第29章

His cravat appeared to trouble him.He put his hand to his throat, and moved his neck from side to side.He was an old man of a swollen character of face, and his nose was immoveably hitched up on one side, as if by a little hook inserted in that nostril.Mr.Goodchild felt exceedingly uncomfortable, and began to think the night was hot, and not cold.

'A strong description, sir,' he observed.

'A strong sensation,' the old man rejoined.

Again, Mr.Goodchild looked to Mr.Thomas Idle; but Thomas lay on his back with his face attentively turned towards the One old man, and made no sign.At this time Mr.Goodchild believed that he saw threads of fire stretch from the old man's eyes to his own, and there attach themselves.(Mr.Goodchild writes the present account of his experience, and, with the utmost solemnity, protests that he had the strongest sensation upon him of being forced to look at the old man along those two fiery films, from that moment.)'I must tell it to you,' said the old man, with a ghastly and a stony stare.'What?' asked Francis Goodchild.

'You know where it took place.Yonder!'

Whether he pointed to the room above, or to the room below, or to any room in that old house, or to a room in some other old house in that old town, Mr.Goodchild was not, nor is, nor ever can be, sure.He was confused by the circumstance that the right forefinger of the One old man seemed to dip itself in one of the threads of fire, light itself, and make a fiery start in the air, as it pointed somewhere.Having pointed somewhere, it went out.

'You know she was a Bride,' said the old man.

'I know they still send up Bride-cake,' Mr.Goodchild faltered.'This is a very oppressive air.'

'She was a Bride,' said the old man.'She was a fair, flaxen- haired, large-eyed girl, who had no character, no purpose.A weak, credulous, incapable, helpless nothing.Not like her mother.No, no.It was her father whose character she reflected.

'Her mother had taken care to secure everything to herself, for her own life, when the father of this girl (a child at that time) died - of sheer helplessness; no other disorder - and then He renewed the acquaintance that had once subsisted between the mother and Him.He had been put aside for the flaxen-haired, large-eyed man (or nonentity) with Money.He could overlook that for Money.He wanted compensation in Money.

'So, he returned to the side of that woman the mother, made love to heragain, danced attendance on her, and submitted himself to her whims.She wreaked upon him every whim she had, or could invent.He bore it.And the more he bore, the more he wanted compensation in Money, and the more he was resolved to have it.

'But, lo! Before he got it, she cheated him.In one of her imperious states, she froze, and never thawed again.She put her hands to her head one night, uttered a cry, stiffened, lay in that attitude certain hours, and died.And he had got no compensation from her in Money, yet.Blight and Murrain on her!Not a penny.

'He had hated her throughout that second pursuit, and had longed for retaliation on her.He now counterfeited her signature to an instrument, leaving all she had to leave, to her daughter - ten years old then - to whom the property passed absolutely, and appointing himself the daughter's Guardian.When He slid it under the pillow of the bed on which she lay, He bent down in the deaf ear of Death, and whispered: "Mistress Pride, I have determined a long time that, dead or alive, you must make me compensation in Money.'

'So, now there were only two left.Which two were, He, and the fair flaxen-haired, large-eyed foolish daughter, who afterwards became the Bride.

'He put her to school.In a secret, dark, oppressive, ancient house, he put her to school with a watchful and unscrupulous woman."My worthy lady," he said, "here is a mind to be formed; will you help me to form it?" She accepted the trust.For which she, too, wanted compensation in Money, and had it.

'The girl was formed in the fear of him, and in the conviction, that there was no escape from him.She was taught, from the first, to regard him as her future husband - the man who must marry her - the destiny that overshadowed her - the appointed certainty that could never be evaded.The poor fool was soft white wax in their hands, and took the impression that they put upon her.It hardened with time.It became a part of herself.Inseparable from herself, and only to be torn away from her, by tearing life away from her.

'Eleven years she had lived in the dark house and its gloomy garden.

He was jealous of the very light and air getting to her, and they kept her close.He stopped the wide chimneys, shaded the little windows, left the strong-stemmed ivy to wander where it would over the house-front, the moss to accumulate on the untrimmed fruit-trees in the red-walled garden, the weeds to over-run its green and yellow walks.He surrounded her with images of sorrow and desolation.He caused her to be filled with fears of the place and of the stories that were told of it, and then on pretext of correcting them, to be left in it in solitude, or made to shrink about it in the dark.When her mind was most depressed and fullest of terrors, then, he would come out of one of the hiding-places from which he overlooked her, and present himself as her sole resource.

'Thus, by being from her childhood the one embodiment her life presented to her of power to coerce and power to relieve, power to bind and power to loose, the ascendency over her weakness was secured.She was twenty-one years and twenty-one days old, when he brought her home to the gloomy house, his half-witted, frightened, and submissive Bride of three weeks.

'He had dismissed the governess by that time - what he had left to do, he could best do alone - and they came back, upon a rain night, to the scene of her long preparation.She turned to him upon the threshold, as the rain was dripping from the porch, and said: