‘I knew in a general way,’ said Mr Searle, ‘of my having relations in America; but you know one hardly realises those things. I could hardly more have imagined people of our blood there, than I could have imagined being there myself. There was a man I knew at college, a very odd fellow, a nice fellow too; he and I were rather cronies; I think he afterwards went to America; to the Argentine Republic, I believe. Do you know the Argentine Republic? What an extraordinary name, by the way! And then, you know, there was that great-uncle of mine whom Sir Joshua painted. He went to America, but he never got there. He was lost at sea. You look enough like him to have one fancy he did get there, and that he has lived along till now. If you are he, you’ve not done a wise thing to show yourself here. He left a bad name behind him. There’s a ghost who comes sobbing about the house every now and then, the ghost of one against whom he wrought a great evil!’
‘O brother!’ cried Miss Searle, in simple horror.
‘Of course you know nothing of such things,’ said Mr Searle. ‘You’re too sound a sleeper to hear the sobbing of ghosts.’
‘I’m sure I should like immensely to hear the sobbing of a ghost!’ said my friend, with the light of his previous eagerness playing up into his eyes. ‘Why does it sob? Unfold the wondrous tale.’
Mr Searle eyed his audience for a moment gaugingly; and then, as the French say, se recueillit, as if he were measuring his own imaginative force.
He wished to do justice to his theme. With the five finger-nails of his left hand nervously playing against the tinkling crystal of his wineglass, and his bright eye telling of a gleeful sense that, small and grotesque as he sat there, he was for the moment profoundly impressive, he distilled into our untutored minds the sombre legend of his house. ‘Mr Clement Searle, from all I gather, was a young man of great talents but a weak disposition. His mother was left a widow early in life, with two sons, of whom he was the older and the more promising. She educated him with the utmost fondness and care. Of course, when he came to manhood she wished him to marry well. His means were quite sufficient to enable him to overlook the want of means in his wife; and Mrs Searle selected a young lady who possessed, as she conceived, every good gift save a fortune, – a fine, proud, handsome girl, the daughter of an old friend, – an old lover, I fancy, of her own. Clement, however, as it appeared, had either chosen otherwise or was as yet unprepared to choose. The young lady discharged upon him in vain the battery of her attractions; in vain his mother urged her cause. Clement remained cold, insensible, inflexible. Mrs Searle possessed a native force of which in its feminine branch the family seems to have lost trick. A proud, passionate, imperious woman, she had had great cares and a number of lawsuits; they had given her a great will. She suspected that her son’s affections were lodged elsewhere, and lodged amiss. Irritated by his stubborn defiance of her wishes, she persisted in her urgency. The more she watched him the more she believed that he loved in secret. If he loved in secret, of course he loved beneath him. He went about sombre, sullen, and preoccupied. At last, with the fatal indiscretion of an angry woman, she threatened to bring the young lady of her choice – who, by the way, seems to have been no shrinking blossom – to stay in the house. A stormy scene was the result. He threatened that if she did so, he would leave the country and sail for America. She probably disbelieved him; she knew him to be weak, but she overrated his weakness. At all events, the fair rejected arrived and Clement departed. On a dark December day he took ship at Southampton. The two women, desperate with rage and sorrow, sat alone in this great house, mingling their tears and imprecations. A fortnight later, on Christmas eve, in the midst of a great snow-storm, long famous in the country, there came to them a mighty quickening of their bitterness. A young woman, soaked and chilled by the storm, gained entrance to the house and made her way into the presence of the mistress and her guest. She poured out her tale. She was a poor curate’s daughter of Hereford. Clement Searle had loved her; loved her all too well. She had been turned out in wrath from her father’s house; his mother, at least, might pity her; if not for herself, then for the child she was soon to bring forth. The poor girl had been a second time too trustful. The women, in scorn, in horror, with blows, possibly, turned her forth again into the storm. In the storm she wandered, and in the deep snow she died. Her lover, as you know, perished in that hard winter weather at sea; the news came to his mother late, but soon enough. We are haunted by the curate’s daughter!’
There was a pause of some moments. ‘Ah, well we may be!’ said Miss Searle, with great pity.
Searle blazed up into enthusiasm. ‘Of course you know,’ – and suddenly he began to blush violently, – ‘I should be sorry to claim any identity with my faithless namesake, poor fellow. But I shall be hugely tickled if this poor ghost should be deceived by my resemblance and mistake me for her cruel lover. She’s welcome to the comfort of it. What one can do in the case I shall be glad to do. But can a ghost haunt a ghost? I am a ghost!’
Mr Searle stared a moment, and then smiling superbly: ‘I could almost believe you are!’ he said.
‘Oh brother – cousin!’ cried Miss Searle, with the gentlest, yet most appealing dignity, ‘how can you talk so horribly?’ This horrible talk, however, evidently possessed a potent magic for my friend; and his imagination, chilled for a while by the frigid contact of his kinsman, began to glow again with its earlier fire. From this moment he ceased to steer his cockleshell, to care what he said or how he said it, so long as he expressed his passionate satisfaction in the scene about him. As he talked I ceased even mentally to protest. I have wondered since that I should not have resented the exhibition of so rank and florid an egotism. But a great frankness for the time makes its own law, and a great passion its own channel. There was, moreover, an immense sweetness in the manner of my friend’s speech. Free alike from either adulation or envy, the very soul of it was a divine apprehension, an imaginative mastery, free as the flight of Ariel, of the poetry of his companions’ situation and of the contrasted prosiness of their attitude.
