of boisterous spirits, paroxysms of violent outburst
against his lot. “Infernal parish!
Hateful parish! Forsaken parish!” after
the ignominy of flight before the bull. “Blow
the dinner! Dash the dinner! Blow the dinner!”
after wrestling a soggy steak from his pocket and
hurling it half a mile through the air. These
and that single but terrible occasion of “Cambridge!
Cambridge! My youth! My God, my God, my
youth!”
A terribly lonely man.
The Aubyn family occupied only a portion of the enormous
rectory. There was a whole floor upstairs, and
there were several rooms on the ground and first floors,
that were never used, were unfurnished except for
odds and ends of lumber left behind by the previous
vicar, and were never entered. Rosalie once explored
them all, systematically though very fearfully, and
also very excitedly. She was searching for some
one, for two people.
In the household she knew her father and her mother,
her brothers and sisters and the servants; but there
were two mysterious inhabitants of whom she often
heard but whom she never saw and never could find.
It used to frighten her sometimes, lying awake at
night, or creeping about the house of an evening, to
think of those two mysterious people hidden away somewhere
and perhaps likely to pounce on her out of the dark.
What did they eat? Where did they live?
What did they do? What were they?
One of these two eerie and invisible people was heard
of from her father. Several times Rosalie had
heard him, when talking to persons not of the family,
speak of “my wife.” The other eerie
and invisible creature was heard of from her mother:
“My husband.”
Where were they? Of all the mysterious things
which Rosalie used to wonder over in those days, this
undiscoverable “wife” and “husband”
were the most mysterious of all, and more mysterious
than ever after that day on which, walking on tiptoe
for fear of coming upon them suddenly, holding her
breath and pausing in fearful apprehension before
entering the untenanted rooms upstairs, she explored
the whole house in search of them. She got to
know all sorts of little odds and ends about them;
that the wife felt the cold very much, for instance,
for she had heard her father say so; and that the
husband did not like mutton, for her mother told that
to Mr. Grant the butcher: and she was often hot
on their tracks for she had heard her father say,
“My wife is upstairs” and had rushed upstairs
and searched; and her mother say, “My husband
is in the garden,” and had run into the garden
and hunted. But all these clues only deepened
the mystery. They were never to be found.
It was mysterious.
Then one day the wife (she heard) fell ill, and through
her great concern about that—for she was
profoundly interested in these people and used to
feel awfully sorry for them, hidden away like that
perhaps with no fire and nothing to eat but mutton—the
mystery was explained.
