CHAPTER XL.
OF A MESSENGER FROM CHAPELIZOD VAULT WHO WAITED IN THE TYLED HOUSE FOR
MR. MERVYN.
Mervyn was just about this time walking up the steep Ballyfermot Road. It was then a lonely track, with great bushes and hedgerows overhanging it; and as other emotions subsided, something of the chill and excitement of solitude stole over him. The moon was wading through flecked masses of cloud. The breath of night rustled lightly through the bushes, and seemed to follow her steps with a strange sort of sigh and a titter. He stopped and looked back under the branches of an old thorn, and traced against the dark horizon the still darker outline of the ivied church tower of Chapelizod, and thought of the dead that lay there, and of all that those sealed lips might tell, and old tales of strange meetings on moors and desolate places with departed spirits, flitted across his brain; and the melancholy rush of the night air swept close about his ears, and he turned and walked more briskly toward his own gloomy quarters, passing the churchyard of Ballyfermot on his right. There were plenty of head-stones among the docks and nettles: some short and some tall, some straight and some slanting back, and some with a shoulder up, and a lonely old ash-tree still and dewy in the midst, glimmering cold among the moveless shadows; and then at last he sighted the heavy masses of old elm, and the pale, peeping front of the 'Tyled House,' through the close and dismal avenue of elm, he reached the front of the mansion. There was no glimmer of light from the lower windows, not even the noiseless flitting of a bat over the dark little court-yard. His key let him in. He knew that his servants were in bed. There was something cynical in his ree-raw independence. It was unlike what he had been used to, and its savagery suited with his bitter and unsociable mood of late.
But his step sounding through the hall, and the stories about the place
of which he was conscious. He battled with his disturbed foolish
sensations, however, and though he knew there was a candle burning in
his bed-room, he turned aside at the foot of the great stair, and
stumbled and groped his way into the old wainscoted back-parlour, that
looked out, through its great bow window, upon the haunted orchard, and
sat down in its dismal solitude.
He ruminated upon his own hard fate—the meanness of man-kind—the
burning wrongs, as he felt confident, of other times, Fortune's
inexorable persecution of his family, and the stygian gulf that deepened
between him and the object of his love; and his soul darkened with a
fierce despair, and with unshaped but evil thoughts that invited the
tempter.
The darkness and associations of the place were unwholesome, and he was
about to leave it for the companionship of his candle, but that, on a
sudden, he thought he heard a sound nearer than the breeze among the old
orchard trees.
This was the measured breathing of some one in the room. He held his own
breath while he listened—'One of the dogs,' he thought, and he called
them quietly; but no dog came. 'The wind, then, in the chimney;' and he
got up resolutely, designing to open the half-closed shutter. He fancied
as he did so that he heard the respiration near him, and passed close to
some one in the dark.
With an unpleasant expectation he threw back the shutters, and
unquestionably he did see, very unmistakably, a dark figure in a chair; so dark, indeed, that he could not discern more of it than the rude but undoubted outline of a human shape; and he stood for some seconds, holding the open shutter in his hand, and looking at it with more of the reality of fear than he had, perhaps, ever experienced before. Pale Hecate now, in the conspiracy, as it seemed, withdrew on a sudden the pall from before her face, and threw her beams full upon the figure. A slim, tall shape, in dark clothing, and, as it seemed, a countenance he had never beheld before—black hair, pale features, with a sinister-smiling character, and a very blue chin, and closed eyes.
Fixed with a strange horror, and almost expecting to see it undergo some
frightful metamorphosis, Mervyn stood gazing on the cadaverous intruder.
'Hollo! who's that?' cried Mervyn sternly.
The figure opened his eyes, with a wild stare, as if he had not opened
them for a hundred years before, and rose up with an uncertain motion, returning Mervyn's gaze, as if he did not know where he was.
'Who are you?' repeated Mervyn.
The phantom seemed to recover himself slowly, and only said: 'Mr. Mervyn?'