Uncle Silas J. Sheridan Le Fanu (good books to read for beginners .TXT) 📖

his trust, in it he found his reward, in it lives my only hope; consult it, my beloved niece, day and night, as the oracle of life.”

Then he laid his thin hand on my head, and blessed me, and then kissed my forehead.

“No⁠—a!” exclaimed Cousin Milly’s lusty voice. I had quite forgotten her presence, and looked at her with a little start. She was seated on a very high old-fashioned chair; she had palpably been asleep; her round eyes were blinking and staring glassily at us; and her white legs and navvy boots were dangling in the air.

“Have you anything to remark about Noah?” enquired her father, with a polite inclination and an ironical interest.

“No⁠—a,” she repeated in the same blunt accents; “I didn’t snore; did I? No⁠—a.”

The old man smiled and shrugged a little at me⁠—it was the smile of disgust.

“Good night, my dear Maud;” and turning to her, he said, with a peculiar gentle sharpness, “Had not you better wake, my dear, and try whether your cousin would like some supper?”

So he accompanied us to the door, outside which we found L’Amour’s candle awaiting us.

“I’m awful afraid of the Governor, I am. Did I snore that time?”

“No, dear; at least, I did not hear it,” I said, unable to repress a smile.

“Well, if I didn’t, I was awful near it,” she said, reflectively.

We found poor Mary Quince dozing over the fire; but we soon had tea and other good things, of which Milly partook with a wonderful appetite.

“I was in a qualm about it,” said Milly, who by this time was quite herself again. “When he spies me a-napping, maybe he don’t fetch me a prod with his pencil-case over the head. Odd! girl, it is sore.”

When I contrasted the refined and fluent old gentleman whom I had just left, with this amazing specimen of young ladyhood, I grew sceptical almost as to the possibility of her being his child.

I was to learn, however, how little she had, I won’t say of his society, but even of his presence⁠—that she had no domestic companion of the least pretensions to education⁠—that she ran wild about the place⁠—never, except in church, so much as saw a person of that rank to which she was born⁠—and that the little she knew of reading and writing had been picked up, in desultory half-hours, from a person who did not care a pin about her manners or decorum, and perhaps rather enjoyed her grotesqueness⁠—and that no one who was willing to take the least trouble about her was competent to make her a particle more refined than I saw her⁠—the wonder ceased. We don’t know how little is heritable, and how much simply training, until we encounter some-such spectacle as that of my poor cousin Milly.

When I lay down in my bed and reviewed the day, it seemed like a month of wonders. Uncle Silas was always before me; the voice so silvery for an old man⁠—so preternaturally soft; the manners so sweet, so gentle; the aspect, smiling, suffering, spectral. It was no longer a shadow; I had now seen him in the flesh. But, after all, was he more than a shadow to me? When I closed my eyes I saw him before me still, in necromantic black, ashy with a pallor on which I looked with fear and pain, a face so dazzlingly pale, and those hollow, fiery, awful eyes! It sometimes seemed as if the curtain opened, and I had seen a ghost.

I had seen him; but he was still an enigma and a marvel. The living face did not expound the past, any more than the portrait portended the future. He was still a mystery and a vision; and thinking of these things I fell asleep.

Mary Quince, who slept in the dressing-room, the door of which was close to my bed, and lay open to secure me against ghosts, called me up; and the moment I knew where I was I jumped up, and peeped eagerly from the window. It commanded the avenue and courtyard; but we were many windows removed from that over the hall-door, and immediately beneath ours lay the two giant lime trees, prostrate and uprooted, which I had observed as we drove up the night before.

I saw more clearly in the bright light of morning the signs of neglect and almost of dilapidation which had struck me as I approached. The courtyard was tufted over with grass, seldom from year to year crushed by the carriage-wheels, or trodden by the feet of visitors. This melancholy verdure thickened where the area was more remote from the centre; and under the windows, and skirting the walls to the left, was reinforced by a thick grove of nettles. The avenue was all grass-grown, except in the very centre, where a narrow track still showed the roadway. The handsome carved balustrade of the courtyard was discoloured with lichens, and in two places gapped and broken; and the air of decay was heightened by the fallen trees, among whose sprays and yellow leaves the small birds were hopping.

Before my toilet was completed, in marched my cousin Milly. We were to breakfast alone that morning, “and so much the better,” she told me. Sometimes the Governor ordered her to breakfast with him, and “never left off chaffing her” till his newspaper came, and “sometimes he said such things he made her cry,” and then he only “boshed her more,” and packed her away to her room; but she was by chalks nicer than him, talk as he might. “Was not she nicer? was not she? was not she?” Upon this point she was so strong and urgent that I was obliged to reply by a protest against awarding the palm of elegance between parent and child, and declaring I liked her very much, which I attested by a kiss.

“I know right well which of us you do think’s the nicest, and no mistake, only you’re afraid of him; and he had