CHAPTER VI
The night before my wedding-day—it was natural enough—there was a restlessness upon me which would not let me sleep, or think of sleep.
When supper was over I bade my servants retire. They had thought me cracked, and with reason, I believe, for the way in which I had wandered about the house all day, moving and shifting and preparing, and giving orders to no seeming purpose. I sat down in my uncle’s room, and, drawing the chair he had died in opposite his portrait, I held a strange conclave with (as I believed then) his ghost. I know now that if any spirit communed with me that night it was my own evil angel.
I had had the light set where it best illuminated the well-known countenance. At my elbow was a goodly bottle of his famous red wine.
“Na, old one,” said I aloud, leaning back in my chair in luxurious self-satisfaction and proud complacency, “am I doing well for the old name? Who knows if one day thou countest not kings among thy descendants!”
Methought the old man grinned back at me, his hideous tusked grin.
“‘Tis well, Kerlchen,” he said.
I unrolled the pedigree. That cursed parchment, what a part it has played in my life!—as evil a part, as fatal as the apple by which our first parents fell. It is pride that damns us all! And I read aloud the entries I had made: they sounded very well, and so my uncle thought—or seemed to—for I swear he winked at me and said: