Kitabı oku: «David Elginbrod», sayfa 12

CHAPTER VII. THE PICTURE GALLERY

 
the house is crencled to and fro,
And hath so queint waies for to go,
For it is shapen as the mase is wrought.
 

CHAUCER—Legend of Ariadne.

Luncheon over, and Harry dismissed as usual to lie down, Miss Cameron said to Hugh:

“You have never been over the old house yet, I believe, Mr. Sutherland. Would you not like to see it?”

“I should indeed,” said Hugh. “It is what I have long hoped for, and have often been on the point of begging.”

“Come, then; I will be your guide—if you will trust yourself with a madcap like me, in the solitudes of the old hive.”

“Lead on to the family vaults, if you will,” said Hugh.

“That might be possible, too, from below. We are not so very far from them. Even within the house there is an old chapel, and some monuments worth looking at. Shall we take it last?”

“As you think best,” answered Hugh.

She rose and rang the bell. When it was answered,

“Jacob,” she said, “get me the keys of the house from Mrs. Horton.”

Jacob vanished, and reappeared with a huge bunch of keys. She took them.

“Thank you. They should not be allowed to get quite rusty, Jacob.”

“Please, Miss, Mrs. Horton desired me to say, she would have seen to them, if she had known you wanted them.”

“Oh! never mind. Just tell my maid to bring me an old pair of gloves.”

Jacob went; and the maid came with the required armour.

“Now, Mr. Sutherland. Jane, you will come with us. No, you need not take the keys. I will find those I want as we go.”

She unlocked a door in the corner of the hall, which Hugh had never seen open. Passing through a long low passage, they came to a spiral staircase of stone, up which they went, arriving at another wide hall, very dusty, but in perfect repair. Hugh asked if there was not some communication between this hall and the great oak staircase.

“Yes,” answered Euphra; “but this is the more direct way.”

As she said this, he felt somehow as if she cast on him one of her keenest glances; but the place was very dusky, and he stood in a spot where the light fell upon him from an opening in a shutter, while she stood in deep shadow.

“Jane, open that shutter.”

The girl obeyed; and the entering light revealed the walls covered with paintings, many of them apparently of no value, yet adding much to the effect of the place. Seeing that Hugh was at once attracted by the pictures, Euphra said:

“Perhaps you would like to see the picture gallery first?”

Hugh assented. Euphra chose key after key, and opened door after door, till they came into a long gallery, well lighted from each end. The windows were soon opened.

“Mr. Arnold is very proud of his pictures, especially of his family portraits; but he is content with knowing he has them, and never visits them except to show them; or perhaps once or twice a year, when something or other keeps him at home for a day, without anything particular to do.”

In glancing over the portraits, some of them by famous masters, Hugh’s eyes were arrested by a blonde beauty in the dress of the time of Charles II. There was such a reality of self-willed boldness as well as something worse in her face, that, though arrested by the picture, Hugh felt ashamed of looking at it in the presence of Euphra and her maid. The pictured woman almost put him out of countenance, and yet at the same time fascinated him. Dragging his eyes from it, he saw that Jane had turned her back upon it, while Euphra regarded it steadily.

“Open that opposite window, Jane,” said she; “there is not light enough on this portrait.”

Jane obeyed. While she did so, Hugh caught a glimpse of her face, and saw that the formerly rosy girl was deadly pale. He said to Euphra:

“Your maid seems ill, Miss Cameron.”

“Jane, what is the matter with you?”

She did not reply, but, leaning against the wall, seemed ready to faint.

“The place is close,” said her mistress. “Go into the next room there,”—she pointed to a door—“and open the window. You will soon be well.”

“If you please, Miss, I would rather stay with you. This place makes me feel that strange.”

She had come but lately, and had never been over the house before.

“Nonsense!” said Miss Cameron, looking at her sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Please, don’t be angry, Miss; but the first night e’er I slept here, I saw that very lady—”

“Saw that lady!”

“Well, Miss, I mean, I dreamed that I saw her; and I remembered her the minute I see her up there; and she give me a turn like. I’m all right now, Miss.”

Euphra fixed her eyes on her, and kept them fixed, till she was very nearly all wrong again. She turned as pale as before, and began to draw her breath hard.

