Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh (1899)
J S Le Fanu



TO
THE RIGHT HON.
THE COUNTESS OF GIFFORD,
AS A TOKEN OF
RESPECT, SYMPATHY, AND ADMIRATION
_This Tale_
IS INSCRIBED BY
THE AUTHOR



_A PRELIMINARY WORD_

The writer of this Tale ventures, in his own person, to address a very few
words, chiefly of explanation, to his readers. A leading situation in this
'Story of Bartram-Haugh' is repeated, with a slight variation, from a short
magazine tale of some fifteen pages written by him, and published long ago
in a periodical under the title of 'A Passage in the Secret History of an
Irish Countess,' and afterwards, still anonymously, in a small volume under
an altered title. It is very unlikely that any of his readers should have
encountered, and still more so that they should remember, this trifle. The
bare possibility, however, he has ventured to anticipate by this brief
explanation, lest he should be charged with plagiarism--always a disrespect
to a reader.

May he be permitted a few words also of remonstrance against the
promiscuous application of the term 'sensation' to that large school of
fiction which transgresses no one of those canons of construction and
morality which, in producing the unapproachable 'Waverley Novels,' their
great author imposed upon himself? No one, it is assumed, would describe
Sir Walter Scott's romances as 'sensation novels;' yet in that marvellous
series there is not a single tale in which death, crime, and, in some form,
mystery, have not a place.

Passing by those grand romances of 'Ivanhoe,' 'Old Mortality,' and
'Kenilworth,' with their terrible intricacies of crime and bloodshed,
constructed with so fine a mastery of the art of exciting suspense and
horror, let the reader pick out those two exceptional novels in the series
which profess to paint contemporary manners and the scenes of common life;
and remembering in the 'Antiquary' the vision in the tapestried chamber,
the duel, the horrible secret, and the death of old Elspeth, the drowned
fisherman, and above all the tremendous situation of the tide-bound party
under the cliffs; and in 'St. Ronan's Well,' the long-drawn mystery, the
suspicion of insanity, and the catastrophe of suicide;--determine whether
an epithet which it would be a profanation to apply to the structure of
any, even the most exciting of Sir Walter Scott's stories, is fairly
applicable to tales which, though illimitably inferior in execution, yet
observe the same limitations of incident, and the same moral aims.

The author trusts that the Press, to whose masterly criticism and generous
encouragement he and other humble labourers in the art owe so much, will
insist upon the limitation of that degrading term to the peculiar type of
fiction which it was originally intended to indicate, and prevent, as they
may, its being made to include the legitimate school of tragic English
romance, which has been ennobled, and in great measure founded, by the
genius of Sir Walter Scott.




CONTENTS

I. AUSTIN RUTHYN, OF KNOWL, AND HIS DAUGHTER
II. UNCLE SILAS
III. A NEW FACE
IV. MADAME DE LA ROUGIERRE
V. SIGHTS AND NOISES
VI. A WALK IN THE WOOD
VII. CHURCH SCARSDALE
VIII. THE SMOKER
IX. MONICA KNOLLYS
X. LADY KNOLLYS REMOVES A COVERLET
XI. LADY KNOLLYS SEES THE FEATURES
XII. A CURIOUS CONVERSATION
XIII. BEFORE AND AFTER BREAKFAST
XIV. ANGRY WORDS
XV. A WARNING
XVI. DOCTOR BRYERLY LOOKS IN
XVII. AN ADVENTURE
XVIII. A MIDNIGHT VISITOR
XIX. AU REVOIR
XX. AUSTIN RUTHYN SETS OUT ON HIS JOURNEY
XXI. ARRIVALS
XXII. SOMEBODY IN THE ROOM WITH THE COFFIN
XXIII. I TALK WITH DOCTOR BRYERLY
XXIV. THE OPENING OF THE WILL
XXV. I HEAR FROM UNCLE SILAS
XXVI. THE STORY OF UNCLE SILAS
XXVII. MORE ABOUT TOM CHARKE'S SUICIDE
XXVIII. I AM PERSUADED
XXIX. HOW THE AMBASSADOR FARED
XXX. ON THE ROAD
XXXI. BARTRAM-HAUGH
XXXII. UNCLE SILAS
XXXIII. THE WINDMILL WOOD
XXXIV. ZAMIEL
XXXV. WE VISIT A ROOM IN THE SECOND STOREY
XXXVI. AN ARRIVAL AT DEAD OF NIGHT
XXXVII. DOCTOR BRYERLY EMERGES
XXXVIII. A MIDNIGHT DEPARTURE
XXXIX. COUSIN MONICA AND UNCLE SILAS MEET
XL. IN WHICH I MAKE ANOTHER COUSIN'S ACQUAINTANCE
XLI. MY COUSIN DUDLEY
XLII. ELVERSTON AND ITS PEOPLE
XLIII. NEWS AT BARTRAM GATE
XLIV. A FRIEND ARISES
XLV. A CHAPTER-FULL OF LOVERS
XLVI. THE RIVALS
XLVII. DOCTOR BRYERLY REAPPEARS
XLVIII. QUESTION AND ANSWER
XLIX. AN APPARITION
L. MILLY'S FAREWELL
LI. SARAH MATILDA COMES TO LIGHT
LII. THE PICTURE OF A WOLF
LIII. AN ODD PROPOSAL
LIV. IN SEARCH OF MR. CHARKE'S SKELETON
LV. THE FOOT OF HERCULES
LVI. I CONSPIRE
LVII. THE LETTER
LVIII. LADY KNOLLYS' CARRIAGE
LIX. A SUDDEN DEPARTURE
LX. THE JOURNEY
LXI. OUR BED-CHAMBER
LXII. A WELL-KNOWN FACE LOOKS IN
LXIII. SPICED CLARET
LXIV. THE HOUR OF DEATH
LXV. IN THE OAK PARLOUR
CONCLUSION





CHAPTER I

_AUSTIN RUTHYN, OF KNOWL, AND HIS DAUGHTER_


It was winter--that is, about the second week in November--and great gusts
were rattling at the windows, and wailing and thundering among our tall
trees and ivied chimneys--a very dark night, and a very cheerful fire
blazing, a pleasant mixture of good round coal and spluttering dry wood, in
a genuine old fireplace, in a sombre old room. Black wainscoting glimmered
up to the ceiling, in small ebony panels; a cheerful clump of wax candles
on the tea-table; many old portraits, some grim and pale, others pretty,
and some very graceful and charming, hanging from the walls. Few pictures,
except portraits long and short, were there. On the whole, I think you
would have taken the room for our parlour. It was not like our modern
notion of a drawing-room. It was a long room too, and every way capacious,
but irregularly shaped.

A girl, of a little more than seventeen, looking, I believe, younger still;
slight and rather tall, with a great deal of golden hair, dark grey-eyed,
and with a countenance rather sensitive and melancholy, was sitting at the
tea-table, in a reverie. I was that girl.

The only other person in the room--the only person in the house related to
me--was my father. He was Mr. Ruthyn, of Knowl, so called in his county,
but he had many other places, was of a very ancient lineage, who had
refused a baronetage often, and it was said even a viscounty, being of a
proud and defiant spirit, and thinking themselves higher in station and
purer of blood than two-thirds of the nobility into whose ranks, it was
said, they had been invited to enter. Of all this family lore I knew but
little and vaguely; only what is to be gathered from the fireside talk of
old retainers in the nursery.

I am sure my father loved me, and I know I loved him. With the sure
instinct of childhood I apprehended his tenderness, although it was never
expressed in common ways. But my father was an oddity. He had been early
disappointed in Parliament, where it was his ambition to succeed. Though a
clever man, he failed there, where very inferior men did extremely well.
Then he went abroad, and became a connoisseur and a collector; took a part,
on his return, in literary and scientific institutions, and also in the
foundation and direction of some charities. But he tired of this mimic
government, and gave himself up to a country life, not that of a sportsman,
but rather of a student, staying sometimes at one of his places and
sometimes at another, and living a secluded life.

Rather late in life he married, and his beautiful young wife died, leaving
me, their only child, to his care. This bereavement, I have been told,
changed him--made him more odd and taciturn than ever, and his temper also,
except to me, more severe. There was also some disgrace about his younger
brother--my uncle Silas--which he felt bitterly.

He was now walking up and down this spacious old room, which, extending
round an angle at the far end, was very dark in that quarter. It was his
wont to walk up and down thus, without speaking--an exercise which used to
remind me of Chateaubriand's father in the great chamber of the Château
de Combourg. At the far end he nearly disappeared in the gloom, and then
returning emerged for a few minutes, like a portrait with a background of
shadow, and then again in silence faded nearly out of view.

This monotony and silence would have been terrifying to a person less
accustomed to it than I. As it was, it had its effect. I have known my
father a whole day without once speaking to me. Though I loved him very
much, I was also much in awe of him.

While my father paced the floor, my thoughts were employed about the events
of a month before. So few things happened at Knowl out of the accustomed
routine, that a very trifling occurrence was enough to set people wondering
and conjecturing in that serene household. My father lived in remarkable
seclusion; except for a ride, he hardly ever left the grounds of Knowl; and
I don't think it happened twice in the year that a visitor sojourned among
us.

There was not even that mild religious bustle which sometimes besets the
wealthy and moral recluse. My father had left the Church of England for
some odd sect, I forget its name, and ultimately became, I was told, a
Swedenborgian. But he did not care to trouble me upon the subject. So the
old carriage brought my governess, when I had one, the old housekeeper,
Mrs. Rusk, and myself to the parish church every Sunday. And my father, in
the view of the honest rector who shook his head over him--'a cloud without
water, carried about of winds, and a wandering star to whom is reserved the
blackness of darkness'--corresponded with the 'minister' of his church, and
was provokingly contented with his own fertility and illumination; and
Mrs. Rusk, who was a sound and bitter churchwoman, said he fancied he saw
visions and talked with angels like the rest of that 'rubbitch.'

I don't know that she had any better foundation than analogy and conjecture
for charging my father with supernatural pretensions; and in all points
when her orthodoxy was not concerned, she loved her master and was a loyal
housekeeper.

I found her one morning superintending preparations for the reception of
a visitor, in the hunting-room it was called, from the pieces of tapestry
that covered its walls, representing scenes _à la Wouvermans_, of falconry,
and the chase, dogs, hawks, ladies, gallants, and pages. In the midst of
whom Mrs. Rusk, in black silk, was rummaging drawers, counting linen, and
issuing orders.

'Who is coming, Mrs. Rusk?'

Well, she only knew his name. It was a Mr. Bryerly. My papa expected him to
dinner, and to stay for some days.

'I guess he's one of those creatures, dear, for I mentioned his name just
to Dr. Clay (the rector), and he says there _is_ a Doctor Bryerly, a great
conjurer among the Swedenborg sect--and that's him, I do suppose.'

In my hazy notions of these sectaries there was mingled a suspicion of
necromancy, and a weird freemasonry, that inspired something of awe and
antipathy.

Mr. Bryerly arrived time enough to dress at his leisure, before dinner. He
entered the drawing-room--a tall, lean man, all in ungainly black, with a
white choker, with either a black wig, or black hair dressed in imitation
of one, a pair of spectacles, and a dark, sharp, short visage, rubbing his
large hands together, and with a short brisk nod to me, whom he plainly
regarded merely as a child, he sat down before the fire, crossed his legs,
and took up a magazine.

This treatment was mortifying, and I remember very well the resentment of
which _he_ was quite unconscious.

His stay was not very long; not one of us divined the object of his visit,
and he did not prepossess us favourably. He seemed restless, as men of busy
habits do in country houses, and took walks, and a drive, and read in the
library, and wrote half a dozen letters.

His bed-room and dressing-room were at the side of the gallery, directly
opposite to my father's, which had a sort of ante-room _en suite_, in which
were some of his theological books.

The day after Mr. Bryerly's arrival, I was about to see whether my father's
water caraffe and glass had been duly laid on the table in this ante-room,
and in doubt whether he was there, I knocked at the door.

I suppose they were too intent on other matters to hear, but receiving no
answer, I entered the room. My father was sitting in his chair, with his
coat and waistcoat off, Mr. Bryerly kneeling on a stool beside him, rather
facing him, his black scratch wig leaning close to my father's grizzled
hair. There was a large tome of their divinity lore, I suppose, open on
the table close by. The lank black figure of Mr. Bryerly stood up, and he
concealed something quickly in the breast of his coat.

My father stood up also, looking paler, I think, than I ever saw him till
then, and he pointed grimly to the door, and said, 'Go.'

Mr. Bryerly pushed me gently back with his hands to my shoulders, and
smiled down from his dark features with an expression quite unintelligible
to me.

I had recovered myself in a second, and withdrew without a word. The last
thing I saw at the door was the tall, slim figure in black, and the dark,
significant smile following me: and then the door was shut and locked, and
the two Swedenborgians were left to their mysteries.

I remember so well the kind of shock and disgust I felt in the certainty
that I had surprised them at some, perhaps, debasing incantation--a
suspicion of this Mr. Bryerly, of the ill-fitting black coat, and white
choker--and a sort of fear came upon me, and I fancied he was asserting
some kind of mastery over my father, which very much alarmed me.

I fancied all sorts of dangers in the enigmatical smile of the lank
high-priest. The image of my father, as I had seen him, it might be,
confessing to this man in black, who was I knew not what, haunted me with
the disagreeable uncertainties of a mind very uninstructed as to the limits
of the marvellous.

I mentioned it to no one. But I was immensely relieved when the sinister
visitor took his departure the morning after, and it was upon this
occurrence that my mind was now employed.

Some one said that Dr. Johnson resembled a ghost, who must be spoken to
before it will speak. But my father, in whatever else he may have resembled
a ghost, did not in that particular; for no one but I in his household--and
I very seldom--dared to address him until first addressed by him. I had no
notion how singular this was until I began to go out a little among friends
and relations, and found no such rule in force anywhere else.

As I leaned back in my chair thinking, this phantasm of my father came, and
turned, and vanished with a solemn regularity. It was a peculiar figure,
strongly made, thick-set, with a face large, and very stern; he wore a
loose, black velvet coat and waistcoat. It was, however, the figure of an
elderly rather than an old man--though he was then past seventy--but firm,
and with no sign of feebleness.

