Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 62
In terms of tone and form, as these men saw it, it was a stretch of sands against a stretch of sunset, the whole scene lying in strips of sombre colour, dead green and bronze and brown and a drab that was not merely dull but in that gloaming in some way more mysterious than gold. All that broke these level lines was a long building which ran out from the fields into the sands of the sea, so that its fringe of dreary weeds and rushes seemed almost to meet the seaweed. But its most singular feature was that the upper part of it had the ragged outlines of a ruin, pierced by so many wide windows and large rents as to be a mere dark skeleton against the dying light; while the lower bulk of the building had hardly any windows at all, most of them being blind and bricked up and their outlines only faintly traceable in the twilight. But one window at least was still a window; and it seemed strangest of all that it showed a light.
‘Who on earth can live in that old shell?’ exclaimed the Londoner, who was a big, bohemian-looking man, young but with a shaggy red beard that made him look older; Chelsea knew him familiarly as Harry Payne.
‘Ghosts, you might suppose,’ replied his friend Martin Wood. ‘Well, the people who live there really are rather like ghosts.’
It was perhaps rather a paradox that the London artist seemed almost bucolic in his boisterous freshness and wonder, while the local artist seemed a more shrewd and experienced person, regarding him with mature and amiable amusement; indeed, the latter was altogether a quieter and more conventional figure, wearing darker clothes and with his square and stolid face clean shaven.
‘It is only a sign of the times, of course,’ he went on,’ or of the passing of old times and old families with them. The last of the great Darnaways live in that house, and not many of the new poor are as poor as they are. They can’t even afford to make their own top-storey habitable; but have to live in the lower rooms of a ruin, like bats and owls. Yet they have family portraits that go back to the Wars of the Roses and the first portrait-painting in England, and very fine some of them are; I happen to know, because they asked for my professional advice in overhauling them. There’s one of them especially, and one of the earliest, but it’s so good that it gives you the creeps.’
‘The whole place gives you the creeps, I should think by the look of it,’ replied Payne.
‘Well,’ said his friend, ‘to tell you the truth, it does.’
The silence that followed was stirred by a faint rustle among the rushes by the moat; and it gave them, rationally enough, a slight nervous start when a dark figure brushed along the bank, moving rapidly and almost like a startled bird. But it was only a man walking briskly with a black bag in his hand: a man with a long sallow face and sharp eyes that glanced at the London stranger in a slightly darkling and suspicious manner.
‘It’s only Dr Barnet,’ said Wood with a sort of relief. ‘Good evening, Doctor. Are you going up to the house? I hope nobody’s ill.’
‘Everybody’s always ill in a place like that,’ growled the doctor; ‘only sometimes they’re too ill to know it. The very air of the place is a blight and a pestilence. I don’t envy the young man from Australia.’
‘And who,’ asked Payne abruptly and rather absently, ‘may the young man from Australia be?’
‘Ah!’ snorted the doctor; ‘hasn’t your friend told you about him? As a matter of fact I believe he is arriving today. Quite a romance in the old style of melodrama: the heir back from the colonies to his ruined castle, all complete even down to an old family compact for his marrying the lady watching in the ivied tower. Queer old stuff, isn’t it? but it really happens sometimes. He’s even got a little money, which is the only bright spot there ever was in this business.’
‘What does Miss Darnaway herself, in her ivied tower, think of the business?’ asked Martin Wood dryly.
‘What she thinks of everything else by this time,’ replied the doctor. ‘They don’t think in this weedy old den of superstitions, they only dream and drift. I think she accepts the family contract and the colonial husband as part of the Doom of the Darnaways, don’t you know. I really think that if he turned out to be a humpbacked Negro with one eye and a homicidal mania, she would only think it added a finishing touch and fitted in with the twilight scenery.’
