Le Fanu Joseph Sheridan
Checkmate
CHAPTER LIV
AMONG THE TREES
When the old woman had raised the window, “Thanks,” said Mr. Longcluse, almost in a whisper. “There are people, Lady May Penrose told me this morning, threatening to interrupt the funeral to-night. Of course you know – you must know.”
“I have heard o' some such matter, but 'tis nout to no one here. We don't care a snap for them, and if they try any sich lids, by my sang, we'll fit them. And I think, Sir, if ye've any thing o' consequence to tell to the family, ye'll not mind my saying 'twould be better ye sud go, like ither folk, to the hall-door, and leave your message there.”
“Your reproof would be better deserved, Mrs. Tansey,” he answers good-humouredly, “if there had not been a difficulty. Mr. Richard Arden is not on pleasant terms with me, and my business will not afford to wait. I understand that Miss Arden has suffered much anxiety. It is entirely on her account that I have interested myself so much in it; and I don't see, Mrs. Tansey, why you and I should not be better friends,” he adds, extending his long slender hand gently towards her.
She does not take it, but makes a stiff little curtsey instead, and draws back about six inches.
Perhaps Mr. Longcluse had meditated making her a present, but her severe looks daunted him, and he thought that he might as well be a little better acquainted before he made that venture. He went on —
“You have spoken very wisely, Mrs. Tansey; I am sure if these people do as they threaten, it will be contrary to law, and so, as you say, you may snap your fingers at them at last. But in the meantime they may enter the house and seize the coffin, or possibly cause some disgraceful interruption on the way. Lady May tells me that Miss Alice has suffered a great deal in consequence. Will you tell her to set her mind at ease? Pray assure her that I have seen the people, that I have threatened them into submission, that I am confident no such attempt will be made, and that should the slightest annoyance be attempted, Crozier has only to present the notice enclosed in this to the person offering it, and it will instantly be discontinued. I have done all this entirely on her account, and pray lose no time in quieting her alarms. I am sure, Mrs. Tansey, you and I shall be better friends some day.”
Mrs. Tansey curtseyed again.
“Pray take this note.”
She took it.
“Give it to Crozier; and pray tell Miss Alice Arden, immediately, that she need have no fears. Good-night.”
And pale Mr. Longcluse, with his smile and his dismally dark gaze, and the strange suggestion of something undefined in look or tone, or air, that gradually overcame her more and more till she almost felt faint, as he smiled and murmured at the open window, in the moonlight, was gone. Then she stood with the note in her thin fingers, without moving, and called to Crozier with a shrill and earnest summons as one who has just had a frightful dream will call up a sleeper in the same room.
Mr. Longcluse walks boldly and listlessly through this forbidden ground. He does not care who may meet him. Near the house, indeed, he would not like an encounter with Sir Richard Arden, because he knows that his being involved in a quarrel at such a moment, so near, especially with her brother, would not subserve his interests with Alice Arden.
For hours he strode or loitered alone through the solitary woodlands. The moonlight was beautiful; the old trees stand mournful and black against the luminous sky; there is for him a fascination in the solitude, as his noiseless steps lead him alternately into the black shadow cast on the sward by the towering foliage, and into the clear moonlight, on dewy grass that shows grey in that cold brightness. He was in the excitement of hope and suspense. Things had looked very black, but a door had opened and light came out. Was it a dream?
He leans with folded arms against the trunk of one of the trees that stand there, and from the slight elevation of the ground he can see the avenue under the boughs of the trees that flank it, and the chimneys of Mortlake Hall through the summits of the opening clumps. How melancholy and still the whole scene looks under that light!