I remember the start with which, not suspecting that he was close by me, I
lifted my eyes, and saw that large, rugged countenance looking fixedly on
me, from less than a yard away.

After I saw him, he continued to regard me for a second or two; and then,
taking one of the heavy candlesticks in his gnarled hand, he beckoned me to
follow him; which, in silence and wondering, I accordingly did.

He led me across the hall, where there were lights burning, and into a
lobby by the foot of the back stairs, and so into his library.

It is a long, narrow room, with two tall, slim windows at the far end, now
draped in dark curtains. Dusky it was with but one candle; and he paused
near the door, at the left-hand side of which stood, in those days, an
old-fashioned press or cabinet of carved oak. In front of this he stopped.

He had odd, absent ways, and talked more to himself, I believe, than to all
the rest of the world put together.

'She won't understand,' he whispered, looking at me enquiringly. 'No, she
won't. _Will_ she?'

Then there was a pause, during which he brought forth from his breast
pocket a small bunch of some half-dozen keys, on one of which he looked
frowningly, every now and then balancing it a little before his eyes,
between his finger and thumb, as he deliberated.

I knew him too well, of course, to interpose a word.

'They are easily frightened--ay, they are. I'd better do it another way.'

And pausing, he looked in my face as he might upon a picture.

'They _are_--yes--I had better do it another way--another way; yes--and
she'll not suspect--she'll not suppose.'

Then he looked steadfastly upon the key, and from it to me, suddenly
lifting it up, and said abruptly, 'See, child,' and, after a second or two,
'_Remember_ this key.'

It was oddly shaped, and unlike others.

'Yes, sir.' I always called him 'sir.'

'It opens that,' and he tapped it sharply on the door of the cabinet. 'In
the daytime it is always here,' at which word he dropped it into his pocket
again. 'You see?--and at night under my pillow--you hear me?'

'Yes, sir.'

'You won't forget this cabinet--oak--next the door--on your left--you won't
forget?'

'No, sir.'

'Pity she's a girl, and so young--ay, a girl, and so young--no
sense--giddy. You say, you'll _remember_?'

'Yes, sir.'

'It behoves you.'

He turned round and looked full upon me, like a man who has taken a sudden
resolution; and I think for a moment he had made up his mind to tell me a
great deal more. But if so, he changed it again; and after another pause,
he said slowly and sternly--'You will tell nobody what I have said, under
pain of my displeasure.'

'Oh! no, sir!'

'Good child!'

'_Except_,' he resumed, 'under one contingency; that is, in case I should
be absent, and Dr. Bryerly--you recollect the thin gentleman, in spectacles
and a black wig, who spent three days here last month--should come and
enquire for the key, you understand, in my absence.'

'Yes, sir.'

So he kissed me on the forehead, and said--

'Let us return.'

Which, accordingly, we did, in silence; the storm outside, like a dirge on
a great organ, accompanying our flitting.




CHAPTER II

_UNCLE SILAS_


When we reached the drawing-room, I resumed my chair, and my father his
slow and regular walk to and fro, in the great room. Perhaps it was the
uproar of the wind that disturbed the ordinary tenor of his thoughts; but,
whatever was the cause, certainly he was unusually talkative that night.

After an interval of nearly half an hour, he drew near again, and sat down
in a high-backed arm-chair, beside the fire, and nearly opposite to me, and
looked at me steadfastly for some time, as was his wont, before speaking;
and said he--

'This won't do--you must have a governess.'

In cases of this kind I merely set down my book or work, as it might be,
and adjusted myself to listen without speaking.

'Your French is pretty well, and your Italian; but you have no German.
Your music may be pretty good--I'm no judge--but your drawing might be
better--yes--yes. I believe there are accomplished ladies--finishing
governesses, they call them--who undertake more than any one teacher would
have professed in my time, and do very well. She can prepare you, and
next winter, then, you shall visit France and Italy, where you may be
accomplished as highly as you please.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'You shall. It is nearly six months since Miss Ellerton left you--too long
without a teacher.'

Then followed an interval.

'Dr. Bryerly will ask you about that key, and what it opens; you show all
that to _him_, and no one else.'

'But,' I said, for I had a great terror of disobeying him in ever so minute
a matter, 'you will then be absent, sir--how am I to find the key?'

He smiled on me suddenly--a bright but wintry smile--it seldom came, and
was very transitory, and kindly though mysterious.

'True, child; I'm glad you are so wise; _that_, you will find, I have
provided for, and you shall know exactly where to look. You have remarked
how solitarily I live. You fancy, perhaps, I have not got a friend, and
you are nearly right--_nearly_, but not altogether. I have a very sure
friend--_one_--a friend whom I once misunderstood, but now appreciate.'

I wondered silently whether it could be Uncle Silas.

'He'll make me a call, some day soon; I'm not quite sure when. I won't tell
you his name--you'll hear that soon enough, and I don't want it talked of;
and I must make a little journey with him. You'll not be afraid of being
left alone for a time?'

'And have you promised, sir?' I answered, with another question, my
curiosity and anxiety overcoming my awe. He took my questioning very
good-humouredly.

'Well--_promise_?--no, child; but I'm under condition; he's not to be
denied. I must make the excursion with him the moment he calls. I have no
choice; but, on the whole, I rather like it--remember, I say, I rather
_like_ it.'

And he smiled again, with the same meaning, that was at once stern and sad.
The exact purport of these sentences remained fixed in my mind, so that
even at this distance of time I am quite sure of them.

A person quite unacquainted with my father's habitually abrupt and odd way
of talking, would have fancied that he was possibly a little disordered in
his mind. But no such suspicion for a moment troubled me. I was quite sure
that he spoke of a real person who was coming, and that his journey was
something momentous; and when the visitor of whom he spoke did come, and he
departed with him upon that mysterious excursion, I perfectly understood
his language and his reasons for saying so much and yet so little.

You are not to suppose that all my hours were passed in the sort of
conference and isolation of which I have just given you a specimen; and
singular and even awful as were sometimes my _tête-a-têtes_ with my father,
I had grown so accustomed to his strange ways, and had so unbounded a
confidence in his affection, that they never depressed or agitated me in
the manner you might have supposed. I had a great deal of quite a different
sort of chat with good old Mrs. Rusk, and very pleasant talks with Mary
Quince, my somewhat ancient maid; and besides all this, I had now and then
a visit of a week or so at the house of some one of our country neighbours,
and occasionally a visitor--but this, I must own, very rarely--at Knowl.

There had come now a little pause in my father's revelations, and my fancy
wandered away upon a flight of discovery. Who, I again thought, could this
intending visitor be, who was to come, armed with the prerogative to make
my stay-at-home father forthwith leave his household goods--his books and
his child--to whom he clung, and set forth on an unknown knight-errantry?
Who but Uncle Silas, I thought--that mysterious relative whom I had
never seen--who was, it had in old times been very darkly hinted to me,
unspeakably unfortunate or unspeakably vicious--whom I had seldom heard my
father mention, and then in a hurried way, and with a pained, thoughtful
look. Once only he had said anything from which I could gather my father's
opinion of him, and then it was so slight and enigmatical that I might have
filled in the character very nearly as I pleased.

It happened thus. One day Mrs. Rusk was in the oak-room, I being then about
fourteen. She was removing a stain from a tapestry chair, and I watched the
process with a childish interest. She sat down to rest herself--she had
been stooping over her work--and threw her head back, for her neck was
weary, and in this position she fixed her eyes on a portrait that hung
before her.

It was a full-length, and represented a singularly handsome young man,
dark, slender, elegant, in a costume then quite obsolete, though I believe
it was seen at the beginning of this century--white leather pantaloons and
top-boots, a buff waistcoat, and a chocolate-coloured coat, and the hair
long and brushed back.

There was a remarkable elegance and a delicacy in the features, but also a
character of resolution and ability that quite took the portrait out of the
category of mere fops or fine men. When people looked at it for the first
time, I have so often heard the exclamation--'What a wonderfully handsome
man!' and then, 'What a clever face!' An Italian greyhound stood by him,
and some slender columns and a rich drapery in the background. But though
the accessories were of the luxurious sort, and the beauty, as I have said,
refined, there was a masculine force in that slender oval face, and a fire
in the large, shadowy eyes, which were very peculiar, and quite redeemed it
from the suspicion of effeminacy.

'Is not that Uncle Silas?' said I.

'Yes, dear,' answered Mrs. Rusk, looking, with her resolute little face,
quietly on the portrait.

'He must be a very handsome man, Mrs. Rusk. Don't you think so?' I
continued.

'He _was_, my dear--yes; but it is forty years since that was painted--the
date is there in the corner, in the shadow that comes from his foot, and
forty years, I can tell you, makes a change in most of us;' and Mrs. Rusk
laughed, in cynical good-humour.

There was a little pause, both still looking on the handsome man in
top-boots, and I said--

'And why, Mrs. Rusk, is papa always so sad about Uncle Silas?'

'What's that, child?' said my father's voice, very near. I looked round,
with a start, and flushed and faltered, receding a step from him.

'No harm, dear. You have said nothing wrong,' he said gently, observing
my alarm. 'You said I was always sad, I think, about Uncle Silas. Well,
I don't know how you gather that; but if I were, I will now tell you, it
would not be unnatural. Your uncle is a man of great talents, great faults,
and great wrongs. His talents have not availed him; his faults are long ago
repented of; and his wrongs I believe he feels less than I do, but they are
deep. Did she say any more, madam?' he demanded abruptly of Mrs. Rusk.

'Nothing, sir,' with a stiff little courtesy, answered Mrs. Rusk, who stood
in awe of him.

'And there is no need, child,' he continued, addressing himself to me,
'that you should think more of him at present. Clear your head of Uncle
Silas. One day, perhaps, you will know him--yes, very well--and understand
how villains have injured him.

Then my father retired, and at the door he said--

'Mrs. Rusk, a word, if you please,' beckoning to that lady, who trotted
after him to the library.

I think he then laid some injunction upon the housekeeper, which was
transmitted by her to Mary Quince, for from that time forth I could never
lead either to talk with me about Uncle Silas. They let me talk on, but
were reserved and silent themselves, and seemed embarrassed, and Mrs. Rusk
sometimes pettish and angry, when I pressed for information.

Thus curiosity was piqued; and round the slender portrait in the leather
pantaloons and top-boots gathered many-coloured circles of mystery, and the
handsome features seemed to smile down upon my baffled curiosity with a
provoking significance.

Why is it that this form of ambition--curiosity--which entered into the
temptation of our first parent, is so specially hard to resist? Knowledge
is power--and power of one sort or another is the secret lust of human
souls; and here is, beside the sense of exploration, the undefinable
interest of a story, and above all, something forbidden, to stimulate the
contumacious appetite.




CHAPTER III

_A NEW FACE_


I think it was about a fortnight after that conversation in which my father
had expressed his opinion, and given me the mysterious charge about the
old oak cabinet in his library, as already detailed, that I was one night
sitting at the great drawing-room window, lost in the melancholy reveries
of night, and in admiration of the moonlighted scene. I was the only
occupant of the room; and the lights near the fire, at its farther end,
hardly reached to the window at which I sat.

The shorn grass sloped gently downward from the windows till it met the
broad level on which stood, in clumps, or solitarily scattered, some of the
noblest timber in England. Hoar in the moonbeams stood those graceful
trees casting their moveless shadows upon the grass, and in the background
crowning the undulations of the distance, in masses, were piled those woods
among which lay the solitary tomb where the remains of my beloved mother
rested.

The air was still. The silvery vapour hung serenely on the far horizon,
and the frosty stars blinked brightly. Everyone knows the effect of such a
scene on a mind already saddened. Fancies and regrets float mistily in
the dream, and the scene affects us with a strange mixture of memory and
anticipation, like some sweet old air heard in the distance. As my eyes
rested on those, to me, funereal but glorious woods, which formed the
background of the picture, my thoughts recurred to my father's mysterious
intimations and the image of the approaching visitor; and the thought of
the unknown journey saddened me.

In all that concerned his religion, from very early association, there was
to me something of the unearthly and spectral.

When my dear mamma died I was not nine years old; and I remember, two days
before the funeral, there came to Knowl, where she died, a thin little man,
with large black eyes, and a very grave, dark face.

He was shut up a good deal with my dear father, who was in deep affliction;
and Mrs. Rusk used to say, 'It is rather odd to see him praying with that
little scarecrow from London, and good Mr. Clay ready at call, in the
village; much good that little black whipper-snapper will do him!'

With that little black man, on the day after the funeral, I was sent out,
for some reason, for a walk; my governess was ill, I know, and there was
confusion in the house, and I dare say the maids made as much of a holiday
as they could.

I remember feeling a sort of awe of this little dark man; but I was not
afraid of him, for he was gentle, though sad--and seemed kind. He led me
into the garden--the Dutch garden, we used to call it--with a balustrade,
and statues at the farther front, laid out in a carpet-pattern of
brilliantly-coloured flowers. We came down the broad flight of Caen stone
steps into this, and we walked in silence to the balustrade. The base was
too high at the spot where we reached it for me to see over; but holding my
hand, he said, 'Look through that, my child. Well, you can't; but _I_ can
see beyond it--shall I tell you what? I see ever so much. I see a cottage
with a steep roof, that looks like gold in the sunlight; there are tall
trees throwing soft shadows round it, and flowering shrubs, I can't say
what, only the colours are beautiful, growing by the walls and windows, and
two little children are playing among the stems of the trees, and we are on
our way there, and in a few minutes shall be under those trees ourselves,
and talking to those little children. Yet now to me it is but a picture in
my brain, and to you but a story told by me, which you believe. Come, dear;
let us be going.'

So we descended the steps at the right, and side by side walked along the
grass lane between tall trim walls of evergreens. The way was in deep
shadow, for the sun was near the horizon; but suddenly we turned to the
left, and there we stood in rich sunlight, among the many objects he had
described.

