I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those
lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind and the
rain always rushing by. A ghost could not have been taken and hanged on
my account, and the consideration that he could be, and the dread that
he would be, were no small addition to my horrors. When he was not
asleep, or playing a complicated kind of Patience with a ragged pack of
cards of his own,--a game that I never saw before or since, and in which
he recorded his winnings by sticking his jackknife into the table,--when
he was not engaged in either of these pursuits, he would ask me to
read to him,--"Foreign language, dear boy!" While I complied, he, not
comprehending a single word, would stand before the fire surveying me
with the air of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers
of the hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to
the furniture to take notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student
pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more
wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling
from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the
fonder he was of me.
This is written of, I am sensible, as if it had lasted a year. It lasted
about five days. Expecting Herbert all the time, I dared not go out,
except when I took Provis for an airing after dark. At length, one
evening when dinner was over and I had dropped into a slumber quite
worn out,--for my nights had been agitated and my rest broken by fearful
dreams,--I was roused by the welcome footstep on the staircase. Provis,
who had been asleep too, staggered up at the noise I made, and in an
instant I saw his jackknife shining in his hand.
"Quiet! It's Herbert!" I said; and Herbert came bursting in, with the
airy freshness of six hundred miles of France upon him.
"Handel, my dear fellow, how are you, and again how are you, and again
how are you? I seem to have been gone a twelvemonth! Why, so I must have
been, for you have grown quite thin and pale! Handel, my--Halloa! I beg
your pardon."
He was stopped in his running on and in his shaking hands with me, by
seeing Provis. Provis, regarding him with a fixed attention, was slowly
putting up his jackknife, and groping in another pocket for something
else.