debating with himself, until it began to grow dark. At last he slowly and distinctly observed, "I will do it." "Do what?" sharply inquired Mrs Banyan, who was dusting the furniture, as indeed she was always dusting it when there was no more pressing business on hand. "Do as you are bid," said her master without turning his head. "Put Chrysippus's cot by the side of my bed. He shall sleep in my room to-night." Mrs Banyan, though a woman of great experience, was genuinely surprised. "Sleep in your room!" she exclaimed. "The part of my speech, which it were well for you to remark, was, Put Chrysippus's cot by the side of my bed.' Go and put it." "Thank you kindly, sir. I am very well aware that I must pay for the pleasure of serving you by doing as I am bid; but if it were not for that motherless babe, and fatherless too, or worse but there!" and with this incomplete but pregnant sentence, the good dame vanished. Neither the raised voice, the last flick of the duster, nor the slammed door, produced the slightest effect on Mr John Strong. When his servant had gone, he took from his pocket a key of antique shape, and opened an old cabinet which stood behind his chair. From a mass of old clothes, old papers, old sticks of divers sizes, old weapons of divers shapes, he drew out a rusty hammer, and after a long search, a piece of iron beaten thin, which, battered as it was, still bore a far-off likeness to the cast of a human face. Whilst he examined the latter object with the greatest care, he wore a look which in any other man would be held to denote fear. Perhaps it was only the moonlight which made his cheek so pale; perhaps in the moon's VOL. CXVIII.-NO. DCCXVII. vague glimmer the powerful hands which held that pliant metal only seemed to tremble. "It is long since it was used in this brute shape," he muttered. "Shall I use it now, and can I change it as I wish?" He was roused from his deliberation by a little hand which was pulling his coat-tail. His infant son, after making for a time a new plaything of the moonbeams, had suddenly been frightened by the growing darkness, and crept up from the floor to claim his father's protection. John Strong looked down, and saw a little face with high forehead, delicate cheek wet with tears, and trembling lip, appealing to him for pity. His hesitation was at an end. "It will save him a great deal of pain," he said; "and perhaps wear off if he ever can do without it," he added after a moment. He thrust his hand once more into the cupboard, and drew from a shelf at the back a flask of quaint workmanship, which sent a drowsy perfume through the room. Then with flask, hammer, and battered iron in his grasp, and carrying Chrysippus under his arm, he went slowly upstairs to his bedroom and locked himself in with his son. Mrs Banyan having vented her natural annoyance by bumping the cot of Chrysippus against every corner of the passage, and planting it with a final bang by the sombre bed of his father, donned her nightcap and prepared herself for that repose which her innocence deserved. But her perturbed spirit was not so easily lulled to rest as usual. She fell into a broken slumber and dreamed of her master. She saw him as a bird of ashen plumage and flaming tail, who with a long sharp bill tapped on the metal plate of a coffin. Still asleep, she was angry with herself for being troubled about so unworthy с a person; and in her efforts to dismiss him from her mind she awoke as the clock was striking one. When the sharp note of the old timepiece had passed from her ear, the tapping, which the weird fowl had made in dreamland, was distinctly audible to the awakened sense. "Drat the man!" said Mrs Banyan, "why can't he sleep and let sleep, instead of hammering nails into his boots at this time of night? I'd hammer him if I had my way." This good lady was the only inhabitant of the village who did not quake before Mr John Strong. Had all the clocks in clock-land cried one with voices of every degree of awe, she had not stirred her blanket. Nay, if her master himself had come riding into the window on a flash of lightning, she would have knocked him down with the shovel, and put him to bed in poultices. She had no belief in his supernatural alliances. She knew too much about him. If she gave him damp sheets, did he not have a cold in the nose like other people? And, indeed, the notion of a wizard calling in muffled tones on "Bephistopheles" to warm his bed is ludicrous enough. If his dinner was tepid, did he not grumble, and was not such grumbling inconsistent with the friendship of one who could heat the dish at a word? In short, whether it be true or not that no man is a hero to his lackey, it is certain that no man is a wizard to his cook. The pulse of Mrs Banyan beat with its wonted regularity as she listened to the mysterious rapping in the next room and when it ceased, her ample night-cap sank upon the pillow, the sigh of satisfaction became more guttural in character, and she slept. But not for long. As the clock struck two, she was wide