Your uncle is a man of great talents, great faults, and great wrongs. His talents have not availed him; his faults are long ago repented of; and his wrongs I believe he feels less than I do, but they are deep. Did she say any more, madam?” he demanded abruptly of Mrs. Rusk.
“Nothing, sir,” with a stiff little courtesy, answered Mrs. Rusk, who stood in awe of him.
“And there is no need, child,” he continued, addressing himself to me, “that you should think more of him at present. Clear your head of Uncle Silas. One day, perhaps, you will know him — yes, very well — and understand how villains have injured him.”
Then my father retired, and at the door he said —
“Mrs. Rusk, a word, if you please,” beckoning to that lady, who trotted after him to the library.
I think he then laid some injunction upon the housekeeper, which was transmitted by her to Mary Quince, for from that time forth I could never lead either to talk with me about Uncle Silas. They let me talk on, but were reserved and silent themselves, and seemed embarrassed, and Mrs. Rusk sometimes pettish and angry, when I pressed for information.
Thus curiosity was piqued; and round the slender portrait in the leather pantaloons and top-boots gathered many-coloured circles of mystery, and the handsome features seemed to smile down upon my baffled curiosity with a provoking significance.
Why is it that this form of ambition — curiosity — which entered into the temptation of our first parent, is so specially hard to resist? Knowledge is power — and power of one sort or another is the secret lust of human souls; and here is, beside the sense of exploration, the undefinable interest of a story, and above all, something forbidden, to stimulate the contumacious appetite.
Chapter 3.
A New Face
I THINK IT was about a fortnight after that conversation in which my father had expressed his opinion, and given me the mysterious charge about the old oak cabinet in his library, as already detailed, that I was one night sitting at the great drawing-room window, lost in the melancholy reveries of night, and in admiration of the moonlighted scene. I was the only occupant of the room; and the lights near the fire, at its farther end, hardly reached to the window at which I sat.
The shorn grass sloped gently downward from the windows till it met the broad level on which stood, in clumps, or solitarily scattered, some of the noblest timber in England. Hoar in the moonbeams stood those graceful trees casting their moveless shadows upon the grass, and in the background crowning the undulations of the distance, in masses, were piled those woods among which lay the solitary tomb where the remains of my beloved mother rested.
The air was still. The silvery vapour hung serenely on the far horizon, and the frosty stars blinked brightly. Everyone knows the effect of such a scene on a mind already saddened. Fancies and regrets float mistily in the dream, and the scene affects us with a strange mixture of memory and anticipation, like some sweet old air heard in the distance. As my eyes rested on those, to me, funereal but glorious woods, which formed the background of the picture, my thoughts recurred to my father’s mysterious intimations and the image of the approaching visitor; and the thought of the unknown journey saddened me.
In all that concerned his religion, from very early association, there was to me something of the unearthly and spectral.
When my dear mamma died I was not nine years old; and I remember, two days before the funeral, there came to Knowl, where she died, a thin little man, with large black eyes, and a very grave, dark face.
He was shut up a good deal with my dear father, who was in deep affliction; and Mrs. Rusk used to say, “It is rather odd to see him praying with that little scarecrow from London, and good Mr. Clay ready at call, in the village; much good that little black whipper-snapper will do him!”
With that little black man, on the day after the funeral, I was sent out, for some reason, for a walk; my governess was ill, I know, and there was confusion in the house, and I dare say the maids made as much of a holiday as they could.
I remember feeling a sort of awe of this little dark man; but I was not afraid of him, for he was gentle, though sad — and seemed kind. He led me into the garden — the Dutch garden, we used to call it — with a balustrade, and statues at the farther front, laid out in a carpet-pattern of brilliantly-coloured flowers. We came down the broad flight of Caen stone steps into this, and we walked in silence to the balustrade. The base was too high at the spot where we reached it for me to see over; but holding my hand, he said, “Look through that, my child. Well, you can’t; but I can see beyond it — shall I tell you what? I see ever so much. I see a cottage with a steep roof, that looks like gold in the sunlight; there are tall trees throwing soft shadows round it, and flowering shrubs, I can’t say what, only the colours are beautiful, growing by the walls and windows, and two little children are playing among the stems of the trees, and we are on our way there, and in a few minutes shall be under those trees ourselves, and talking to those little children. Yet now to me it is but a picture in my brain, and to you but a story told by me, which you believe. Come dear; let us be going.”
So we descended the steps at the right, and side by side walked along the grass lane between tall trim walls of evergreens. The way was in deep shadow, for the sun was near the horizon; but suddenly we turned to the left, and there we stood in rich sunlight, among the many objects he had described.
“Is this your house, my little men?” he asked of the children — pretty little rosy boys — who assented; and he leaned with his open hand against the stem of one of the trees, and with a grave smile he nodded down to me, saying —
“You see now, and hear, and feel for yourself that both the vision and the story were quite true; but come on, my dear, we have further to go.”
And relapsing into silence we had a long ramble through the wood, the same on which I was now looking in the distance. Every now and then he made me sit down to rest, and he in a musing solemn sort of way would relate some little story, reflecting, even to my childish mind, a strange suspicion of a spiritual meaning, but different from what honest Mrs. Rusk used to expound to me from the Parables, and, somehow, startling in its very vagueness.
Thus entertained, though a little awfully, I accompanied the dark mysterious little “whipper-snapper” through the woodland glades. We came, to me quite unexpectedly, in the deep sylvan shadows, upon the grey, pillared temple, four-fronted, with a slanting pedestal of lichen-stained steps, the lonely sepulchre in which I had the morning before seen poor mamma laid. At the sight the fountains of my grief reopened, and I cried bitterly, repeating, “Oh! mamma, mamma, little mamma!” and so went on weeping and calling wildly on the deaf and the silent. There was a stone bench some ten steps away from the tomb.
“Sit down beside me, child!” said the grave man with the black eyes, very kindly and gently. “Now, what do you see there?” he asked, pointing horizontally with his stick towards the centre of the opposite structure.
“Oh, that — that place where poor mamma is?”
“Yes, a stone wall with pillars, too high for either you or me to see over. But ——”
Here he mentioned a name which I think must have been Swedenborg, from what I afterwards learnt of his tenets and revelations; I only know that it sounded to me like the name of a magician in a fairy tale; I fancied he lived in the wood which
