Spinster of This Parish

by W. B. Maxwell

As well as a lamp on the dresser, there were two candles stuck in bottles on the table, so that one had him fairly illumined and easy to study. He was tall and thin, so sallow of complexion as to seem like a sick man; every tint of him was vague and unnatural, from the sunken yellowish eyes, the blue mistiness of his shaved cheeks, the umber-coloured lips and blackened teeth, to the undyed shaggy cloth of his coat and the tarnished velvet of his broad belt; for the rest, there was about him the air of something that must necessarily cause fear and shrinking in all that looks at it—as of a pallid ghost in a graveyard, or the body of a hanged murderer brought into a dissecting room and there come to life again—an arrogance of sheer repulsiveness that seemed to defy one to look at it a second time. Dyke observed the mark of a sword cut on his forehead, the saliva at the corners of the brown lips, and the spasmodic flicker of his hairless eyelids. He wore two unusually long knives in a leather belt above the velvet.

“A pleasant calm night,” Dyke said carelessly, as he crossed the room and opened the door of egress. He stood there looking out, taking the air. The two horses were in the same place; all was dark now at the sheds; the landlord had left his lantern on the ground by the corner of the house. Overhead the stars shone brightly from a purple sky.

Dyke strolled back to the door of his own room, and, leaning against its jamb, talked to the pallid man. He spoke politely enough, but with the careless, indefinably contemptuous tone that he might have employed to a stranger at his club, somebody who ought to be a gentleman and yet isn’t.

“You are moving on soon, I hear—before to-morrow.”

“Yes,” said the man, drawling and blinking his eyes, “I do not stay long anywhere. So I may go soon from here. With me it is always uncertain. And you?”

“As soon as I can. I have a boy here with me, and he’s very tired. I want him to get a good night’s rest, and then—”

“Ah, yes.” The man interrupted him. “There is a boy. You are not alone. There is your boy”; and he turned his eyes from Dyke and blinked at the ceiling.

“Moving as I do,” he murmured, after a pause, “now here, now there, not sure myself where next I may be, I do not care to account for myself. In truth—as is generally known—I prefer not to be met with or observed, even involuntarily.”

Then he asked Dyke how it was that he, who appeared to be an Englishman, had so reduced himself in baggage and belongings, when visiting a neighbourhood as unfrequented as this. In the same careless tone as before, Dyke gave him a brief but entirely truthful outline of his trip: describing how he had gone far north in search of an ancient mine, and how his followers had decamped, leaving him and his young servant to get out of the scrape as best they could.