CHAPTER XII

Laying of ghosts is a public duty, and, as the mystery of the apparition that had frightened little Clare was never solved on the stage of events at Raynham, where dread walked the Abbey, let us go behind the scenes a moment.  Morally superstitious as the baronet was, the character of his mind was opposed to anything like spiritual agency in the affairs of men, and, when the matter was made clear to him, it shook off a weight of weakness and restored his mental balance; so that from this time he went about more like the man he had once been, grasping more thoroughly the great truth, that This World is well designed.  Nay, he could laugh on hearing Adrian, in reminiscence of the ill luck of one of the family members at its first manifestation, call the uneasy spirit, Algernon’s Leg.

Mrs. Doria was outraged.  She maintained that her child had seen——­ Not to believe in it was almost to rob her of her personal property.  After satisfactorily studying his old state of mind in her, Sir Austin, moved by pity, took her aside one day and showed her that her Ghost could write words in the flesh.  It was a letter from the unhappy lady who had given Richard birth,—­brief cold lines, simply telling him his house would be disturbed by her no more.  Cold lines, but penned by what heart-broken abnegation, and underlying them with what anguish of soul!  Like most who dealt with him, Lady Feverel thought her husband a man fatally stern and implacable, and she acted as silly creatures will act when they fancy they see a fate against them:  she neither petitioned for her right nor claimed it:  she tried to ease her heart’s yearning by stealth, and, now she renounced all.  Mrs. Doria, not wanting in the family tenderness and softness, shuddered at him for accepting the sacrifice so composedly:  but he bade her to think how distracting to this boy would be the sight of such relations between mother and father.  A few years, and as man he should know, and judge, and love her.  “Let this be her penance, not inflicted by me!” Mrs. Doria bowed to the System for another, not opining when it would be her turn to bow for herself.

Further behind the scenes we observe Rizzio and Mary grown older, much disenchanted:  she discrowned, dishevelled,—­he with gouty fingers on a greasy guitar.  The Diaper Sandoe of promise lends his pen for small hires.  His fame has sunk; his bodily girth has sensibly increased.  What he can do, and will do, is still his theme; meantime the juice of the juniper is in requisition, and it seems that those small hires cannot be performed without it.  Returning from her wretched journey to her wretcheder home, the lady had to listen to a mild reproof from easy-going Diaper,—­a reproof so mild that he couched it in blank verse:  for, seldom writing metrically now, he took to talking it.  With a fluent sympathetic tear, he explained to her that she was damaging her interests by these proceedings;