University of Virginia Library

6. VI.
Fanchon.

THE next day being Sunday, St. Denys inquired
if there were any practicable church in the
neighborhood; and soon, under Redruth's guidance,
departed with Miriam to find it, leaving Sir
Rohan to his primitive desolation.

Instantly, a loneliness utterly new overcame
him. These people, who had not been with him
half a week, and one of whom he had known but
three days, became suddenly as indispensable to
him as the air he breathed. The unusual stir
about the house, proceeding from the kitchen and
its occupants, only reminded him of the silence
around himself; and unused to control any emotion,
except in its exhibition, he allowed the little
annoyance to vex him unbearably, while he paced
the long drawing-room and execrated the murmuring
air that his rapid step set in motion about

him like another presence. A scarf of Miriam's,
a tiny silken thing, lay across a chair; he took it
up tenderly, as if it were a part of herself, for so
full of life did she seem to him that he fancied
her imparting her vitality to all around her. `But
I am myself half dead,” he murmured. A glove
of hers had been dropped at the door, and scattered
violets from the bunch he had plucked for
her at sunrise marked her path across the lawn.
“It is a generous prodigality that distinguishes
her,” he thought. “Her heart is so large as to
receive every creature with kindness, and she looks
at all men with equal eyes.” Sir Rohan was on
dangerous ground; so he rolled the scarf and
glove together without lingering over their delicate
perfume, placed them by themselves, and
went up to grind colors. The clock struck the
quarter before two as he lifted the curtain of his
painting, and simultaneously feet and voices echoed
through the hall, and Miriam, searching drawing
and dining-room, called aloud, “Sir Rohan! Sir
Rohan! Do you know what day it is? Do you
work on Sundays?”

Sir Rohan dropped the curtain, despite the faint
and revengeful look that gathered over the face
beneath, and joined his guests like one ashamed.

“What a queer little church!” said Miriam, as
they sat at lunch. “It stands so lonely on that
long slope, and buttressed by those great cliffs,
with only three little lonely graves and the sea
before it, that I believed Uther Pendragon to have
said his prayers there; but nobody since. I said
so to papa, going in, and a quick voice from no-one-knew-where
replied, `I apprehend the gentleman
you refer to did not accustom himself to
that amusement.' One might have known who
spoke, but I could n't see him, till half through
the service, in the great pew opposite, there were
his evil eyes staring us out of countenance, at
least if Marc Arundel's eyes could do so much.”

“Miriam, you don't mean to say —” cried St.
Denys, dropping his fork.

“Precisely that, papa. He bowed with the condescension
of a Prince Cardinal.”

“You did n't return it in service, Miriam?”

“O no! we were past the creed. So I was
oblivious of all the Arundels since the flood, till
leaving; when I put as much graciousness and as
many smiles as could be crowded into a nod, and
gave it him.”

“You are a coquette! But I did n't see him.”

“O dear, no, papa! Your eyes were blinded
by your prayer-book.”

“And where were yours?”

“O, mine are like those bugs, that see all ways
at once. What a superb altar-cloth that was! —
amaranth velvet, powdered with silver fleurs de
lis; we must have one like it, at the Castle. Did
any ladies of your family make it, Sir Rohan?”

“No, indeed! There have been no ladies
in my family, you know, for many years; that
little church flourishes under the Arundelian
dynasty.”

“I should n't wonder if Marc worked it himself,”
said Miriam. “It would be very fit employment;
he has such a finikin faculty of mending,
picking up, patching, — surely he knows the scandal
of every family in the kingdom, papa! I
think he 'd like to make flourishes in gold
thread.”

“You are growing vituperative, young lady,”
said St. Denys. “But there is one fortunate
thing about this rencontre. He does not know
where we are.”

“O, papa, that 's too soothing a medicament;
he saw Redruth with us!” she replied, pulling

off her bonnet and suffering it to fall from her
fingers.