'Is this your house, my little men?' he asked of the children--pretty
little rosy boys--who assented; and he leaned with his open hand against
the stem of one of the trees, and with a grave smile he nodded down to me,
saying--

'You see now, and hear, and _feel_ for yourself that both the vision and
the story were quite true; but come on, my dear, we have further to go.'

And relapsing into silence we had a long ramble through the wood, the same
on which I was now looking in the distance. Every now and then he made me
sit down to rest, and he in a musing solemn sort of way would relate some
little story, reflecting, even to my childish mind, a strange suspicion
of a spiritual meaning, but different from what honest Mrs. Rusk used
to expound to me from the Parables, and, somehow, startling in its very
vagueness.

Thus entertained, though a little awfully, I accompanied the dark
mysterious little 'whipper-snapper' through the woodland glades. We came,
to me quite unexpectedly, in the deep sylvan shadows, upon the grey,
pillared temple, four-fronted, with a slanting pedestal of lichen-stained
steps, the lonely sepulchre in which I had the morning before seen poor
mamma laid. At the sight the fountains of my grief reopened, and I cried
bitterly, repeating, 'Oh! mamma, mamma, little mamma!' and so went on
weeping and calling wildly on the deaf and the silent. There was a stone
bench some ten steps away from the tomb.

'Sit down beside me, my child,' said the grave man with the black eyes,
very kindly and gently. 'Now, what do you see there?' he asked, pointing
horizontally with his stick towards the centre of the opposite structure.

'Oh, _that_--that place where poor mamma is?'

'Yes, a stone wall with pillars, too high for either you or me to see over.
But----'

Here he mentioned a name which I think must have been Swedenborg, from what
I afterwards learnt of his tenets and revelations; I only know that it
sounded to me like the name of a magician in a fairy tale; I fancied he
lived in the wood which surrounded us, and I began to grow frightened as he
proceeded.

'But Swedenborg sees beyond it, over, and _through_ it, and has told me all
that concerns us to know. He says your mamma is not there.'

'She is taken away!' I cried, starting up, and with streaming eyes, gazing
on the building which, though I stamped my feet in my distraction, I was
afraid to approach. 'Oh, _is_ mamma taken away? Where is she? Where have
they brought her to?'

I was uttering unconsciously very nearly the question with which Mary,
in the grey of that wondrous morning on which she stood by the empty
sepulchre, accosted the figure standing near.

'Your mamma is alive but too far away to see or hear us. Swedenborg,
standing here, can see and hear her, and tells me all he sees, just as I
told you in the garden about the little boys and the cottage, and the trees
and flowers which you could not see. You believed in when _I_ told you. So
I can tell you now as I did then; and as we are both, I hope, walking on to
the same place just as we did to the trees and cottage. You will surely see
with your own eyes how true the description is which I give you.'

I was very frightened, for I feared that when he had done his narrative we
were to walk on through the wood into that place of wonders and of shadows
where the dead were visible.

He leaned his elbow on his knee, and his forehead on his hand, which
shaded his downcast eyes. In that attitude he described to me a beautiful
landscape, radiant with a wondrous light, in which, rejoicing, my mother
moved along an airy path, ascending among mountains of fantastic height,
and peaks, melting in celestial colouring into the air, and peopled with
human beings translated into the same image, beauty, and splendour. And
when he had ended his relation, he rose, took my hand, and smiling gently
down on my pale, wondering face, he said the same words he had spoken
before--

'Come, dear, let us go.'

'Oh! no, no, _no_--not now,' I said, resisting, and very much frightened.

'Home, I mean, dear. We cannot walk to the place I have described. We can
only reach it through the gate of death, to which we are all tending, young
and old, with sure steps.'

'And where is the gate of death?' I asked in a sort of whisper, as we
walked together, holding his hand, and looking stealthily. He smiled sadly
and said--

'When, sooner or later, the time comes, as Hagar's eyes were opened in the
wilderness, and she beheld the fountain of water, so shall each of us see
the door open before us, and enter in and be refreshed.'

For a long time following this walk I was very nervous; more so for the
awful manner in which Mrs. Rusk received my statement--with stern lips and
upturned hands and eyes, and an angry expostulation: 'I do wonder at
you, Mary Quince, letting the child walk into the wood with that limb of
darkness. It is a mercy he did not show her the devil, or frighten her out
of her senses, in that lonely place!'

Of these Swedenborgians, indeed, I know no more than I might learn from
good Mrs. Rusk's very inaccurate talk. Two or three of them crossed in the
course of my early life, like magic-lantern figures, the disk of my very
circumscribed observation. All outside was and is darkness. I once tried to
read one of their books upon the future state--heaven and hell; but I grew
after a day or two so nervous that I laid it aside. It is enough for me
to know that their founder either saw or fancied he saw amazing visions,
which, so far from superseding, confirmed and interpreted the language of
the Bible; and as dear papa accepted their ideas, I am happy in thinking
that they did not conflict with the supreme authority of holy writ.

Leaning on my hand, I was now looking upon that solemn wood, white and
shadowy in the moonlight, where, for a long time after that ramble with the
visionary, I fancied the gate of death, hidden only by a strange glamour,
and the dazzling land of ghosts, were situate; and I suppose these earlier
associations gave to my reverie about my father's coming visitor a wilder
and a sadder tinge.




CHAPTER IV

_MADAME DE LA ROUGIERRE_


On a sudden, on the grass before me, stood an odd figure--a very tall woman
in grey draperies, nearly white under the moon, courtesying extraordinarily
low, and rather fantastically.

I stared in something like a horror upon the large and rather hollow
features which I did not know, smiling very unpleasantly on me; and the
moment it was plain that I saw her, the grey woman began gobbling
and cackling shrilly--I could not distinctly hear _what_ through the
window--and gesticulating oddly with her long hands and arms.

As she drew near the window, I flew to the fireplace, and rang the bell
frantically, and seeing her still there, and fearing that she might break
into the room, I flew out of the door, very much frightened, and met
Branston the butler in the lobby.

'There's a woman at the window!' I gasped; 'turn her away, please.'

If I had said a man, I suppose fat Branston would have summoned and sent
forward a detachment of footmen. As it was, he bowed gravely, with a--

'Yes,'m--shall,'m.'

And with an air of authority approached the window.

I don't think that he was pleasantly impressed himself by the first sight
of our visitor, for he stopped short some steps of the window, and demanded
rather sternly--

'What ye doin' there, woman?'

To this summons, her answer, which occupied a little time, was inaudible to
me. But Branston replied--

'I wasn't aware, ma'am; I heerd nothin'; if you'll go round _that_ way,
you'll see the hall-door steps, and I'll speak to the master, and do as he
shall order.'

The figure said something and pointed.

'Yes, that's it, and ye can't miss the door.'

And Mr. Branston returned slowly down the long room, and halted with
out-turned pumps and a grave inclination before me, and the faintest amount
of interrogation in the announcement--

'Please,'m, she says she's the governess.'

'The governess! _What_ governess?'

Branston was too well-bred to smile, and he said thoughtfully--

'P'raps,'m, I'd best ask the master?'

To which I assented, and away strode the flat pumps of the butler to the
library.

I stood breathless in the hall. Every girl at my age knows how much is
involved in such an advent. I also heard Mrs. Rusk, in a minute or two
more, emerge I suppose from the study. She walked quickly, and muttered
sharply to herself--an evil trick, in which she indulged when much 'put
about.' I should have been glad of a word with her; but I fancied she was
vexed, and would not have talked satisfactorily. She did not, however, come
my way; merely crossing the hall with her quick, energetic step.

Was it really the arrival of a governess? Was that apparition which had
impressed me so unpleasantly to take the command of me--to sit alone with
me, and haunt me perpetually with her sinister looks and shrilly gabble?

I was just making up my mind to go to Mary Quince, and learn something
definite, when I heard my father's step approaching from the library: so
I quietly re-entered the drawingroom, but with an anxious and throbbing
heart.

When he came in, as usual, he patted me on the head gently, with a kind of
smile, and then began his silent walk up and down the room. I was yearning
to question him on the point that just then engrossed me so disagreeably;
but the awe in which I stood of him forbade.

After a time he stopped at the window, the curtain of which I had drawn,
and the shutter partly opened, and he looked out, perhaps with associations
of his own, on the scene I had been contemplating.

It was not for nearly an hour after, that my father suddenly, after his
wont, in a few words, apprised me of the arrival of Madame de la Rougierre
to be my governess, highly recommended and perfectly qualified. My heart
sank with a sure presage of ill. I already disliked, distrusted, and feared
her.

I had more than an apprehension of her temper and fear of possibly abused
authority. The large-featured, smirking phantom, saluting me so oddly in
the moonlight, retained ever after its peculiar and unpleasant hold upon my
nerves.

'Well, Miss Maud, dear, I hope you'll like your new governess--for it's
more than _I_ do, just at present at least,' said Mrs. Rusk, sharply--she
was awaiting me in my room. 'I hate them French-women; they're not natural,
I think. I gave her her supper in my room. She eats like a wolf, she does,
the great raw-boned hannimal. I wish you saw her in bed as I did. I put her
next the clock-room--she'll hear the hours betimes, I'm thinking. You never
saw such a sight. The great long nose and hollow cheeks of her, and oogh!
such a mouth! I felt a'most like little Red Riding-Hood--I did, Miss.'

Here honest Mary Quince, who enjoyed Mrs. Rusk's satire, a weapon in which
she was not herself strong, laughed outright.

'Turn down the bed, Mary. She's very agreeable--she is, just now--all
new-comers is; but she did not get many compliments from me, Miss--no,
I rayther think not. I wonder why honest English girls won't answer the
gentry for governesses, instead of them gaping, scheming, wicked furriners?
Lord forgi' me, I think they're all alike.'

Next morning I made acquaintance with Madame de la Rougierre. She was tall,
masculine, a little ghastly perhaps, and draped in purple silk, with a
lace cap, and great bands of black hair, too thick and black, perhaps, to
correspond quite naturally with her bleached and sallow skin, her hollow
jaws, and the fine but grim wrinkles traced about her brows and eyelids.
She smiled, she nodded, and then for a good while she scanned me in silence
with a steady cunning eye, and a stern smile.

'And how is she named--what is Mademoiselle's name?' said the tall
stranger.

'_Maud_, Madame.'

'Maud!--what pretty name! Eh bien! I am very sure my dear Maud she will
be very good little girl--is not so?--and I am sure I shall love you vary
moche. And what 'av you been learning, Maud, my dear cheaile--music,
French, German, eh?'

'Yes, a little; and I had just begun the use of the globes when my
governess went away.'

I nodded towards the globes, which stood near her, as I said this.

'Oh! yes--the globes;' and she spun one of them with her great hand. 'Je
vous expliquerai tout cela à fond.'

Madame de la Rougierre, I found, was always quite ready to explain
everything 'à fond;' but somehow her 'explications,' as she termed them,
were not very intelligible, and when pressed her temper woke up; so that I
preferred, after a while, accepting the expositions just as they came.

Madame was on an unusually large scale, a circumstance which made some of
her traits more startling, and altogether rendered her, in her strange way,
more awful in the eyes of a nervous _child,_ I may say, such as I was. She
used to look at me for a long time sometimes, with the peculiar smile
I have mentioned, and a great finger upon her lip, like the Eleusinian
priestess on the vase.

She would sit, too, sometimes for an hour together, looking into the fire
or out of the window, plainly seeing nothing, and with an odd, fixed look
of something like triumph--very nearly a smile--on her cunning face.

She was by no means a pleasant _gouvernante_ for a nervous girl of my
years. Sometimes she had accesses of a sort of hilarity which frightened me
still more than her graver moods, and I will describe these by-and-by.




CHAPTER V

_SIGHTS AND NOISES_


There is not an old house in England of which the servants and young people
who live in it do not cherish some traditions of the ghostly. Knowl has its
shadows, noises, and marvellous records. Rachel Ruthyn, the beauty of Queen
Anne's time, who died of grief for the handsome Colonel Norbrooke, who
was killed in the Low Countries, walks the house by night, in crisp and
sounding silks. She is not seen, only heard. The tapping of her high-heeled
shoes, the sweep and rustle of her brocades, her sighs as she pauses in the
galleries, near the bed-room doors; and sometimes, on stormy nights, her
sobs.

There is, beside, the 'link-man', a lank, dark-faced, black-haired man, in
a sable suit, with a link or torch in his hand. It usually only smoulders,
with a deep red glow, as he visits his beat. The library is one of the
rooms he sees to. Unlike 'Lady Rachel,' as the maids called her, he is seen
only, never heard. His steps fall noiseless as shadows on floor and carpet.
The lurid glow of his smouldering torch imperfectly lights his figure and
face, and, except when much perturbed, his link never blazes. On those
occasions, however, as he goes his rounds, he ever and anon whirls it
around his head, and it bursts into a dismal flame. This is a fearful omen,
and always portends some direful crisis or calamity. It occurs, only once
or twice in a century.

I don't know whether Madame had heard anything of these phenomena; but she
did report which very much frightened me and Mary Quince. She asked us who
walked in the gallery on which her bed-room opened, making a rustling with
her dress, and going down the stairs, and breathing long breaths here and
there. Twice, she said, she had stood at her door in the dark, listening to
these sounds, and once she called to know who it was. There was no answer,
but the person plainly turned back, and hurried towards her with an
unnatural speed, which made her jump within her door and shut it.

When first such tales are told, they excite the nerves of the young and the
ignorant intensely. But the special effect, I have found, soon wears out
The tale simply takes it's place with the rest. It was with Madame's
narrative.

About a week after its relation, I had my experience of a similar sort.
Mary Quince went down-stairs for a night-light, leaving me in bed, a candle
burning in the room, and being tired. I fell asleep before her return.
When I awoke the candle had been extinguished. But I heard a step softly
approaching. I jumped up--quite forgetting the ghost, and thinking only of
Mary Quince--and opened the door, expecting to see the light of her candle.
Instead, all was dark, and near me I heard the fall of a bare foot on the
oak floor. It was as if some one had stumbled. I said, 'Mary,' but no
answer came, only a rustling of clothes and a breathing at the other side
of the gallery, which passed off towards the upper staircase. I turned into
my room, freezing with horror, and clapt my door. The noise wakened Mary
Quince, who had returned and gone to her bed half an hour before.