“When I succeed to all this, who will be mistress of it?” he says, with his strange smile, looking toward the summits of the chimneys, that indicate the site of the Hall. “No one knows who I am; who can tell my history? What about that opera-girl? What about my money? – money is alway exaggerated. How many humbugs! how many collapses! stealing into society by evasions, on false pretences, in disguise! The man in the mask, ha! ha! Really perhaps two masks; not a bad fluke, that. The villain! You would not take a thousand pounds and know me – that is speaking boldly. A thousand pounds is still something in your book. You would not take it. The time will come, perhaps, when you'd give a thousand —ten thousand, if you had them – that I were your friend. Slanderous villain! To think of his talking so of me! The man in the mask trying to excite suspicion. My two masks are broken, and I all the better. By – ! you shall meet me yet without a mask. Alice! will you be my idol? There is no neutrality with one like me in such a case. If I don't worship, I must break the image. What a speck we stand on between the illimitable – the eternal past and the eternal future – always looking for a present that shall be something tangible; always finding it a mathematical point, cujus nulla est pars– the mere stand-point of a retrospect and a conjecture. Ha! There are the wheels: there goes the funeral!”
He holds his breath, and watches. How interesting is everything connected with Alice! Slowly it passes along. Through one opening made by the havoc of a storm in the line of trees that form the avenue, he sees it plainly enough. A very scanty procession – the plumed hearse and three carriages, and a few persons walking beside. It passes. The great iron gate shrieks its long and dolorous note as it opened, and Longcluse heard it clang after the last carriage had passed, and with this farewell the old gate sent forth the dead master of Mortlake.
“Farewell to Mortlake,” murmured Longcluse, as he heard these sounds, with a shrug and his peculiar smile; “farewell, the lights, the claret-jug, the whist, and all the rest. You ‘fear neither justices nor bailiffs,’ as the song says, any longer. Very easy about your interest and your premiums; very careless who arrests you in your leaden vesture; and having paid, if nothing else, at least your beloved son's post obit. Courage, Sir Reginald! your earthly troubles are over. Here am I, erect as this tree, and as like to live my term out, with all that money, and no will made, and yet as tired as ever you were, and very willing, if the transaction were feasible, to die, and be bothered no more, instead of you.”
He sighs, and looks toward the house, and sighs again.
“Does she relent? Was it not she who told Lady May to ask this service of me? If I could only be sure of that, I should stand here, this moment, the proudest man in England. I think I know myself – a very simple character; just two principles – love and malice; for the rest, unscrupulous. Mere cruelty gives me no pleasure: well for some people it don't. Revenge does make me happy: well for some people if it didn't. Except for those I love or those I hate, I live for none. The rest live for me. I owe them no more than I do this rotten stick. Let them rot and fatten my land; let them burn and bake my bread.”
With these words he kicked the fragments of a decayed branch that lay at his foot, and glided over the short grass, like a ghost, toward the gate.
CHAPTER LV
MR. LONGCLUSE SEES A FRIEND
Sir Reginald Arden, then, is actually dead and buried, and is quite done with the pomps and vanities, the business and the miseries of life – dead as King Duncan, and cannot come out of his grave to trouble any one with protest or interference; and his son, Sir Richard, is in possession of the title, and seized of the acres, and uses them, without caring to trouble himself with conjectures as to what his father would have liked or abhorred.
A week has passed since the funeral. Lady May has spent two days at Mortlake, and then gone down to Brighton. Alice does not leave Mortlake; her spirits do not rise. Kind Lady May has done her best to persuade her to come down with her to Brighton, but the perversity or the indolence of grief has prevailed, and Alice has grown more melancholy and self-upbraiding about her quarrel with her father, and will not be persuaded to leave Mortlake, the very worst place she could have chosen, as Lady May protests, for a residence during her mourning. Perhaps in a little while she may feel equal to the effort, but now she can't. She has quite lost her energy, and the idea of a place like Brighton, or even the chance of meeting people, is odious to her.
“So, my dear, do what I may, there she will remain, in that triste place,” says Lady May Penrose; “and her brother, Sir Richard, has so much business just now on his hands, that he is often away two or three days at a time, and then she stays moping there quite alone; and only that she likes gardening and flowers, and that kind of thing, I really think she would go melancholy mad. But you know that kind of folly can't go on always, and I am determined to take her away in a month or so. People at first are so morbid, and make recluses of themselves.”
