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Wilfrid Cumbermede

G >> George MacDonald >> Wilfrid Cumbermede




Although my uncle's habit was silence, however, he would now and then
take a fit of talking to me. I remember many such talks; the better,
perhaps, that they were divided by long intervals. I had perfect
confidence in his wisdom, and submission to his will. I did not much
mind my aunt. Perhaps her deference to my uncle made me feel as if she
and I were more on a level. She must have been really kind, for she
never resented any petulance or carelessness. Possibly she sacrificed
her own feeling to the love my uncle bore me; but I think it was rather
that, because he cared for me, she cared for me too.

Twice during every meal she would rise from the table with some dish in
her hand, open the door behind the chimney, and ascend the winding
stair.




CHAPTER III.


AT THE TOP OF THE CHIMNEY-STAIR.

I fear my reader may have thought me too long occupied with the
explanatory foundations of my structure: I shall at once proceed to
raise its walls of narrative. Whatever further explanations may be
necessary, can be applied as buttresses in lieu of a broader base.

One Sunday--it was his custom of a Sunday--I fancy I was then somewhere
about six years of age--my uncle rose from the table after our homely
dinner, took me by the hand, and led me to the dark door with the long
arrow-headed hinges, and up the winding stone stair which I never
ascended except with him or my aunt. At the top was another rugged
door, and within that, one covered with green baize. The last opened on
what had always seemed to me a very paradise of a room. It was
old-fashioned enough; but childhood is of any and every age, and it was
not old-fashioned to me--only intensely cosy and comfortable. The first
thing my eyes generally rested upon was an old bureau, with a book-case
on the top of it, the glass-doors of which were lined with faded red
silk. The next thing I would see was a small tent-bed, with the whitest
of curtains, and enchanting fringes of white ball-tassels. The bed was
covered with an equally charming counterpane of silk patchwork. The
next object was the genius of the place, in a high, close, easy-chair,
covered with some dark stuff, against which her face, surrounded with
its widow's cap, of ancient form, but dazzling whiteness, was strongly
relieved. How shall I describe the shrunken, yet delicate, the
gracious, if not graceful form, and the face from which extreme old age
had not wasted half the loveliness? Yet I always beheld it with an
indescribable sensation, one of whose elements I can isolate and
identify as a faint fear. Perhaps this arose partly from the fact that,
in going up the stair, more than once my uncle had said to me, 'You
must not mind what grannie says, Willie, for old people will often
speak strange things that young people cannot understand. But you must
love grannie, for she is a very good old lady.'

'Well, grannie, how are you to-day?' said my uncle, as we entered, this
particular Sunday.

I may as well mention at once that my uncle called her _grannie_ in his
own right and not in mine, for she was in truth my great-grandmother.

'Pretty well, David, I thank you; but much too long out of my grave,'
answered grannie; in no sepulchral tones, however, for her voice,
although weak and uneven, had a sound in it like that of one of the
upper strings of a violin. The plaintiveness of it touched me, and I
crept near her--nearer than, I believe, I had ever yet gone of my own
will--and laid my hand upon hers. I withdrew it instantly, for there
was something in the touch that made me--not shudder, exactly--but
creep. Her hand was smooth and soft, and warm too, only somehow the
skin of it seemed dead. With a quicker movement than belonged to her
years, she caught hold of mine, which she kept in one of her hands,
while she stroked it with the other. My slight repugnance vanished for
the time, and I looked up in her face, grateful for a tenderness which
was altogether new to me.

'What makes you so long out of your grave, grannie?' I asked.

'They won't let me into it, my dear.'

'Who won't let you, grannie?'

'My own grandson there, and the woman down the stair.'

'But you don't really want to go--do you, grannie?'

'I do want to go, Willie. I ought to have been there long ago. I am
very old; so old that I've forgotten how old I am. How old am I?' she
asked, looking up at my uncle.

'Nearly ninety-five, grannie; and the older you get before you go the
better we shall be pleased, as you know very well.'

'There! I told you,' she said with a smile, not all of pleasure, as she
turned her head towards me. 'They won't let me go. I want to go to my
grave, and they won't let me! Is that an age at which to keep a poor
woman from her grave?'

'But it's not a nice place, is it, grannie?' I asked, with the vaguest
ideas of what _the grave_ meant. 'I think somebody told me it was in
the churchyard.'

But neither did I know with any clearness what the church itself meant,
for we were a long way from church, and I had never been there yet.

'Yes, it is in the churchyard, my dear.'

'Is it a house?' I asked.

'Yes, a little house; just big enough for one.'

'I shouldn't like that.'

'Oh yes, you would.'

'Is it a nice place, then?'

'Yes, the nicest place in the world, when you get to be so old as I am.
If they would only let me die!'

'Die, grannie!' I exclaimed. My notions of death as yet were derived
only from the fowls brought from the farm, with their necks hanging
down long and limp, and their heads wagging hither and thither.

'Come, grannie, you mustn't frighten our little man,' interposed my
uncle, looking kindly at us both.

'David!' said grannie, with a reproachful dignity, '_you_ know what I
mean well enough. You know that until I have done what I have to do,
the grave that is waiting for me will not open its mouth to receive me.
If you will only allow me to do what I have to do, I shall not trouble
you long. Oh dear! oh dear!' she broke out, moaning and rocking herself
to and fro, 'I am too old to weep, and they will not let me to my bed.
I want to go to bed. I want to go to sleep.'

She moaned and complained like a child. My uncle went near and took her
hand.

'Come, come, dear grannie!' he said, 'you must not behave like this.
You know all things are for the best.'

'To keep a corpse out of its grave!' retorted the old lady, almost
fiercely, only she was too old and weak to be fierce. 'Why should you
keep a soul that's longing to depart and go to its own people,
lingering on in the coffin? What better than a coffin is this withered
body? The child is old enough to understand me. Leave him with me for
half an hour, and I shall trouble you no longer. I shall at least wait
my end in peace. But I think I should die before the morning.'

Ere grannie had finished this sentence, I had shrunk from her again and
retreated behind my uncle.

'There!' she went on, 'you make my own child fear me. Don't be
frightened, Willie dear; your old mother is not a wild beast; she loves
you dearly. Only my grand-children are so undutiful! They will not let
my own son come near me.'

How I recall this I do not know, for I could not have understood it at
the time. The fact is that during the last few years I have found
pictures of the past returning upon me in the most vivid and
unaccountable manner, so much so as almost to alarm me. Things I had
utterly forgotten--or so far at least that when they return, they must
appear only as vivid imaginations, were it not for a certain conviction
of fact which accompanies them--are constantly dawning out of the past.
Can it be that the decay of the observant faculties allows the memory
to revive and gather force? But I must refrain, for my business is to
narrate, not to speculate.

My uncle took me by the hand, and turned to leave the room. I cast one
look at grannie as he led me away. She had thrown her head back on her
chair, and her eyes were closed; but her face looked offended, almost
angry. She looked to my fancy as if she were trying but unable to lie
down. My uncle closed the doors very gently. In the middle of the stair
he stopped, and said in a low voice,

'Willie, do you know that when people grow very old they are not quite
like other people?'

'Yes. They want to go to the churchyard,' I answered.

'They fancy things,' said my uncle. 'Grannie thinks you are her own
son.'

'And ain't I?' I asked innocently.

'Not exactly,' he answered. 'Your father was her son's son. She forgets
that, and wants to talk to you as if you were your grandfather. Poor
old grannie! I don't wish you to go and see her without your aunt or
me: mind that.'

Whether I made any promise I do not remember; but I know that a new
something was mingled with my life from that moment. An air as it were
of the tomb mingled henceforth with the homely delights of my life.
Grannie wanted to die, and uncle would not let her. She longed for her
grave, and they would keep her above-ground. And from the feeling that
grannie ought to be buried, grew an awful sense that she was not
alive--not alive, that is, as other people are alive, and a gulf was
fixed between her and me which for a long time I never attempted to
pass, avoiding as much as I could all communication with her, even when
my uncle or aunt wished to take me to her room. They did not seem
displeased, however, when I objected, and not always insisted on
obedience. Thus affairs went on in our quiet household for what seemed
to me a very long time.




CHAPTER IV.


THE PENDULUM.

