Читать книгу The Midnight Queen - May Agnes Fleming - Страница 9

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The by-path down which Sir Norman rode, led to an inn, “The Golden Crown,” about a quarter of a mile from the ruin. Not wishing to take his horse, lest it should lead to discovery, he proposed leaving it here till his return; and, with this intention, and the strong desire for a glass of wine—for the heat and his ride made him extremely thirsty—he dismounted at the door, and consigning the animal to the care of a hostler, he entered the bar-room. It was not the most inviting place in the world, this same bar-room—being illy-lighted, dim with tobacco-smoke, and pervaded by a strong spirituous essence of stronger drinks than malt or cold water. A number of men were loitering about, smoking, drinking, and discussing the all-absorbing topic of the plague, and the fires that might be kindled. There was a moment's pause, as Sir Norman entered, took a seat, and called for a glass of sack, and then the conversation went on as before. The landlord hastened to supply his wants by placing a glass and a bottle of wine before him, and Sir Norman fell to helping himself, and to ruminating deeply on the events of the night. Rather melancholy these ruminations were, though to do the young gentleman justice, sentimental melancholy was not at all in his line; but then you will please to recollect he was in love, and when people come to that state, they are no longer to be held responsible either for their thoughts or actions. It is true his attack had been a rapid one, but it was no less severe for that; and if any evil-minded critic is disposed to sneer at the suddenness of his disorder, I have only to say, that I know from observation, not to speak of experience, that love at first sight is a lamentable fact, and no myth.

Love is not a plant that requires time to flourish, but is quite capable of springing up like the gourd of Jonah full grown in a moment. Our young friend, Sir Norman, had not been aware of the existence of the object of his affections for a much longer space than two hours and a half, yet he had already got to such a pitch, that if he did not speedily find her, he felt he would do something so desperate as to shake society to its utmost foundations. The very mystery of the affair spurred him on, and the romantic way in which she had been found, saved, and disappeared, threw such a halo of interest round her, that he was inclined to think sometimes she was nothing but a shining vision from another world. Those dark, splendid eyes; that lovely marblelike face; those wavy ebon tresses; that exquisitely exquisite figure; yes, he felt they were all a great deal too perfect for this imperfect and wicked world. Sir Norman was in a very bad way, beyond doubt, but no worse than millions of young men before and after him; and he heaved a great many profound sighs, and drank a great many glasses of sack, and came to the sorrowful conclusion that Dame Fortune was a malicious jade, inclined to poke fun at his best affections, and make a shuttlecock of his heart for the rest of his life. He thought, too, of Count L'Estrange; and the longer he thought, the more he became convinced that he knew him well, and had met him often. But where? He racked his brain until, between love, Leoline, and the count, he got that delicate organ into such a maze of bewilderment and distraction, that he felt he would be a case of congestion, shortly, if he did not give it up. That the count's voice was not the only thing about him assumed, he was positive; and he mentally called over the muster-roll of his past friends, who spent half their time at Whitehall, and the other half going through the streets, making love to the honest citizens' pretty wives and daughters; but none of them answered to Count L'Estrange. He could scarcely be a foreigner—he spoke English with too perfect an accent to be that; and then he knew him, Sir Norman, as if he had been his brother. In short, there was no use driving himself insane trying to read so unreadable a riddle; and inwardly consigning the mysterious count to Old Nick, he swallowed another glass of sack, and quit thinking about him.

So absorbed had Sir Norman been in his own mournful musings, that he paid no attention whatever to those around him, and had nearly forgotten their very presence, when one of them, with a loud cry, sprang to his feet, and then fell writhing to the floor. The others, in dismay, gathered abut him, but the next instant fell back with a cry of, “He has the plague!” At that dreaded announcement, half of them scampered off incontinently; and the other half with the landlord at their head, lifted the sufferer whose groans and cries were heart-rendering, and carried him out of the house. Sir Norman, rather dismayed himself, had risen to his feet, fully aroused from his reverie, and found himself and another individual sole possessors of the premises. His companion he could not very well make out; for he was sitting, or rather crouching, in a remote and shadowy corner, where nothing was clearly visible but the glare of a pair of fiery eyes. There was a great redundancy of hair, too, about his head and face, indeed considerable more about the latter than there seemed any real necessity for, and even with the imperfect glimpse he caught of him the young man set him down in his own mind as about as hard-looking a customer as he had ever seen. The fiery eyes were glaring upon him like those of a tiger, through a jungle of bushy hair, but their owner spoke never a word, though the other stared back with compound interest. There they sat, beaming upon each other—one fiercely, the other curiously, until the re-appearance of the landlord with a very lugubrious and woebegone countenance. It struck Sir Norman that it was about time to start for the ruin; and, with an eye to business, he turned to cross-examine mine host a trifle.