Lady May stayed away at Brighton for about a week. On her return, Mr. Longcluse called to see her.
“It was so kind of you, Mr. Longcluse, to take all the trouble you did about that terrible business! and it was perfectly successful. There was not the slightest unpleasantness.”
“Yes, I knew I had made anything of that kind all but impossible, but you are not to thank me. It made me only too happy to have an opportunity of being of any use – of relieving any anxiety.”
Longcluse sighed.
“You have placed me, I know, under a great obligation, and if every one felt it as I do, you would have been thanked as you deserved before now.”
A little silence followed.
“How is Miss Arden?” asked he in a low tone, and hardly raising his eyes.
“Pretty well,” she answered, a little dryly. “She's not very wise, I think, in planning to shut herself up so entirely in that melancholy place, Mortlake. You have seen it?”
“Yes, more than once,” he answered.
Lady May appeared more embarrassed as Mr. Longcluse grew less so. They became silent again. Mr. Longcluse was the first to speak, which he did a little hesitatingly.
“I was going to say that I hoped Miss Arden was not vexed at my having ventured to interfere as I did.”
“Oh! about that, of course there ought to be, as I said, but one opinion; but you know she is not herself just now, and I shall have, perhaps, something to tell by-and-by; and, to say truth – you won't be vexed, but I'm sorry I undertook to speak to her, for on that point I really don't quite understand her; and I am a little vexed – and – I'll talk to you more another time. I'm obliged to keep an appointment just now, and the carriage,” she added, glancing at the pendule on the bracket close by, “will be at the door in two or three minutes; so I must do a very ungracious thing, and say good-bye; and you must come again very soon – come to luncheon to-morrow – you must, really; I won't let you off, I assure you; there are two or three people coming to see me, whom I think you would like to meet.”
And, looking very good-natured, and a little flushed, and rather avoiding Mr. Longcluse's dark eyes, she departed.
He had been thinking of paying Miss Maubray a visit, but he had not avowed, even to himself, how high his hopes had mounted; and here was, in Lady May's ominous manner and determined evasion, matter to disturb and even shock him. Instead, therefore, of pursuing the route he had originally designed, he strolled into the park, and under the shade of green boughs he walked, amid the twitter of birds and the prattle of children and nursery-maids, with despair at his heart, and a brain in chaos.
As he sauntered, with downcast looks, under the trees, he came upon a humble Hebrew friend, Mr. Goldshed, a magnate in his own circle, but dwarfed into nothing beside the paragon of Mammon who walked on the grass, so unpretentiously, and with a face as anxious as that of the greengrocer who had just been supplicating the Jew for a renewal of his twenty-five pound bill.
Mr. Goldshed came to a full stop a little way in advance of Mr. Longcluse, anxious to attract his attention. Mr. Longcluse did see him, as he sauntered on; and the fat old Jew, with the seedy velvet waistcoat, crossed with gold chains, and with an old-fashioned gold eye-glass dangling at his breast, first smiled engagingly, then looked reverential and solemn, and then smiled again with his great moist lips, and raised his hat. Longcluse gave him a sharp, short nod, and intended to pass him.
“Will you shpare me one word, Mr. Lonclushe?”
“Not to-day, Sir.”
“But I've been to your chambers, Sir, and to your houshe, Mr. Lonclushe.”
“You've wasted time – waste no more.”
“I do assure you, Shir, it'sh very urgent.”
“I don't care.”
“It'sh about that East Indian thing,” and he lowered his voice as he concluded the sentence.
“I don't care a pin, Sir.”
The amiable Mr. Goldshed hesitated; Mr. Longcluse passed him as if he had been a post. He turned, however, and walked a few steps by Mr. Longcluse's side.