“You should have been less devout, and by
staying at home have avoided your friend,” said
Sir Rohan.

“That 's a remedy too late. But there 's yet
another; let us use expedition, and depart.”

“Miss Miriam, you will not leave me yet?”

“Why, Sir Rohan, if we stay we shall see Marc
Arundel.”

“And if you go, I shall see worse.”

“Do you really mean that you want us here?”

“Most assuredly.”

“Then, if content to have your retirement
broken in upon, all your household upset, and
your immutable decrees turned topsy-turvy by a
romping lass and an angelic gentleman, what did
you seek it for?”

“Miriam, child,” said St. Denys, “what affair
is that of yours?”

“Do you be quiet, papa, if you can't return
your partner's lead.”

“One may weary even of chosen pursuits, Miss
Miriam.”

“Then you 'll soon weary of us, and we had
better go before that catastrophe.”

“Give me, at least, the opportunity of trial.”

“Now, papa, am I not a good diplomatist?
You said, this very morning, we might be trespassing
after all, coming as we did into a student's
quiet without an invitation, like an irruption of
Saxons; and now I have procured you one, although
not starting with that intention,” she
added, merrily.

“I don't know, little chatterbox, where that
tongue will lead you,” said St. Denys. But Miriam
was already half dancing away, moved by
some fresh caprice.

It was toward the conservatory — Sir Rohan's
mongrel between hot and green-houses being thus
styled — that Miriam now bent her steps; and
always choosing the most unusual way, she preferred
crossing the sill of the oriol at the back of
the drawing-room, to seeking it by either of the
hall-doors. It was built apart from the house,
and was kept by Sir Rohan with exquisite care, in
which labor an experienced gardener, one of his
nearest tenants, shared; and here the owner's useless
wealth had been lavished. Scarcely a rod
from the window, it looked thence, when the noonday
sun illumined its gorgeous nurslings, like

some sunset cloud blown into a nook of the great
buildings, and screened there from all harsh dissolving
winds. Since it had been the place where
Sir Rohan grouped his colors and studied forms,
where, also, he had been least dejected, it was less
a formal hot-house than a wilderness of delights.
Once within it, and you fancied yourself in the
heart of the zone that girdles the earth with all
the beauty of that magical one of Venus.

Miriam had not seen this place before, and indeed
had no business there now, for it was as
private and peculiar to Sir Rohan as his painting-room;
but she was one of those who take possession
of whatever they see, and entering an open
door, a long green leaf and white-impearled
plume of the rice kissed her cheek in welcome.
She had not passed the threshold, before, rapt
into a new world, every sense concentrated itself
into that of scent; every known perfume was wafting
toward her; every blossom on the face of the
earth, she thought, was steaming with delicious
fragrance. There were no forms or tiers, but the
plants grew in broad beds, terraces, and mossy
mounds, where practicable, while the walks were
mosaicked in thick-strewn autumn leaves; serpents,

