questions on the events of this day — on the share which Rashleigh has in your deliverance from this petty scrape — upon many other points which cannot but excite your attention; and I cannot bring myself to answer with the necessary falsehood and finesse — I should do it awkwardly, and lose your good opinion, if I have any share of it, as well as my own. It is best to say at once, Ask me no questions,— I have it not in my power to reply to them.”
Miss Vernon spoke these words with a tone of feeling which could not but make a corresponding impression upon me. I assured her she had neither to fear my urging her with impertinent questions, nor my misconstruing her declining to answer those which might in themselves be reasonable, or at least natural.
“I was too much obliged,” I said, “by the interest she had taken in my affairs, to misuse the opportunity her goodness had afforded me of prying into hers — I only trusted and entreated, that if my services could at any time be useful, she would command them without doubt or hesitation.”
“Thank you — thank you,” she replied; “your voice does not ring the cuckoo chime of compliment, but speaks like that of one who knows to what he pledges himself. If — but it is impossible — but yet, if an opportunity should occur, I will ask you if you remember this promise; and I assure you, I shall not be angry if I find you have forgotten it, for it is enough that you are sincere in your intentions just now — much may occur to alter them ere I call upon you, should that moment ever come, to assist Die Vernon, as if you were Die Vernon’s brother.”
“And if I were Die Vernon’s brother,” said I, “there could not be less chance that I should refuse my assistance — And now I am afraid I must not ask whether Rashleigh was willingly accessory to my deliverance?”
“Not of me; but you may ask it of himself, and depend upon it, he will say yes; for rather than any good action should walk through the world like an unappropriated adjective in an ill-arranged sentence, he is always willing to stand noun substantive to it himself.”
“And I must not ask whether this Campbell be himself the party who eased Mr. Morris of his portmanteau,— or whether the letter, which our friend the attorney received, was not a finesse to withdraw him from the scene of action, lest he should have marred the happy event of my deliverance? And I must not ask”—
“You must ask nothing of me,” said Miss Vernon; “so it is quite in vain to go on putting cases. You are to think just as well of me as if I had answered all these queries, and twenty others besides, as glibly as Rashleigh could have done; and observe, whenever I touch my chin just so, it is a sign that I cannot speak upon the topic which happens to occupy your attention. I must settle signals of correspondence with you, because you are to be my confidant and my counsellor, only you are to know nothing whatever of my affairs.”
“Nothing can be more reasonable,” I replied, laughing; “and the extent of your confidence will, you may rely upon it, only be equalled by the sagacity of my counsels.”
This sort of conversation brought us, in the highest good-humour with each other, to Osbaldistone Hall, where we found the family far advanced in the revels of the evening.
“Get some dinner for Mr. Osbaldistone and me in the library,” said Miss Vernon to a servant.—“I must have some compassion upon you,” she added, turning to me, “and provide against your starving in this mansion of brutal abundance; otherwise I am not sure that I should show you my private haunts. This same library is my den — the only corner of the Hall-house where I am safe from the Ourang-Outangs, my cousins. They never venture there, I suppose for fear the folios should fall down and crack their skulls; for they will never affect their heads in any other way — So follow me.”
And I followed through hall and bower, vaulted passage and winding stair, until we reached the room where she had ordered our refreshments.
37 [The lines here quoted belong to or were altered from a set of verses at one time very popular in England, beginning, Tobacco that is withered quite. In Scotland, the celebrated Ralph Erskine, author of the Gospel Sonnets, published what he called “Smoking Spiritualized, in two parts. The first part being an Old Meditation upon Smoking Tobacco.” It begins —
This Indian weed now withered quite,
Tho’ green at noon, cut down at night,
Shows thy decay;
All flesh is hay.
Thus thank, and smoke tobacco.]
38 The Abbess of Wilton.
The nunnery of Wilton was granted to the Earl of Pembroke upon its dissolution, by the magisterial authority of Henry VIII., or his son Edward VI. On the accession of Queen Mary, of Catholic memory, the Earl found it necessary to reinstate the Abbess and her fair recluses, which he did with many expressions of his remorse, kneeling humbly to the vestals, and inducting them into the convent and possessions from which he had expelled them. With the accession of Elizabeth, the accommodating Earl again resumed his Protestant faith, and a second time drove the nuns from their sanctuary. The remonstrances of the Abbess, who reminded him of his penitent expressions on the former occasion, could wring from him no other answer than that in the text —“Go spin, you jade!— Go spin!”
Chapter Tenth.
In the wide pile, by others heeded not,
Hers was one sacred solitary spot,
Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves contain
For moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain.
Anonymous.
The library at Osbaldistone Hall was a gloomy room, whose antique oaken shelves bent beneath the weight of the ponderous folios so dear to the seventeenth century, from which, under favour be it spoken, we have distilled matter for our quartos and octavos, and which, once more subjected to the alembic, may, should our sons be yet more frivolous than ourselves, be still farther reduced into duodecimos and pamphlets. The collection was chiefly of the classics, as well foreign as ancient history, and, above all, divinity. It was in wretched order. The priests, who in succession had acted as chaplains at the Hall, were, for many years, the only persons who entered its precincts, until Rashleigh’s thirst for reading had led him to disturb the venerable spiders, who had muffled the fronts of the presses with their tapestry. His destination for the church rendered his conduct less absurd in his father’s eyes, than if any of his other descendants had betrayed so strange a propensity, and Sir Hildebrand acquiesced in the library receiving some repairs, so as to fit it for a sitting-room. Still an air of dilapidation, as obvious as it was uncomfortable, pervaded the large apartment, and announced the neglect from which the knowledge which its walls contained had not been able to exempt it. The tattered tapestry, the worm-eaten shelves, the huge and clumsy, yet tottering, tables, desks, and chairs, the rusty grate, seldom gladdened by either sea-coal or faggots, intimated the contempt of the lords of Osbaldistone Hall for learning, and for the volumes which record its treasures.
“You think this place somewhat disconsolate, I suppose?” said Diana, as I glanced my eye round the forlorn apartment; “but to me it seems like a little paradise, for I call it my own, and fear no intrusion. Rashleigh was joint proprietor with me, while we were friends.”
“And are you no longer so?” was my natural question. Her fore-finger immediately touched her dimpled chin, with an arch