“And everything elshe is going sho vell; and it would look fishy, don't you think, to let thish thing go that way?”
“Let them go – and go you with them. I wish the earth would swallow you all – scrip, bonds, children, and beldames.” And if a stamp could have made the earth open at his bidding, it would have yawned wide enough at that instant. “If you follow me another step, by Heaven, I'll make it unpleasant to you.”
Mr. Longcluse looked so angry, that the Jew made him an unctuous bow, and remained fixed for a while to the earth, gazing after his patron with his hands in his pockets; and, with a gloomy countenance, he took forth a big cigar from his case, lighted a vesuvian, and began to smoke, still looking after Mr. Longcluse.
That gentleman sauntered on, striking his stick now and then to the ground, or waving it over the grass in as many odd flourishes as a magician in a pantomime traces with his wand.
If men are prone to teaze themselves with imaginations, they are equally disposed to comfort themselves with the same shadowy influences.
“I'm so nervous about this thing, and so anxious, that I exaggerate everything that seems to tell against me. How did I ever come to love her so? And yet, would I kill that love if I could? Should I not kill myself first? I'll go and see Miss Maubray – I may hear something from her. Lady May was embarrassed: what then? Were I a simple observer of such a scene in the case of another, I should say there was nothing in it more than this – that she had quite forgotten all about her promise. She never mentioned my name, and when the moment came, and I had come to ask for an account, she did not know what to say. It was well done, to see old Mrs. Tansey as I did. Lady May is so good-natured, and would feel her little neglect so much, and she will be sure to make it up. Fifty things may have prevented her. Yes, I'll go and hear what Miss Maubray has to say, and I'll lunch with Lady May to-morrow. I suspect that her visit to-day was to Mortlake.”
With these reflections, Mr. Longcluse's pace became brisker, and his countenance brightened.
CHAPTER LVI
A HOPE EXPIRES
Mr. Longcluse knocked at Mr. David Arden's door. Yes, Miss Maubray was at home. He mounted the stairs, and was duly announced at the drawing-room door, and saw the brilliant young lady, who received him very graciously. She was alone.
Mr. Longcluse began by saying that the weather was cooler, and the sun much less intolerable.
“I wish we could say as much for the people, though, indeed, they are cool enough. There are some people called Tramways: he's a baronet – a very new one. Do you know anything of them? Are they people one can know?”
“I only know that Lady Tramway chaperoned a very charming young lady, whom everybody is very glad to know, to Lady May's garden-party the other day, at Richmond.”
“Yes, very true; I'm that young lady, and that is the very reason I want to know. My uncle placed me in their hands.”
“Oh, he knows everybody.”
“Yes, and every one, which is quite another thing; and the woman has never given me an hour's quiet since. She presents me with bouquets, and fruit, and every imaginable thing I don't want, herself included, at least once a day; and I assure you I live in hourly terror of her getting into the drawing-room. You don't know anything about them?”
“I only know that her husband made a great deal of money by a contract.”
“That sounds very badly, and she is such a vulgar woman?”
“I know no more of them; but Lady May had her to Raleigh Hall, and surely she can satisfy your scruples.”
“No, it was my guardian who asked for their card, so that goes for nothing. It is really too bad.”
“My heart bleeds for you.”
“By-the-bye, talking of Lady May, I had a visit from her not a quarter-of-an-hour ago. What a fuss our friends at Mortlake do make about the death of that disagreeable old man! – Alice, I mean. Richard Arden bears it wonderfully. When did you see either?” she asked, innocently.
“You forget he has not been dead three weeks, and Alice Arden is not likely to see any one but very intimate friends for a long time; and – and I daresay you have heard that Sir Richard Arden and I are not on very pleasant terms.”
“‘Oh! Pity such difference should be – .’”
“Thanks, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee are not likely to make it up. I'm afraid people aren't always reasonable, you know, and expect, often, things that are not quite fair.”
“He ought to marry some one with money, and give up play.”
