Read Ebook: Cecilia de Noël by Falconer Lanoe

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Ebook has 709 lines and 36596 words, and 15 pages

"I should have to pay too dear for it afterwards. My superfine habits are not a matter of choice only, you must remember."

"Oh!--the women! Not the best of them is worth bothering about, let alone a shameless jilt."

"You were always hard upon her, George. She jilted a cripple for a very fine specimen of the race. Some of your favourite physiologists would say she was quite right."

"You never understood her, Lindy. It was not a case of jilting a cripple at all. She jilted three thousand a year and a small place for ten thousand a year and a big one."

"I shall be sorry," he said presently, lying rather than sitting in the deep chair beside the fire, "very sorry, if the ghost is going to make itself a nuisance."

"What is the story of the ghost?"

"Story! God bless you, it has none to tell, sir; at least it never has told it, and no one else rightly knows it. It--I mean the ghost--is older than the family. We found it here when we came into the place about two hundred years ago, and it refused to be dislodged. It is rather uncertain in its habits. Sometimes it is not heard of for years; then all at once it reappears, generally, I may observe, when some imaginative female in the house is in love, or out of spirits, or bored in any other way. She sees it, and then, of course--the complaint being highly infectious--so do a lot more. One of the family started the theory it was the ghost of the portrait, or rather the unknown individual whose portrait hangs high up over the sideboard in the dining-room."

"You don't mean the lady in green velvet with the snuff-box?"

"Certainly not; that is my own great-grand-aunt. I mean a square of black canvas with one round yellow spot in the middle and a dirty white smudge under the spot. There are members of this family--Aunt Eleanour, for instance--who tell me the yellow spot is a man's face and the dirty white smudge is an Elizabethan ruff. Then there is a picture of a man in armour in the oak room, which I don't believe is a portrait at all; but Aunt Henrietta swears it is, and of the ghost, too--as he was before he died, of course. And very interesting details both my aunts are ready to furnish concerning the two originals. It is extraordinary what an amount of information is always forthcoming about things of which nobody can know anything--as about the next world, for instance. The, last time I went to church the preacher gave as minute an account of what our post-mortem experiences were to be as if he had gone through it all himself several times."

"Well, does the ghost usually appear in a ruff or in armour?"

"It depends entirely upon who sees it--a ghost always does. Last night, for instance, I lay you odds it wore neither ruff nor armour, because Mrs. Mallet is not likely to have heard of either the one or the other. Not that she saw the ghost--not she. What she saw was a bogie, not a ghost."

"Why, what is the difference?"

"Immense! As big as that which separates the objective from the subjective. Any one can see a bogie. It is a real thing belonging to the external world. It may be a bright light, a white sheet, or a black shadow--always at night, you know, or at least in the dusk, when you are apt to be a little mixed in your observations. The best example of a bogie was Sir Walter Scott's. It looked--in the twilight remember--exactly like Lord Byron, who had not long departed this life at the time Sir Walter saw it. Nine men out of ten would have gone off and sworn they had seen a ghost; why, religions have been founded on just such stuff: but Sir Walter, as sane a man as ever lived--though he did write poetry--kept his head clear and went up closer to his ghost, which proved on examination to be a waterproof."

"A waterproof?"

"Or a railway rug--I forget which: the moral is the same."

"Well, what is a ghost?"

"A ghost is nothing--an airy nothing manufactured by your own disordered senses of your own over-excited brain."

"I beg to observe that I never saw a ghost in my life."

"I am glad to hear it. It does you credit. If ever any one had an excuse for seeing a ghost it would be a man whose spine was jarred. But I meant nothing personal by the pronoun--only to give greater force to my remarks. The first person singular will do instead. The ghost belongs to the same lot, as the faces that make mouths at me when I have brain-fever, the reptiles that crawl about when I have an attack of the D.T., or--to take a more familiar example--the spots I see floating before my eyes when my liver is out of order. You will allow there is nothing supernatural in all that?"

"Certainly. Though, did not that pretty niece of Mrs. Molyneux's say she used to see those spots floating before her eyes when a misfortune was impending?"

He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and added:

"And now, Lindy, as we don't want another ghost haunting the house. I will conduct you to by-by."

It was a strange house, Weald Manor, designed, one might suppose, by some inveterate enemy of light. It lay at the foot of a steep hill which screened it from the morning sun, and the few windows which looked towards the rising day were so shaped as to admit but little of its brightness. At night it was even worse, at least in the halls and passages, for there, owing probably to the dark oak which lined both walls and floor, a generous supply of lamps did little more than illumine the surface of the darkness, leaving unfathomed and unexplained mysterious shadows that brooded in distant corners, or, towering giant-wise to the ceiling, loomed ominously overhead. Will-o'-the-wisp-like reflections from our lighted candles danced in the polished surface of panel and balustrade, as from the hall we went upstairs, I helping myself from step to step by Atherley's arm, as instinctively, as unconsciously almost, as he offered it. We stopped on the first landing. Before us rose the stairs leading to the gallery where Atherley's bedroom was: to our left ran "the bachelor's passage," where I was lodged.