“You silly goose!” said Euphra, and withdrew her eyes; upon which the girl began to breathe more freely.

Hugh was making some wise remarks in his own mind on the unsteady condition of a nature in which the imagination predominates over the powers of reflection, when Euphra turned to him, and began to tell him that that was the picture of her three or four times great-grandmother, painted by Sir Peter Lely, just after she was married.

“Isn’t she fair?” said she.—“She turned nun at last, they say.”

“She is more fair than honest,” thought Hugh. “It would take a great deal of nun to make her into a saint.” But he only said, “She is more beautiful than lovely. What was her name?”

“If you mean her maiden name, it was Halkar—Lady Euphrasia Halkar—named after me, you see. She had foreign blood in her, of course; and, to tell the truth, there were strange stories told of her, of more sorts than one. I know nothing of her family. It was never heard of in England, I believe, till after the Restoration.”

All the time Euphra was speaking, Hugh was being perplexed with that most annoying of perplexities—the flitting phantom of a resemblance, which he could not catch. He was forced to dismiss it for the present, utterly baffled.

“Were you really named after her, Miss Cameron?”

“No, no. It is a family name with us. But, indeed, I may be said to be named after her, for she was the first of us who bore it. You don’t seem to like the portrait.”

“I do not; but I cannot help looking at it, for all that.”

“I am so used to the lady’s face,” said Euphra, “that it makes no impression on me of any sort. But it is said,” she added, glancing at the maid, who stood at some distance, looking uneasily about her—and as she spoke she lowered her voice to a whisper—“it is said, she cannot lie still.”

“Cannot lie still! What do you mean?”

“I mean down there in the chapel,” she answered, pointing.

The Celtic nerves of Hugh shuddered. Euphra laughed; and her voice echoed in silvery billows, that broke on the faces of the men and women of old time, that had owned the whole; whose lives had flowed and ebbed in varied tides through the ancient house; who had married and been given in marriage; and gone down to the chapel below—below the prayers and below the psalms—and made a Sunday of all the week.

Ashamed of his feeling of passing dismay, Hugh said, just to say something:

“What a strange ornament that is! Is it a brooch or a pin? No, I declare it is a ring—large enough for three cardinals, and worn on her thumb. It seems almost to sparkle. Is it ruby, or carbuncle, or what?”

“I don’t know: some clumsy old thing,” answered Euphra, carelessly.

“Oh! I see,” said Hugh; “it is not a red stone. The glow is only a reflection from part of her dress. It is as clear as a diamond. But that is impossible—such a size. There seems to me something curious about it; and the longer I look at it, the more strange it appears.”

Euphra stole another of her piercing glances at him, but said nothing.

“Surely,” Hugh went on, “a ring like that would hardly be likely to be lost out of the family? Your uncle must have it somewhere.”

Euphra laughed; but this laugh was very different from the last. It rattled rather than rang.

“You are wonderfully taken with a bauble—for a man of letters, that is, Mr. Sutherland. The stone may have been carried down any one of the hundred streams into which a family river is always dividing.”

“It is a very remarkable ornament for a lady’s finger, notwithstanding,” said Hugh, smiling in his turn.

“But we shall never get through the pictures at this rate,” remarked Euphra; and going on, she directed Hugh’s attention now to this, now to that portrait, saying who each was, and mentioning anything remarkable in the history of their originals. She manifested a thorough acquaintance with the family story, and made, in fact, an excellent show-woman. Having gone nearly to the other end of the gallery,

“This door,” said she, stopping at one, and turning over the keys, “leads to one of the oldest portions of the house, the principal room in which is said to have belonged especially to the lady over there.”

As she said this, she fixed her eyes once more on the maid.

“Oh! don’t ye now, Miss,” interrupted Jane. “Hannah du say as how a whitey-blue light shines in the window of a dark night, sometimes—that lady’s window, you know, Miss. Don’t ye open the door—pray, Miss.”

Jane seemed on the point of falling into the same terror as before.

“Really, Jane,” said her mistress, “I am ashamed of you; and of myself, for having such silly servants about me.”

“I beg your pardon, Miss, but—”

“So Mr. Sutherland and I must give up our plan of going over the house, because my maid’s nerves are too delicate to permit her to accompany us. For shame!”