About a fortnight after this, Mary Quince, a very veracious spinster,
reported to me, that having got up to fix the window, which was rattling,
at about four o'clock in the morning, she saw a light shining from the
library window. She could swear to its being a strong light, streaming
through the chinks of the shutter, and moving. No doubt the link was waved
about his head by the angry 'link-man.'

These strange occurrences helped, I think, just then to make me nervous,
and prepared the way for the odd sort of ascendency which, through my
sense of the mysterious and super-natural, that repulsive Frenchwoman was
gradually, and it seemed without effort, establishing over me.

Some dark points of her character speedily emerged from the prismatic mist
with which she had enveloped it.

Mrs. Rusk's observation about the agreeability of new-comers I found to be
true; for as Madame began to lose that character, her good-humour abated
very perceptibly, and she began to show gleams of another sort of temper,
that was lurid and dangerous.

Notwithstanding this, she was in the habit of always having her Bible open
by her, and was austerely attentive at morning and evening services, and
asked my father, with great humility, to lend her some translations of
Swedenborg's books, which she laid much to heart.

When we went out for our walk, if the weather were bad we generally made
our promenade up and down the broad terrace in front of the windows. Sullen
and malign at times she used to look, and as suddenly she would pat me on
the shoulder caressingly, and smile with a grotesque benignity, asking
tenderly, 'Are you fatigue, ma chère?' or 'Are you cold-a, dear Maud?'

At first these abrupt transitions puzzled me, sometimes half frightened
me, savouring, I fancied, of insanity. The key, however, was accidentally
supplied, and I found that these accesses of demonstrative affection were
sure to supervene whenever my father's face was visible through the library
windows.

I did not know well what to make of this woman, whom I feared with a vein
of superstitious dread. I hated being alone with her after dusk in the
school-room. She would sometimes sit for half an hour at a time, with her
wide mouth drawn down at the corners, and a scowl, looking into the fire.
If she saw me looking at her, she would change all this on the instant,
affect a sort of languor, and lean her head upon her hand, and ultimately
have recourse to her Bible. But I fancied she did not read, but pursued her
own dark ruminations, for I observed that the open book might often lie for
half an hour or more under her eyes and yet the leaf never turned.

I should have been glad to be assured that she prayed when on her knees, or
read when that book was before her; I should have felt that she was more
canny and human. As it was, those external pieties made a suspicion of a
hollow contrast with realities that helped to scare me; yet it was but a
suspicion--I could not be certain.

Our rector and the curate, with whom she was very gracious, and anxious
about my collects and catechism, had an exalted opinion of her. In public
places her affection for me was always demonstrative.

In like manner she contrived conferences with my father. She was always
making excuses to consult him about my reading, and to confide in him her
sufferings, as I learned, from my contumacy and temper. The fact is, I was
altogether quiet and submissive. But I think she had a wish to reduce me
to a state of the most abject bondage. She had designs of domination and
subversion regarding the entire household, I now believe, worthy of the
evil spirit I sometimes fancied her.

My father beckoned me into the study one day, and said he--

'You ought not to give poor Madame so much pain. She is one of the few
persons who take an interest in you; why should she have so often to
complain of your ill-temper and disobedience?--why should she be compelled
to ask my permission to punish you? Don't be afraid, I won't concede that.
But in so kind a person it argues much. Affection I can't command--respect
and obedience I may--and I insist on your rendering _both_ to Madame.'

'But sir,' I said, roused into courage by the gross injustice of the
charge, 'I have always done exactly as she bid me, and never said one
disrespectful word to Madame.'

'I don't think, child, _you_ are the best judge of that. Go, and _amend_.'
And with a displeased look he pointed to the door. My heart swelled with
the sense of wrong, and as I reached the door I turned to say another word,
but I could not, and only burst into tears.

'There--don't cry, little Maud--only let us do better for the future.
There--there--there has been enough.'

And he kissed my forehead, and gently put me out and closed the door.

In the school-room I took courage, and with some warmth upbraided Madame.

'Wat wicked cheaile!' moaned Madame, demurely. 'Read aloud those
three--yes, _those_ three chapters of the Bible, my dear Maud.'

There was no special fitness in those particular chapters, and when they
were ended she said in a sad tone--

'Now, dear, you must commit to memory this pretty priaire for umility of
art.'

It was a long one, and in a state of profound irritation I got through the
task.

Mrs. Rusk hated her. She said she stole wine and brandy whenever the
opportunity offered--that she was always asking her for such stimulants and
pretending pains in her stomach. Here, perhaps, there was exaggeration; but
I knew it was true that I had been at different times despatched on that
errand and pretext for brandy to Mrs. Rusk, who at last came to her bedside
with pills and a mustard blister only, and was hated irrevocably ever
after.

I felt all this was done to torture me. But a day is a long time to a
child, and they forgive quickly. It was always with a sense of danger that
I heard Madame say she must go and see Monsieur Ruthyn in the library,
and I think a jealousy of her growing influence was an ingredient in the
detestation in which honest Mrs. Rusk held her.




CHAPTER VI

_A WALK IN THE WOOD_


Two little pieces of by-play in which I detected her confirmed my
unpleasant suspicion. From the corner of the gallery I one day saw her,
when she thought I was out and all quiet, with her ear at the keyhole of
papa's study, as we used to call the sitting-room next his bed-room. Her
eyes were turned in the direction of the stairs, from which only she
apprehended surprise. Her great mouth was open, and her eyes absolutely
goggled with eagerness. She was devouring all that was passing there.
I drew back into the shadow with a kind of disgust and horror. She was
transformed into a great gaping reptile. I felt that I could have thrown
something at her; but a kind of fear made me recede again toward my room.
Indignation, however, quickly returned, and I came back, treading briskly
as I did so. When I reached the angle of the gallery again. Madame, I
suppose, had heard me, for she was half-way down the stairs.

'Ah, my dear Cheaile, I am so glad to find you, and you are dress to come
out. We shall have so pleasant walk.'

At that moment the door of my father's study opened, and Mrs. Rusk, with
her dark energetic face very much flushed, stepped out in high excitement.

'The Master says you may have the brandy-bottle, Madame and I'm glad to be
rid of it--_I_ am.'

Madame courtesied with a great smirk, that was full of intangible hate and
insult.

'Better your own brandy, if drink you must!' exclaimed Mrs. Rusk. 'You may
come to the store-room now, or the butler can take it.'

And off whisked Mrs. Rusk for the back staircase.

There had been no common skirmish on this occasion, but a pitched battle.

Madame had made a sort of pet of Anne Wixted, an underchambermaid, and
attached her to her interest economically by persuading me to make her
presents of some old dresses and other things. Anne was such an angel!

But Mrs. Rusk, whose eyes were about her, detected Anne, with a
brandy-bottle under her apron, stealing up-stairs. Anne, in a panic,
declared the truth. Madame had commissioned her to buy it in the town, and
convey it to her bed-room. Upon this, Mrs. Rusk impounded the flask; and,
with Anne beside her, rather precipitately appeared before 'the Master.' He
heard and summoned Madame. Madame was cool, frank, and fluent. The brandy
was purely medicinal. She produced a document in the form of a note. Doctor
Somebody presented his compliments to Madame de la Rougierre, and ordered
her a table-spoonful of brandy and some drops of laudanum whenever the pain
of stomach returned. The flask would last a whole year, perhaps two. She
claimed her medicine.

Man's estimate of woman is higher than woman's own. Perhaps in their
relations to men they are generally more trustworthy--perhaps woman's is
the juster, and the other an appointed illusion. I don't know; but so it is
ordained.

Mrs. Rusk was recalled, and I saw, as you are aware, Madame's procedure
during the interview.

It was a great battle--a great victory. Madame was in high spirits. The air
was sweet--the landscape charming--I, so good--everything so beautiful!
Where should we go? _this_ way?

I had made a resolution to speak as little as possible to Madame, I was so
incensed at the treachery I had witnessed; but such resolutions do not last
long with very young people, and by the time we had reached the skirts of
the wood we were talking pretty much as usual.

'I don't wish to go into the wood, Madame.

'And for what?'

'Poor mamma is buried there.'

'Is _there_ the vault?' demanded Madame eagerly.

I assented.

'My faith, curious reason; you say because poor mamma is buried there you
will not approach! Why, cheaile, what would good Monsieur Ruthyn say if
he heard such thing? You are surely not so unkain', and I am with you.
_Allons_. Let us come--even a little part of the way.'

And so I yielded, though still reluctant.

There was a grass-grown road, which we easily reached, leading to the
sombre building, and we soon arrived before it.

Madame de la Rougierre seemed rather curious. She sat down on the little
bank opposite, in her most languid pose--her head leaned upon the tips of
her fingers.

'How very sad--how solemn!' murmured Madame. 'What noble tomb! How triste,
my dear cheaile, your visit 'ere must it be, remembering a so sweet maman.
There is new inscription--is it not new?' And so, indeed, it seemed.

'I am fatigue--maybe you will read it aloud to me slowly and solemnly, my
dearest Maud?'

As I approached, I happened to look, I can't tell why, suddenly, over my
shoulder; I was startled, for Madame was grimacing after me with a vile
derisive distortion. She pretended to be seized with a fit of coughing. But
it would not do: she saw that I had detected her, and she laughed aloud.

'Come here, dear cheaile. I was just reflecting how foolish is all this
thing--the tomb--the epitaph. I think I would 'av none--no, no epitaph. We
regard them first for the oracle of the dead, and find them after only the
folly of the living. So I despise. Do you think your house of Knowl down
there is what you call haunt, my dear?'

'Why?' said I, flushing and growing pale again. I felt quite afraid of
Madame, and confounded at the suddenness of all this.

'Because Anne Wixted she says there is ghost. How dark is this place! and
so many of the Ruthyn family they are buried here--is not so? How high and
thick are the trees all round! and nobody comes near.'

And Madame rolled her eyes awfully, as if she expected to see something
unearthly, and, indeed, looked very like it herself.

'Come away, Madame,' I said, growing frightened, and feeling that if I were
once, by any accident, to give way to the panic that was gathering round
me, I should instantaneously lose all control of myself. 'Oh, come away!
do, Madame--I'm frightened.'

'No, on the contrary, sit here by me. It is very odd, you will think, ma
chêre--un goût bizarre, vraiment!--but I love very much to be near to the
dead people--in solitary place like this. I am not afraid of the dead
people, nor of the ghosts. 'Av you ever see a ghost, my dear?'

'Do, Madame, _pray_ speak of something else.'

'Wat little fool! But no, you are not afraid. I 'av seen the ghosts myself.
I saw one, for example, last night, shape like a monkey, sitting in the
corner, with his arms round his knees; very wicked, old, old man his face
was like, and white eyes so large.'

'Come away, Madame! you are trying to frighten me,' I said, in the childish
anger which accompanies fear. Madame laughed an ugly laugh, and said--

'Eh bien! little fool!--I will not tell the rest if you are really
frightened; let us change to something else.'

'Yes, yes! oh, do--pray do.'

'Wat good man is your father!'

'Very--the kindest darling. I don't know why it is, Madame, I am so afraid
of him, and never could tell him how much I love him.'

This confidential talking with Madame, strange to say, implied no
confidence; it resulted from fear--it was deprecatory. I treated her as if
she had human sympathies, in the hope that they might be generated somehow.

'Was there not a doctor from London with him a few months ago? Dr. Bryerly,
I think they call him.'

'Yes, a Doctor Bryerly, who remained a few days. Shall we begin to walk
towards home, Madame? Do, pray.'

'Immediately, cheaile; and does your father suffer much?'

'No--I think not.'

'And what then is his disease?'

'Disease! he has _no_ disease. Have you heard anything about his health,
Madame?' I said, anxiously.

'Oh no, ma foi--I have heard nothing; but if the doctor came, it was not
because he was quite well.'

'But that doctor is a doctor in theology, I fancy. I know he is a
Swedenborgian; and papa is so well, he _could_ not have come as a
physician.'

'I am very glad, ma chère, to hear; but still you know your father is
old man to have so young cheaile as you. Oh, yes--he is old man, and so
uncertain life is. 'As he made his will, my dear? Every man so rich as he,
especially so old, aught to 'av made his will.'

'There is no need of haste, Madame; it is quite time enough when his health
begins to fail.'

'But has he really compose no will?'

'I really don't know, Madame.'

'Ah, little rogue! you will not tell--but you are not such fool as you
feign yourself. No, no; you know everything. Come, tell me all about--it is
for your advantage, you know. What is in his will, and when he wrote?'

'But, Madame, I really know nothing of it. I can't say whether there is a
will or not. Let us talk of something else.'

'But, cheaile, it will not kill Monsieur Ruthyn to make his will; he will
not come to lie here a day sooner by cause of that; but if he make no will,
you may lose a great deal of the property. Would not that be pity?'

'I really don't know anything of his will. If papa has made one, he has
never spoken of it to me. I know he loves me--that is enough.'

'Ah! you are not such little goose--you do know everything, of course. Come
tell me, little obstinate, otherwise I will break your little finger. Tell
me everything.'

'I know nothing of papa's will. You don't know, Madame, how you hurt me.
Let us speak of something else.'

'You do know, and you must tell, petite dure-tête, or I will break a your
little finger.'

With which words she seized that joint, and laughing spitefully, she
twisted it suddenly back. I screamed while she continued to laugh.

'Will you tell?'

'Yes, yes! let me go,' I shrieked.

She did not release it immediately however, but continued her torture and
discordant laughter. At last she finally released my finger.

'So she is going to be good cheaile, and tell everything to her
affectionate gouvernante. What do you cry for, little fool?'

'You've hurt me very much--you have broken my finger,' I sobbed.

'Rub it and blow it and give it a kiss, little fool! What cross girl! I
will never play with you again--never. Let us go home.'

Madame was silent and morose all the way home. She would not answer my
questions, and affected to be very lofty and offended.

