"Hush!" cried he, looking involuntarily over his shoulder; "do not mention that name, Peter. I would gladly give up house and land this moment, never to go back to Fairburn; I have a presentiment that evil will come of it. She would absolve me from my promise even now—Heaven bless her, as it must do, for she is of the angels!—but that there will be another soon whose interests must be looked to as well as our own. You will be godfather, dear Peter, will you not? Lucy and I both wish it. 'Let it be Peter's godchild, Marmaduke,' she said to me only yesterday, although I should not divulge these secrets to an old bachelor like you."
Of course, I promised readily enough, but long after he had bidden me good-night, I sat over the paling embers, thinking, thinking; and when every coal was charred, and the black bars cold that held them, I sat thinking still. My hopes, for a few fleeting hours, long ago, had been as bright and warm as they, and were now as dark—and dead.
CHAPTER XVI.
TAKING THE SEALS OFF.
Marmaduke Heath came down to Fairburn according to his promise, but it cost him a great effort. With every stage his spirits seemed to fall and fail; and when Mrs. Myrtle at last clasped him in her arms—for Master Marmaduke was ever a great favourite of hers, and the fact of his having grown up and got married weighed with her not a feather—his wan face was paler than when she had seen it last, notwithstanding its three years of happiness and freedom. It was Christmas-time; the Rectory was a bower of ivy and holly-berries; and just within the threshold, the locality which the good housekeeper had chosen for her embrace, hung a huge bough of mistletoe, the finest that could be found in all the Chase. In the spotless kitchen, so exquisitely clean that you might, as the phrase goes, "have eaten your dinner off the floor," if it had not happened to have been a sanded one, there were preparations for sumptuous feasting; a delightful fragrance, suggestive of mince-pies with plenty of citron, pervaded Mrs. Myrtle's private parlour, where the divine mysteries of Apicius were being celebrated. The little larder, cold and immaculate as a dead sucking-pig ready for the spit, was victualled with noble meats as for a siege; while monstrous pasties and plum-puddings, too many for the broad stone slabs, reposed upon the Dutch tiles that formed its carpet. It was not intended that the inhabitants of the Rectory should eat all the good things themselves; but it was a custom of Mr. Long, aided and abetted by Mrs. Myrtle, to keep open house for about a fortnight at this festive period, and to entertain certain worthy persons, who were old and indigent, in the sanded kitchen daily. Attempts to edify the poor in those days were not made so often as they are at present, but it was held essential by all good Christian country folk to keep Christmas as a feast, and to see that others kept it. I suppose Fairburn Hall was the only house in the county where that blessed time was ignored and taken no account of; Sir Massingberd had never suffered the slightest honour to be paid to it; and his worthy deputy and locum-tenens, Richard Gilmore, treated it with the like contumely.
The change from the bright little Rectory, with all its hospitable preparations, to the gloomy grandeur of the masterless mansion, was very striking, when we three crossed the road next morning, to take the seals off, which Mr. Long had placed upon the principal rooms, and so, as it were, to break the blockade caused by the baronet's disappearance. The contrast began even with things without. Half one of the globes had been sliced from its pedestal on one side of the great iron gates; and in the very centre of the avenue, the grass grew long and rank. The sun-dial was cracked and gaped in zigzag, an emblem of the uncertainty that overhung the place. The heraldic beasts at the foot of the entrance-steps were much more mutilated than when I had seen them last, and had indeed only one stone fore-paw or claw between them. Disuse is sister to Abuse, but still how comes it that mere absence should beget, as it always does, such absolute Ruin? Had the Squire been at home the last three years, the globe upon the pedestal would have been whole, the dial flawless, the griffins with at least their larger limbs intact; and yet no man was ever seen to work this mischief. When the great door swung reluctantly back to admit the new possessor, he took my hand, and bade me Welcome, but his tone was far from gay. Every glance he cast around him evoked, I could see, some unpleasant association, and even, perhaps, a vague terror.
There is something uncanny in exploring any dwelling the rooms of which have been locked up and unvisited for years—places that have been once consecrated to humanity, but have afterwards been given up to Solitude and slow decay. Memories of their ancient inmates seem to hang gloomily about them, like the cobweb in their corners; they are eloquent of desertion and of death. The shriek of the mouse, and the singing of the blue fly in the pane, have perhaps alone been heard there in the interim; but there seem to have been other and ghostlier noises, which cease at our approach. Who knows what eerie deeds our sudden intrusion may have interrupted!
"What faces glimmered through the doors,
What footsteps trod the upper floors,"
ere we broke in! The peculiar circumstances under which our search was made intensified these feelings in us three, and even Gilmore, who accompanied us, was affected by them.