This treatment was mortifying, and I remember very well the resentment of which he was quite unconscious.
His stay was not very long; not one of us divined the object of his visit, and he did not prepossesses us favourably. He seemed restless, as men of busy habits do in country houses, and took walks, and a drive, and read in the library, and wrote half a dozen letters.
His bed-room and dressing-room were at the side of the gallery, directly opposite to my father’s, which had a sort of ante-room en suite, in which were some of his theological books.
The day after Mr. Bryerly’s arrival, I was about to see whether my father’s water caraffe and glass had been duly laid on the table in this ante-room, and in doubt whether he was there, I knocked at the door.
I suppose they were too intent on other matters to hear, but receiving no answer, I entered the room. My father was sitting in his chair, with his coat and waistcoat off, Mr. Bryerly kneeling on a stool beside him, rather facing him, his black scratch wig leaning close to my father’s grizzled hair. There was a large tome of their divinity lore, I suppose, open on the table close by. The lank black figure of Mr. Bryerly stood up, and he concealed something quickly in the breast of his coat.
My father stood up also, looking paler, I think, than I ever saw him till then, and he pointed grimly to the door, and said, “Go.”
Mr. Bryerly pushed me gently back with his hands to my shoulders, and smiled down from his dark features with an expression quite unintelligible to me.
I had recovered myself in a second, and withdrew without a word. The last thing I saw at the door was the tall, slim figure in black, and the dark, significant smile following me: and then the door was shut and locked, and the two sssians were left to their mysteries.
I remember so well the kind of shock and disgust I felt in the certainty that I had surprised them at some, perhaps, debasing incantation — a suspicion of this Mr. Bryerly, of the ill-fitting black coat, and white choker — and a sort of fear came upon me, and I fancied he was asserting some kind of mastery over my father, which very much alarmed me.
I fancied all sorts of dangers in the enigmatical smile of the lank high-priest. The image of my father, as I had seen him, it might be, confessing to this man in black, who was I knew not what, haunted me with the disagreeable uncertainties of a mind very uninstructed as to the limits of the marvellous.
I mentioned it to no one. But I was immensely relieved when the sinister visitor took his departure the morning after, and it was upon this occurrence that my mind was now employed.
Some one said that Dr. Johnson resembled a ghost, who must be spoken to before it will speak. But my father, in whatever else he may have resembled a ghost, did not in that particular; for no one but I in his household — and I very seldom — dared to address him until first addressed by him. I had no notion how singular this was until I began to go out a little among friends and relations, and found no such rule in force anywhere else.
As I leaned back in my chair thinking, this phantasm of my father came, and turned, and vanished with a solemn regularity. It was a peculiar figure, strongly made, thick-set, with a face large, and very stern; he wore a loose, black velvet coat and waistcoat. It was, however, the figure of an elderly rather than an old man — though he was then past seventy — but firm, and with no sign of feebleness.
I remember the start with which, not suspecting that he was close by me, I lifted my eyes, and saw that large, rugged countenance looking fixedly on me, from less than a yard away.
After I saw him, he continued to regard me for a second or two; and then, taking one of the heavy candlesticks in his gnarled hand, he beckoned me to follow him; which, in silence and wondering, I accordingly did.
He led me across the hall, where there were lights burning, and into a lobby by the foot of the back stairs, and so into his library.
It is a long, narrow room, with two tall, slim windows at the far end, now draped in dark curtains. Dusky it was with but one candle; and he paused near the door, at the left-hand side of which stood, in those days, an old-fashioned press or cabinet of carved oak. In front of this he stopped.
He had odd, absent ways, and talked more to himself, I believe, than to all the rest of the world put together.
“She won’t understand,” he whispered, looking at me enquiringly. “No, she won’t. Will she?”
Then there was a pause, during which he brought forth from his breast pocket a small bunch of some half-dozen keys, on one of which he looked frowningly, every now and then balancing it a little before his eyes, between his finger and thumb, as he deliberated.
I knew him too well, of course, to interpose a word.
“They are easily frightened — ay, they are. I’d better do it another way.”
And pausing, he looked in my face as he might upon a picture.
“They are — yes — I had better do it another way — another way; yes — and she’ll not suspect — she’ll not suppose.”
Then he looked steadfastly upon the key, and from it to me, suddenly lifting it up, and said abruptly, “See, child,” and, after a second or two, “Remember this key.”
It was oddly shaped, and unlike others.
“Yes, sir.” I always called him “sir.”
“It opens that,” and he tapped it sharply on the door of the cabinet. “In the daytime it is always here,” at which word he dropped it into his pocket again. “You see? — and at night under my pillow — you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You won’t forget this cabinet — oak — next the door — on your left — you won’t forget?”
“No, sir.”
“Pity she’s a girl, and so young — ay, a girl, and so young — no sense — giddy. You say, you’ll remember?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It behoves you.”
He turned round and looked full upon me, like a man who has taken a sudden resolution; and I think for a moment he had made up his mind to tell me a great deal more. But if so, he changed it again; and after another pause, he said slowly and sternly —
“You will tell nobody what I have said, under pain of my displeasure.”
“Oh! no, sir!”
“Good child!”
“Except,” he resumed, “under one contingency; that is, in case I should be absent, and Dr. Bryerly — you recollect the tin gentleman, in spectacles and a black wig, who spent three days here last month — should come and enquire for the key, you understand, in my absence.”
“Yes, sir.”
So he kissed me on the forehead, and said —
“Let us return.”
Which, accordingly, we did, in silence; the storm outside, like a dirge on a great organ, accompanying our flitting.
Chapter 2.
Uncle Silas
WHEN WE REACHED the drawing-room, I resumed my chair, and my father his slow and regular walk to and fro, in the great room. Perhaps it was the uproar of the mind that disturbed the ordinary tenor of his thoughts; but, whatever was the cause, certainly he was unusually talkative that night.