"Night, night," were Atherley's parting words. "Don't dream of flirts or ghosts, but sleep sound."

Sitting before the wood-fire I slowly unfolded them: the three faintly-perfumed sheets with the gilt monogram above the pointed writing:

"Dear Mr. Lyndsay," ran the first, "why did you not come over to-day? I was expecting you to appear all the afternoon.--Yours sincerely, G.E.L."

The second was dated four weeks later--

"You silly boy! I forbid you ever to write or talk of yourself in such a way again. You are not a cripple; and if you had ever had a mother or a sister, you would know how little women think of such things. How many more assurances do you expect from me? Do you wish me to propose to you again? No, if you won't have me, go.--Yours, in spite of yourself, GLADYS."

The third--the third is too long to quote entire; besides, the substance is contained in this last sentence--

"So I think, my dear Mr. Lyndsay, for your sake more than my own, our engagement had better be broken off."

In this letter, dated six weeks ago, she had charged me to burn all that she had written to me, and as yet I had not done so, shrinking from the sharp unreasonable pain with which we bury the beloved dead. But the time of my mourning was accomplished. I tore the paper into fragments and dropped them into the flames.

It was long before the last fluttering rags had vanished, transmuted into fiery dust. The clock on the landing had many times chanted its dirge since I had heard below the footsteps of the servants carrying away the lamps from the sitting-rooms and the hall. Later still came the far-off sound of Atherley's door closing behind him, like the final good-night of the waking day. Over all the unconscious household had stolen that silence which is more than silence, that hush which seems to wait for something, that stillness of the night-watch which is kept alone. It was familiar enough to me, but to-night it had a new meaning; like the sunlight that shines when we are happy, or the rain that falls when we are weeping, it seemed, as if in sympathy, to be repeating and accenting what I could not so vividly have told in words. In my life, and for the second time, there was the same desolate pause, as if the dreary tale were finished and only the drearier epilogue remained to live through--the same sense of sad separation from the happy and the healthful.

I made a great effort to read, holding the book before me and compelling myself to follow the sentences, but that power of abstraction which can conquer pain does not belong to temperaments like mine. If only I could have slept, as men have been able to do even upon the rack; but every hour that passed left me more awake, more alive, more supersensitive to suffering.

Early in the morning, long before the dawn, I must have been feverish, I think. My head and hands burned, the air of the room stifled me, I was losing my self-control.

I opened the window and leant out. The cool air revived me bodily, but to the fever of the spirit it brought no relief. To my heart, if not to my lips, sprang the old old cry for help which anguish has wrung from generation after generation. The agony of mine, I felt wildly, must pierce through sense, time, space, everything--even to the Living Heart of all, and bring thence some token of pity! For one instant my passion seemed to beat against the silent heavens, then to fall back bruised and bleeding.

Out of the darkness came not so much as a wind whisper or the twinkle of a star.

Was Atherley right after all?

THE STRANGER'S GOSPEL

From the short unsatisfying slumber which sometimes follows a night of insomnia I was awakened by the laughter and shouts of children. When I looked out I saw brooding above the hollow a still gray day, in whose light the woodlands of the park were all in sombre brown, and the trout stream between its sedgy banks glided dark and lustreless.

On the lawn, still wet with dew, and crossed by the shadows of the bare elms, Atherley's little sons, Harold and Denis, were playing with a very unlovely but much-beloved mongrel called Tip. They had bought him with their own pocket-money from a tinker who was ill-using him, and then claimed for him the hospitality of their parents; so, though Atherley often spoke of the dog as a disgrace to the household, he remained a member thereof, and received, from a family incapable of being uncivil, far less unkind, to an animal, as much attention as if he had been high-bred and beautiful--which indeed he plainly supposed himself to be.

When, about an hour later, after their daily custom, this almost inseparable trio fell into the breakfast-room as if the door had suddenly given way before them, the boys were able to revenge themselves for the rebuke this entrance provoked by the tidings they brought with them.

"I say, old Mallet is going," cried Harold cheerfully, as he wriggled himself on to his chair. "Denis, mind I want some of that egg-stuff."

"Take your arms off the table, Harold," said Lady Atherley. "Pray, how do you know Mrs. Mallet is going?"

"She said so herself. She said," he went on, screwing up his nose and speaking in a falsetto to express the intensity of his scorn--"she said she was afraid of the ghost."

"I told you I did not allow that word to be mentioned."

"I did not; it was old Mallet."

"But, pray, what were you doing in old Mallet's domain?" asked Atherley.

"Cooking cabbage for Tip."

"Hum! What with ghosts by night and boys by day, our cook seems to have a pleasant time of it; I shall be glad when Miss Jones's holidays are over. Castleman, is it true that Mrs. Mallet talks of leaving us because of the ghost?"

"I am sure I don't know, Sir George," answered the old butler. "She was going on about it very foolish this morning."

"And how is the kitchen-maid?"

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