This did not last very long, however, and she soon resumed her wonted ways.
And she returned to the question of the will, but not so directly, and with
more art.

Why should this dreadful woman's thoughts be running so continually upon my
father's will? How could it concern her?




CHAPTER VII

_CHURCH SCARSDALE_


I think all the females of our household, except Mrs. Rusk, who was at open
feud with her and had only room for the fiercer emotions, were more or less
afraid of this inauspicious foreigner.

Mrs. Rusk would say in her confidences in my room--

'Where does she come from?--is she a French or a Swiss one, or is she a
Canada woman? I remember one of _them_ when I was a girl, and a nice limb
_she_ was, too! And who did she live with? Where was her last family? Not
one of us knows nothing about her, no more than a child; except, of course,
the Master--I do suppose he made enquiry. She's always at hugger-mugger
with Anne Wixted. I'll pack that _one_ about her business, if she doesn't
mind. Tattling and whispering eternally. It's not about her own business
she's a-talking. Madame de la Rougepot, I call her. She _does_ know how to
paint up to the ninety-nines--she does, the old cat. I beg your pardon,
Miss, but _that_ she is--a devil, and no mistake. I found her out first by
her thieving the Master's gin, that the doctor ordered him, and filling the
decanter up with water--the old villain; but she'll be found out yet, she
will; and all the maids is afraid on her. She's not right, they think--a
witch or a ghost--I should not wonder. Catherine Jones found her in her bed
asleep in the morning after she sulked with you, you know, Miss, with all
her clothes on, what-ever was the meaning; and I think she has frightened
_you,_ Miss and has you as nervous as anythink--I do,' and so forth.

It was true. I _was_ nervous, and growing rather more so; and I think this
cynical woman perceived and intended it, and was pleased. I was always
afraid of her concealing herself in my room, and emerging at night to scare
me. She began sometimes to mingle in my dreams, too--always awfully; and
this nourished, of course, the kind of ambiguous fear in which, in waking
hours, I held her.

I dreamed one night that she led me, all the time whispering something so
very fast that I could not understand her, into the library, holding
a candle in her other hand above her head. We walked on tiptoe, like
criminals at the dead of night, and stopped before that old oak cabinet
which my father had indicated in so odd a way to me. I felt that we were
about some contraband practice. There was a key in the door, which I
experienced a guilty horror at turning, she whispering in the same
unintelligible way, all the time, at my ear. I _did_ turn it; the door
opened quite softly, and within stood my father, his face white and
malignant, and glaring close in mine. He cried in a terrible voice,
'Death!' Out went Madame's candle, and at the same moment, with a scream,
I waked in the dark--still fancying myself in the library; and for an hour
after I continued in a hysterical state.

Every little incident about Madame furnished a topic of eager discussion
among the maids. More or less covertly, they nearly all hated and feared
her. They fancied that she was making good her footing with 'the Master;'
and that she would then oust Mrs. Rusk--perhaps usurp her place--and so
make a clean sweep of them all. I fancy the honest little housekeeper did
not discourage that suspicion.

About this time I recollect a pedlar--an odd, gipsified-looking man--called
in at Knowl. I and Catherine Jones were in the court when he came, and set
down his pack on the low balustrade beside the door.

All sorts of commodities he had--ribbons, cottons, silks, stockings,
lace, and even some bad jewellry; and just as he began his display--an
interesting matter in a quiet country house--Madame came upon the ground.
He grinned a recognition, and hoped 'Madamasel' was well, and 'did not look
to see _her_ here.'

'Madamasel' thanked him. 'Yes, vary well,' and looked for the first time
decidedly 'put out.'

'Wat a pretty things!' she said. 'Catherine, run and tell Mrs. Rusk. She
wants scissars, and lace too--I heard her say.'

So Catherine, with a lingering look, departed; and Madame said--

'Will you, dear cheaile, be so kind to bring here my purse, I forgot on the
table in my room; also, I advise you, bring _your_.'

Catherine returned with Mrs. Rusk. Here was a man who could tell them
something of the old Frenchwoman, at last! Slyly they dawdled over his
wares, until Madame had made her market and departed with me. But when the
coveted opportunity came, the pedlar was quite impenetrable. 'He forgot
everything; he did not believe as he ever saw the lady before. He called a
Frenchwoman, all the world over, Madamasel--that wor the name on 'em all.
He never seed her in partiklar afore, as he could bring to mind. He liked
to see 'em always, 'cause they makes the young uns buy.'

This reserve and oblivion were very provoking, and neither Mrs. Rusk nor
Catherine Jones spent sixpence with him;--he was a stupid fellow, or worse.

Of course Madame had tampered with him. But truth, like murder, will out
some day. Tom Williams, the groom, had seen her, when alone with him, and
pretending to look at his stock, with her face almost buried in his silks
and Welsh linseys, talking as fast as she could all the time, and slipping
_money_, he did suppose, under a piece of stuff in his box.

In the mean time, I and Madame were walking over the wide, peaty
sheep-walks that lie between Knowl and Church Scarsdale. Since our visit to
the mausoleum in the wood, she had not worried me so much as before. She
had been, indeed, more than usually thoughtful, very little talkative, and
troubled me hardly at all about French and other accomplishments. A walk
was a part of our daily routine. I now carried a tiny basket in my hand,
with a few sandwiches, which were to furnish our luncheon when we reached
the pretty scene, about two miles away, whither we were tending.

We had started a little too late; Madame grew unwontedly fatigued and sat
down to rest on a stile before we had got half-way; and there she intoned,
with a dismal nasal cadence, a quaint old Bretagne ballad, about a lady
with a pig's head:--

  'This lady was neither pig nor maid,
  And so she was not of human mould;
  Not of the living nor the dead.
  Her left hand and foot were warm to touch;
  Her right as cold as a corpse's flesh!
  And she would sing like a funeral bell, with a ding-dong tune.
  The pigs were afraid, and viewed her aloof;
  And women feared her and stood afar.
  She could do without sleep for a year and a day;
  She could sleep like a corpse, for a month and more.
  No one knew how this lady fed--
  On acorns or on flesh.
  Some say that she's one of the swine-possessed,
  That swam over the sea of Gennesaret.
  A mongrel body and demon soul.
  Some say she's the wife of the Wandering Jew,
  And broke the law for the sake of pork;
  And a swinish face for a token doth bear,
  That her shame is now, and her punishment coming.'

And so it went on, in a gingling rigmarole. The more anxious I seemed to go
on our way, the more likely was she to loiter. I therefore showed no signs
of impatience, and I saw her consult her watch in the course of her ugly
minstrelsy, and slyly glance, as if expecting something, in the direction
of our destination.

When she had sung to her heart's content, up rose Madame, and began to walk
onward silently. I saw her glance once or twice, as before, toward the
village of Trillsworth, which lay in front, a little to our left, and
the smoke of which hung in a film over the brow of the hill. I think she
observed me, for she enquired--

'Wat is that a smoke there?'

'That is Trillsworth, Madame; there is a railway station there.'

'Oh, le chemin de fer, so near! I did not think. Where it goes?'

I told her, and silence returned.

Church Scarsdale is a very pretty and odd scene. The slightly undulating
sheep-walk dips suddenly into a wide glen, in the lap of which, by a
bright, winding rill, rise from the sward the ruins of a small abbey, with
a few solemn trees scattered round. The crows' nests hung untenanted in the
trees; the birds were foraging far away from their roosts. The very cattle
had forsaken the place. It was solitude itself.

Madame drew a long breath and smiled.

'Come down, come down, cheaile--come down to the churchyard.'

As we descended the slope which shut out the surrounding world, and the
scene grew more sad and lonely. Madame's spirits seemed to rise.

'See 'ow many grave-stones--one, _two_ hundred. Don't you love the dead,
cheaile? I will teach you to love them. You shall see me die here to-day,
for half an hour, and be among them. That is what I love.'

We were by this time at the little brook's side, and the low churchyard
wall with a stile, reached by a couple of stepping-stones, across the
stream, immediately at the other side.

'Come, now!' cried Madame, raising her face, as if to sniff the air; 'we
are close to them. You will like them soon as I. You shall see five of
them. Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira! Come cross quickily! I am Madame la
Morgue--Mrs. Deadhouse! I will present you my friends, Monsieur Cadavre and
Monsieur Squelette. Come, come, leetle mortal, let us play. Ouaah!' And
she uttered a horrid yell from her enormous mouth, and pushing her wig and
bonnet back, so as to show her great, bald head. She was laughing, and
really looked quite mad.

'No, Madame, I will not go with you,' I said, disengaging my hand with a
violent effort, receding two or three steps.

'Not enter the churchyard! Ma foi--wat mauvais goût! But see, we are
already in shade. The sun he is setting soon--where well you remain,
cheaile? I will not stay long.'

'I'll stay here,' I said, a little angrily--for I _was_ angry as well as
nervous; and through my fear was that indignation at her extravagances
which mimicked lunacy so unpleasantly, and were, I knew, designed to
frighten me.

Over the stepping-stones, pulling up her dress, she skipped with her long,
lank legs, like a witch joining a Walpurgis. Over the stile she strode, and
I saw her head wagging, and heard her sing some of her ill-omened rhymes,
as she capered solemnly, with many a grin and courtesy, among the graves
and headstones, towards the ruin.




CHAPTER VIII

_THE SMOKER_


Three years later I learned--in a way she probably little expected, and
then did not much care about--what really occurred there. I learned even
phrases and looks--for the story was related by one who had heard it
told--and therefore I venture to narrate what at the moment I neither saw
nor suspected. While I sat, flushed and nervous, upon a flat stone by the
bank of the little stream, Madame looked over her shoulder, and perceiving
that I was out of sight, she abated her pace, and turned sharply towards
the ruin which lay at her left. It was her first visit, and she was merely
exploring; but now, with a perfectly shrewd and businesslike air, turning
the corner of the building, she saw, seated upon the edge of a grave-stone,
a rather fat and flashily-equipped young man, with large, light whiskers, a
jerry hat, green cutaway coat with gilt buttons, and waistcoat and trousers
rather striking than elegant in pattern. He was smoking a short pipe, and
made a nod to Madame, without either removing it from his lips or rising,
but with his brown and rather good-looking face turned up, he eyed her with
something of the impudent and sulky expression that was habitual to it.

'Ha, Deedle, you are there! an' look so well. I am here, too, quite _a_lon;
but my friend, she wait outside the churchyard, by-side the leetle river,
for she must not think I know you--so I am come _a_lon.'

'You're a quarter late, and I lost a fight by you, old girl, this morning,'
said the gay man, and spat on the ground; 'and I wish you would not call me
Diddle. I'll call you Granny if you do.'

'Eh bien! _Dud,_ then. She is vary nice--wat you like. Slim waist, wite
teeth, vary nice eyes--dark--wat you say is best--and nice leetle foot and
ankle.'

Madame smiled leeringly.

Dud smoked on.

'Go on,' said Dud, with a nod of command.

'I am teach her to sing and play--she has such sweet voice!

There was another interval here.

'Well, that isn't much good. I hate women's screechin' about fairies and
flowers. Hang her! there's a scarecrow as sings at Curl's Divan. Such a
caterwauling upon a stage! I'd like to put my two barrels into her.'

By this time Dud's pipe was out, and he could afford to converse.

'You shall see her and decide. You will walk down the river, and pass her
by.'

'That's as may be; howsoever, it would not do, nohow, to buy a pig in a
poke, you know. And s'pose I shouldn't like her, arter all?'

Madame sneered, with a patois ejaculation of derision.

'Vary good! Then some one else will not be so 'ard to please--as you will
soon find.'

'Some one's bin a-lookin' arter her, you mean?' said the young man, with a
shrewd uneasy glance on the cunning face of the French lady.

'I mean precisely--that which I mean,' replied the lady, with a teazing
pause at the break I have marked.

'Come, old 'un, none of your d---- old chaff, if you want me to stay
here listening to you. Speak out, can't you? There's any chap as has bin
a-lookin' arter her--is there?'

'Eh bien! I suppose some.'

'Well, you _suppose,_ and _I_ suppose--we may _all_ suppose, I guess; but
that does not make a thing be, as wasn't before; and you tell me as how
the lass is kep' private up there, and will be till you're done educating
her--a precious good 'un that is!' And he laughed a little lazily, with
the ivory handle of his cane on his lip, and eyeing Madame with indolent
derision.

Madame laughed, but looked rather dangerous.

'I'm only chaffin', you know, old girl. _You_'ve bin chaffin'--w'y
shouldn't _I_? But I don't see why she can't wait a bit; and what's all the
d----d hurry for? _I_'m in no hurry. I don't want a wife on my back for a
while. There's no fellow marries till he's took his bit o' fun, and seen
life--is there! And why should I be driving with her to fairs, or to
church, or to meeting, by jingo!--for they say she's a Quaker--with a babby
on each knee, only to please them as will be dead and rotten when _I_'m
only beginning?'

'Ah, you are such charming fellow; always the same--always sensible. So
I and my friend we will walk home again, and you go see Maggie Hawkes.
Good-a-by, Dud--good-a-by.'

'Quiet, you fool!--can't ye?' said the young gentleman, with the sort of
grin that made his face vicious when a horse vexed him. 'Who ever said I
wouldn't go look at the girl? Why, you know that's just what I come here
for--don't you? Only when I think a bit, and a notion comes across me, why
shouldn't I speak out? I'm not one o' them shilly-shallies. If I like the
girl, I'll not be mug in and mug out about it. Only mind ye, I'll judge for
myself. Is that her a-coming?'

'No; it was a distant sound.'

Madame peeped round the corner. No one was approaching.

'Well, you go round that a-way, and you only look at her, you know, for she
is such fool--so nairvous.'

'Oh, is that the way with her?' said Dud, knocking out the ashes of his
pipe on a tombstone, and replacing the Turkish utensil in his pocket.
'Well, then, old lass, good-bye,' and he shook her hand. 'And, do ye see,
don't ye come up till I pass, for I'm no hand at play-acting; an' if you
called me "sir," or was coming it dignified and distant, you know, I'd be
sure to laugh, a'most, and let all out. So good-bye, d'ye see, and if you
want me again be sharp to time, mind.