‘You’re not giving my friend from London a very lively picture of my friends in the country,’ said Wood, laughing. ‘I had intended taking him there to call; no artist ought to miss those Darnaway portraits if he gets the chance. But perhaps I’d better postpone it if they’re in the middle of the Australian invasion.’
‘Oh, do go in and see them, for the Lord’s sake,’ said Dr Barnet warmly. ‘Anything that will brighten their blighted lives will make my task easier. It will need a good many colonial cousins to cheer things up, I should think; and the more the merrier. Come, I’ll take you in myself.’
As they drew nearer to the house it was seen to be isolated like an island in a moat of brackish water which they crossed by a bridge. On the other side spread a fairly wide stony floor or embankment with great cracks across it, in which little tufts of weed and thorn sprouted here and there. This rock platform looked large and bare in the grey twilight, and Payne could hardly have believed that such a corner of space could have contained so much of the soul of a wilderness. This platform only jutted out on one side, like a giant door-step and beyond it was the door; a very low-browed Tudor archway standing open, but dark like a cave.
When the brisk doctor led them inside without ceremony, Payne had, as it were, another shock of depression. He could have expected to find himself mounting to a very ruinous tower, by very narrow winding staircases; but in this case the first steps into the house were actually steps downwards. They went down several short and broken stairways into large twilit rooms which but for their lines of dark pictures and dusty bookshelves, might have been the traditional dungeons beneath the castle moat. Here and there a candle in an old candlestick lit up some dusty accidental detail of a dead elegance; but the visitor was not so much impressed or depressed by this artificial light as by the one pale gleam of natural light. As he passed down the long room he saw the only window in that wall — a curious low oval window of a late-seventeenth-century fashion. But the strange thing about it was that it did not look out directly on any space of sky but only on a reflection of sky; a pale strip of daylight merely mirrored in the moat, under the hanging shadow of the bank. Payne had a memory of the Lady of Shallot who never saw the world outside except in a mirror. The lady of this Shallot not only in some sense saw the world in a mirror, but even saw the world upside-down.
‘It’s as if the house of Darnaway were falling literally as well as metaphorically,’ said Wood in a low voice; ‘as if it were sinking slowly into a swamp or a quicksand, until the sea goes over it like a green roof.’
Even the sturdy Dr Barnet started a little at the silent approach of the figure that came to receive them. Indeed, the room was so silent that they were all startled to realize that it was not empty. There were three people in it when they entered: three dim figures motionless in the dim room; all three dressed in black and looking like dark shadows. As the foremost figure drew nearer the grey light from the window, he showed a face that looked almost as grey as its frame of hair. This was old Vine, the steward, long left in loco parentis since the death of that eccentric parent, the last Lord Darnaway. He would have been a handsome old man if he had had no teeth. As it was, he had one which showed every now and then and gave him a rather sinister appearance. He received the doctor and his friends with a fine courtesy and escorted them to where the other two figures in black were seated. One of them seemed to Payne to give another appropriate touch of gloomy antiquity to the castle by the mere fact of being a Roman Catholic priest, who might have come out of a priest’s hole in the dark old days. Payne could imagine him muttering prayers or telling beads, or tolling bells or doing a number of indistinct and melancholy things in that melancholy place. Just then he might be supposed to have been giving religious consolation to the lady; but it could hardly be supposed that the consolation was very consoling, or at any rate that it was very cheering. For the rest, the priest was personally insignificant enough, with plain and rather expressionless features; but the lady was a very different matter. Her face was very far from being plain or insignificant; it stood out from the darkness of her dress and hair and background with a pallor that was almost awful, but a beauty that was almost awfully alive. Payne looked at it as long as he dared; and he was to look at it a good deal longer before he died.
Wood merely exchanged with his friends such pleasant and polite phrases as would lead up to his purpose of revisiting the portraits. He apologized for calling on the day which he heard was to be one of family welcome; but he was soon convinced that the family was rather mildly relieved to have visitors to distract them or break the shock. He did not hesitate, therefore, to lead Payne through the central reception-room into the library beyond, where hung the portrait, for there was one which he was especially bent on showing, not only as a picture but almost as a puzzle. The little priest trudged along with them; he seemed to know something about old pictures as well as about old prayers.