“Oh, du ye now go without me!” cried the girl, clasping her hands.

“And you will wait here till we come back?”

“Oh! don’t ye leave me here. Just show me the way out.”

And once more she turned pale as death.

“Mr. Sutherland, I am very sorry, but we must put off the rest of our ramble till another time. I am, like Hamlet, very vilely attended, as you see. Come, then, you foolish girl,” she added, more mildly.

The poor maid, what with terror of Lady Euphrasia, and respect for her mistress, was in a pitiable condition of moral helplessness. She seemed almost too frightened to walk behind them. But if she had been in front it would have been no better; for, like other ghost-fearers, she seemed to feel very painfully that she had no eyes in her back.

They returned as they came; and Jane receiving the keys to take to the housekeeper, darted away. When she reached Mrs. Horton’s room, she sank on a chair in hysterics.

“I must get rid of that girl, I fear,” said Miss Cameron, leading the way to the library; “she will infect the whole household with her foolish terrors. We shall not hear the last of this for some time to come. We had a fit of it the same year I came; and I suppose the time has come round for another attack of the same epidemic.”

“What is there about the room to terrify the poor thing?”

“Oh! they say it is haunted; that is all. Was there ever an old house anywhere over Europe, especially an old family house, but was said to be haunted? Here the story centres in that room—or at least in that room and the avenue in front of its windows.”

“Is that the avenue called the Ghost’s Walk?”

“Yes. Who told you?”

“Harry would not let me cross it.”

“Poor boy! This is really too bad. He cannot stand anything of that kind, I am sure. Those servants!”

“Oh! I hope we shall soon get him too well to be frightened at anything. Are these places said to be haunted by any particular ghost?”

“Yes. By Lady Euphrasia—Rubbish!”

Had Hugh possessed a yet keener perception of resemblance, he would have seen that the phantom-likeness which haunted him in the portrait of Euphrasia Halkar, was that of Euphrasia Cameron—by his side all the time. But the mere difference of complexion was sufficient to throw him out—insignificant difference as that is, beside the correspondence of features and their relations. Euphra herself was perfectly aware of the likeness, but had no wish that Hugh should discover it.

As if the likeness, however, had been dimly identified by the unconscious part of his being, he sat in one corner of the library sofa, with his eyes fixed on the face of Euphra, as she sat in the other. Presently he was made aware of his unintentional rudeness, by seeing her turn pale as death, and sink back in the sofa. In a moment she started up, and began pacing about the room, rubbing her eyes and temples. He was bewildered and alarmed.

“Miss Cameron, are you ill?” he exclaimed.

She gave a kind of half-hysterical laugh, and said:

“No—nothing worth speaking of. I felt a little faint, that was all. I am better now.”

She turned full towards him, and seemed to try to look all right; but there was a kind of film over the clearness of her black eyes.

“I fear you have headache.”

“A little, but it is nothing. I will go and lie down.”

“Do, pray; else you will not be well enough to appear at dinner.”

She retired, and Hugh joined Hairy.

Euphra had another glass of claret with her uncle that evening, in order to give her report of the morning’s ride.

“Really, there is not much to be afraid of, uncle. He takes very good care of Harry. To be sure, I had occasion several times to check him a little; but he has this good quality in addition to a considerable aptitude for teaching, that he perceives a hint, and takes it at once.”

Knowing her uncle’s formality, and preference for precise and judicial modes of expression, Euphra modelled her phrase to his mind.

“I am glad he has your good opinion so far, Euphra; for I confess there is something about the youth that pleases me. I was afraid at first that I might be annoyed by his overstepping the true boundaries of his position in my family: he seems to have been in good society, too. But your assurance that he can take a hint, lessens my apprehension considerably. To-morrow, I will ask him to resume his seat after dessert.”

This was not exactly the object of Euphra’s qualified commendation of Hugh. But she could not help it now.

“I think, however, if you approve, uncle, that it will be more prudent to keep a little watch over the riding for a while. I confess, too, I should be glad of a little more of that exercise than I have had for some time: I found my seat not very secure to-day.”

“Very desirable on both considerations, my love.”

And so the conference ended.