From habit he looked about for his dogs, but he had not brought one. He had
come unostentatiously by rail, travelling in a third-class carriage, for
the advantage of Jack Briderly's company, and getting a world of useful
wrinkles about the steeplechase that was coming off next week.

So he strode away, cutting off the heads of the nettles with his cane as he
went; and Madame walked forth into the open space among the graves, where I
might have seen her, had I stood up, looking with the absorbed gaze of an
artist on the ruin.

In a little while, along the path, I heard the clank of a step, and the
gentleman in the green cutaway coat, sucking his cane, and eyeing me
with an offensive familiar sort of stare the while, passed me by, rather
hesitating as he did so. I was glad when he turned the corner in the little
hollow close by, and disappeared. I stood up at once, and was reassured
by a sight of Madame, not very many yards away, looking at the ruin, and
apparently restored to her right mind. The last beams of the sun were by
this time touching the uplands, and I was longing to recommence our walk
home. I was hesitating about calling to Madame, because that lady had a
certain spirit of opposition within her, and to disclose a small wish
of any sort was generally, if it lay in her power, to prevent its
accomplishment.

At this moment the gentleman in the green coat returned, approaching me
with a slow sort of swagger.

'I say, Miss, I dropped a glove close by here. May you have seen it?'

'No, sir,' I said, drawing back a little, and looking, I dare say, both
frightened and offended.

'I do think I must 'a dropped it close by your foot, Miss.'

'No, sir,' I repeated.

'No offence, Miss, but you're sure you didn't hide it?'

I was beginning to grow seriously uncomfortable.

'Don't be frightened, Miss; it's only a bit o' chaff. I'm not going to
search.'

I called aloud, 'Madame, Madame!' and he whistled through his fingers, and
shouted, 'Madame, Madame,' and added, 'She's as deaf as a tombstone, or
she'll hear that. Gi'e her my compliments, and say I said you're a beauty,
Miss;' and with a laugh and a leer he strode off.

Altogether this had not been a very pleasant excursion. Madame gobbled up
our sandwiches, commending them every now and then to me. But I had been
too much excited to have any appetite left, and very tired I was when we
reached home.

'So, there is lady coming to-morrow?' said Madame, who knew everything.
'Wat is her name? I forget.'

'Lady Knollys,' I answered.

'Lady Knollys--wat odd name! She is very young--is she not?'

'Past fifty, I think.'

'Hélas! She's vary old, then. Is she rich?'

'I don't know. She has a place in Derbyshire.'

'Derbyshire--that is one of your English counties, is it not?'

'Oh yes, Madame,' I answered, laughing. 'I have said it to you twice since
you came;' and I gabbled through the chief towns and rivers as catalogued
in my geography.

'Bah! to be sure--of course, cheaile. And is she your relation?'

'Papa's first cousin.'

'Won't you present-a me, pray?--I would so like!'

Madame had fallen into the English way of liking people with titles, as
perhaps foreigners would if titles implied the sort of power they do
generally with us.

'Certainly, Madame.'

'You will not forget?'

'Oh no.'

Madame reminded me twice, in the course of the evening, of my promise.
She was very eager on this point. But it is a world of disappointment,
influenza, and rheumatics; and next morning Madame was prostrate in her
bed, and careless of all things but flannel and James's powder.

Madame was _désolée_; but she could not raise her head. She only murmured a
question.

'For 'ow long time, dear, will Lady Knollys remain?'

'A very few days, I believe.'

'Hélas! 'ow onlucky! maybe to-morrow I shall be better Ouah! my ear. The
laudanum, dear cheaile!'

And so our conversation for that time ended, and Madame buried her head in
her old red cashmere shawl.




CHAPTER IX

_MONICA KNOLLYS_


Punctually Lady Knollys arrived. She was accompanied by her nephew, Captain
Oakley.

They arrived a little before dinner; just in time to get to their rooms and
dress. But Mary Quince enlivened my toilet with eloquent descriptions of
the youthful Captain whom she had met in the gallery, on his way to his
room, with the servant, and told me how he stopped to let her pass, and how
'he smiled so 'ansom.'

I was very young then, you know, and more childish even than my years; but
this talk of Mary Quince's interested me, I must confess, considerably. I
was painting all sort of portraits of this heroic soldier, while affecting,
I am afraid, a hypocritical indifference to her narration, and I know I was
very nervous and painstaking about my toilet that evening. When I went down
to the drawing-room, Lady Knollys was there, talking volubly to my father
as I entered--a woman not really old, but such as very young people fancy
aged--energetic, bright, saucy, dressed handsomely in purple satin, with a
good deal of lace, and a rich point--I know not how to call it--not a cap,
a sort of head-dress--light and simple, but grand withal, over her greyish,
silken hair.

Rather tall, by no means stout, on the whole a good firm figure, with
something kindly in her look. She got up, quite like a young person, and
coming quickly to meet me with a smile--

'My young cousin!' she cried, and kissed me on both cheeks. 'You know who
I am? Your cousin Monica--Monica Knollys--and very glad, dear, to see you,
though she has not set eyes on you since you were no longer than that
paper-knife. Now come here to the lamp, for I must look at you. Who is she
like? Let me see. Like your poor mother, I think, my dear; but you've the
Aylmer nose--yes--not a bad nose either, and, come I very good eyes, upon
my life--yes, certainly something of her poor mother--not a bit like you,
Austin.'

My father gave her a look as near a smile as I had seen there for a long
time, shrewd, cynical, but kindly too, and said he--

'So much the better, Monica, eh?'

'It was not for me to say--but you know, Austin, you always were an ugly
creature. How shocked and indignant the little girl looks! You must not be
vexed, you loyal little woman, with Cousin Monica for telling the truth.
Papa was and will be ugly all his days. Come, Austin, dear, tell her--is
not it so?'

'What! depose against myself! That's not English law, Monica.'

'Well, maybe not; but if the child won't believe her own eyes, how is she
to believe me? She has long, pretty hands--you have--and very nice feet
too. How old is she?'

'How old, child?' said my father to me, transferring the question.

She recurred again to my eyes.

'That is the true grey--large, deep, soft--very peculiar. Yes, dear, very
pretty--long lashes, and such bright tints! You'll be in the Book of
Beauty, my dear, when you come out, and have all the poet people writing
verses to the tip of your nose--and a very pretty little nose it is!'

I must mention here how striking was the change in my father's spirit while
talking and listening to his odd and voluble old Cousin Monica. Reflected
from bygone associations, there had come a glimmer of something, not
gaiety, indeed, but like an appreciation of gaiety. The gloom and
inflexibility were gone, and there was an evident encouragement and
enjoyment of the incessant sallies of his bustling visitor.

How morbid must have been the tendencies of his habitual solitude, I think,
appeared from the evident thawing and brightening that accompanied even
this transient gleam of human society. I was not a companion--more childish
than most girls of my age, and trained in all his whimsical ways, never to
interrupt a silence, or force his thoughts by unexpected question or remark
out of their monotonous or painful channel.

I was as much surprised at the good-humour with which he submitted to
his cousin's saucy talk; and, indeed, just then those black-panelled and
pictured walls, and that quaint, misshapen room, seemed to have exchanged
their stern and awful character for something wonderfully pleasanter to me,
notwithstanding the unpleasantness of the personal criticism to which the
plain-spoken lady chose to subject me.

Just at that moment Captain Oakley joined us. He was my first actual vision
of that awful and distant world of fashion, of whose splendours I had
already read something in the three-volumed gospel of the circulating
library.

Handsome, elegant, with features almost feminine, and soft, wavy, black
hair, whiskers and moustache, he was altogether such a knight as I had
never beheld, or even fancied, at Knowl--a hero of another species, and
from the region of the demigods. I did not then perceive that coldness of
the eye, and cruel curl of the voluptuous lip--only a suspicion, yet enough
to indicate the profligate man, and savouring of death unto death.

But I was young, and had not yet the direful knowledge of good and evil
that comes with years; and he was so very handsome, and talked in a way
that was so new to me, and was so much more charming than the well-bred
converse of the humdrum county families with whom I had occasionally
sojourned for a week at a time.

It came out incidentally that his leave of absence was to expire the
day after to-morrow. A Lilliputian pang of disappointment followed this
announcement. Already I was sorry to lose him. So soon we begin to make a
property of what pleases us.

I was shy, but not awkward. I was flattered by the attention of this
amusing, perhaps rather fascinating, young man of the world; and he plainly
addressed himself with diligence to amuse and please me. I dare say there
was more effort than I fancied in bringing his talk down to my humble
level, and interesting me and making me laugh about people whom I had never
heard of before, than I then suspected.

Cousin Knollys meanwhile was talking to papa. It was just the conversation
that suited a man so silent as habit had made him, for her frolic fluency
left him little to supply. It was totally impossible, indeed, even in our
taciturn household, that conversation should ever flag while she was among
us.

Cousin Knollys and I went into the drawing-room together, leaving the
gentlemen--rather ill-assorted, I fear--to entertain one another for a
time.

'Come here, my dear, and sit near me,' said Lady Knollys, dropping into an
easy chair with an energetic little plump, 'and tell me how you and your
papa get on. I can remember him quite a cheerful man once, and rather
amusing--yes, indeed--and now you see what a bore he is--all by shutting
himself up and nursing his whims and fancies. Are those your drawings,
dear?'

'Yes, very bad, I'm afraid; but there are a few, _better_, I think in the
portfolio in the cabinet in the hall.'

'They are by _no_ means bad, my dear; and you play, of course?'

'Yes--that is, a little--pretty well, I hope.'

'I dare say. I must hear you by-and-by. And how does your papa amuse you?
You look bewildered, dear. Well, I dare say, amusement is not a frequent
word in this house. But you must not turn into a nun, or worse, into a
puritan. What is he? A Fifth-Monarchy-man, or something--I forget; tell me
the name, my dear.'

'Papa is a Swedenborgian, I believe.'

'Yes, yes--I forgot the horrid name--a Swedenborgian, that is it. I don't
know exactly what they think, but everyone knows they are a sort of pagans,
my dear. He's not making one of _you_, dear--is he?'

'I go to church every Sunday.'

'Well, that's a mercy; Swedenborgian is such an ugly name, and besides,
they are all likely to be damned, my dear, and that's a serious
consideration. I really wish poor Austin had hit on something else; I'd
much rather have no religion, and enjoy life while I'm in it, than choose
one to worry me here and bedevil me hereafter. But some people, my dear,
have a taste for being miserable, and provide, like poor Austin, for its
gratification in the next world as well as here. Ha, ha, ha! how grave the
little woman looks! Don't you think me very wicked? You know you do; and
very likely you are right. Who makes your dresses, my dear? You _are_ such
a figure of fun!'

'Mrs. Rusk, I think, ordered _this_ dress. I and Mary Quince planned it. I
thought it very nice. We all like it very well.'

There was something, I dare say, very whimsical about it, probably very
absurd, judged at least by the canons of fashion, and old Cousin Monica
Knollys, in whose eye the London fashions were always fresh, was palpably
struck by it as if it had been some enormity against anatomy, for she
certainly laughed very heartily; indeed, there were tears on her cheeks
when she had done, and I am sure my aspect of wonder and dignity, as her
hilarity proceeded, helped to revive her merriment again and again as it
was subsiding.

'There, you mustn't be vexed with old Cousin Monica,' she cried, jumping
up, and giving me a little hug, and bestowing a hearty kiss on my forehead,
and a jolly little slap on my cheek. 'Always remember your cousin Monica is
an outspoken, wicked old fool, who likes you, and never be offended by her
nonsense. A council of three--you all sat upon it--Mrs. Rusk, you said, and
Mary Quince, and your wise self, the weird sisters; and Austin stepped in,
as Macbeth, and said, 'What is't ye do?' you all made answer together, 'A
something or other without a name!' Now, seriously, my dear, it is quite
unpardonable in Austin--your papa, I mean--to hand you over to be robed and
bedizened according to the whimsies of these wild old women--aren't they
old? If they know better, it's positively _fiendish._ I'll blow him up--I
will indeed, my dear. You know you're an heiress, and ought not to appear
like a jack-pudding.'

'Papa intends sending me to London with Madame and Mary Quince, and going
with me himself, if Doctor Bryerly says he may make the journey, and then I
am to have dresses and everything.'

'Well, that is better. And who is Doctor Bryerly--is your papa ill?'

'Ill; oh no; he always seems just the same. You don't think him
ill-_looking_ ill, I mean?' I asked eagerly and frightened.

'No, my dear, he looks very well for his time of life; but why is Doctor
What's-his-name here? Is he a physician, or a divine, or a horse-doctor?
and why is his leave asked?'

'I--I really don't understand.'

'Is he a what d'ye call'em--a Swedenborgian?'

'I believe so.'

'Oh, I see; ha, ha, ha! And so poor Austin must ask leave to go up to town.
Well, go he shall, whether his doctor likes it or not, for it would not do
to send you there in charge of your Frenchwoman, my dear. What's her name?'

'Madame de la Rougierre.'




CHAPTER X

_LADY KNOLLYS REMOVES A COVERLET_


Lady Knollys pursued her enquiries.

'And why does not Madame make your dresses, my dear? I wager a guinea the
woman's a milliner. Did not she engage to make your dresses?'

'I--I really don't know; I rather think not. She is my governess--a
finishing governess, Mrs. Rusk says.'

'Finishing fiddle! Hoity-toity! and my lady's too grand to cut out your
dresses and help to sew them? And what _does_ she do? I venture to say
she's fit to teach nothing but devilment--not that she has taught _you_
much, my dear--_yet_ at least. I'll see her, my dear; where is she? Come,
let us visit Madame. I should so like to talk to her a little.'

'But she is ill,' I answered, and all this time I was ready to cry for
vexation, thinking of my dress, which must be very absurd to elicit so much
unaffected laughter from my experienced relative, and I was only longing to
get away and hide myself before that handsome Captain returned.

'Ill! is she? what's the matter?'

'A cold--feverish and rheumatic, she says.'

'Oh, a cold; is she up, or in bed?'

