Foxglove Manor, Volume II (of III). Robert W Buchanan

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СКАЧАТЬ their diabolic gentleness, their suavity of supreme and total self-surrender. She felt helpless in spite of herself. The man was overmastering her, and rapidly encroaching. She felt like a person morally stifled, and with a strong effort tried to shake the evil influence away.

      “I was right,” she said. “We must not meet.”

      He smiled sadly.

      “As you please. I will come, or I will go, at your will. You have only to say to me, ‘Go and destroy yourself, obliterate yourself for ever from my life, blot yourself out from the roll of living beings,’ and I shall obey you.”

      Her spirit revolted more and more against the steadfast, self-assured obliquity of the man. She saw that he was desperate, and that the danger grew with his desperation. In every word he spoke, and in his whole manner, there was the sombre assurance of something between them, of some veiled, but excitable sympathy, which she herself utterly ignored. That moment of wild delirium, when he caught her in his arms and kissed her, seemed, instead of severing them, to have made a link between them. He had been conscious of her indignation, he had even professed penitence; but she saw to her dismay that the fact of his folly filled him, not with fear, but with courage. So she determined to end it once and for ever.

      “Let us understand each other,” she said, trembling violently. “How dare you talk as if there was any community of feeling between us? How dare you presume upon my patience, Mr. Santley? It is wretched; it is abominable! When you talk of killing yourself, when you assume that I have any serious interest in you, or any right over you, you insult me and degrade yourself. We are nothing, and can be nothing to each other.”

      “I know that,” he replied. “Do you think I am so mad as not to know that?”

      “Then why do you come here to torture me, and to tempt me?”

      The word came from her before she knew it, and her face became scarlet; but he uttered no protest, and raised his white hand in deprecation.

      “Tempt you? God forbid!”

      “I did not mean that,” she murmured, in confusion; “but you must know, you cannot fail to know, that it is not right for a married woman to receive such expressions of sympathy, however spiritual. It is that which makes me hate the Catholic Church. The priest promises you his office, and too often makes mischief under the guise of religion.”

      “Do you accuse me of doing so?” he demanded, in the same sad, calm voice.

      “No; but you should remember that you have not the custody of my soul, and I have no right to influence your actions. Come,” she continued, with rather a forced laugh, “talk to me like a true English clergyman. Tell me of the old women of the village, and their ailments; ask me for a subscription to give to your new soup kitchen; talk to me as if Mr. Haldane were listening to us – of your schools, your parish troubles – and you shall find me an eager listener!”

      “I will talk of anything, Ellen, so long as I may talk to you.”

      Again that manner of despairing certainty, of assured and fatal sympathy. The man was incorrigible.

      She waited impatiently for some minutes, but finding he did not speak again, she held out her hand.

      “Since you have nothing more to tell me,” she observed lightly, “I think I will say good morning. I am going to order the carriage and drive to Omberley.”

      “When may I come again?”

      “When you have anything really parochial to say to me. Please go now.”

      Their eyes met, and hers sank beneath his own.

      As he crossed towards the door it opened, and Baptisto appeared upon the threshold.

      “Did you ring, senora?”

      At the sight of the Spaniard’s dull impressive face Mrs. Haldane started violently, and went a little pale. She had heard nothing of his return, and he came like an apparition.

      “Baptisto! What are you doing here? I thought – ”

      She paused in wonder, while the Spaniard inclined his head and bowed profoundly.

      “I was taken with a vertigo at the station, and the senor permitted me to return.”

      “Then your master has gone alone?”

      “Yes, senora.”

      “Very well. Order the carriage at once. I am going out.”

      Baptisto bowed and retired, quickly closing the door.

      Santley, who had stood listening during the above conversation, now prepared to follow, but, glancing at Ellen, saw that she was unusually agitated.

      “That is a sinister-looking fellow,” he remarked. “I am afraid he has frightened you.”

      “Indeed, no,” she replied; “though I confess I was startled at his unexpected return. Good-bye.”

      “Good-bye,” he said, again taking her hand and holding it up a moment in his own.

      Passing from the drawing-room, he again came face to face with Baptisto, who was lurking in the lobby, but who drew aside with a respectful bow, to allow the clergyman to pass.

      He crossed the hall, descended the stone steps of the portico, and walked slowly towards the lodge. As he passed the ruined chapel, its shadows seemed to fall upon his spirit and leave it in ominous darkness. He shivered slightly, and drew his cloak about him, then with his eyes cast down he thoughtfully walked on.

      He did not glance back. Had he done so, he would have seen Baptisto standing on the steps of the Manor house, watching him with a sinister smile.

      CHAPTER XV. CONJURATION

      It was a chill day in early autumn, and as Charles Santley passed along the dark avenue of the Manor his path was strewn here and there with freshly fallen leaves. Dark shadows lay on every side, and the heaven above was full of a sullen, cheerless light. It was just the day for a modern Faust, in the course of his noonday walk, to encounter, in some fancied guise, canine or human, the evil one of old superstition.

      Be that as it may, Santley knew at last that the hour of his temptation was over, and that the evil one was not far away. He knew it, by the sullen acquiescence of evil of his own soul; by the deliberate and despairing precision with which he had chosen the easy and downward path; by the sense of darkness which already obliterated the bright moral instincts in his essentially religious mind. He had spoken the truth when he said he would follow Ellen Haldane anywhere, even to the eternal pit itself. Her beauty possessed him and disturbed him with the joy of impure thoughts; and now that he perceived his own power to trouble her peace of mind, he rejoiced at the strength of his passion with a truly diabolic perversity.

      As he came out of the lodge gate he saw, far away over the fields, the spire of his own church.

      He laughed to himself.

      But the man’s faith in spiritual things, so far from being shaken, was as strong as ever. His own sense of moral deterioration, of spiritual backsliding, only made him believe all the more fervently in the heaven from which he had fallen, or might choose to fall. For it is surely a mistake to picture, as so many poets have pictured, the evil spirit as one ignorant of or insensible to good. Far wiser is the theology which describes СКАЧАТЬ