‘How does the look of age come?’ he demanded, at dessert. ‘Does it come of itself, unobserved, unrecorded, unmeasured? Or do you woo it and set baits and traps for it, and watch it like the dawning brownness of a meerschaum pipe, and nail it down when it appears, just where it peeps out, and light a votive taper beneath it and give thanks to it daily? Or do you forbid it and fight it and resist it, and yet feel it settling and deepening about you, as irresistible as fate?’
‘What the deuce is the man talking about?’ said the smile of our host.
‘I found a grey hair this morning,’ said Miss Searle.
‘Good heavens! I hope you respected it,’ cried Searle.
‘I looked at it for a long time in my little glass,’ said his cousin, simply.
‘Miss Searle, for many years to come, can afford to be amused at grey hairs,’ I said.
‘Ten years hence I shall be forty-three,’ she answered.
‘That’s my age,’ said Searle. ‘If I had only come here ten years ago! I should have had more time to enjoy the feast, but I should have had less of an appetite. I needed to get famished for it.’
‘Why did you wait for the starving point?’ asked Mr Searle. ‘To think of these ten years that we might have been enjoying you!’ And at the thought of these wasted ten years Mr Searle broke into a violent nervous laugh.
‘I always had a notion, – a stupid, vulgar notion, if there ever was one, – that to come abroad properly one ought to have a pot of money. My pot was too nearly empty. At last I came with my empty pot!’
Mr Searle coughed with an air of hesitation. ‘You’re a – you’re in limited circumstances?’
My friend apparently was vastly tickled to have his bleak situation called by so soft a name. ‘Limited circumstances!’ he cried with a long, light laugh; ‘I’m in no circumstances at all!’
‘Upon my word!’ murmured Mr Searle, with an air of being divided between his sense of the indecency and his
sense of the rarity of a gentleman taking just that tone about his affairs. ‘Well – well – well!’ he added, in a voice which might have meant everything or nothing; and proceeded, with a twinkle in his eye, to finish a glass of wine. His sparkling eye, as he drank, encountered mine over the top of his glass, and, for a moment, we exchanged a long deep glance, – a glance so keen as to leave a slight embarrassment on the face of each. ‘And you,’ said Mr Searle, by way of carrying it off, ‘how about your circumstances?’
‘O, his,’ said my friend, ‘his are unlimited! He could buy up Lockley Park!’ He had drunk, I think, a rather greater number of glasses of port – I admit that the port was infinitely drinkable – than was to have been desired in the interest of perfect self-control. He was rapidly drifting beyond any tacit dissuasion of mine. A certain feverish harshness in his glance and voice warned me that to attempt to direct him would simply irritate him. As we rose from the table he caught my troubled look. Passing his arm for a moment into mine, ‘This is the great night!’ he whispered. ‘The night of fatality, the night of destiny!’
Mr Searle had caused the whole lower region of the house to be thrown open and a multitude of lights to be placed in convenient and effective positions. Such a marshalled wealth of ancient candlesticks and flambeaux I had never beheld. Niched against the dark panellings, casting great luminous circles upon the pendent stiffness of sombre tapestries, enhancing and completing with admirable effect the vastness and mystery of the ancient house, they seemed to people the great rooms, as our little group passed slowly from one to another, with a dim, expectant presence. We had a delightful hour of it. Mr Searle at once assumed the part of cicerone, and – I had not hitherto done him justice – Mr Searle became agreeable. While I lingered behind with Miss Searle, he walked in advance with his kinsman. It was as if he had said, ‘Well, if you want the old place, you shall have it – metaphysically!’ To speak vulgarly, he rubbed it in. Carrying a great silver candlestick in his left hand, he raised it and lowered it and cast the light hither and thither upon pictures and hangings and bits of carving and a hundred lurking architectural treasures. Mr Searle knew his house. He hinted at innumerable traditions and memories, and evoked with a very pretty wit the figures of its earlier occupants. He told a dozen anecdotes with an almost reverential gravity and neatness. His companion attended, with a sort of brooding intelligence. Miss Searle and I, meanwhile, were not wholly silent.
‘I suppose that by this time,’ I said, ‘you and your cousin are almost old friends.’
She trifled a moment with her fan, and then raising her homely candid gaze: ‘Old friends, and at the same time strangely new! My cousin, – my cousin,’ – and her voice lingered on the word, – ‘it seems so strange to call him my cousin, after thinking these many years that I had no cousin! He’s a most singular man.’
‘It’s not so much he as his circumstances that are singular,’ I ventured to say.
‘I’m so sorry for his circumstances. I wish I could help him in some way. He interests me so much.’ And here Miss Searle gave a rich, mellow sigh. ‘I wish I had known him a long time ago. He told me that he is but the shadow of what he was.’