CHAPTER VIII. NEST-BUILDING

If you will have a tree bear more fruit than it hath used to do, it is not anything you can do to the boughs, but it is the stirring of the earth, and putting new mould about the roots, that must work it.

LORD BACON’S Advancement of Learning, b. ii.

In a short time Harry’s health was so much improved, and consequently the strength and activity of his mind so much increased, that Hugh began to give him more exact mental operations to perform. But as if he had been a reader of Lord Bacon, which as yet he was not, and had learned from him that “wonder is the seed of knowledge,” he came, by a kind of sympathetic instinct, to the same conclusion practically, in the case of Harry. He tried to wake a question in him, by showing him something that would rouse his interest. The reply to this question might be the whole rudiments of a science.

Things themselves should lead to the science of them. If things are not interesting in themselves, how can any amount of knowledge about them be? To be sure, there is such a thing as a purely or abstractly intellectual interest—the pleasure of the mere operation of the intellect upon the signs of things; but this must spring from a highly exercised intellectual condition, and is not to be expected before the pleasures of intellectual motion have been experienced through the employment of its means for other ends. Whether this is a higher condition or not, is open to much disquisition.

One day Hugh was purposely engaged in taking the altitude of the highest turret of the house, with an old quadrant he had found in the library, when Harry came up.

“What are you doing, big brother?” said he; for now that he was quite at home with Hugh, there was a wonderful mixture of familiarity and respect in him, that was quite bewitching.

“Finding out how high your house is, little brother,” answered Hugh.

“How can you do it with that thing? Will it measure the height of other things besides the house?”

“Yes, the height of a mountain, or anything you like.”

“Do show me how.”

Hugh showed him as much of it as he could.

“But I don’t understand it.”

“Oh! that is quite another thing. To do that, you must learn a great many things—Euclid to begin with.”

That very afternoon Harry began Euclid, and soon found quite enough of interest on the road to the quadrant, to prevent him from feeling any tediousness in its length.

Of an afternoon Hugh had taken to reading Shakspere to Harry. Euphra was always a listener. On one occasion Harry said:

“I am so sorry, Mr. Sutherland, but I don’t understand the half of it. Sometimes when Euphra and you are laughing,—and sometimes when Euphra is crying,” added he, looking at her slyly, “I can’t understand what it is all about. Am I so very stupid, Mr. Sutherland?” And he almost cried himself.

“Not a bit of it, Harry, my boy; only you must learn a great many other things first.”

“How can I learn them? I am willing to learn anything. I don’t find it tire me now as it used.”

“There are many things necessary to understand Shakspere that I cannot teach you, and that some people never learn. Most of them will come of themselves. But of one thing you may be sure, Harry, that if you learn anything, whatever it be, you are so far nearer to understanding Shakspere.”

The same afternoon, when Harry had waked from his siesta, upon which Hugh still insisted, they went out for a walk in the fields. The sun was half way down the sky, but very hot and sultry.

“I wish we had our cave of straw to creep into now,” said Harry. “I felt exactly like the little field-mouse you read to me about in Burns’s poems, when we went in that morning, and found it all torn up, and half of it carried away. We have no place to go to now for a peculiar own place; and the consequence is, you have not told me any stories about the Romans for a whole week.”

“Well, Harry, is there any way of making another?”

“There’s no more straw lying about that I know of,” answered Harry; “and it won’t do to pull the inside out of a rick, I am afraid.”

“But don’t you think it would be pleasant to have a change now; and as we have lived underground, or say in the snow like the North people, try living in the air, like some of the South people?”

“Delightful!” cried Harry.—“A balloon?”

“No, not quite that. Don’t you think a nest would do?”

“Up in a tree?”

“Yes.”

Harry darted off for a run, as the only means of expressing his delight. When he came back, he said:

“When shall we begin, Mr. Sutherland?”

“We will go and look for a place at once; but I am not quite sure when we shall begin yet. I shall find out to-night, though.”

They left the fields, and went into the woods in the neighbourhood of the house, at the back. Here the trees had grown to a great size, some of them being very old indeed. They soon fixed upon a grotesque old oak as a proper tree in which to build their nest; and Harry, who, as well as Hugh, had a good deal of constructiveness in his nature, was so delighted, that the heat seemed to have no more influence upon him; and Hugh, fearful of the reaction, was compelled to restrain his gambols.

