IN WHICH AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR IS SEEN. IN THE
CEDAR-PARLOUR OF THE TILED HOUSE, AND THE STORY OF
MR. BEAUCLERC AND THE ‘FLOWER DE LUCE’
BEGINS TO BE UNFOLDED.
It was an awful night, indeed, on which all this occurred,
and that apparition had shown itself up at the Mills.
And truly it would seem the devil had business on
his hands, for in the cedar-parlour of the Tiled House
another unexpected manifestation occurred just about
the same hour.
What gentleman is there of broken fortunes, undefined
rights, and in search of evidence, without a legal
adviser of some sort? Mr. Mervyn, of course,
had his, and paid for the luxury according to custom.
And every now and then off went a despatch from the
Tiled House to the oracular London attorney; sometimes
it was a budget of evidence, and sometimes only a
string of queries. To-night, to the awful diapason
of the storm—he was penning one of these—the
fruit of a tedious study of many papers and letters,
tied up in bundles by his desk, all of them redolent
of ominous or fearful associations.
I don’t know why it is the hours fly with such
a strange celerity in the monotony and solitude of
such nightwork. But Mervyn was surprised, as
many a one similarly occupied has been, on looking
at his watch, to find that it was now long past midnight;
so he threw himself back in his chair with a sigh,
and thought how vainly his life was speeding away,
and heard, with a sort of wonder, how mad was the roar
of the storm without, while he had quietly penned
his long rescript undisturbed.
The wild bursts of supernatural fury and agony which
swell and mingle in a hurricane, I dare say, led his
imagination a strange aerial journey through the dark.
Now it was the baying of hell hounds, and the long
shriek of the spirit that flies before them. Anon
it was the bellowing thunder of an ocean, and the
myriad voices of shipwreck. And the old house
quivering from base to cornice under the strain; and
then there would come a pause, like a gasp, and the
tempest once more rolled up, and the same mad hubbub
shook and clamoured at the windows.
So he let his Pegasus spread his pinions on the blast,
and mingled with the wild rout that peopled the darkness;
or, in plainer words, he abandoned his fancy to the
haunted associations of the hour, the storm, and the
house, with a not unpleasant horror. In one of
these momentary lulls of the wind, there came a sharp,
distinct knocking on the window-pane. He remembered
with a thrill the old story of the supernatural hand
which had troubled that house, and began its pranks
at this very window.
Ay, ay, ’twas the impatient rapping of a knuckle
on the glass quite indisputably.
It is all very well weaving the sort of dream or poem
with which Mervyn was half amusing and half awing
himself, but the sensation is quite different when
a questionable sound or sight comes uninvited to take
the matter out of the province of our fancy and the
control of our will. Mervyn found himself on
his legs, and listening in a less comfortable sort
of horror, with his gaze fixed in the direction of
that small sharp knocking. But the storm was
up again, and drowning every other sound in its fury.