‘I’m rather proud of having spotted this,’ said Wood. ‘I believe it’s a Holbein. If it isn’t, there was somebody living in Holbein’s time who was as great as Holbein.’
It was a portrait in the hard but sincere and living fashion of the period, representing a man clad in black trimmed with gold and fur, with a heavy, full, rather pale face but watchful eyes.
‘What a pity art couldn’t have stopped for ever at just that transition stage,’ cried Wood, ‘and never transitioned any more. Don’t you see it’s just realistic enough to be real? Don’t you see the face speaks all the more because it stands out from a rather stiffer framework of less essential things? And the eyes are even more real than the face. On my soul, I think the eyes are too real for the face! It’s just as if those sly, quick eyeballs were protruding out of a great pale mask.’
‘The stiffness extends to the figure a little, I think,’ said Payne. ‘They hadn’t quite mastered anatomy when medievalism ended, at least in the north. That left leg looks to me a good deal out of drawing.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ replied Wood quietly. ‘Those fellows who painted just when realism began to be done, and before it began to be overdone, were often more realistic than we think. They put real details of portraiture into things that are thought merely conventional. You might say this fellow’s eyebrows or eye-sockets are a little lop-sided; but I bet if you knew him you’d find that one of his eyebrows did really stick up more than the other. And I shouldn’t wonder if he was lame or something, and that black leg was meant to be crooked.’
‘What an old devil he looks!’ burst out Payne suddenly. ‘I trust his reverence will excuse my language.’
‘I believe in the devil, thank you,’ said the priest with an inscrutable face. ‘Curiously enough there was a legend that the devil was lame.’
‘I say,’ protested Payne, ‘you can’t really mean that he was the devil; but who the devil was he?’
‘He was the Lord Darnaway under Henry VII and Henry VIII,’ replied his companion. ‘But there are curious legends about him, too; one of them is referred to in that inscription round the frame, and further developed in some notes left by somebody in a book I found here. They are both rather curious reading.’
Payne leaned forward, craning his head so as to follow the archaic inscription round the frame. Leaving out the antiquated lettering and spelling, it seemed to be a sort of rhyme running somewhat thus:
In the seventh hour I shall return:
In the seventh hour I shall depart:
None in that hour shall hold my hand:
And woe to her that holds my heart.
‘It sounds creepy somehow,’ said Payne, ‘but that may be partly because I don’t understand a word of it.’
‘It’s pretty creepy even when you do,’ said Wood in a low voice. ‘The record made at a later date, in the old book I found, is all about how this beauty deliberately killed himself in such a way that his wife was executed for his murder. Another note commemorates a later tragedy, seven successions later — under the Georges — in which another Darnaway committed suicide, having first thoughtfully left poison in his wife’s wine. It’s said that both suicides took place at seven in the evening. I suppose the inference is that he does really return with every seventh inheritor and makes things unpleasant, as the rhyme suggests, for any lady unwise enough to marry him.’
‘On that argument,’ replied Payne, ‘it would be a trifle uncomfortable for the next seventh gentleman.’
Wood’s voice was lower still as he said: ‘The new heir will be the seventh.’
Harry Payne suddenly heaved up his great chest and shoulders like a man flinging off a burden.
‘What crazy stuff are we all talking?’ he cried. ‘We’re all educated men in an enlightened age, I suppose. Before I came into this damned dank atmosphere I’d never have believed I should be talking of such things, except to laugh at them.’
‘You are right,’ said Wood. ‘If you lived long enough in this underground palace you’d begin to feel differently about things. I’ve begun to feel very curiously about that picture, having had so much to do with handling and hanging it. It sometimes seems to me that the painted face is more alive than the dead faces of the people living here; that it is a sort of talisman or magnet: that it commands the elements and draws out the destinies of men and things. I suppose you would call it very fanciful.’
