“True,” said Melmoth, “I certainly saw him die; but—you say ‘there was an odd story in the family,’ do you know anything about it?”
“Not a word, it was long before my time, as old as I am.”
“Certainly it must have been so; but, was my uncle ever superstitious, fanciful?”—and Melmoth was compelled to use many synonymous expressions, before he could make himself understood.
When he did, the answer was plain and decisive, “No, never, never. When his honor sat in the kitchen in winter, to save a fire in his own room, he could never bear the talk of the old women that came in to light their pipes ‘betimes’ (from time to time). He used to show such impatience of their superstitious nonsense, that they were fain to smoke them in silence, without the consolatory accompaniment of one whisper about a child that the evil eye had looked on, or another, that though apparently a mewling, peevish, crippled brat all day, went regularly out at night to dance with the ’good people’ on the top of a neighbouring mountain, summoned thereto by the sound of a bagpipe, which was unfailingly heard at the cabin door every night.”
Melmoth’s thoughts began to take somewhat of a darker hue at this account. If his uncle was not superstitious, might he not have been guilty, and might not his strange and sudden death, and even the terrible visitation that preceded it, have been owing to some wrong that his rapacity had done the widow and the fatherless. He questioned the old woman indirectly and cautiously on the subject—her answer completely justified the deceased. “He was a man,” she said, “of a hard hand, and a hard heart, but he was as jealous of another’s right as of his own. He would have starved all the world, but he would not have wronged it of a farthing.”
Melmoth’s last resource was to send for Biddy Brannigan, who was still in the house, and from whom he at least hoped to hear the odd story that the old woman confessed was in the family. She came, and, on her introduction to Melmoth, it was curious to observe the mingled look of servility and command, the result of the habits of her life, which was alternately one of abject mendicity, and of arrogant but clever imposture. When she first appeared, she stood at the door, awed and curtseying in the presence, and muttering sounds which, possibly intended for blessings, had, from the harsh tone and witch-like look of the speaker, every appearance of malediction; but when interrogated on the subject of the story, she rose at once into consequence—her figure seemed frightfully dilated, like that of Virgil’s Alecto, who exchanges in a moment the appearance of a feeble old woman for that of a menacing fury. She walked deliberately across the room, seated, or rather squatted herself on the hearthstone like a hare in her form, spread her bony and withered hands towards the blaze, and rocked for a considerable time in silence before she commenced her tale. When she had finished it, Melmoth remained in astonishment at the state of mind to which the late singular circumstances had reduced him—at finding himself listening with varying and increasing emotions of interest, curiosity, and terror, to a tale so wild, so improbable, nay, so actually incredible, that he at least blushed for the folly he could not conquer. The result of these impressions was, a resolution to visit the closet, and examine the manuscript that very night.
This resolution he found it impossible to execute immediately, for, on inquiring for lights, the governante confessed the very last had been burnt at “his honor’s” wake; and a barefooted boy was charged to run for life and death to the neighbouring village for candles; and if you could “borry” a couple of candlesticks, added the housekeeper.
“Are there no candlesticks in the house?” said Melmoth.
“There are, honey, plinty, but it’s no time to be opening the old chest, for the plated ones, in regard of their being at the bottom of it, and the brass ones that’s ‘in it’ (in the house), one of them has no socket, and the other has no bottom.”
“And how did you make shift yourself,” said Melmoth.
“I stuck it in a potato,” quoth the housekeeper. So the gossoon ran for life and death, and Melmoth, towards the close of the evening, was left alone to meditate.
It was an evening apt for meditation, and Melmoth had his fill of it before the messenger returned. The weather was cold and gloomy; heavy clouds betokened a long and dreary continuance of autumnal rains; cloud after cloud came sweeping on like the dark banners of an approaching host, whose march is for desolation. As Melmoth leaned against the window, whose dismantled frame, and pieced and shattered panes, shook with every gust of wind, his eye encountered nothing but that most cheerless of all prospects, a miser’s garden—walls broken down, grass-grown walks whose grass was not even green, dwarfish, doddered, leafless trees, and a luxuriant crop of nettles and weeds rearing their unlovely heads where there had once been flowers, all