Pursuing their way through the dark warp of the wood, with its golden weft of crossing sunbeams, Hugh began to tell Harry the story of the killing of Cæsar by Brutus and the rest, filling up the account with portions from Shakspere. Fortunately, he was able to give the orations of Brutus and Antony in full. Harry was in ecstasy over the eloquence of the two men.

“Well, what language do you think they spoke, Harry?” said Hugh.

“Why,” said Harry, hesitating, “I suppose—” then, as if a sudden light broke upon him—“Latin of course. How strange!”

“Why strange?”

“That such men should talk such a dry, unpleasant language.”

“I allow it is a difficult language, Harry; and very ponderous and mechanical; but not necessarily dry or unpleasant. The Romans, you know, were particularly fond of law in everything; and so they made a great many laws for their language; or rather, it grew so, because they were of that sort. It was like their swords and armour generally, not very graceful, but very strong;—like their architecture too, Harry. Nobody can ever understand what a people is, without knowing its language. It is not only that we find all these stories about them in their language, but the language itself is more like them than anything else can be. Besides, Harry, I don’t believe you know anything about Latin yet.”

“I know all the declensions and conjugations.”

“But don’t you think it must have been a very different thing to hear it spoken?”

“Yes, to be sure—and by such men. But how ever could they speak it?”

“They spoke it just as you do English. It was as natural to them. But you cannot say you know anything about it, till you read what they wrote in it; till your ears delight in the sound of their poetry;—”

“Poetry?”

“Yes; and beautiful letters; and wise lessons; and histories and plays.”

“Oh! I should like you to teach me. Will it be as hard to learn always as it is now?”

“Certainly not. I am sure you will like it.”

“When will you begin me?”

“To-morrow. And if you get on pretty well, we will begin our nest, too, in the afternoon.”

“Oh, how kind you are! I will try very hard.”

“I am sure you will, Harry.”

Next morning, accordingly, Hugh did begin him, after a fashion of his own; namely, by giving him a short simple story to read, finding out all the words with him in the dictionary, and telling him what the terminations of the words signified; for he found that he had already forgotten a very great deal of what, according to Euphra, he had been thoroughly taught. No one can remember what is entirely uninteresting to him.

Hugh was as precise about the grammar of a language as any Scotch Professor of Humanity, old Prosody not excepted; but he thought it time enough to begin to that, when some interest in the words themselves should have been awakened in the mind of his pupil. He hated slovenliness as much as any one; but the question was, how best to arrive at thoroughness in the end, without losing the higher objects of study; and not how, at all risks, to commence teaching the lesson of thoroughness at once, and so waste on the shape of a pin-head the intellect which, properly directed, might arrive at the far more minute accuracies of a steam-engine. The fault of Euphra in teaching Harry, had been that, with a certain kind of tyrannical accuracy, she had determined to have the thing done—not merely decently and in order, but prudishly and pedantically; so that she deprived progress of the pleasure which ought naturally to attend it. She spoiled the walk to the distant outlook, by stopping at every step, not merely to pick flowers, but to botanise on the weeds, and to calculate the distance advanced. It is quite true that we ought to learn to do things irrespective of the reward; but plenty of opportunities will be given in the progress of life, and in much higher kinds of action, to exercise our sense of duty in severe loneliness. We have no right to turn intellectual exercises into pure operations of conscience: these ought to involve essential duty; although no doubt there is plenty of room for mingling duty with those; while, on the other hand, the highest act of suffering self-denial is not without its accompanying reward. Neither is there any exercise of the higher intellectual powers in learning the mere grammar of a language, necessary as it is for a means. And language having been made before grammar, a language must be in some measure understood, before its grammar can become intelligible.

Harry’s weak (though true and keen) life could not force its way into any channel. His was a nature essentially dependent on sympathy. It could flow into truth through another loving mind: left to itself, it could not find the way, and sank in the dry sand of ennui and self-imposed obligations. Euphra was utterly incapable of understanding him; and the boy had been dying for lack of sympathy, though neither he nor any one about him had suspected the fact.

