Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated), page 307
There had been no step actually taken in the threatened lawsuit since the death of Sir Jekyl. But there were unpleasant rumours, and Pelter and Crowe were in communication with the Rev. Sir Dives Marlowe on the subject, and he occasionally communicated his peevish sense of poor Jekyl’s unreasonableness in having died just when everything was at sixes and sevens, and the unfairness of his having all the trouble and so little of the estates.
Varbarriere, I suppose, was on good terms once more with his nephew. There was no more talk of Algeria, and they were now again in London. That corpulent old gentleman used to smile with an unctuous scorn over the long letters with which Lady Alice occasionally favoured him.
“My faith! she must suppose I have fine leisure, good eyes also, to read all that. I wish, Guy, she would distinguish only you with her correspondence. I suppose if I answer her never, she will cease some time.”
He had a letter from her while in London, on which he discoursed in the above vein. I doubt that he ever read it through.
Guy received one by the same post, in the conclusion of which she said —
“Beatrix Marlowe goes in a few days, with the Fentons, to Paris, and thence to Italy. My house will then be a desert, and I miserably solitary, unless you and your uncle will come to me, as you long since promised, and as you well know there is nothing to prevent. I have written to him, naming Wednesday week. I shall then have rooms in which to place you, and you positively must not refuse.”
Under this hospitable pressure, Varbarriere resolved to make the visit to Wardlock — a flying visit of a day and night — rather to hear what she might have to say than to enjoy the excellent lady’s society. From Slowton, having there got rid of their railway dust and vapour, the gentlemen reached Wardlock at the approach of evening. In the hall they found old Lady Alice, her thin stooping figure cloaked and shawled for a walk, and her close bonnet shading her hollow and wrinkled face.
Hospitable in her way, and really glad to see her guests, was the crone. She would have dismantled and unbonneted, and called for luncheon, and would have led the way into the parlour; but they would not hear of such things, having refreshed at Slowton, and insisted instead on joining the old lady in her walk.
There is a tall glass door in the back hall, which opens on the shorn grass, and through it they passed into the circumscribed but pretty pleasure-ground, a quadrangle, of which the old house, overgrown with jessamine and woodbine, formed nearly one side; the opposite garden wall, overtopped with ancient fruit-trees, another; and screens of tall-stemmed birch and ash, and an underwood of juniper and evergreens, the others; beds of brilliant verbena here and there patterned the green sod; and the whole had an air so quaint and cloister-like, as drew forth some honest sentences of admiration from old Varbarriere.
They strolled among these flowers in this pleasant seclusion for a time, until Lady Alice pronounced herself fatigued, and sat down upon a rustic seat, with due ceremony of adjustment and assistance.
“Sit down by me, Mr. Strangways. Which am I to call you, by-the-bye?”
“Which you please, madam,” answered Varbarriere, with the kind of smile he used with her — deferential, with, nevertheless, a suspicion of the scornful and amused in it, and as he spoke he was seated.
“As for you, grandson,” she continued, “you had better take a walk in the garden — you’ll find the door open;” she pointed with her parasol to the oldfashioned fluted door-case of Caen stone in the garden wall; “and I want to talk a little to my friend, M. de Varbarriere — Mr. Strangways, as I remember him.” And turning to that sage, she said —
“You got my letter, and have well considered it, I trust?”
“I never fail to consider well anything that falls from Lady Alice Redcliffe.”
“Well, sir, I must tell you — — “
These were the last words that Guy heard as he departed, according to orders, to visit her ladyship’s oldfashioned garden. Could a young fellow fancy a duller entertainment? Yet to Guy Deverell it was not dull. Everything he looked on here was beautified and saddened by the influence that had been there so recently and was gone.
Those same roses, whose leaves were dropping to the earth, she had seen but a day or two ago in their melancholy clusters; under these tall trees she had walked, here on this rustic seat she had rested; and Guy, like a reverent worshipper of relics, sat him down in the same seat, and, with a strange thrill, fancied he saw a pencilled word or two on the arm of it. But no, it was nothing, only the veining of the wood. Why do ladies use their pencils so much less than we men, and so seldom (those I mean whose relics are precious) trace a line by chance, and throw this bread upon the waters, where we poor devils pull cheerless against wind and tide?
Here were flowers, too, tied up on tall sticks. He wondered whether Beatrix ever tended these with her delicate fingers, and he rose and looked at the bass-mat with inexpressible feeling.
Then, on a sudden, he stopped by a little circle of annuals, overgrown, run into pod, all draggled, but in the centre a split stick and a piece of bleached paper folded and stuck across it. Had she written the name of the flower, which perhaps she sowed? and he plucked the stick from the earth, and with tender fingers unfolded the record. In a hideous scrawl, evidently the seedsman’s, “Lupines” sprawled across the weather-beaten brown paper.