'In her room, but not in bed.'

'I should so like to see her, my dear. It is not mere curiosity, I assure
you. In fact, curiosity has nothing on earth to do with it. A governess may
be a very useful or a very useless person; but she may also be about the
most pernicious inmate imaginable. She may teach you a bad accent, and
worse manners, and heaven knows what beside. Send the housekeeper, my dear,
to tell her that I am going to see her.'

'I had better go myself, perhaps,' I said, fearing a collision between Mrs.
Rusk and the bitter Frenchwoman.

'Very well, dear.'

And away I ran, not sorry somehow to escape before Captain Oakley returned.

As I went along the passage, I was thinking whether my dress could be
so very ridiculous as my old cousin thought it, and trying in vain to
recollect any evidence of a similar contemptuous estimate on the part of
that beautiful and garrulous dandy. I could not--quite the reverse, indeed.
Still I was uncomfortable and feverish--girls of my then age will easily
conceive how miserable, under similar circumstances, such a misgiving would
make them.

It was a long way to Madame's room. I met Mrs. Rusk bustling along the
passage with a housemaid.

'How is Madame?' I asked.

'Quite well, I believe,' answered the housekeeper, drily. 'Nothing the
matter that _I_ know of. She eat enough for two to-day. I wish _I_ could
sit in my room doing nothing.'

Madame was sitting, or rather reclining, in a low arm-chair, when I entered
the room, close to the fire, as was her wont, her feet extended near to the
bars, and a little coffee equipage beside her. She stuffed a book hastily
between her dress and the chair, and received me in a state of langour
which, had it not been for Mrs. Rusk's comfortable assurances, would have
frightened me.

'I hope you are better, Madame,' I said, approaching.

'Better than I deserve, my dear cheaile, sufficiently well. The people
are all so good, trying me with every little thing, like a bird; here is
café--Mrs. Rusk-a, poor woman, I try to swallow a little to please her.'

'And your cold, is it better?'

She shook her head languidly, her elbow resting on the chair, and three
finger-tips supporting her forehead, and then she made a little sigh,
looking down from the corners of her eyes, in an interesting dejection.

'Je sens des lassitudes in all the members--but I am quaite 'appy, and
though I suffer I am console and oblige des bontés, ma chère, que vous
avez tous pour moi;' and with these words she turned a languid glance of
gratitude on me which dropped on the ground.

'Lady Knollys wishes very much to see you, only for a few minutes, if you
could admit her.'

'Vous savez les malades see _never_ visitors,' she replied with a startled
sort of tartness, and a momentary energy. 'Besides, I cannot converse; je
sens de temps en temps des douleurs de tête--of head, and of the ear, the
right ear, it is parfois agony absolutely, and now it is here.'

And she winced and moaned, with her eyes closed and her hand pressed to the
organ affected.

Simple as I was, I felt instinctively that Madame was shamming. She was
over-acting; her transitions were too violent, and beside she forgot that
I knew how well she could speak English, and must perceive that she was
heightening the interest of her helplessness by that pretty tessellation
of foreign idiom. I there-fore said with a kind of courage which sometimes
helped me suddenly--

'Oh, Madame, don't you really think you might, without much inconvenience,
see Lady Knollys for a very few minutes?'

'Cruel cheaile! you know I have a pain of the ear which makes me 'orribly
suffer at this moment, and you demand me whether I will not converse
with strangers. I did not think you would be so unkain, Maud; but it is
impossible, you must see--quite impossible. I never, you _know_, refuse to
take trouble when I am able--never--_never_.'

And Madame shed some tears, which always came at call, and with her hand
pressed to her ear, said very faintly,

'Be so good to tell your friend how you see me, and how I suffer, and leave
me, Maud, for I wish to lie down for a little, since the pain will not
allow me to remain longer.'

So with a few words of comfort which could not well be refused, but I dare
say betraying my suspicion that more was made of her sufferings than need
be, I returned to the drawing-room.

'Captain Oakley has been here, my dear, and fancying, I suppose, that you
had left us for the evening, has gone to the billiard-room, I think,' said
Lady Knollys, as I entered.

That, then, accounted for the rumble and smack of balls which I had heard
as I passed the door.

'I have been telling Maud how detestably she is got up.'

'Very thoughtful of you, Monica!' said my father.

'Yes, and really, Austin, it is quite clear you ought to marry; you want
some one to take this girl out, and look after her, and who's to do it?
She's a dowdy--don't you see? Such a dust! And it _is_ really such a pity;
for she's a very pretty creature, and a clever woman could make her quite
charming.'

My father took Cousin Monica's sallies with the most wonderful good-humour.
She had always, I fancy, been a privileged person, and my father, whom we
all feared, received her jolly attacks, as I fancy the grim Front-de-Boeufs
of old accepted the humours and personalities of their jesters.

'Am I to accept this as an overture?' said my father to his voluble cousin.

'Yes, you may, but not for myself, Austin--I'm not worthy. Do you remember
little Kitty Weadon that I wanted you to marry eight-and-twenty years ago,
or more, with a hundred and twenty thousand pounds? Well, you know, she
has got ever so much now, and she is really a most amiable old thing, and
though _you_ would not have her then, she has had her second husband since,
I can tell you.'

'I'm glad I was not the first,' said my father.

'Well, they really say her wealth is absolutely immense. Her last husband,
the Russian merchant, left her everything. She has not a human relation,
and she is in the best set.'

'You were always a match-maker, Monica,' said my father, stopping, and
putting his hand kindly on hers. 'But it won't do. No, no, Monica; we must
take care of little Maud some other way.'

I was relieved. We women have all an instinctive dread of second marriages,
and think that no widower is quite above or below that danger; and I
remember, whenever my father, which indeed was but seldom, made a visit to
town or anywhere else, it was a saying of Mrs. Rusk--

'I shan't wonder, neither need you, my dear, if he brings home a young wife
with him.'

So my father, with a kind look at her, and a very tender one on me, went
silently to the library, as he often did about that hour.

I could not help resenting my Cousin Knollys' officious recommendation of
matrimony. Nothing I dreaded more than a step-mother. Good Mrs. Rusk
and Mary Quince, in their several ways, used to enhance, by occasional
anecdotes and frequent reflections, the terrors of such an intrusion. I
suppose they did not wish a revolution and all its consequences at Knowl,
and thought it no harm to excite my vigilance.

But it was impossible long to be vexed with Cousin Monica.

'You know, my dear, your father is an oddity,' she said. 'I don't mind
him--I never did. You must not. Cracky, my dear, cracky--decidedly cracky!'

And she tapped the corner of her forehead, with a look so sly and comical,
that I think I should have laughed, if the sentiment had not been so
awfully irreverent.

'Well, dear, how is our friend the milliner?'

'Madame is suffering so much from pain in her ear, that she says it would
be quite impossible to have the honour--'

'Honour--fiddle! I want to see what the woman's like. Pain in her ear, you
say? Poor thing! Well, dear, I think I can cure that in five minutes. I
have it myself, now and then. Come to my room, and we'll get the bottles.

So she lighted her candle in the lobby, and with a light and agile step
she scaled the stairs, I following; and having found the remedies, we
approached Madame's room together.

I think, while we were still at the end of the gallery, Madame heard and
divined our approach, for her door suddenly shut, and there was a fumbling
at the handle. But the bolt was out of order.

Lady Knollys tapped at the door, saying--'we'll come in, please, and see
you. I've some remedies, which I'm sure will do you good.'

There was no answer; so she opened the door, and we both entered. Madame
had rolled herself in the blue coverlet, and was lying on the bed, with her
face buried in the pillow, and enveloped in the covering.

'Perhaps she's asleep?' said Lady Knollys, getting round to the side of the
bed, and stooping over her.

Madame lay still as a mouse. Cousin Monica set down her two little vials
on the table, and, stooping again over the bed, began very gently with
her fingers to lift the coverlet that covered her face. Madame uttered
a slumbering moan, and turned more upon her face, clasping the coverlet
faster about her.

'Madame, it is Maud and Lady Knollys. We have come to relieve your ear.
Pray let me see it. She can't be asleep, she's holding the clothes so fast.
Do, pray, allow me to see it.'




CHAPTER XI

_LADY KNOLLYS SEES THE FEATURES_


Perhaps, if Madame had murmured, 'It is quite well--pray permit me to
sleep,' she would have escaped an awkwardness. But having adopted the rôle
of the exhausted slumberer, she could not consistently speak at the moment;
neither would it do by main force, to hold the coverlet about her face, and
so her presence of mind forsook her. Cousin Monica drew it back and hardly
beheld the profile of the sufferer, when her good-humoured face was lined
and shadowed with a dark curiosity and a surprise by no means pleasant. She
stood erect beside the bed, with her mouth firmly shut and drawn down at
the corners, in a sort of recoil and perturbation, looking down upon the
patient.

'So that's Madame de la Rougierre?' at length exclaimed Lady Knollys, with
a very stately disdain. I think I never saw anyone look more shocked.

Madame sat up, very flushed. No wonder, for she had been wrapped so close
in the coverlet. She did not look quite at Lady Knollys, but straight
before her, rather downward, and very luridly.

I was very much frightened and amazed, and felt on the point of bursting
into tears.

'So, Mademoiselle, you have married, it seems, since I had last the honour
of seeing you? I did not recognise Mademoiselle under her new name.'

'Yes--I _am_ married, Lady Knollys; I thought everyone who knew me had
heard of that. Very respectably married, for a person of my rank. I shall
not need long the life of a governess. There is no harm, I hope?'

'I hope not,' said Lady Knollys, drily, a little pale, and still looking
with a dark sort of wonder upon the flushed face and forehead of the
governess, who was looking downward, straight before her, very sulkily and
disconcerted.

'I suppose you have explained everything satisfactorily to Mr. Ruthyn, in
whose house I find you?' said Cousin Monica.

'Yes, certainly, everything he requires--in effect there is _nothing_ to
explain. I am ready to answer to any question. Let _him_ demand me.'

'Very good, Mademoiselle.'

'_Madame_, if you please.'

'I forgot--_Madame_--yes, I shall apprise him of everything.'

Madame turned upon her a peaked and malign look, smiling askance with a
stealthy scorn.

'For myself, I have nothing to conceal. I have always done my duty. What
fine scene about nothing absolutely--what charming remedies for a sick
person! Ma foi! how much oblige I am for these so amiable attentions!'

'So far as I can see, Mademoiselle--Madame, I mean--you don't stand very
much in need of remedies. Your ear and head don't seem to trouble you just
now. I fancy these pains may now be dismissed.'

Lady Knollys was now speaking French.

'Mi ladi has diverted my attention for a moment, but that does not prevent
that I suffer frightfully. I am, of course, only poor governess, and such
people perhaps ought not to have pain--at least to show when they suffer.
It is permitted us to die, but not to be sick.'

'Come, Maud, my dear, let us leave the invalid to her repose and to nature.
I don't think she needs my chloroform and opium at present.'

'Mi ladi is herself a physic which chases many things, and powerfully
affects the ear. I would wish to sleep, notwithstanding, and can but gain
that in silence, if it pleases mi ladi.'

'Come, my dear,' said Lady Knollys, without again glancing at the scowling,
smiling, swarthy face in the bed; 'let us leave your instructress to her
_concforto_.'

'The room smells all over of brandy, my dear--does she drink?' said Lady
Knollys, as she closed the door, a little sharply.

I am sure I looked as much amazed as I felt, at an imputation which then
seemed to me so entirely incredible.

'Good little simpleton!' said Cousin Monica, smiling in my face, and
bestowing a little kiss on my cheek; 'such a thing as a tipsy lady has
never been dreamt of in your philosophy. Well, we live and learn. Let us
have our tea in my room--the gentlemen, I dare say, have retired.'

I assented, of course, and we had tea very cosily by her bedroom fire.

'How long have you had that woman?' she asked suddenly, after, for her, a
very long rumination.

'She came in the beginning of February--nearly ten months ago--is not it?'

'And who sent her?'

'I really don't know; papa tells me so little--he arranged it all himself,
I think.'

Cousin Monica made a sound of acquiescence--her lips closed and a nod,
frowning hard at the bars.

'It _is_ very odd!' she said; 'how people _can_ be such fools!' Here there
came a little pause. 'And what sort of person is she--do you like her?'

'Very well--that is, _pretty_ well. You won't tell?--but she rather
frightens me. I'm sure she does not intend it, but somehow I am very much
afraid of her.'

'She does not beat you?' said Cousin Monica, with an incipient frenzy in
her face that made me love her.

'Oh no!'

'Nor ill-use you in any way?'

'No.'

'Upon your honour and word, Maud?'

'No, upon my honour.'

'You know I won't tell her anything you say to me; and I only want to know,
that I may put an end to it, my poor little cousin.'

'Thank you, Cousin Monica very much; but really and truly she does not
ill-use me.'

'Nor threaten you, child?'

'Well, _no_--no, she does not threaten.'

'And how the plague _does_ she frighten you, child?'

'Well, I really--I'm half ashamed to tell you--you'll laugh at me--and I
don't know that she wishes to frighten me. But there is something, is not
there, ghosty, you know, about her?'

'_Ghosty_--is there? well, I'm sure I don't know, but I suspect there's
something devilish--I mean, she seems roguish--does not she? And I really
think she has had neither cold nor pain, but has just been shamming
sickness, to keep out of my way.'

I perceived plainly enough that Cousin Monica's damnatory epithet referred
to some retrospective knowledge, which she was not going to disclose to me.

'You knew Madame before,' I said. 'Who is she?'

'She assures me she is Madame de la Rougierre, and, I suppose, in French
phrase she so calls herself,' answered Lady Knollys, with a laugh, but
uncomfortably, I thought.

'Oh, dear Cousin Monica, do tell me--is she--is she very wicked? I am so
afraid of her!'

'How should I know, dear Maud? But I do remember her face, and I don't very
much like her, and you may depend on it. I will speak to your father in the
morning about her, and don't, darling, ask me any more about her, for I
really have not very much to tell that you would care to hear, and the fact
is I _won't_ say any more about her--there!'

