The Man in Black. G. P. R. James

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      CHAPTER I.

      Let me take you into an old-fashioned country house, built by architects of the early reign of James the First. It had all the peculiarities--I might almost say the oddities--of that particular epoch in the building art. Chimneys innumerable had it. Heaven only knows what rooms they ventilated; but their name must have been legion. The windows were not fewer in number, and much more irregular: for the chimneys were gathered together in some sort of symmetrical arrangement, while the windows were scattered all over the various faces of the building, with no apparent arrangement at all. Heaven knows, also, what rooms they lighted, or were intended to light, for they very little served the purpose, being narrow, and obstructed by the stone mullions of the Elizabethan age. Each, too, had its label of stone superincumbent, and projecting from the brick-work, which might leave the period of construction somewhat doubtful--but the gables decided the fact.

      They, too, were manifold; for although the house had been built all at once, it seemed, nevertheless, to have been erected in detached masses, and joined together as best the builder could; so that there were no less than six gables, turning north, south, east, and west, with four right angles, and flat walls between them. These gables were surmounted--topped, as it were, by a triangular wall, somewhat higher than the acute roof, and this wall was constructed with a row of steps, coped with freestone, on either side of the ascent, as if the architect had fancied that some man or statue would, one day or another, have to climb up to the top of the pyramid, and take his place upon the crowning stone.

      It was a gloomy old edifice: the bricks had become discolored; the livery of age, yellow and gray lichen, was upon it; daws hovered round the chimney tops; rooks passed cawing over it, on the way to their conventicle hard by; no swallow built under the eaves; and the trees, as if repelled by its stern, cold aspect, retreated from it on three sides, leaving it alone on its own flat ground, like a moody man amidst a gay society. On the fourth side, indeed, an avenue--that is to say, two rows of old elms--crept cautiously up to it in a winding and sinuous course, as if afraid of approaching too rapidly; and at the distance of some five or six hundred yards, clumps of old trees, beeches, and ever-green oaks, and things of sombre foliage, dotted the park, only enlivened by here and there a herd of deer.

      Now and then, a milk-maid, a country woman going to church or market, a peasant, or at game-keeper, might be seen traversing the dry brown expanse of grass, and but rarely deviating from a beaten path, which led from one stile over the path wall to another. It was all sombre and monotonous: the very spirit of dulness seemed to hang over it; and the clouds themselves--the rapid sportive clouds, free denizens of the sky, and playmates of the wind and sunbeam--appeared to grow dull and tardy, as they passed across the wide space open to the view, and to proceed with awe and gravity, like timid youth in the presence of stern old age.

      Enough of the outside of the house. Let me take you into the interior, reader, and into one particular room--not the largest and the finest; but one of the highest. It was a little oblong chamber, with one window, which was ornamented--the only ornament the chamber had--with a decent curtain of red and white checked linen. On the side next the door, and between it and the western wall, was a small bed. A walnut-tree table and two or three chairs were near the window. In one corner stood a washing-stand, not very tidily arranged, in another chest of drawers; and opposite the fire-place, hung from nails driven into the wall, two or three shelves of the same material as the table, each supporting a row of books, which, by the dark black covers, brown edges, and thumbed corners, seemed to have a right to boast of some antiquity and much use.

      At the table, as you perceive, there is seated a boy of some fifteen years of age, with pen and ink and paper, and an open book. If you look over his shoulder, you will perceive that the words are Latin. Yet he reads it with ease and facility, and seeks no aid from the dictionary. It is the "Cato Major" of Cicero. Heaven! what a book for a child like that to read! Boyhood studying old age!

      But let us turn from the book, and examine the lad himself more closely. See that pale face, with a manlike unnatural gravity upon it. Look at that high broad brow, towering as a monument above the eyes. Remark those eyes themselves, with their deep eager thought; and then the gleam in them--something more than earnestness, and less than wildness--a thirsty sort of expression, as if they drank in that they rested on, and yet were unsated.

      The brow rests upon the pale fair hand, as if requiring something to support the heavy weight of thoughts with which the brain is burdened. He marks nothing but the lines of that old book. His whole soul is in the eloquent words. He hears not the door open; he sees not that tall, venerable, but somewhat stiff and gaunt figure, enter and approach him. He reads on, till the old man's Geneva cloak brushes his arm, and his hand is upon his shoulder. Then he starts up--looks around--but says nothing. A faint smile, pleasant yet grave, crosses his finely cut lip; but that is the only welcome, as he raises his eyes to the face that bends over him. Can that boy in years be already aged in heart?

      It is clear that the old man--the old clergyman, for so he evidently is--has no very tender nature. Every line of his face forbids the supposition. The expression itself is grave, not to say stern. There is powerful thought about it, but small gentleness. He seems one of those who have been tried and hardened in some one of the many fiery furnaces which the world provides for the test of men of strong minds and strong hearts. There has been much persecution in the land; there have been changes, from the rigid and severe to the light and frivolous--from the light and frivolous to the bitter and cruel. There have been tyrants of all shapes and all characters within the last forty years, and fools, and knaves, and madmen, to cry them on in every course of evil. In all these chances and changes, what fixed and rigid mind could escape the fangs of persecution and wrong? He had known both; but they had changed him little. His was originally an unbending spirit: it grew more tough and stubborn by the habit of resistance; but its original bent was still the same.

      Fortune--heaven's will--or his own inclination, had denied him wife or child; and near relation he had none. A friend he had: that boy's father, who had sheltered him in evil times, protected him as far as possible against the rage of enemies, and bestowed upon him the small living which afforded him support. He did his duty therein conscientiously, but with a firm unyielding spirit, adhering to the Calvinistic tenets which he had early received, in spite of the universal falling off of companions and neighbors. He would not have yielded an iota to have saved his head.

      With all his hardness, he had one object of affection, to which all that was gentle in his nature was bent. That object wits the boy by whom he now stood, and for whom СКАЧАТЬ