He raised his eyes with a sigh, and perceived that the respectable gardener, in a blue body-coat with brass buttons, was at hand, and eyed him with a rather stern inquisitiveness. Guy threw the stick down carelessly, feeling a little foolish, and walked on with more swagger than usual.
And now he had entered that distant part of the garden where dark and stately yew hedges, cut here and there in arches, form a meditative maze. With the melancholy yearnings of a lover he gazed on these, no doubt the recent haunts of that beautiful creature who was his day-dream. With a friendly feeling he looked on the dark wall of yew on either side; and from this solemn walk he turned into another, and — saw Beatrix!
More beautiful than ever he thought her — her features a little saddened. Each gazed on the other, as the old stories truly say in such cases, with changing colour. Each had imagined the other more than a hundred miles away. Neither had fancied a meeting likely, perhaps possible. The matter hung upon the wills of others, who might never consent until too late. A few days would see Beatrix on her way to Italy with the Fentons; and yet here were she and Guy Deverell, by the sleight of that not ill-natured witch, old Lady Alice, face to face.
I don’t know exactly what Guy said. I don’t know what she answered. The rhetoric was chiefly his; but he held her hand in his, and from time to time pleaded, not quite in vain, for a word from the goddess with glowing cheeks and downcast eyes, by whose side he walked. Low were those tones, and few those words, that answered his impetuous periods; yet there was a magic in them that made him prouder and more blessed than ever his hopes had dared to promise.
Sometimes they stopped, sometimes they walked slowly on, quite unconscious whether they moved or paused — whether the birds sang or were silent — of all things but their love — in a beautiful dream.
They had surprised one another, and now in turn both were surprised by others; for under one of those airy arches cut so sharply in the yew hedge, on a sudden, stood old Lady Alice and Monsieur Varbarriere — the Enchanter and the Fairy at the close of a tale.
Indulgently, benevolently, the superior powers looked on. The young people paused, abashed. A sharp little nod from Lady Alice told them they were understood. Varbarriere came forward, and took the young lady’s hand very kindly, and held it very long, and at the close of his salutation, stooping towards her pretty ear, murmured something, smiling, which made her drop her eyes again.
“I think you both might have waited until I had spoken to you; however, it does not signify much. I don’t expect to be of any great consequence, or in any great request henceforward.”
Her grandson hastened to plead his excuses, which were received, I must allow, with a good grace.
In matters of true love, I have observed, where not only Cupid applauds, but Plutus smiles, Hymen seldom makes much pother about his share in the business. Beatrix did not make that tour with the Fentons. They, on the contrary, delayed their departure for rather more than a month; and I find Miss Fenton and Miss Arabella Fenton among the bridesmaids. Drayton did not attend the wedding, and oddly enough, was married only about three weeks after to Lady Justina Flynston, who was not pretty, and had but little money; and they say he has turned out rather cross, and hates the French and all their products, as “utter rot.”
Varbarriere has established two great silk-factories, and lives in France, where they say gold pours in upon him in streams before which the last editor of “Aladdin” and Mr. Kightley of the “Ancient Mythology” hang their heads. His chief “object” is the eldest son of the happy union which we have seen celebrated a few lines back. They would have called the boy Herbert, but Varbarriere would not hear of anything but Guy. They say that he is a prodigy of beauty and cleverness. Of course, we hear accounts of infant phenomena with allowance. All I can say is, “If he’s not handsome it’s very odd, and he has at least as good a right to be clever as most boys going.” And as in these pages we have heard something of a father, a son, and a grandson, each bearing the same name, I think I can’t do better than call this tale after them — Guy Deverell.
THE END
ALL IN THE DARK
Serialised in the Dublin University Magazine between February and June 1866 before publication in two volumes by Richard Bentley later the same year, this novel was a departure for Le Fanu, being a fairly conventional story of middle-class life, with some autobiographical echoes. In the figure of the bogus mystic Dinah Perfect, however, it also satirises the contemporary mania for spiritualism.
Both M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft claimed to have disliked the novel intensely, the former dismissing it as ‘a domestic story with a sham ghost’. Such criticisms were also made at the time of publication and bear out Le Fanu’s fears that his work in the sensation and ghost story genres had resulted in him becoming typecast as a writer of supernatural thrillers. For this reason, he later regretted ever publishing All in the Dark under his own name. Modern readers might care to make up their own minds.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
CHAPTER LIII.
CHAPTER LIV.
CHAPTER LV.
CHAPTER LVI.
CHAPTER LVII.
CHAPTER LVIII.
CHAPTER LIX.
CHAPTER LX.
CHAPTER LXI.
CHAPTER LXII.
CHAPTER LXIII.
CHAPTER LXIV.
CHAPTER LXV.
CHAPTER LXVI.
CHAPTER LXVII.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
CHAPTER LXIX.
CHAPTER LXX.
CHAPTER LXXI.
CHAPTER I.
GILROYD HALL AND ITS MISTRESS.
NEAR the ancient and pretty village of Saxton, with its gabled side to the road, stands an old redbrick house of moderate dimensions, called Gilroyd Hall, with some tall elms of very old date about it; and an ancient, brick walled garden, overtopping the road with standard fruit-trees, that have quite outgrown the common stature of such timber, and have acquired a sylvan and venerable appearance.
Here dwelt my aunt, an old maid, Miss Dinah Perfect by name; and here my Cousin William Maubray, the nephew whom she had in effect adopted, used to spend his holidays.
I shall have a good deal to say of her by-and-by, though my story chiefly concerns William Maubray, who was an orphan, and very nearly absolutely dependent upon the kindness of his aunt. Her love was true, but crossed and ruffled now and then by temper and caprice. Not an ill temper was hers, but whimsical and despotic, and excited oftenest upon the absurdities which she liked letting into her active and perverse little head, which must have been the proper nidus of all odd fancies, they so prospered and multiplied there.
On the whole, Gilroyd Hall and the village of Saxton were rather slow quarters for the holidays. Besides his aunt, William had but one companion under that steep and hospitable roof. This was little Violet Dark well, a child of about eleven years, when he had attained to the matured importance of seventeen, and was in the first eleven at Rugby, had his cap, and was, in fact, a person with a career to look back upon, and who had long left childish things behind him.
This little girl was — in some roundabout way, which, as a lazy man, I had rather take for granted than investigate — a kinswoman; and Miss Dinah Perfect had made her in some sort her property, and had her at least eight months out of the twelve down at Gilroyd Hall. Little Violet was lonely at home — an only daughter, with a father working sternly at the bar, not every day seen by her, and who seemed like a visitor in his own house hurried, reserved, unobtrusive, and a little awful.
To the slim, prettily-formed little girl, with the large dark eyes, brown hair and delicate bright tints, the country was delightful — the air, the flowers, the liberty; and old Aunt Dinah, though with a will and a temper, still so much kindlier and pleasanter than Miss Placey, her governess, in town; and good old Winnie Dobbs was so cosy and goodnatured.
To this little maid, in her pleasant solitude, the arrival of William Maubray for the holidays was an event full of interest and even of excitement. Shy as he was, and much in awe of all young lady-kind, she was far too young to be in his way. Her sparkling fuss and silvery prattle were even pleasant to him. There was life and something of comicality in her interruptions and unreasonableness. She made him visit her kittens and kiss them all round, and learn and recite their names; whistle after tea for her bullfinch, dig in her garden, mend and even nurse her doll, and perform many such tasks, quite beneath his dignity as a “swell” at Rugby, which, however, the gentle fellow did very merrily and industriously for the imperious little woman, with scant thanks, but some liking for his guerdon.
So, in his fancy, she grew to be mixed up with the pleasant influences of Gilroyd Hall, with the flowers and the birds, with the freaks of the little dog Pixie, with the stories he read there, and with his kindly welcomes and goodbyes.
Sitting, after breakfast, deep in his novel in the “study,” with his white flannel cricket trousers on, for he was to play against Winderbroke for the town of Saxton that day, he received a smart tweak by the hair, at the back of his head, and, looking round, saw little Vi, perched on the rung of his oldfashioned chair, and dimly recollected having received several gentler tweaks in succession, without evincing the due attention.
“Pert little Vi! what’s all this?” said the stalwart Rugby boy, turning round with a little shake of his head, and his sweet smile, and leaning on his elbow. The sunny landscape from the window, which was clustered round with roses, and a slanting sunbeam that just touched her hair, helped to make the picture very pretty.
“Great, big, old bear! you never listen to one word I say.”
“Don’t you call names, Miss,” said Aunt Dinah, who had just glided into the room.
“What was little silver-hair saying? What does she want?” he replied, laughing at the child’s indignation, and pursuing the nomenclature of Southey’s pleasant little nursery tale. “Golden-hair, I must call you, though,” he said, looking on her sun-lit head; “ and not quite golden either; it is brown, and very pretty brown, too Who called you Violet?” He was holding the tip of her pretty chin between his fingers, and looking in her large deep eyes. “Who called you Violet?”
“How should I know, Willie?” she replied, disengaging her chin with a little toss.
“Why, your poor mamma called you Violet. I told you so fifty times,” said Aunt Dinah sharply.
“You said it was my godfathers and godmothers in my baptism, grannie!” said Miss Vi, not really meaning to be pert.
“Don’t answer me, Miss — that’s of course, your catechism — we’re speaking of your poor mamma. ’Twas her mamma who called her Violet. What about it?”
“Nothing,” answered William, gently looking up at his aunt, “only it is such a pretty name;” and glancing again at the child, “it goes so well with her eyes. She is a jolly little creature.”
“She has some good features, I suppose, like every other child, and you should not try to turn her head. Nothing extraordinary. There’s vanity enough in the world, and I insist, William, you don’t try to spoil her.”