It may have been a year after this, it may have been two, I cannot
tell, when the next great event in my life occurred. I think it was
towards the close of an Autumn, but there was not so much about our
house as elsewhere to mark the changes of the seasons, for the grass
was always green. I remember it was a sultry afternoon. I had been out
almost the whole day, wandering hither and thither over the grass, and
I felt hot and oppressed. Not an air was stirring. I longed for a
breath of wind, for I was not afraid of the wind itself, only of the
trees that made it. Indeed, I delighted in the wind, and would run
against it with exuberant pleasure, even rejoicing in the fancy that I,
as well as the trees, could make the wind by shaking my hair about as I
ran. I must run, however; whereas the trees, whose prime business it
was, could do it without stirring from the spot. But this was much too
hot an afternoon for me, whose mood was always more inclined to the
passive than the active, to run about and toss my hair, even for the
sake of the breeze that would result therefrom. I bethought myself. I
was nearly a man now; I would be afraid of things no more; I would get
out my pendulum, and see whether that would not help me. Not this time
would I flinch from what consequences might follow. Let them be what
they might, the pendulum should wag, and have a fair chance of doing
its best.

[Illustration: "I SAT AND WATCHED IT WITH GROWING AWE."]

I went up to my room, a sense of high emprise filling my little heart.
Composedly, yea solemnly, I set to work, even as some enchanter of old
might have drawn his circle, and chosen his spell out of his
iron-clasped volume. I strode to the closet in which the awful
instrument dwelt. It stood in the furthest corner. As I lifted it,
something like a groan invaded my ear. My notions of locality were not
then sufficiently developed to let me know that grannie's room was on
the other side of that closet. I almost let the creature, for as such I
regarded it, drop. I was not to be deterred, however. I bore it
carefully to the light, and set it gently on the window sill, full in
view of the distant trees towards the west. I left it then for a
moment, as if that it might gather its strength for its unwonted
labours, while I closed the door, and, with what fancy I can scarcely
imagine now, the curtains of my bed as well. Possibly it was with some
notion of having one place to which, if the worst came to the worst, I
might retreat for safety. Again I approached the window, and after
standing for some time in contemplation of the pendulum, I set it in
motion, and stood watching it.

It swung slower and slower. It wanted to stop. It should not stop. I
gave it another swing. On it went, at first somewhat distractedly, next
more regularly, then with slowly retarding movement. But it should not
stop.

I turned in haste and got from the side of my bed the only chair in the
room, placed it in the window, sat down before the reluctant
instrument, and gave it a third swing. Then, my elbows on the sill, I
sat and watched it with growing awe, but growing determination as well.
Once more it showed signs of refusal; once more the forefinger of my
right hand administered impulse.

Something gave a crack inside the creature: away went the pendulum,
swinging with a will. I sat and gazed, almost horror-stricken. Ere many
moments had passed, the feeling of terror had risen to such a height
that, but for the very terror, I would have seized the pendulum in a
frantic grasp. I did not. On it went, and I sat looking. My dismay was
gradually subsiding.

I have learned since that a certain ancestor--or was he only a
great-uncle?--I forget--had a taste for mechanics, even to the craze of
the perpetual motion, and could work well in brass and iron. The
creature was probably some invention of his. It was a real marvel how,
after so many years of idleness, it could now go as it did. I confess,
as I contemplate the thing, I am in a puzzle, and almost fancy the
whole a dream. But let it pass. At worst, something of which this is
the sole representative residuum, wrought an effect on me which
embodies its cause thus, as I search for it in the past. And why should
not the individual life have its misty legends as well as that of
nations? From them, as from the golden and rosy clouds of morning,
dawns at last the true sun of its unquestionable history. Every boy has
his own fables, just as the Romes and the Englands of the world have
their Romuli and their Arthurs, their suckling wolves and their
granite-sheathed swords. Do they not reflect each other? I tell the
tale as 'tis left in me.

How long I sat thus gazing at the now self-impelled instrument, I
cannot say. The next point in the progress of the legend, is a gust of
wind rattling the window in whose recess I was seated. I jumped from my
chair in terror. While I had been absorbed in the pendulum, the evening
had closed in; clouds had gathered over the sky, and all was gloomy
about the house. It was much too dark to see the distant trees, but
there could be no doubt they were at work. The pendulum had roused
them. Another, a third, and a fourth gust rattled and shook the rickety
frame. I had done it at last! The trees were busy away there in the
darkness. I and my pendulum could make the wind.

