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of care that form upon its surface on mere contact with the upper air and light.
What was my new trouble? A very fantastic one, you will say — the illusion of a self-tormentor. It was the face of Uncle Silas which haunted me. Notwithstanding the old pale smile, there was a shrinking grimness, and the always-averted look.
Sometimes I fancied his mind was disordered. I could not account for the eerie lights and shadows that flickered on his face, except so. There was a look of shame and fear of me, amazing as that seems, in the sheen of his peaked smile.
I thought, “Perhaps he blames himself for having tolerated Dudley’s suit — for having urged it on grounds of personal distress — for having altogether lowered, though under sore temptation, both himself and his office; and he thinks that he has forfeited my respect.”
Such was my analysis; but in the coup-d’oeil of that white face that dazzled me in darkness, and haunted my daily reveries with a faded light, there was an intangible character of the insidious and the terrible.
Chapter 54.
In Search of Mr. Clarke’s Skeleton
ON THE WHOLE, however, I was unspeakably relieved. Dudley Ruthyn, Esq., and Mrs. D. Ruthyn, were now skimming the blue waves on the wings of the Seamew, and every morning widened the distance between us, which was to go on increasing until it measured a point on the antipodes. The Liverpool paper containing this golden line was carefully preserved in my room; and like the gentleman who, when much tried by the shrewish heiress whom he had married, used to retire to his closet and read over his marriage settlement, I used, when blue devils haunted me, to unfold my newspaper and read the paragraph concerning the Seamew.
The day I now speak of was a dismal one of sleety snow. My own room seemed to me cheerier than the lonely parlour, where I could not have had good Mary Quince so decorously.
A good fire, that kind and trusty face, the peep I had just indulged in at my favourite paragraph, and the certainty of soon seeing my dear cousin Monica, and afterwards affectionate Milly, raised my spirits.
“So,” said I, “as old Wyat, you say, is laid up with rheumatism, and can’t turn up to scold me, I think I’ll run up stairs and make an exploration, and find poor Mr. Clarke’s skeleton in a closet.”
“Oh, law, Miss Maud, how can you say such tings!” exclaimed good old Quince, lifting up her honest grey head and round eyes from her knitting.
I had grown so familiar with the frightful tradition of Mr. Clarke and his suicide, that I could now afford to frighten old Quince with him.
“I am quite serious. I am going to have a ramble up-stairs and down-stairs, like goosey-goosey-gander; and if I do light upon his chamber, it is all the more interesting. I feel so like Adelaide, in the “Romance of the Forest,” the book I was reading to you last night, when she commenced her delightful rambles through the interminable ruined abbey in the forest.”
“Shall I go with you, Miss?”
“No, Quince; stay there; keep a good fire, and make some tea. I suspect I shall lose heart and return very soon;” and with a shawl about me, cowl fashion, over my head, I stole up-stairs.
I shall not recount with the particularity of the conscientious heroine of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, all the suites of apartments, corridors, and lobbies, which I threaded in my ramble. It will be enough to mention that I lighted upon a door at the end of a long gallery, which, I think, ran parallel with the front of the house; it interested me because it had the air of having been very long undisturbed. There were two rusty bolts, which did not evidently belong to its original securities, and had been, though very long ago, somewhat clumsily superadded. Dusty and rusty they were, but I had not difficulty in drawing them back. There was a rusty key, I remember it well, with a crooked handle in the lock; I tried to turn it, but could not. My curiosity was piqued. I was thinking of going back and getting Mary Quince’s assistance. It struck me, however, that possibly it was not locked, so I pulled the door and it opened quite easily. I did not find myself in a strangely-furnished suite of apartments, but at the entrance of a gallery, which diverged at right angles from that through which I had just passed; it was very imperfectly lighted, and ended in total darkness.
I began to think how far I had already come, and to consider whether I could retrace my steps with accuracy in case of a panic, and I had serious thoughts of returning.
The idea of Mr. Clarke was growing unpleasantly sharp and menacing; and as I looked down the long space before me, losing itself among ambiguous shadows, lulled in a sinister silence, and as it were inviting my entrance like a trap, I was very near yielding to the cowardly impulse.
But I took heart of grace and determined to see a little more. I opened a side-door, and entered a large room, where were, in a corner, some rusty and cobwebbed bird-cages, but nothing more. It was a wainscoted room, but a white mildew stained the panels. I looked from the window: it commanded that dismal, weed-choked quadrangle into which I had once looked from another window. I opened a door at its farther end, and entered another chamber, not quite so large, but equally dismal, with the same prison-like look-out, not very easily discerned through the grimy panes and the sleet that was falling thickly outside. The door through which I had entered made a little accidental creak, and, with my heart at my lips, I gazed at it, expecting to see Clarke, or the skeleton of which I had talked so lightly, stalk in at the half-open aperture. But I had an odd sort of courage which was always fighting against my cowardly nerves, and I walked to the door, and looking up and down the dismal passage, was reassured.
Well, one room more — just that whose deep-set door fronted me, with a melancholy frown, at the opposite end of the chamber. So to it I glided, shoved it open, advancing one step, and the great bony figure of Madame de la Rougierre was before me.
I could see nothing else.
The drowsy traveller who opens his sheets to slip into bed, and sees a scorpion coiled between them, may have experienced a shock the same in kind, but immeasurably less in degree.
She sat in a clumsy old arm-chair, with an ancient shawl about her, and her bare feet in a delft tub. She looked a thought more withered. Her wig shoved back disclosed her bald wrinkled forehead, and enhanced the ugly effect of her exaggerated features and the gaunt hollows of her face. With a sense of incredulity and terror I gazed, freezing, at this evil phantom, who returned my stare for a few seconds with a shrinking scowl, dismal and grim, as of an evil spirit detected.
The meeting, at least then and there, was as complete a surprise for her as for me. She could not tell how I might take it; but she quickly rallied, burst into a loud screeching laugh, and, with her old Walpurgis gaiety, danced some fantastic steps in her bare wet feet, tracking the floor with water, and holding out with finger and thumb, in dainty caricature, her slammakin old skirt, while she sang some of her nasal patois with an abominable hilarity and emphasis.
With a gasp, I too recovered from the fascination of the surprise. I could not speak though for some seconds, and Madame was first.
“Ah, dear Maud, what surprise! Are we not overjoy, dearest, and cannot speak? I am full of joy — quite charmed — ravie of seeing you. So are you of me, your face betray. Ah! yes, thou dear little baboon! here is poor Madame once more! Who could have imagine?”
“I thought you were in France, Madame,” I said, with a dismal effort.
“And so I was, dear Maud; I ‘av just arrive. Your uncle Silas he wrote to the superioress for gouvernante to accompany a young lady — that is you, Maud — on her journey, and she send me; and so, ma chère, here is poor Madame arrive to charge herself of that affair.”
“How soon do we leave for France, Madame?” I asked.
“I do not know, but the old women — wat is her name?”
“Wyat,” I suggested.
“Oh!