LITMIR.BIZ

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stones on the hollow shingle.

      The rising of winds and the fall of the waves!

      I love the music of shingle and caves.

      And the billows that travel so far to die,

      In foam, on the loved shore where they lie.

      I lean my cold cheek on my hand;

      And as a child, with open eyes,

      Listens, in a dim surprise,

      To some high story

      Of grief and glory,

      It cannot understand;

      So, like that child,

      To meanings of a music wild,

      I listen, in a rapture lonely,

      Not understanding, listening only,

      To a story not for me;

      And let my fancies come and go,

      And fall and flow,

      With the eternal sea.

      And so, to leave rhyme, and return to prose, I end my preface, and begin my story here.

      CHAPTER I

      an arrival

      One of the earliest scenes I can remember with perfect distinctness is this. My sister and I, still denizens of the nursery, had come down to take our tea with good old Rebecca Torkill, the Malory housekeeper, in the room we called the cedar parlour. It is a long and rather sombre room, with two tall windows looking out upon the shadowy court-yard. There are on the wall some dingy portraits, whose pale faces peep out, as it were, through a background of black fog, from the canvas; and there is one, in better order than the others, of a grave man in the stately costume of James the First, which hangs over the mantel-piece. As a child I loved this room; I loved the half-decipherable pictures; it was solemn and even gloomy, but it was with the delightful gloom and solemnity of one of Rebecca Torkill's stories of castles, giants, and goblins.

      It was evening now, with a stormy, red sky in the west. Rebecca and we two children were seated round the table, sipping our tea, eating hot cake, and listening to her oft-told tale, entitled the Knight of the Black Castle.

      This knight, habited in black, lived in his black castle, in the centre of a dark wood, and being a giant, and an ogre, and something of a magician besides, he used to ride out at nightfall with a couple of great black bags, to stow his prey in, at his saddle-bow, for the purpose of visiting such houses as had their nurseries well-stocked with children. His tall black horse, when he dismounted, waited at the hall-door, which, however mighty its bars and bolts, could not resist certain magical words which he uttered in a sepulchral voice —

      "Yoke, yoke,

      Iron and oak;

      One, two, and three,

      Open to me."

      At this charmed summons the door turned instantly on its hinges, without warning of creak or rattle, and the black knight mounted the stairs to the nursery, and was drawing the children softly out of their beds, by their feet, before any one knew he was near.

      As this story, which with childish love of iteration we were listening to now for the fiftieth time, went on, I, whose chair faced the window, saw a tall man on a tall horse – both looked black enough against the red sky – ride by at a walk.

      I thought it was the gaunt old vicar, who used to ride up now and then to visit our gardener's mother, who was sick and weak, and troubling my head no more about him, was instantly as much absorbed as ever in the predatory prowlings of the Knight of the Black Castle.

      It was not until I saw Rebecca's face, in which I was staring with the steadiness of an eager interest, undergo a sudden and uncomfortable change, that I discovered my error. She stopped in the middle of a sentence, and her eyes were fixed on the door. Mine followed hers thither. I was more than startled. In the very crisis of a tale of terror, ready to believe any horror, I thought, for a moment, that I actually beheld the Black Knight, and felt that his horse, no doubt, and his saddle-bags, were waiting at the hall-door to receive me and my sister.

      What I did see was a man who looked to me gigantic. He seemed to fill the tall door-case. His dress was dark, and he had a pair of leather overalls, I believe they called them, which had very much the effect of jack-boots, and he had a low-crowned hat on. His hair was long and black, his prominent black eyes were fixed on us, his face was long, but handsome, and deadly pale, as it seemed to me, from intense anger. A child's instinctive reading of countenance is seldom at fault. The ideas of power and mystery surround grown persons in the eyes of children. A gloomy or forbidding face upon a person of great stature inspires something like panic; and if that person is a stranger, and evidently transported with anger, his mere appearance in the same room will, I can answer for it, frighten a child half into hysterics. This alarming face, with its black knit brows, and very blue shorn chin, was to me all the more fearful that it was that of a man no longer young. He advanced to the table with two strides, and said, in resonant, deep tones, to which my very heart seemed to vibrate:

      "Mr. Ware's not here, but he will be, soon enough; you give him that;" and he hammered down a letter on the table, with a thump of his huge fist. "That's my answer; and tell him, moreover, that I took his letter," – and he plucked an open letter deliberately from his great-coat pocket – "and tore it, this way and that way, across and across," and he suited the action fiercely to the words, "and left it for him, there!"

      So saying, he slapped down the pieces with his big hand, and made our tea-spoons jump and jingle in our cups, and turned and strode again to the door.

      "And tell him this," he added, in a tone of calmer hatred, turning his awful face on us again, "that there's a God above us, who judges righteously."

      The door shut, and we saw him no more. I and my sister burst into clamorous tears, and roared and cried for a full half hour, from sheer fright – a demonstration which, for a time, gave Rebecca Torkill ample occupation for all her energies and adroitness.

      This recollection remains, with all the colouring and exaggeration of a horrible impression received in childhood, fixed in my imagination. I and dear Nelly long remembered the apparition, and in our plays used to call him, after the goblin hero of the romance to which we had been listening when he entered, the Knight of the Black Castle.

      The adventure made, indeed, a profound impression upon our nerves, and I have related it, with more detail than it seems to deserve, because it was, in truth, connected with my story; and I afterwards, unexpectedly, saw a good deal more of the awful man in whose presence my heart had quaked, and after whose visit I and my sister seemed for days to have drunk of "the cup of trembling."

      I must take up my story now at a point a great many years later.

      Let the reader fancy me and my sister Helen; I dark-haired, and a few months past sixteen; she, with flaxen, or rather golden hair and large blue eyes, and only fifteen, standing in the hall at Malory, lighted with two candles; one in the old-fashioned glass bell that swings by three chains from the ceiling, the other carried out hastily from the housekeeper's room, and flaming on the table, in the foggy puffs of the February night air that entered at the wide-open hall-door.

      Old Rebecca Torkill stood on the steps, with her broad hand shading her eyes, as if the moon dazzled them.

      "There's nothing, dear; no, Miss Helen, it mustn't a' bin the gate. There's no sign o' nothin' comin' up, and no sound nor nothing at all; come in, dear; you shouldn't a' come out to the open door, with your cough in this fog."

      So in she stumped, and shut the door; and we saw no more of the dark trunks and boughs of the elms at the other side of the courtyard, with the smoky mist between; and we three trooped together to the housekeeper's room, where we had taken up our temporary quarters.

      This was the second false alarm that night, sounded, in Helen's fancy, by the quavering scream of the old iron gate. We had to wait and watch in the fever of expectation for some time longer.

      Our old house of Malory was, at the best, in the forlorn condition of a ship of war out of commission.

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