The gusts came faster and faster, and grew into blasts which settled
into a steady gale. The pendulum went on swinging to and fro, and the
gale went on increasing in violence. I sat half in terror, half in
delight, at the awful success of my experiment. I would have opened the
window to let in the coveted air, but that was beyond my knowledge and
strength. I could make the wind blow, but, like other magicians, I
could not share in its benefits. I would go out and meet it on the open
plain. I crept down the stair like a thief--not that I feared
detention, but that I felt such a sense of the important, even the
dread, about myself and my instrument, that I was not in harmony with
souls reflecting only the common affairs of life. In a moment I was in
the middle of a storm--for storm it very nearly was and soon became. I
rushed to and fro in the midst of it, lay down and rolled in it, and
laughed and shouted as I looked up to the window where the pendulum was
swinging, and thought of the trees at work away in the dark. The wind
grew stronger and stronger. What if the pendulum should not stop at
all, and the wind went on and on, growing louder and fiercer, till it
grew mad and blew away the house? Ah, then, poor grannie would have a
chance of being buried at last! Seriously, the affair might grow
serious.

Such thoughts were passing in my mind, when all at once the wind gave a
roar which made me spring to my feet and rush for the house. I must
stop the pendulum. There was a strange sound in that blast. The trees
themselves had had enough of it, and were protesting against the
creature's tyranny. Their master was working them too hard. I ran up
the stair on all fours: it was my way when I was in a hurry. Swinging
went the pendulum in the window, and the wind roared in the chimney. I
seized hold of the oscillating thing, and stopped it; but to my amaze
and consternation, the moment I released it, on it went again. I must
sit and hold it. But the voice of my aunt called me from below, and as
I dared not explain why I would rather not appear, I was forced to
obey. I lingered on the stair, half minded to return.

'What a rough night it is!' I heard my aunt say, with rare remark.

'It gets worse and worse,' responded my uncle. 'I hope it won't disturb
grannie; but the wind must roar fearfully in her chimney.'

I stood like a culprit. What if they should find out that I was at the
root of the mischief, at the heart of the storm!

'If I could believe all that I have been reading to-night about the
Prince of the Power of the Air, I should not like this storm at all,'
continued my uncle, with a smile. 'But books are not always to be
trusted because they are old,' he added with another smile. 'From the
glass, I expected rain and not wind.'

'Whatever wind there is, we get it all,' said my aunt. 'I wonder what
Willie is about. I thought I heard him coming down. Isn't it time,
David, we did something about his schooling? It won't do to have him
idling about this way all day long.'

'He's a mere child,' returned my uncle. 'I'm not forgetting him. But I
can't send him away yet.'

'You know best,' returned my aunt.

_Send me away!_ What could it mean? Why should I--where should I go?
Was not the old place a part of me, just like my own clothes on my own
body? This was the kind of feeling that woke in me at the words. But
hearing my aunt push back her chair, evidently with the purpose of
finding me, I descended into the room.

'Come along, Willie,' said my uncle. 'Hear the wind how it roars!'

'Yes, uncle; it does roar,' I said, feeling a hypocrite for the first
time in my life. Knowing far more about the roaring than he did, I yet
spoke like an innocent!

'Do you know who makes the wind, Willie?'

'Yes. The trees,' I answered.

My uncle opened his blue eyes very wide, and looked at my aunt. He had
had no idea what a little heathen I was. The more a man has wrought out
his own mental condition, the readier he is to suppose that children
must be able to work out theirs, and to forget that he did not work out
his information, but only his conclusions. My uncle began to think it
was time to take me in hand.

'No, Willie,' he said. 'I must teach you better than that.'

I expected him to begin by telling me that God made the wind; but,
whether it was that what the old book said about the Prince of the
Power of the Air returned upon him, or that he thought it an unfitting
occasion for such a lesson when the wind was roaring so as might render
its divine origin questionable, he said no more. Bewildered, I fancy,
with my ignorance, he turned, after a pause, to my aunt.

'Don't you think it's time for him to go to bed, Jane?' he suggested.

My aunt replied by getting from the cupboard my usual supper--a basin
of milk and a slice of bread; which I ate with less circumspection than
usual, for I was eager to return to my room. As soon as I had finished,
Nannie was called, and I bade them good-night.

'Make haste, Nannie,' I said. 'Don't you hear how the wind is roaring?'