“What have they done with that man?” he asked by way of preface.

“Sent him to the pest-house,” replied the landlord, resting his elbows on the counter and his chin in his hands, and staring dismally at the opposite wall. “Ah! Lord 'a' mercy on us! These be dreadful times!”

“Dreadful enough!” said Sir Norman, sighing deeply, as he thought of his beautiful Leoline, a victim of the merciless pestilence. “Have there been many deaths here of the distemper?”

“Twenty-five to-day!” groaned the man. “Lord! what will become of us?”

“You seem rather disheartened,” said Sir Norman, pouring out a glass of wine and handing it to him. “Just drink this, and don't borrow trouble. They say sack is a sure specific against the plague.”

Mine host drained the bumper, and wiped his mouth, with another hollow groan.

“If I thought that, sir, I'd not be sober from one week's end to t'other; but I know well enough I will be in a plague-pit in less than a week. O Lord! have mercy on us!”

“Amen!” said Sir Norman, impatiently. “If fear has not taken away your wits, my good sir, will you tell me what old ruin that is I saw a little above here as I rode up?”

The man started from his trance of terror, and glanced, first at the fiery eyes in the corner, and then at Sir Norman, in evident trepidation of the question.

“That ruin, sir? You must be a stranger in this place, surely, or you would not need to ask that question.”

“Well, suppose I am a stranger? What then?”

“Nothing, sir; only I thought everybody knew everything about that ruin.”

“But I do not, you see? So fill your glass again, and while you are drinking it, just tell me what that everything comprises.”

Again the landlord glanced fearfully at the fiery eyes in the corner, and again hesitated.

“Well!” exclaimed Sir Norman, at once surprised and impatient at his taciturnity, “Can't you speak man? I want you to tell me all about it.”

“There is nothing to tell, sir,” replied the host, goaded to desperation. “It is an old, deserted ruin that's been here ever since I remember; and that's all I know about it.”

While, he spoke, the crouching shape in the corner reared itself upright, and keeping his fiery eyes still glaring upon Sir Norman, advanced into the light. Our young knight was in the act of raising his glass to his lips; but as the apparition approached, he laid it down again, untasted, and stared at it in the wildest surprise and intensest curiosity. Truly, it was a singular-looking creature, not to say a rather startling one. A dwarf of some four feet high, and at least five feet broad across the shoulders, with immense arms and head—a giant in everything but height. His immense skull was set on such a trifle of a neck as to be scarcely worth mentioning, and was garnished by a violent mat of coarse, black hair, which also overran the territory of his cheeks and chin, leaving no neutral ground but his two fiery eyes and a broken nose all twisted awry. On a pair of short, stout legs he wore immense jack-boots, his Herculean shoulders and chest were adorned with a leathern doublet, and in the belt round his waist were conspicuously stuck a pair of pistols and a dagger. Altogether, a more ugly or sinister gentleman of his inches it would have been hard to find in all broad England. Stopping deliberately before Sir Norman, he placed a hand on each hip, and in a deep, guttural voice, addressed him:

“So, sir knight—for such I perceive you are—you are anxious to know something of that old ruin yonder?”

“Well,” said Sir Norman, so far recovering from his surprise as to be able to speak, “suppose I am? Have you anything to say against it, my little friend?”

“Oh, not in the least!” said the dwarf, with a hoarse chuckle. “Only, instead of wasting your breath asking this good man, who professes such utter ignorance, you had better apply to me for information.”

Again Sir Norman surveyed the little Hercules from head to foot for a moment, in silence, as one, nowadays, would an intelligent gorilla.

“You think so—do you? And what may you happen to know about it, my pretty little friend?”

“O Lord!” exclaimed the landlord, to himself, with a frightened face, while the dwarf “grinned horribly a ghastly smile” from ear to ear.

“So much, my good sir, that I would strongly advise you not to go near it, unless you wish to catch something worse than the plague. There have been others—our worthy host, there, whose teeth, you may perceive, are chattering in his head, can tell you about those that have tried the trick, and—”

“Well?” said Sir Norman, curiously.