awake and somewhat angry. Sounds as of some foreign language came from the next room, and ever and anon deep pants and groans as of some one striving wearily at a task beyond his strength. "The sufferings that poor man undergoes from nightmare nobody would believe," was the comment of Mrs Banyan. The night was very still, and the voice of John Strong was clearly heard in the darkness, but so changed that his very servant doubted if it were his. In its tones might have been detected by a more subtle hearer a strange mixture of authority and dismay. The man was talking nonsense with terrible earnestness, and the effect was disagreeable. But Mrs Banyan was not to be disturbed by another's nightmare. She had learned from experience that to bang the wall with a poker or to shout through the keyhole gained nothing but a flood of undesirable eloquence. So, determined to treat the sounds as a lullaby, she again laid her night-cap on the swelling pillow and in a few moments slept. On that night, however, not the strongest will joined with the easiest conscience could insure repose. The cranky clock upon the stairs struck three, as the night-cap, now sadly ruffled and cocked defiantly, parted from the pillow. In that ear which was not obscured by frills was a babel of noises. Doors and windows were flying open; a fresh wind howled in the chimney; distinct amid the hubbub rose the cry of a human voice, and dying away in the distance a sound like mocking laughter. "Drat the owl!" said Mrs Banyan. "And drat the wind!" she added after a pause, with the manner of one who fulfils a solemn duty. But the time had come for action. Since the window in the next room was blown in, and the door blown out, it was clear that Chrysippus must be in a draught, and of draught his nurse had a horror. Hastily rising and attiring herself in an antique robe, which fell in bold curves from her chin to her feet, she groped her way along the passage. "How that fire has been smoking, to be sure!" she said, as she gained the open door of Mr Strong's chamber. On the threshold she paused, as much amazed as a woman of such character could be. The wind had played strange pranks in the apartment. The blind was streaming inward like a banner. On either side the heavy curtains waving to and fro made moving shadows. On the floor lay a broken bottle, and from it oozed a slow thick liquor, whose perfume mingled with the blinding smoke which choked the place. Midway between the window and the door a chalk circle was half traced half smudged. The moon was hurrying by, but could not pass the room. Her unwilling rays turned the thickened air to silver, till the cot of Chrysippus seemed a sheeny boat lulled on a murky stream. "He has been at his chemicals again," said Mrs Banyan, "and it is a mercy if he has not blown himself up this time." She looked round anxiously. A few deep oaths from a dark corner would have been a positive luxury. There was no sound. She explored the room carefully. Her master was not therein. "Sleep - walking again," said Mrs Banyan: "perhaps in the well by this time; and if so, nobody will set eyes on him again in this world." She was naturally indignant with Mr John Strong for walking in his sleep, and leaving his concoctions to explode in his absence. If he had fallen down the old well, it served him right; but the thought that, if her surmise were correct, it would be impossible to find the body and inter it with the fitting pageantry of plumes and dyed horses was inexpressibly melancholy. She shook her night-cap, and its strings trembled. But Mrs Banyan was not "passion's slave," to waste her time in speculations on the unknown future or regrets for the vanished past. She was ready to do the work which lay nearest to her hand; which lay on this occasion in the cot of Chrysippus. Bathed in white moonlight, beneath a passing wind, noise, smoke, and dust about him, the child lay sleeping in unnatural calm. For the first time that night the woman felt a flutter at her heart, as she looked on his pale face. She touched the wrist which lay upon the counterpane. The pulse was firm, and she heaved a deep sigh of relief. Leaning in a motherly fashion over the little rail which hedged him in, she laid a great kiss upon the boy's cheek. How cold and hard it was! CHAPTER II. "The child that's father to the man, methinks Must be his grandam's grandsire, and should teach The docile dame each dear domestic art." The disappearance of Mr John Strong was to the rustics amid whom he had dwelt at least a nine years' wonder. After that time other topics slowly usurped its place as the chief subject of ale-house conversation; and when another six years had passed away with prophecy and fulfilment of harvest, courtships, marriages, and deaths, keen interest in the rector's chronic influenza, and faint rumours of European wars, it was only remembered by those who chanced to pass, Under the Mask. with vacant mind, the house where Chrysippus and his female guardian still lived. About this dismal mansion were gathered