The Greatest Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (65+ Novels & Short Stories in One Edition). Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

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СКАЧАТЬ which nature craves. His waking is a pain; he is quite worn out, and peevish, and stupid, and vows he is not sleepy, even to the moment when his mother takes him in her arms, and carries him, in a sweet slumber, to the nursery. So it is with us old children of earth and the great sleep of death, and nature our kind mother. Just so reluctantly we part with consciousness, the picture is, even to the last, so interesting; the bird in the hand, though sick and moulting, so inestimably better than all the brilliant tenants of the bush. We sit up, yawning, and blinking, and stupid, the whole scene swimming before us, and the stories and music humming off into the sound of distant winds and waters. It is not time yet; we are not fatigued; we are good for another hour still, and so protesting against bed, we falter and drop into the dreamless sleep which nature assigns to fatigue and satiety.

      He then spoke a little eulogy of his brother, very polished, and, indeed, in a kind of way, eloquent. He possessed in a high degree that accomplishment, too little cultivated, I think, by the present generation, of expressing himself with perfect precision and fluency. There was, too, a good deal of slight illustrative quotation, and a sprinkling of French flowers, over the conversation, which gave to it a character at once elegant and artificial. It was all easy, light, and pointed, and being quite new to me, had a wonderful fascination.

      He then told me that Bartram was the temple of liberty, that the health of a whole life was founded in a few years of youth, air, and exercise, and that accomplishments, at least, if not education, should wait upon health. Therefore, while at Bartram, I should dispose of my time quite as I pleased, and the more I plundered the garden and gipsied in the woodlands, the better.

      Then he told me what a miserable invalid he was, and how the doctors interfered with his frugal tastes. A glass of beer and a mutton chop — his ideal of a dinner — he dared not touch. They made him drink light wines, which he detested, and live upon those artificial abominations all liking for which vanishes with youth.

      There stood on a side-table, in its silver coaster, a long-necked Rhenish bottle, and beside it a thin pink glass, and he quivered his fingers in a peevish way toward them.

      But unless he found himself better very soon, he would take his case into his own hands, and try the dietary to which nature pointed.

      He waved his fingers toward his bookcases, and told me his books were altogether at my service during my stay; but this promise ended, I must confess, disappointingly. At last, remarking that I must be fatigued, he rose, and kissed me with a solemn tenderness, placed his hand upon what I now perceived to be a large Bible, with two broad silk markers, red and gold, folded in it — the one, I might conjecture, indicating the place in the Old, the other in the New Testament. It stood on the small table that supported the waxlights, with a handsome cut bottle of eau-de-cologne, his gold and jewelled pencil-case, and his chased repeater, chain and seals, beside it. There certainly were no indications of poverty in Uncle Silas’s room; and he said impressively —

      “Remember that book; in it your father placed his trust, in it he found his reward, in it lives my only hope; consult it, my beloved niece, day and night, as the oracle of life.”

      Then he laid his thin hand on my head, and blessed me, and then kissed my forehead.

      “No-a!” exclaimed Cousin Milly’s lusty voice. I had quite forgotten her presence, and looked at her with a little start. She was seated on a very high old-fashioned chair; she had palpably been asleep; her round eyes were blinking and staring glassily at us; and her white legs and navvy boots were dangling in the air.

      “Have you anything to remark about Noah?” enquired her father, with a polite inclination and an ironical interest.

      “No-a!” she repeated in the same blunt accents; “I didn’t snore; did I? No-a.”

      The old man smiled and shrugged a little at me — it was the smile of disgust.

      “Good night, my dear Maud;” and turning to her, he said, with a peculiar gentle sharpness, “Had not you better wake, my dear, and try whether your cousin would like some supper?”

      So he accompanied us to the door, outside which we found L’Amour’s candle awaiting us.

      “I’m awful afraid of the Governor, I am. Did I snore that time?”

      “No, dear; at least, I did not hear it,” I said, unable to repress a smile.

      “Well, if I didn’t, I was awful near it,” she said, reflectively.

      We found poor Mary Quince dozing over the fire; but we soon had tea and other good things, of which Milly partook with a wonderful appetite.

      “I was in a qualm about it,” said Milly, who by this time was quite herself again. “When he spies me a-napping, maybe he don’t fetch me a prod with his pencil-case over the head. Odd! girl, it is sore.”

      When I contrasted the refined and fluent old gentleman whom I had just left, with this amazing specimen of young ladyhood, I grew sceptical almost as to the possibility of her being his child.

      I was to learn, however, how little she had, I won’t say of his society, but even of his presence — that she had no domestic companion of the least pretensions to education — that she ran wild about the place — never, except in church, so much as saw a person of that rank to which she was born — and that the little she knew of reading and writing had been picked up, in desultory half-hours, from a person who did not care a pin about her manners of decorum, and perhaps rather enjoyed her grotesqueness — and that no one who was willing to take the least trouble about her was competent to make her a particle more refined than I saw her — the wonder ceased. We don’t know how little is heritable, and how much simply training, until we encounter some such spectacle as that of my poor cousin Milly.

      When I lay down in my bed and reviewed the day, it seemed like a month of wonders. Uncle Silas was always before me; the voice so silvery for an old man — so preternaturally soft; the manners so sweet, so gentle; the aspect, smiling, suffering, spectral. It was no longer a shadow; I had now seen him in the flesh. But, after all, was he more than a shadow to me? When I closed my eyes I saw him before me still, in necromantic black, ashy with a pallor on which I looked with fear and pain, a face so dazzlingly pale, and those hollow, fiery, awful eyes! It sometimes seemed as if the curtain opened, and I had seen a ghost.

      I had seen him; but he was still an enigma and a marvel. The living face did not expound the past, any more than the portrait portended the future. He was still a mystery and a vision; and thinking of these things I fell asleep.

      Mary Quince, who slept in the dressing-room, the door of which was close to my bed, and lay open to secure me against ghosts, called me up; and the moment I knew where I was I jumped up, and peeped eagerly from the window. It commanded the avenue and court-yard; but we were many windows removed from that over the half-door, and immediately beneath ours lay the two giant lime trees, prostrate and uprooted, which I had observed as we drove up the night before.

      I saw more clearly in the bright light of morning the signs of neglect and almost of dilapidation which had struck me as I approached. The court-yard was tufted over with grass, seldom from year to year crushed by the carriage-wheels, or trodden by the feet of visitors. This melancholy verdure thickened where the area was more remote from the centre; and under the windows, and skirting the walls to the left, was reinforced by a thick grove of nettles. The avenue was all grass-grown, except in the very centre, where a narrow track still showed the roadway. The handsome carved balustrade of the court-yard was discoloured with lichens, and in two places gapped and broken; and the air of decay was heightened by the fallen trees, among whose sprays and yellow leaves the small birds were hopping.

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