas Eve, when I crave permission to introduce him to my readers.
A good-looking man ladies considered him. A tall, dark-complexioned, black-haired, straight-limbed, deeply divinely blue-eyed fellow, with a soft voice, with a pleasant brogue, who had ridden like a centaur over the loose stone walls in Connemara, who had danced all night at the Dublin balls, who had walked across the Bennebeola Mountains, gun in hand, day after day, without weariness, who had fished in every one of the hundred lakes you can behold from the top of that mountain near the Recess Hotel, who had led a mad, wild life in Trinity College, and a wilder, perhaps, while “studying for a doctor”—as the Irish phrase goes—in Edinburgh, and who, after the death of his eldest brother left him free to return to Calgillan, and pursue the usual utterly useless, utterly purposeless, utterly pleasant life of an Irish gentleman possessed of health, birth, and expectations, suddenly kicked over the paternal traces, bade adieu to Calgillan Castle and the blandishments of a certain beautiful Miss Clifden, beloved of his mother, and laid out to be his wife, walked down the avenue without even so much company as a Gossoon to carry his carpet-bag, shook the dust from his feet at the lodge gates, and took his seat on the coach, never once looking back at Calgillan, where his favourite mare was standing in the stable, his greyhounds chasing one another round the home paddock, his gun at half-cock in his dressing-room and his fishing-tackle all in order and ready for use.
He had not kissed his mother, or asked for his father’s blessing; he left Miss Clifden, arrayed in her brand-new riding-habit, without a word of affection or regret; he had spoken no syllable of farewell to any servant about the place; only when the old woman at the lodge bade him good morning and God-blessed his handsome face, he recommended her bitterly to look at it well for she would never see it more
.
Twelve years and a half had passed since then, without either Miss Clifden or any other one of the Calgillan people having set eyes on Master Hertford’s handsome face.
He had kept his vow to himself; he had not written home; he had not been indebted to mother or father for even a tenpenny-piece during the whole of that time; he had lived without friends; and he had lived without God—so far as God ever lets a man live without him.
One thing only he felt to be needful—money; money to keep him when the evil days of sickness, or age, or loss of practice came upon him. Though a spendthrift, he was not a simpleton; around him he saw men, who, having started with fairer prospects that his own, were, nevertheless, reduced to indigence; and he knew that what had happened to others might happen to himself.
An unlucky cut, slipping on a piece of orange-peel in the street, the merest accident imaginable, is sufficient to change opulence to beggary in the life’s programme of an individual, whose income depends on eye, on nerve, on hand; and, besides the consciousness of this fact, Hertford O’Donnell knew that beyond a certain point in his profession, progress was not easy.
It did not depend quite on the strength of his own bow and shield whether he counted his earnings by hundreds or thousands. Work may achieve competence; but mere work cannot, in a profession, at all events, compass fortune.
He looked around him, and he perceived that the majority of great men—great and wealthy—had been indebted for their elevation, more to the accident of birth, patronage, connection, or marriage, than to personal ability.
Personal ability, no doubt, they possessed; but then, little Jones, who lived in Frith Street, and who could barely keep himself and his wife and family, had ability, too, only he lacked the concomitants of success.
The Fifth Ghost Story Megapack 25 Classic Haunts Page 33