‘What is that noise?’ cried Payne suddenly.
They all listened, and there seemed to be no noise except the dull boom of the distant sea; then they began to have the sense of something mingling with it; something like a voice calling through the sound of the surf, dulled by it at first, but coming nearer and nearer. The next moment they were certain: someone was shouting outside in the dusk.
Payne turned to the low window behind him and bent to look out. It was the window from which nothing could be seen except the moat with its reflection of bank and sky. But that inverted vision was not the same that he had seen before. From the hanging shadow of the bank in the water depended two dark shadows reflected from the feet and legs of a figure standing above upon the bank. Through that limited aperture they could see nothing but the two legs black against the reflection of a pale and livid sunset. But somehow that very fact of the head being invisible, as if in the clouds, gave something dreadful to the sound that followed; the voice of a man crying aloud what they could not properly hear or understand. Payne especially was peering out of the little window with an altered face, and he spoke with an altered voice:
‘How queerly he’s standing!’
‘No, no,’ said Wood, in a sort of soothing whisper. ‘Things often look like that in reflection. It’s the wavering of the water that makes you think that.’
‘Think what?’ asked the priest shortly.
‘That his left leg is crooked,’ said Wood.
Payne had thought of the oval window as a sort of mystical mirror; and it seemed to him that there were in it other inscrutable images of doom. There was something else beside the figure that he did not understand; three thinner legs showing in dark lines against the light, as if some monstrous three-legged spider or bird were standing beside the stranger. Then he had the less crazy thought of a tripod like that of the heathen oracles; and the next moment the thing had vanished and the legs of the human figure passed out of the picture.
He turned to meet the pale face of old Vine, the steward, with his mouth open, eager to speak, and his single tooth showing. ‘He has come,’ he said. ‘The boat arrived from Australia this morning.’
Even as they went back out of the library into the central salon they heard the footsteps of the newcomer clattering down the entrance steps, with various items of light luggage trailed behind him. When Payne saw one of them, he laughed with a reaction of relief. His tripod was nothing but the telescopic legs of a portable camera, easily packed and unpacked; and the man who was carrying it seemed so far to take on equally solid and normal qualities. He was dressed in dark clothes, but of a careless and holiday sort; his shirt was of grey flannel, and his boots echoed uncompromisingly enough in those still chambers. As he strode forward to greet his new circle his stride had scarcely more than the suggestion of a limp. But Payne and his companions were looking at his face, and could scarcely take their eyes from it.
He evidently felt there was something curious and uncomfortable about his reception; but they could have sworn that he did not himself know the cause of it. The lady, supposed to be in some sense already betrothed to him, was certainly beautiful enough to attract him; but she evidently also frightened him. The old steward brought him a sort of feudal homage, yet treated him as if he were the family ghost. The priest still looked at him with a face which was quite indecipherable, and therefore perhaps all the more unnerving. A new sort of irony, more like the Greek irony, began to pass over Payne’s mind. He had dreamed of the stranger as a devil, but it seemed almost worse that he was an unconscious destiny. He seemed to march towards crime with the monstrous innocence of Oedipus. He had approached the family mansion in so blindly buoyant a spirit as to have set up his camera to photograph his first sight of it; and even the camera had taken on the semblance of the tripod of a tragic pythoness.
Payne was surprised, when taking his leave a little while after, at something which showed that the Australian was already less unconscious of his surroundings. He said in a low voice:
‘Don’t go ... or come again soon. You look like a human being. This place fairly gives me the jumps.’
When Payne emerged out of those almost subterranean halls and came into the night air and the smell of the sea, he felt as if he had come out of that underworld of dreams in which events jumble on top of each other in a way at once unrestful and unreal.