“And have never returned to tell what they found!” concluded the little monster, with a diabolical leer. And as the landlord fell, gray and gasping, back in his seat, he broke out into a loud and hyena-like laugh.

“My dear little friend,” said Sir Norman, staring at him in displeased wonder, “don't laugh, if you can help it. You are unprepossessing enough at best, but when you laugh, you look like the very (a downward gesture) himself!”

Unheeding this advice, the dwarf broke again into an unearthly cachinnation, that frightened the landlord nearly into fits, and seriously discomposed the nervous system even of Sir Norman himself. Then, grinning like a baboon, and still transfixing our puissant young knight with the same tiger-like and unpleasant glare, he nodded a farewell; and in this fashion, grinning, and nodding, and backing, he got to the door, and concluding the interesting performance with a third hoarse and hideous laugh, disappeared in the darkness.

For fully ten minutes after he was gone, the young man kept his eyes blankly fixed on the door, with a vague impression that he was suffering from an attack of nightmare; for it seemed impossible that anything so preposterously ugly as that dwarf could exist out of one. A deep groan from the landlord, however, convinced him that it was no disagreeable midnight vision, but a brawny reality; and turning to that individual, he found him gasping, in the last degree of terror, behind the counter.

“Now, who in the name of all the demons out of Hades may that ugly abortion be?” inquired Sir Norman.

“O Lord! be merciful! sir, it's Caliban; and the only wonder is, he did not leave you a bleeding corpse at his feet!”

“I should like to see him try it. Perhaps he would have found that is a game two can play at! Where does he come from and who is he!”

The landlord leaned over the counter, and placed a very pale and startled face close to Sir Norman's.

“That's just what I wanted to tell you, sir, but I was afraid to speak before him. I think he lives up in that same old ruin you were inquiring about—at least, he is often seen hanging around there; but people are too much afraid of him to ask him any questions. Ah, sir, it's a strange place, that ruin, and there be strange stories afloat about it,” said the man, with a portentious shake of the head.

“What are they?” inquired Sir Norman. “I should particularly like to know.”

“Well, sir, for one thing, some folks say it is haunted, on account of the queer lights and noises about it, sometimes; but, again, there be other folks, sir, that say the ghosts are alive, and that he”—nodding toward the door—“is a sort of ringleader among them.”

“And who are they that cut up such cantrips in the old place, pray?”

“Lord only knows, sir. I'm sure I don't. I never go near it myself; but there are others who have, and some of them tell of the most beautiful lady, all in white, with long, black hair, who walks on the battlements moonlight nights.”

“A beautiful lady, all in white, with long, black hair! Why, that description applies to Leoline exactly.”

And Sir Norman gave a violent start, and arose to proceed to the place directly.

“Don't you go near it, sir!” said the host, warningly. “Others have gone, as he told you, and never come back; for these be dreadful times, and men do as they please. Between the plague and their wickedness, the Lord only knows what will become of us!”

“If I should return here for my horse in an hour or two, I suppose I can get him?” sad Sir Norman, as he turned toward the door.

“It's likely you can, sir, if I'm not dead by that time,” said the landlord, as he sank down again, groaning dismally, with his chin between his hands.

The night was now profoundly dark; but Sir Norman knew the road and ruin well, and, drawing his sword, walked resolutely on. The distance between it and the ruin was trifling, and in less than ten minutes it loomed up before him, a mass of deeper black in the blackness. No white vision floated on the broken battlements this night, as Sir Norman looked wistfully up at them; but neither was there any ungainly dwarf, with two-edged sword, guarding the ruined entrance; and Sir Norman passed unmolested in. He sought the spiral staircase which La Masque had spoken of, and, passing carefully from one ancient chamber to another, stumbling over piles of rubbish and stones as he went, he reached it at last. Descending gingerly its tortuous steepness, he found himself in the mouldering vaults, and, as he trod them, his ear was greeted by the sound of faint and far-off music. Proceeding farther, he heard distinctly, mingled with it, a murmur of voices and laughter, and, through the chinks in the broken flags, he perceived a few faint rays of light. Remembering the directions of La Masque, and feeling intensely curious, he cautiously knelt down, and examined the loose flagstones until he found one he could raise; he pushed it partly aside, and, lying flat on the stones, with his face to the aperture, Sir Norman beheld a most wonderful sight.