There was a strange disproportion between his knowledge and his capacity. He was able, when his attention was directed, his gaze fixed, and his whole nature supported by Hugh, to see deep into many things, and his remarks were often strikingly original; but he was one of the most ignorant boys, for his years, that Hugh had ever come across. A long and severe illness, when he was just passing into boyhood, had thrown him back far into his childhood; and he was only now beginning to show that he had anything of the boy-life in him. Hence arose that unequal development which has been sufficiently evident in the story.

In the afternoon, they went to the wood, and found the tree they had chosen for their nest. To Harry’s intense admiration, Hugh, as he said, went up the tree like a squirrel, only he was too big for a bear even. Just one layer of foliage above the lowest branches, he came to a place where he thought there was a suitable foundation for the nest. From the ground Harry could scarcely see him, as, with an axe which he had borrowed for the purpose (for there was a carpenter’s work-shop on the premises), he cut away several small branches from three of the principal ones; and so had these three as rafters, ready dressed and placed, for the foundation of the nest. Having made some measurements, he descended; and repairing with Harry to the work-shop, procured some boarding and some tools, which Harry assisted in carrying to the tree. Ascending again, and drawing up his materials, by the help of Harry, with a piece of string, Hugh in a very little while had a level floor, four feet square, in the heart of the oak tree, quite invisible from below—buried in a cloud of green leaves. For greater safety, he fastened ropes as handrails all around it from one branch to another. And now nothing remained but to construct a bench to sit on, and such a stair as Harry could easily climb. The boy was quite restless with anxiety to get up and see the nest; and kept calling out constantly to know if he might not come up yet. At length Hugh allowed him to try; but the poor boy was not half strong enough to climb the tree without help. So Hugh descended, and with his aid Harry was soon standing on the new-built platform.

“I feel just like an eagle,” he cried; but here his voice faltered, and he was silent.

“What is the matter, Harry?” said his tutor.

“Oh, nothing,” replied he; “only I didn’t exactly know whereabouts we were till I got up here.”

“Whereabouts are we, then?”

“Close to the end of the Ghost’s Walk.”

“But you don’t mind that now, surely, Harry?”

“No, sir; that is, not so much as I used.”

“Shall I take all this down again, and build our nest somewhere else?”

“Oh, no, if you don’t think it matters. It would be a great pity, after you have taken so much trouble with it. Besides, I shall never be here without you; and I do not think I should be afraid of the ghost herself, if you were with me.”

Yet Harry shuddered involuntarily at the thought of his own daring speech.

“Very well, Harry, my boy; we will finish it here. Now, if you stand there, I will fasten a plank across here between these two stumps—no, that won’t do exactly. I must put a piece on to this one, to raise it to a level with the other—then we shall have a seat in a few minutes.”

Hammer and nails were busy again; and in a few minutes they sat down to enjoy the “soft pipling cold” which swung all the leaves about like little trap-doors that opened into the Infinite. Harry was highly contented. He drew a deep breath of satisfaction as, looking above and beneath and all about him, he saw that they were folded in an almost impenetrable net of foliage, through which nothing could steal into their sanctuary, save “the chartered libertine, the air,” and a few stray beams of the setting sun, filtering through the multitudinous leaves, from which they caught a green tint as they passed.

“Fancy yourself a fish,” said Hugh, “in the depth of a cavern of sea weed, which floats about in the slow swinging motion of the heavy waters.”

“What a funny notion!”

“Not so absurd as you may think, Harry; for just as some fishes crawl about on the bottom of the sea, so do we men at the bottom of an ocean of air; which, if it be a thinner one, is certainly a deeper one.”

“Then the birds are the swimming fishes, are they not?”

“Yes, to be sure.”

“And you and I are two mermen—doing what? Waiting for mother mermaid to give us our dinner. I am getting hungry. But it will be a long time before a mermaid gets up here, I am afraid.”

“That reminds me,” said Hugh, “that I must build a stair for you, Master Harry; for you are not merman enough to get up with a stroke of your scaly tail. So here goes. You can sit there till I fetch you.”

Nailing a little rude bracket here and there on the stem of the tree, just where Harry could avail himself of hand-hold as well, Hugh had soon finished a strangely irregular staircase, which it took Harry two or three times trying, to learn quite off.