“What! give up play, and commence husband? I'm afraid he'd think that a rather dull life.”
“Well, I'm sure I'm no judge of that, although I give an opinion. Whatever he may be, you have a very staunch friend in Lady May.”
“I'm glad of that; she's always so kind.” And he looked rather oddly at the young lady.
Perhaps she seemed conscious of a knowledge more than she had yet divulged.
This young lady was, I need not tell you, a little coarse. She had, when she liked, the frankness that can come pretty boldly to the point; but I think she could be sly enough when she pleased; and was she just a little mischievous?
“Lady May has been talking to me a great deal about Alice Arden. She has been to see her very often since that poor old man died, and she says – she says, Mr. Longcluse – will you be upon honour not to repeat this?”
“Certainly, upon my honour.”
“Well, she says – ”
Miss Maubray gets up quickly, and settles some flowers over the chimney-piece.
“She says that there is a coolness in that quarter also.”
“I don't quite see,” says Mr. Longcluse.
“Well, I must tell you she has taken me into council, and told me a great deal; and she spoke to Alice, and wrote to her. Did she say she would show you the answer? I have got it; she left it with me, and asked me – she's so good-natured – to use my influence – she said my influence! She ought to know I've no influence.”
Longcluse felt very oddly indeed during this speech; he had still presence of mind not to add anything to the knowledge the young lady might actually possess.
“You have not said a great deal, you know; but Lady May certainly did promise to show me an answer which she expected to a note she wrote about three weeks ago, or less, to Miss Arden.”
“I really don't know of what use I can be in the matter. I have no excuse for speaking to Alice on the subject of her note – none in the world. I think I may as well let you see it; but you will promise – you have promised – not to tell any one?”
“I have – I do – I promise. Lady May herself said she would show me that letter.”
“Well, I can't, I suppose, be very wrong. It is only a note: it does not say much, but quite enough, I'm afraid, to make it useless, and almost impertinent, for me, or any one else, to say a word more on the subject to Alice Arden.”
All this time she is opening a very pretty marqueterie writing-desk, on spiral legs, which Longcluse has been listlessly admiring, little thinking what it contains. She now produced a little note, which, disengaging from its envelope, she places in the hand that Mr. Longcluse extended to receive it.
“I do so hope,” she said, as she gave it to him, “that I am doing what Lady May would wish. I think she shrank a little from showing it to you herself, but I am certain she wished you to know what is in it.”
He opened it quickly. It ran thus (“Merry,” I must remark, was a pet name, originating, perhaps, in Shakespeare's song that speaks of “the merry month of May”): —
“Dearest Merry,
“I hope you will come to see me to-morrow. I cannot yet bear the idea of going into town. I feel as if I never should, and I think I grow more and more miserable every day. You are one of the very few friends whom I can see. You can't think what a pleasure a call from you is – if, indeed, in my miserable state, I can call anything a pleasure. I have read your letter about Mr. Longcluse, and parts of it a little puzzle me. I can't say that I have anything to forgive, and I am sure he has acted just as kindly as you say. But our acquaintance has ended, and nothing shall ever induce me to renew it. I can give you fifty reasons, when I see you, for my not choosing to know him. Darling Merry, I have quite made up my mind upon this point. I don't know Mr. Longcluse, and I won't know Mr. Longcluse; and I'll tell you all my reasons, if you wish to hear them, when we meet. Some of them, which seem to me more than sufficient, you do know. The only condition I make is that you don't discuss them with me. I have grown so stupid that I really cannot. I only know that I am right, and that nothing can change me. Come, darling, and see me very soon. You have no idea how very wretched I am. But I do not complain: it has drawn me, I hope, to higher and better thoughts. The world is not what it was to me, and I pray it never may be. Come and see me soon, darling; you cannot think how I long to see you. – Your affectionate,
“Alice Arden.”
“What mountains of molehills!” said Mr. Longcluse, very gently, smiling with a little shrug, as he placed the letter again in Miss Maubray's hand.
