"Shall I ever forget those nights!" muttered he with a shudder. "Can this room ever be otherwise than hateful to me! It was here, as I sat weak and ill in that arm-chair, that my uncle struck me for losing——. Stay, now I remember it all. Remove this skirting-board, Gilmore; take the poker; do not spare the rotting wood. Ay, there it is." A yellow something lay amid the dust and rubbish, which on inspection turned out to be a gold pencil-case. "That was lent me by my uncle, a dozen years ago," said Marmaduke musing, "and he chastised me for losing it. It had rolled under yonder skirting-board, but I was too terrified at the time to recollect the fact. I wish I could forget things now. Undo the other shutters, Richard. Light, more light."
And thus we let the blessed sunlight into all the shuttered rooms. It glanced in galleries on knights in all their panoply, and smote the steel upon their visors, as though the flame of battle once more darted from their eyes; it made their tattered pennons blush again, and tipped their rusted spears with sudden fire. It flashed upon the stern ancestral faces on the wall, and through their dust evoked a look of life. That winter sun had not the power to warm, however; all things struck cold. The dark oak-pannels chilled us from their waveless depths; the cumbrous organ, carved with fruit and flowers, kept frozen silence; while in the chapel, Sir Nicholas in stone and mildew struck to our marrow. His lady opposite, upon her knees in her "devout oratory," gave us cold looks, as though we had interrupted her devotions. In vain the painted windows, high and triple arched, cast down "warm gules" upon her marble breast, and filled the sacred place with glorious hues. In vain the gilded scroll, "Praie for hys Soule," appealed to us through dust and damp, and his memorial pane blushed scarlet in its endeavour to perpetuate his infamy. All things seemed cursed in that accursed house; the hallowed places desecrated, and those where hospitality and good fellowship were meant to reign, solitary and barren. There was one apartment still which had been left by common consent to be visited last of all—Sir Massingberd's oak parlour. There he might have been said to have lived, for it was the only sitting-room he used from early morning—and he was no great sleeper—until very late at night. There, as we have seen, he had held his audiences, and dined, and sometimes slept after any deep debauch. By all the household, except Gilmore, it was held as a Bluebeard's chamber, and would not have been entered upon any account, even had it not had the rector's seal upon it. It was here that the lost baronet had passed his last hours within the house, and thither he had intended to return—if he had meant to return at all—before he retired for the night. The butler entered it first, and let the light in; then Mr. Long, then I, then Marmaduke. Although I had been there once before, I scarcely recognized the place, for upon that occasion the squire himself had occupied it, and I had had no eyes except for him. It was doubtless a comfortable room enough when the fire was shining on its polished walls, and the red curtains snugly drawn over the windows; but with that thin December light—for it was afternoon by this time—creeping coldly in upon the three-year-old ashes of the burnt-out fire, and on the panels, smeared with spots and stains, it was very cheerless:
"There was no sign of life, save one:
The subtle spider, that from overhead
Hung like a spy on human guilt and error,
Suddenly turned, and up its slender thread,
Ran with a nimble terror."
This insect had woven its webs in every nook and cranny, in readiness for the prey that rarely came, and the slanting pillars of motes and light that streamed into the gloom seemed almost as palpable as they. A door led up by three or four steps into Sir Massingberd's bedroom—a bare unfurnished place, where skins of wild animals, instead of carpet, were spread for a banquet to the moth. His shooting-boots stood up still stiff and strong beside the empty grate, although they were white with mildew, and his night-gear lay folded upon the rotting pillow, in preparation for his rest. The sitting-room, however, bore the more striking vestiges of its late proprietor.
The huge arm-chair stood a little aside from the fender, where he had pushed it back as he rose to leave the room; and the book which he had been reading lay open with its face to the table, ready for him to resume its perusal upon his return. A spirit-case with the stoppers in, the couple of cigars which it had been Sir Massingberd's invariable custom to smoke before going to bed, and a few fly-blown lumps of sugar, were set out in hideous travesty of creature-comfort. The rector took up the volume, and with one involuntary glance towards the fire-place, tore the wrinkled and blue-spotted leaves to fragments. A scurrilous French novel had engaged the last hours of the wretched old man, ere he went forth—to his doom.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE FAIRY'S WAND.
There are but few of us, I fear, who can say: "Though I should die suddenly, and at the most unlooked-for time, there will be nothing left behind me which I would have destroyed, even though I had had the opportunity." Of course there are none who can boast that they are at peace with all mankind; that they leave nothing unrepented of or unatoned for; that their human affairs and social relations are exactly where they would have wished them to be. But independent of these matters, neglected by the very best of us, how eagerly must many a man desire, between the warning and swift stroke of death, that he had had but a little time—a little strength to set, not, indeed, his house in order, but his desk and his note-book. What a cruel shock have many a family received, after they have lost the Head whom they have worshipped so many years, by discovering, where they looked for no such thing, after his death, that he had all along (as will be thought) been even such a one—not as themselves, but worse—as they whom they had been taught by his own self to look upon with contempt, or at least with pity; as they who, by contrast with himself, were persons base and vile. Is there no letter, reader, ragged and time-worn, perhaps, but still legible, lying among that heap of correspondence you intend to winnow some day—which it will be better to burn now? Is there no half-forgotten gift, meant for your own eyes alone, when they were brighter than at present, which it would be well to make an end of this very day? Can you say: "Even though I do not return home to night, or ever again, but am smashed by a railway locomotive, or driven over by a 'bus, or poisoned in a cab, yet there will be nothing of mine, nothing when my friends take stock of my personal effects, of which I need be ashamed." If so, thou art a good man indeed—or one of exceeding prudence. Above all things, my friends, be good, for that is best; but if not, at least be prudent. Let your memories be sullied with no stain, at all events in the thoughts of those you leave at home. The actions of the unjust blossom in their dust into flowers compared with which the deadly nightshade is as the violet or the rose. The satirist tells us that in a week, a month, a year at most, the memory of a dead man dies even from the hearts of those he held most dear. This is not true; but the satirist would have been severer yet, and have spoken truth as well, had he said that the memory of a dead man, so far as his vice and wickedness are concerned, dies not at all among his kin. It is spoken of in whispers by the purest, and renders them less pure; it is made light of by the vicious, but only to excuse their wrongful acts by a worse example. "Wild as I may be, I am not so wild as the governor was in his day," is a terrible legacy of comfort to leave behind one to one's son.
It is possible that even Sir Massingberd Heath may at some far-back time have deemed it necessary to lay to his soul some flattering unction of this kind. There were Sir Wentworth and Sir Nicholas, and many a Heath to extenuate his acts, if bad example might do it. But the time came to him, and very early in life, when he had no longer this slender justification, since he had outdone his worse progenitor in vice and folly. Mr. Clint had known, Mr. Long had guessed—we all of us had suspected more or less that the lost baronet's life had been evil beyond that of an ordinary man; but the dumb revelations which were made concerning it in the necessary examination of his papers, were simply shocking. After destroying these, the next approach to cleansing Fairburn Hall was to discharge all the indoor domestics. Mr. Richard Gilmore resented this conduct towards a faithful servant of the family, as he styled himself, very bitterly; but he departed with the rest, laden, there is little doubt with a very considerable plunder. Presently the upholsterers came down from town with a great following of workpeople, and a caravan of waggons, bearing costly furniture; then a host of servants, selected with as much care as was possible, replaced the exiles; and when all was ready within and without—the waste places of the grounds being reclaimed, and put upon the same footing with those which hitherto had alone been "kept up"—Sir Marmaduke Heath and his wife themselves took possession of Fairburn Hall.