And Cousin Monica laughed, and gave me a little slap on the cheek, and then
a kiss.

'Well, just tell me this----'

'Well, I _won't_ tell you this, nor anything--not a word, curious little
woman. The fact is, I have little to tell, and I mean to speak to your
father, and he, I am sure, will do what is right; so don't ask me any more,
and let us talk of something pleasanter.'

There was something indescribably winning, it seemed to me, in Cousin
Monica. Old as she was, she seemed to me so girlish, compared with those
slow, unexceptionable young ladies whom I had met in my few visits at the
county houses. By this time my shyness was quite gone, and I was on the
most intimate terms with her.

'You know a great deal about her, Cousin Monica, but you won't tell me.'

'Nothing I should like better, if I were at liberty, little rogue; but you
know, after all, I don't really say whether I _do_ know anything about
her or not, or what sort of knowledge it is. But tell me what you mean by
ghosty, and all about it.'

So I recounted my experiences, to which, so far from laughing at me, she
listened with very special gravity.

'Does she write and receive many letters?'

I had seen her write letters, and supposed, though I could only recollect
one or two, that she received in proportion.

'Are _you_ Mary Quince?' asked my lady cousin.

Mary was arranging the window-curtains, and turned, dropping a courtesy
affirmatively toward her.

'You wait on my little cousin, Miss Ruthyn, don't you?'

'Yes,'m,' said Mary, in her genteelest way.

'Does anyone sleep in her room?'

'Yes,'m, _I_--please, my lady.'

'And no one else?'

'No,'m--please, my lady.'

'Not even the _governess_, sometimes?

'No, please, my lady.'

'Never, you are quite sure, my dear?' said Lady Knollys, transferring the
question to me.

'Oh, no, never,' I answered.

Cousin Monica mused gravely, I fancied even anxiously, into the grate; then
stirred her tea and sipped it, still looking into the same point of our
cheery fire.

'I like your face, Mary Quince; I'm sure you are a good creature,' she
said, suddenly turning toward her with a pleasant countenance. 'I'm very
glad you have got her, dear. I wonder whether Austin has gone to his bed
yet!'

'I think not. I am certain he is either in the library or in his private
room--papa often reads or prays alone at night, and--and he does not like
to be interrupted.'

'No, no; of course not--it will do very well in the morning.'

Lady Knollys was thinking deeply, as it seemed to me.

'And so you are afraid of goblins, my dear,' she said at last, with a faded
sort of smile, turning toward me; 'well, if _I_ were, I know what _I_
should do--so soon as I, and good Mary Quince here, had got into my
bed-chamber for the night, I should stir the fire into a good blaze, and
bolt the door--do you see, Mary Quince?--bolt the door and keep a candle
lighted all night. You'll be very attentive to her, Mary Quince, for I--I
don't think she is very strong, and she must not grow nervous: so get to
bed early, and don't leave her alone--do you see?--and--and remember to
bolt the door, Mary Quince, and I shall be sending a little Christmas-box
to my cousin, and I shan't forget you. Good-night.'

And with a pleasant courtesy Mary fluttered out of the room.




CHAPTER XII

_A CURIOUS CONVERSATION_


We each had another cup of tea, and were silent for awhile.

'We must not talk of ghosts now. You are a superstitious little woman, you
know, and you shan't be frightened.'

And now Cousin Monica grew silent again, and looking briskly around the
room, like a lady in search of a subject, her eye rested on a small oval
portrait, graceful, brightly tinted, in the French style, representing
a pretty little boy, with rich golden hair, large soft eyes, delicate
features, and a shy, peculiar expression.

'It is odd; I think I remember that pretty little sketch, very long ago. I
think I was then myself a child, but that is a much older style of dress,
and of wearing the hair, too, than I ever saw. I am just forty-nine now. Oh
dear, yes; that is a good while before I was _born_. What a strange, pretty
little boy! a mysterious little fellow. Is he quite sincere, I wonder? What
rich golden hair! It is very clever--a French artist, I dare say--and who
_is_ that little boy?'

'I never heard. Some one a hundred years ago, I dare say. But there is a
picture down-stairs I am so anxious to ask you about!'

'Oh!' murmured Lady Knollys, still gazing dreamily on the crayon.

'It is the full-length picture of Uncle Silas--I want to ask you about
him.'

At mention of his name, my cousin gave me a look so sudden and odd as to
amount almost to a start.

'Your uncle Silas, dear? It is very odd, I was just thinking of him;' and
she laughed a little.

'Wondering whether that little boy could be he.'

And up jumped active Cousin Monica, with a candle in her hand, upon a
chair, and scrutinised the border of the sketch for a name or a date.

'Maybe on the back?' said she.

And so she unhung it, and there, true enough, not on the back of the
drawing, but of the frame, which was just as good, in pen-and-ink round
Italian letters, hardly distinguishable now from the discoloured wood, we
traced--

'_Silas Aylmer Ruthyn, AEtate_ viii. 15 _May_, 1779.'

'It is very odd I should not have been told or remembered who it was.
I think if I had _ever_ been told I _should_ have remembered it. I do
recollect this picture, though, I am nearly certain. What a singular
child's face!'

And my cousin leaned over it with a candle on each side, and her hand
shading her eyes, as if seeking by aid of these fair and half-formed
lineaments to read an enigma.

The childish features defied her, I suppose; their secret was unfathomable,
for after a good while she raised her head, still looking at the portrait,
and sighed.

'A very singular face,' she said, softly, as a person might who was looking
into a coffin. 'Had not we better replace it?'

So the pretty oval, containing the fair golden hair and large eyes, the
pale, unfathomable sphinx, remounted to its nail, and the _funeste_ and
beautiful child seemed to smile down oracularly on our conjectures.

'So is the face in the large portrait--_very_ singular--more, I think, than
that--handsomer too. This is a sickly child, I think; but the full-length
is so manly, though so slender, and so handsome too. I always think him a
hero and a mystery, and they won't tell me about him, and I can only dream
and wonder.'

'He has made more people than you dream and wonder, my dear Maud. I don't
know what to make of him. He is a sort of idol, you know, of your father's,
and yet I don't think he helps him much. His abilities were singular; so
has been his misfortune; for the rest, my dear, he is neither a hero nor a
wonder. So far as I know, there are very few sublime men going about the
world.'

'You really must tell me all you know about him, Cousin Monica. Now don't
refuse.'

'But why should you care to hear? There is really nothing pleasant to
tell.'

'That is just the reason I wish it. If it were at all pleasant, it would be
quite commonplace. I like to hear of adventures, dangers, and misfortunes;
and above all, I love a mystery. You know, papa will never tell me, and I
dare not ask him; not that he is ever unkind, but, somehow, I am afraid;
and neither Mrs. Rusk nor Mary Quince will tell me anything, although I
suspect they know a good deal.'

'I don't see any good in telling you, dear, nor, to say the truth, any
great harm either.'

'No--now that's _quite_ true--no harm. There _can't_ be, for I _must_ know
it all some day, you know, and better now, and from _you_, than perhaps
from a stranger, and in a less favourable way.'

'Upon my word, it is a wise little woman; and really, that's not such bad
sense after all.'

So we poured out another cup of tea each, and sipped it very comfortably by
the fire, while Lady Knollys talked on, and her animated face helped the
strange story.

'It is not very much, after all. Your uncle Silas, you know, is living?'

'Oh yes, in Derbyshire.'

'So I see you do know something of him, sly girl! but no matter. You know
how very rich your father is; but Silas was the younger brother, and had
little more than a thousand a year. If he had not played, and did not care
to marry, it would have been quite enough--ever so much more than younger
sons of dukes often have; but he was--well, a _mauvais sujet_--you know
what that is. I don't want to say any ill of him--more than I really
know--but he was fond of his pleasures, I suppose, like other young men,
and he played, and was always losing, and your father for a long time paid
great sums for him. I believe he was really a most expensive and vicious
young man; and I fancy he does not deny that now, for they say he would
change the past if he could.

I was looking at the pensive little boy in the oval frame--aged eight
years--who was, a few springs later, 'a most expensive and vicious young
man,' and was now a suffering and outcast old one, and wondering from what
a small seed the hemlock or the wallflower grows, and how microscopic are
the beginnings of the kingdom of God or of the mystery of iniquity in a
human being's heart.

'Austin--your papa--was very kind to him--_very_; but then, you know,
he's an oddity, dear--he _is_ an oddity, though no one may have told you
before--and he never forgave him for his marriage. Your father, I suppose,
knew more about the lady than I did--I was young then--but there were
various reports, none of them pleasant, and she was not visited, and for
some time there was a complete estrangement between your father and your
uncle Silas; and it was made up, rather oddly, on the very occasion which
some people said ought to have totally separated them. Did you ever hear
anything--anything _very_ remarkable--about your uncle?'

'No, never, they would not tell me, though I am sure they know. Pray go
on.'

'Well, Maud, as I have begun, I'll complete the story, though perhaps it
might have been better untold. It was something rather shocking--indeed,
_very_ shocking; in fact, they insisted on suspecting him of having
committed a murder.'

I stared at my cousin for some time, and then at the little boy, so
refined, so beautiful, so _funeste_, in the oval frame.

'Yes, dear,' said she, her eyes following mine; 'who'd have supposed he
could ever have--have fallen under so horrible a suspicion?'

'The wretches! Of course, Uncle Silas--of course, he's innocent?' I said at
last.

'Of course, my dear,' said Cousin Monica, with an odd look; 'but you know
there are some things as bad almost to be suspected of as to have done, and
the country gentlemen chose to suspect him. They did not like him, you
see. His politics vexed them; and he resented their treatment of his
wife--though I really think, poor Silas, he did not care a pin about
her--and he annoyed them whenever he could. Your papa, you know, is very
proud of his family--_he_ never had the slightest suspicion of your uncle.'

'Oh no!' I cried vehemently.

'That's right, Maud Ruthyn,' said Cousin Monica, with a sad little smile
and a nod. 'And your papa was, you may suppose, very angry.'

'Of course he was,' I exclaimed.

'You have no idea, my dear, _how_ angry. He directed his attorney to
prosecute, by wholesale, all who had said a word affecting your uncle's
character. But the lawyers were against it, and then your uncle tried to
fight his way through it, but the men would not meet him. He was quite
slurred. Your father went up and saw the Minister. He wanted to have him a
Deputy-Lieutenant, or something, in his county. Your papa, you know, had a
very great influence with the Government. Beside his county influence, he
had two boroughs then. But the Minister was afraid, the feeling was so very
strong. They offered him something in the Colonies, but your father would
not hear of it--that would have been a banishment, you know. They would
have given your father a peerage to make it up, but he would not accept
it, and broke with the party. Except in that way--which, you know, was
connected with the reputation of the family--I don't think, considering his
great wealth, he has done very much for Silas. To say truth, however, he
was very liberal before his marriage. Old Mrs. Aylmer says he made a vow
_then_ that Silas should never have more than five hundred a year, which he
still allows him, I believe, and he permits him to live in the place. But
they say it is in a very wild, neglected state.'

'You live in the same county--have you seen it lately, Cousin Monica?'

'No, not very lately,' said Cousin Monica, and began to hum an air
abstractedly.




CHAPTER XIII

_BEFORE AND AFTER BREAKFAST_


Next morning early I visited my favourite full-length portrait in the
chocolate coat and top-boots. Scanty as had been my cousin Monica's notes
upon this dark and eccentric biography, they were everything to me. A soul
had entered that enchanted form. Truth had passed by with her torch, and a
sad light shone for a moment on that enigmatic face.

There stood the _roué_--the duellist--and, with all his faults, the hero
too! In that dark large eye lurked the profound and fiery enthusiasm of his
ill-starred passion. In the thin but exquisite lip I read the courage of
the paladin, who would have 'fought his way,' though single-handed, against
all the magnates of his county, and by ordeal of battle have purged the
honour of the Ruthyns. There in that delicate half-sarcastic tracery of the
nostril I detected the intellectual defiance which had politically isolated
Silas Ruthyn and opposed him to the landed oligarchy of his county, whose
retaliation had been a hideous slander. There, too, and on his brows and
lip, I traced the patience of a cold disdain. I could now see him as he
was--the prodigal, the hero, and the martyr. I stood gazing on him with a
girlish interest and admiration. There was indignation, there was pity,
there was hope. Some day it might come to pass that I, girl as I was, might
contribute by word or deed towards the vindication of that long-suffering,
gallant, and romantic prodigal. It was a flicker of the Joan of Arc
inspiration, common, I fancy, to many girls. I little then imagined how
profoundly and strangely involved my uncle's fate would one day become with
mine.

I was interrupted by Captain Oakley's voice at the window. He was leaning
on the window-sill, and looking in with a smile--the window being open, the
morning sunny, and his cap lifted in his hand.

'Good-morning, Miss Ruthyn. What a charming old place! quite the setting
for a romance; such timber, and this really _beautiful_ house. I _do_ so
like these white and black houses--wonderful old things. By-the-by, you
treated us very badly last night--you did, indeed; upon my word, now, it
really was too bad--running away, and drinking tea with Lady Knollys--so
she says. I really--I should not like to tell you how very savage I felt,
particularly considering how very short my time is.'

I was a shy, but not a giggling country miss. I knew I was an heiress; I
knew I was somebody. I was not the least bit in the world conceited, but
I think this knowledge helped to give me a certain sense of security and
self-possession, which might have been mistaken for dignity or simplicity.
I am sure I looked at him with a fearless enquiry, for he answered my
thoughts.

'I do really assure you, Miss Ruthyn, I am quite serious; you have no idea
how very much we have missed you.'

There was a little pause, and, like a fool, I lowered my eyes, and blushed.

'I--I was thinking of leaving today; I am so unfortunate--my leave is just
out--it is so unlucky; but I don't quite know whether my aunt Knollys will
allow me to go.'

'_I_?--certainly, my dear Charlie, _I_ don't want you at all,' exclaimed a
voice--Lady Knollys's--briskly, from an open window close by; 'what could
put that in your head, dear?'

And in went my cousin's head, and the window shut down.

'She is _such_ an oddity, poor dear Aunt K