It was roaring louder than ever, and there was the pendulum swinging
away in the window. Nannie took no notice of it, and, I presume, only
thought I wanted to get my head under the bed-clothes, and so escape
the sound of it. Anyhow, she did make haste, and in a very few minutes
I was, as she supposed, snugly settled for the night. But the moment
she shut the door I was out of bed, and at the window. The instant I
reached it, a great dash of rain swept against the panes, and the wind
howled more fiercely than ever. Believing I had the key of the
position, inasmuch as, if I pleased, I could take the pendulum to bed
with me, and stifle its motions with the bed-clothes--for this happy
idea had dawned upon me while Nannie was undressing me--I was composed
enough now to press my face to a pane, and look out. There was a small
space amidst the storm dimly illuminated from the windows below, and
the moment I looked--out of the darkness into this dim space, as if
blown thither by the wind, rushed a figure on horseback, his large
cloak flying out before him, and the mane of the animal he rode
streaming out over his ears in the fierceness of the blast. He pulled
up right under my window, and I thought he looked up, and made
threatening gestures at me; but I believe now that horse and man pulled
up in sudden danger of dashing against the wall of the house. I shrank
back, and when I peeped out again he was gone. The same moment the
pendulum gave a click and stopped; one more rattle of rain against the
windows, and then the wind stopped also. I crept back to my bed in a
new terror, for might not this be the Prince of the Power of the Air,
come to see who was meddling with his affairs? Had he not come right
out of the storm, and straight from the trees? He must have something
to do with it all! Before I had settled the probabilities of the
question, however, I was fast asleep.

I awoke--how long after, I cannot tell--with the sound of voices in my
ears. It was still dark. The voices came from below. I had been
dreaming of the strange horseman, who had turned out to be the awful
being concerning whom Nannie had enlightened me as going about at night
to buy little children from their nurses, and make bagpipes of their
skins. Awaked from such a dream, it was impossible to lie still without
knowing what those voices down below were talking about. The strange
one must belong to the being, whatever he was, whom I had seen come out
of the storm; and of whom could they be talking but me? I was right in
both conclusions.

With a fearful resolution I slipped out of bed, opened the door as
noiselessly as I might, and crept on my bare, silent feet down the
creaking stair, which led, with open balustrade, right into the
kitchen, at the end furthest from the chimney. The one candle at the
other end could not illuminate its darkness, and I sat unseen, a few
steps from the bottom of the stair, listening with all my ears, and
staring with all my eyes. The stranger's huge cloak hung drying before
the fire, and he was drinking something out of a tumbler. The light
fell full upon his face. It was a curious, and certainly not to me an
attractive face. The forehead was very projecting, and the eyes were
very small, deep set, and sparkling. The mouth--I had almost said
muzzle--was very projecting likewise, and the lower jaw shot in front
of the upper. When the man smiled the light was reflected from what
seemed to my eyes an inordinate multitude of white teeth. His ears were
narrow and long, and set very high upon his head. The hand which he
every now and then displayed in the exigencies of his persuasion, was
white, but very large, and the thumb was exceedingly long. I had
weighty reasons for both suspecting and fearing the man; and, leaving
my prejudices out of the question, there was in the conversation itself
enough besides to make me take note of dangerous points in his
appearance. I never could lay much claim to physical courage, and I
attribute my behaviour on this occasion rather to the fascination of
terror than to any impulse of self-preservation: I sat there in utter
silence, listening like an ear-trumpet. The first words I could
distinguish were to this effect:--

'You do not mean,' said the enemy, 'to tell me, Mr Cumbermede, that you
intend to bring up the young fellow in absolute ignorance of the
decrees of fate?'

'I pledge myself to nothing in the matter,' returned my uncle, calmly,
but with something in his tone which was new to me.

'Good heavens!' exclaimed the other. 'Excuse me, sir, but what right
can you have to interfere after such a serious fashion with the young
gentleman's future?'

'It seems to me,' said my uncle, 'that you wish to interfere with it
after a much more serious fashion. There are things in which ignorance
may be preferable to knowledge.'

'But what harm could the knowledge of such a fact do him?'

'Upset all his notions, render him incapable of thinking about anything
of importance, occasion an utter--'

But _can_ anything be more important?' interrupted the visitor.

My uncle went on without heeding him.

'Plunge him over head and ears in--'

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