the old fables and the old fears. No children would play in its shadow; young maidens tested their courage by passing slowly in the dusk, with eyes fixed upon that window which the legend had severed from all windows for ever. Even the elders shunned the place, encouraged in their prejudice by the arrogant conduct of Mrs Banyan, who, as soon as possible after the catastrophe, had given a bit of her mind to every adult in the village. When this good woman became aware that, according to the accepted version of that strange night's tale, her late master had summoned a Netherlandish spirit for some unholy purpose, and having failed to make himself safe, had been snatched from the magic circle by his own familiar, she expressed herself so freely on the subject of the parish intellect, that those substantial neighbours, whose savings should have insured respect for their opinion, felt that society was in danger. When a few men bolder than the rest assembled before the house, and expressed an intention of visiting the scene of the catastrophe, and Mrs Banyan, finding the vials of wrath unavailing, had emptied a water-jug upon them from an upper window, a coldness ensued which time seemed unable to determine. Mrs Banyan's belief that John Strong, while walking in his sleep, had fallen into the long-disused and unfathomable well at the bottom of the garden, was as strong as knowledge; and this theory she imparted as a fact to her young charge. The boyhood of Chrysippus was singularly lonely. He had no playfellows, and did not know how to play. Once when he stood blinking in the sunny street like a young [July owl, on a sudden boys and girls by Mr John Strong was a remark- good. Wandering in the dark neglected garden he pictured this great being as a dweller in the unfathomable well. Often the little child stole out in the first light of dawn, or through the shadows of the unkempt shrubbery at evening to place a small cake or piece of bread at the well's mouth. If this offering were taken, he knew that his father was contented with him; if not, he appeased him by doubling his hours of study. Perhaps the little birds were priests of this religion; and it is said that many a priest has been enriched by gifts intended for his god. So on one side of an old wall Mr John Strong was held a colleague of the powers of darkness, on the other was worshipped as a deity. Only Mrs Banyan, stalwart believer in the golden mean, knew him to have been a very faulty man, and so dismissed him. The religion of Chrysippus, though modified as the years went by, survived even till his eighteenth birthday. All his reverence, which was not very great, was reserved for his father, and for himself as the intellectual erection built on his father's lines. For all other people he felt a calm contempt, caused in part by the fact that in the paternal writings they were always used as a dramatic contrast with ideal humanity. Mr John Strong had preferred men of his own making. At the age of eighteen Chrysippus was master of much learning, which was neatly gathered under the widest possible propositions, and was divided and subdivided with exquisite discrimination. Philosopher, logician, economist, and historian, he stood five feet eight inches in his stockings, and turned a refined but curiously immobile countenance to the world, which he surveyed from his garden through a wall of unusual thickness. If to be satisfied with one's self is happiness, he was happy; for he felt that the education which he owed to the wisdom of a faultless sire, must have placed him, however poor his natural gifts, far above his fellows. One care remained. To the neglected beings around him he had a duty to perform, a duty which it was not sufficient to explain. His circle of acquaintances was small, and he shrank from the effort to extend it; but there close by was one whom he could teach, Mrs Banyan. The thought was delightful. She, too, should gain a share of that store of knowledge which he enjoyed. She, too, should be wise and good; and so the quickening influence of Mr John Strong, finding new channels as the days went by, should slowly fertilise the world. With such benevolent purpose in his mind, the youth one morning. addressed his cook, housekeeper, washerwoman, and quondam nurse as follows: "Banyan, I want to educate you." "Educate your grandmother," said Mrs Banyan. "But, Banyan, I know so much; and what shall I do with all my knowledge? I can go on teaching myself, but that is only one. Now, if I taught you and myself, there would be two. Do you follow me?" "I think a blind donkey could follow you so far," replied the dame, polishing a chair. "And I don't know anybody but you and myself," said he. "That is true enough, poor boy!" said she, pausing with the duster in her hand, and fixing her motherly eyes on his face; "and what with your heathenish name, and your not being able to play at anything, and the odd look and here she checked herself on a sudden, and fell to rubbing the furniture with quite unnecessary violence. |