“Making such a fuss about that poor old man's death! It certainly does look a little like a pretty affectation. Isn't that what you mean? He was so insupportable!”
“No, I know nothing about that. I mean such a ridiculous fuss about nothing. Why, people cease to be acquainted every day for much less reason. Sir Reginald chose to talk over his money matters with me, and I think he expected me to do things which no stranger could be reasonably invited to do. And I suppose, now that he is gone, Miss Arden resents my insensibility to his hints; and I daresay Sir Richard, who, I may say, on precisely similar grounds, chooses to quarrel with me, does not spare invective, and has, of course, a friendly listener in his sister. But how absurdly provoking that Lady May should have made such a diplomacy, and given herself so much trouble! And – I'm afraid I appear so foolish – I merely assented to Lady May's kind proposal to mediate, and I could not, of course, appear to think it a less important mission than she did; and – where are you going – Scotland? Italy?”
“My guardian, Mr. Arden, has not yet settled anything,” she answered; and upon this, Mr. Longcluse begins to recommend, and with much animation to describe, several Continental routes, and then he tells her all his gossip, and takes his leave, apparently in very happy spirits.
I doubt very much whether the face can ever be taught to lie as impudently as the tongue. Its muscles, of course, can be trained; but the young lady thought that Mr. Longcluse's pallor, as he smiled and returned the note, was more intense, and his dark eyes strangely fierce.
“He was more vexed than he cared to say,” thought the young lady. “Lady May has not told me the whole story yet. There has been a great deal of fibbing, but I shall know it all.”
Mr. Longcluse had to dine out. He drove home to dress. On arriving, he first sat down and wrote a note to Lady May.
“Dear Lady May,
“I am so grateful. Miss Maubray told me to-day all the trouble you have been taking for me. Pray think no more of that little vexation. I never took so serious a view of so commonplace an unpleasantness, as to dream of tasking your kindness so severely. I am quite ashamed of having given you so much trouble. – Yours, dear Lady May, sincerely,
“Walter Longcluse.”
“P.S. – I don't forget your kind invitation to lunch to-morrow.”
Longcluse dispatched this note, and then wrote a few words of apology to the giver of the City dinner, to which he had intended to go. He could not go. He was very much agitated: he knew that he could not endure the long constraint of that banquet. He was unfit, for the present, to bear the company of any one. Gloomy and melancholy was the pale face of this man, as if he were going to the funeral of his beloved, when he stepped from his door in the dark. Was he going to walk out to Mortlake, and shoot himself on the steps?
As Mr. Longcluse walked into town, he caught a passing sight of a handsome young face that jarred upon him. It was that of Richard Arden, who was walking, also alone, not under any wild impulse, but to keep an appointment. This handsome face appeared for a moment gliding by, and was lost. Melancholy and thoughtful he looked, and quite unconscious of the near vicinity of his pale adversary. We shall follow him to his place of rendezvous.
He walked quickly by Pall Mall, and down Parliament Street, into the ancient quarter of Westminster, turned into a street near the Abbey, and from it into another that ran toward the river. Here were tall and dingy mansions, some of which were let out as chambers. In one of these, in a room over the front drawing-room, Mr. Levi received his West-end clients; and here, by appointment, he awaited Sir Richard Arden.
The young baronet, a little paler, and with the tired look of a man who was made acquainted with care, enters this room, hot with the dry atmosphere of gas-light. With his back towards the door, and his feet on the fender, smoking, sits Mr. Levi. Sir Richard does not remove his hat, and he stands by the table, which he slaps once or twice sharply with his stick. Mr. Levi turns about, looking, in his own phrase, unusually “down in the mouth,” and his big black eyes are glowing angrily.
“Ho! Shir Richard Harden,” he says, rising, “I did not think we was sho near the time. Izh it a bit too soon?”
“A little later than the time I named.”
“Crikey! sho it izh.”
