Mr. Fane had a thin, tall figure, with stooping shoulders and forward-thrusting head. A pair of keen, cold eyes looked suspiciously forth from under penthouse brows; self-sufficiency had compressed his lips, selfish study had hollowed his cheeks, and his thin, even voice, precise in enunciation even to pedantry, was the true index of a steadfastly unamiable character. The Fanes enjoyed great unpopularity; father, son, and daughter, they were all shunned like lepers. Old Fane had married abroad; no one heard his wife’s maiden name, and when he came back as a widower nobody cared to ask. The two children grew up as they would. The son, Bernard, was notoriously a poacher; the daughter was a beauty, a wild rider, untutored and untamed, and shared, so it was said, her brother’s heinous crimes in the preserves. It was this business which shut off the young Fanes from the society of their peers. Once in past years they had made their appearance at the first meet of the season, but they never went again; and thenceforward avoided society more scrupulously than society avoided them.
All this happened before Noel Farquhar came to The Lilacs. He had more than once tried to make friends with young Fane, and had been snubbed for his pains; and thus to this hour matters stood. Nobody knew much about them, but they possessed a fearsome reputation, which caused nervous ladies to skip nimbly over fences when they saw Bernard Fane approaching on his big black horse.
Eumenes Fane received in his library, a long, low room walled with books. One case held tier on tier of novels in their native French, both old and new; another was devoted to theology, and put a row of Blair’s most unchristian sermons across the middle shelf as a gilded breastplate against the assaults of modern heresies. Mr. Fane was a ferocious Calvinist; he felt it his duty to go in for hell, and wished to exact consent in the same beliefs from his children, his servants, and in ever-widening circles from the ends of the earth. Over the mantel hung an interesting old design in black and white, which represented the Last Day: a small queue of saints in stained-glass attitudes ascending the celestial mountains under the convoy of woolly angels, a large corps of sinners being haled out of their tombs by demons armed with three-pronged spears, which they used as toasting-forks. His Satanic Majesty was gleefully directing their operations, amid tongues of realistic flame. On the card-board mount of the picture the following verse was inscribed in youthful round-hand:
Perdition is needful; beyond any doubt
Hell fire is a thing that we can’t do without.
Saltpetre and pitchforks with brimstone and coals
Are arguments new to rescue men’s souls.
We must keep it up, if we like it or not,
And make it eternal, and make it red-hot.
Mirabelle Fane.