I wondered whether Searle had been consciously playing upon the fancy of this gentle creature. If he had, I believed he had gained his point. But in fact, his position had become to my sense so charged with opposing forces, that I hardly ventured wholly to rejoice. ‘His better self just now,’ I said, ‘seems again to be taking shape. It will have been a good deed on your part, Miss Searle, if you help to restore him to soundness and serenity.’
‘Ah, what can I do?’
‘Be a friend to him. Let him like you, let him love you! You see in him now, doubtless, much to pity and to wonder at. But let him simply enjoy awhile the grateful sense of your nearness and dearness. He will be a better and stronger man for it, and then you can love him, you can respect him without restriction.’
Miss Searle listened with a puzzled tenderness of gaze. ‘It’s a hard part for poor me to play!’
Her almost infantine gentleness left me no choice but to be absolutely frank. ‘Did you ever play any part at all?’ I asked.
Her eyes met mine, wonderingly; she blushed, as with a sudden sense of my meaning. ‘Never! I think I have hardly lived.’
‘You’ve begun now, perhaps. You have begun to care for something outside the narrow circle of habit and duty. (Excuse me if I am rather too outspoken: you know I’m a foreigner.) It’s a great moment: I wish you joy!’
‘I could almost fancy you are laughing at me. I feel more trouble than joy.’
‘Why do you feel trouble?’
She paused, with her eyes fixed on our two companions. ‘My cousin’s arrival,’ she said at last, ‘is a great disturbance.’
‘You mean that you did wrong in recognising him? In that case the fault is mine. He had no intention of giving you the opportunity.’
‘I did wrong, after a fashion! But I can’t find it in my heart to regret it. I never shall regret it! I did what I thought proper. Heaven forgive me!’
‘Heaven bless you, Miss Searle! Is any harm to come of it? I did the evil; let me bear the brunt!’
She shook her head gravely. ‘You don’t know my brother!’
‘The sooner I do know him, then, the better!’ And hereupon I felt a dull irritation which had been gathering force for more than an hour explode into sudden wrath. ‘What on earth is your brother?’ I demanded. She turned away. ‘Are you afraid of him?’ I asked.
She gave me a tearful sidelong glance. ‘He’s looking at me!’ she murmured.
I looked at him. He was standing with his back to us, holding a large Venetian hand-mirror, framed in rococo silver, which he had taken from a shelf of antiquities, in just such a position that he caught the reflection of his sister’s person. Shall I confess it? Something in this performance so tickled my sense of the picturesque, that it was with a sort of blunted anger that I muttered, ‘The sneak!’ Yet I felt passion enough to urge me forward. It seemed to me that by implication I, too, was being covertly watched. I should not be watched for nothing! ‘Miss Searle,’ I said, insisting upon her attention, ‘promise me something.’
She turned upon me with a start and the glance of one appealing from some great pain. ‘O, don’t ask me!’ she cried. It was as if she were standing on the verge of some sudden lapse of familiar ground and had been summoned to make a leap. I felt that retreat was impossible, and that it was the greater kindness to beckon her forward.
‘Promise me,’ I repeated.
Still with her eyes she protested. ‘O, dreadful day!’ she cried, at last.
‘Promise me to let him speak to you, if he should ask you, any wish you may suspect on your brother’s part notwithstanding.’
She coloured deeply. ‘You mean,’ she said, – ‘you mean that he – has something particular to say.’
‘Something most particular!’
‘Poor cousin!’
I gave her a deeply questioning look. ‘Well, poor cousin! But promise me.’
‘I promise,’ she said, and moved away across the long room and out of the door.
‘You’re in time to hear the most delightful story!’ said my friend, as I rejoined the two gentlemen. They were standing before an old sombre portrait of a lady in the dress of Queen Anne’s time, with her ill-painted flesh-tints showing livid in the candlelight against her dark drapery and background. ‘This is Mistress Margaret Searle, – a sort of Beatrix Esmond, – who did as she pleased. She married a paltry Frenchman, a penniless fiddler, in the teeth of her whole family. Fair Margaret, my compliments! Upon my soul, she looks like Miss Searle! Pray go on. What came of it all?’
Mr Searle looked at his kinsman for a moment with an air of distaste for his boisterous homage, and of pity for his crude imagination. Then resuming, with a very effective dryness of tone: ‘I found a year ago, in a box of very old papers, a letter from Mistress Margaret to Cynthia Searle, her elder sist
er. It was dated from Paris and dreadfully ill-spelled. It contained a most passionate appeal for – a – for pecuniary assistance. She had just been confined, she was starving, and neglected by her husband; she cursed the day she left England. It was a most dismal effusion. I never heard that she found means to return.’
‘So much for marrying a Frenchman!’ I said, sententiously.
Mr Searle was silent for some moments. ‘This was the first,’ he said finally, ‘and the last of the family who has been so d–d un-English!’
‘Does Miss Searle know her history?’ asked my friend, staring at the rounded whiteness of the lady’s heavy cheek.
‘Miss Searle knows nothing!’ said our host, with zeal.