parded, barred, and mooned, like agates; wings of
the Purple Emperor of the Woods, and gay fallen
feathers. At one point, long alleys lined with
splendid shrubs formed, in the sun, arcades of
diamond brightness, while half up their height
hung narrow galleries whose vines trailed over
balustrades of gilded network. Where the crystal
wall arched out in crescents, great cones of the
dark, shining leaves of orange, myrtle, and camellia
were massed against the fresh brilliancy of
tamarinds and enormous ferns whose intricate
meshes glittered like cobwebs in morning dew;
while again, the rich green of the maranta was
thrown into deep shade by the startling light of
a mimosa tossing from its rude trunk a spray of
airy, tremulous foliage and long wreaths of golden
blossoms. Opposite these, an Indian coraltree
loftily reared itself, clad in profuse scarlet
flowers; and by its side the regal poinciana, still
breathing of Madagascar and southern wealth,
poised its clusters, crimson and magnificent, on
large twin leaves all winged and nervous for
flight; while counteracting discord, over them
and across, with snake-like coils, the tropical
bauhinia clambered and hung its white festoons,
elegant, unequal, countless. From this excess of
color and contrast, the eye passed to a passion-flower
trellised in broad lace-work against the
glass, looking backward from the increasing
height, with its doubtfully blue and odorous
blooms, upon a bed of late, shade-loving violets
at its feet; on low brackets at one side here
stood vases of the rich, violet-colored gloxinia,
and paler daphne; and higher, on the other, a
wide urn full of the purple Brazilian cleome, each
blossom like the claw of Jove's eagle grasping his
arrows, and round the urn the torenia twined in
wanton luxuriance with its dark-purple, velvety
bells. Easily the prevailing hue changed to the
soft shades of the ponera's buff fascicles, the
cream-dyed asystasia clinging breathlessly to the
wall, and the globy abutilon; till turning suddenly
round a dwarf-palm whose great fronds
waved with dreamy rhythm, she came again upon
a blaze of pomegranate-flowers, orange-colored
sesban, crimson clianthus, pecking like a bunch
of parrot's bills at the sunshine, an acacia, — the
Persian Gul-ebruschim, — rosily tufted with great
silken-threaded tassels, and the blue thunbergia
twisting the light columns near by with involutions
of classical acanthus-leaves. For all these
flowers Sir Rohan forced to abandon their own
proper times and seasons, and bud, bloom, delay,
die, at their master's despotic pleasure. So, by
some secret of superb skill, ordaining for them
such unwithering perpetuity that the buds of May
became the bantlings of December.

Here, glowing carnations took the noon to their
hearts, and among them nestled the ivy-leaved
cyclamen, white, eager, listening; and there, the
perpetual shiver of the hedysarum filled her with
a vague response, and the snowy tube-rose satiated
with a cloud of sweetest spice. Thrown, as things
were, into masses of intense hue, they attained
such individuality only by gradations as minute
in one place as daring in another; while on this
exaggerated scale the combination of color might
be very different from that allowed by the fine
finish of a lady's toilet. Swinging from tiny cups
on high, grew the aerides, delicate and sweet; and
above, hung in every way, the most fantastic, most
delicious orchids. White doves and swans seemed
floating in a world of greenery up the dome, falcons
with light on their pinions shooting from
spray to spray, vermilion-colored spiders sitting

on some broad leaf, and rainbow-tinted fish swimming
the thinner medium of upper air, while,
grassy or pulpy as their stems might be, they all
wore a degree of grace, beauty, and novelty, not
to be rivalled. One epiphyte dropped its spiral
slowly down as she advanced, till a great moth,
with broad-balanced wings stained in crimson and
gold, danced gaudily before her eyes; and round
her head, as she walked, waved the long, wide ribbons
of Sumatra grasses.

Miriam wandered along in a maze. She had
brought her little bible with her, but sooth to say,
it was yet unopened, and at last she threw herself
into a chair of rough Madeira-wood, to recover a
moment from the intoxication. Beside her here
were all strange, mystic plants, with immense
leaves; all tropical vines, sighing for their sultry,
gloomy forests; lush, dark things, still stained
with the steam of hot, humid regions; rank trailers,
whose blue lips dripped with poisonous honey;
and rich, feculent, aromatic scents, whose every
draught held death. It was Sir Rohan's idiosyncrasy.
Over the whole place the pandang shed
his powerful breath, the rarest in the world, and
sacred to the gods themselves.

Near the other extremity, Miriam now saw a
group of figures, risen in a cluster, and through
the shimmer of water that surrounded them, still
rising, one might say. Some were above the others,
and one was uppermost of all; with her right
hand upon the shoulder of the next, she seemed
to have sprung for a wreath which she held in the
uplifted one. It was a wreath of lilies, and from
the heart of each slowly issued a single drop, diffusing
and gathering again at the apex of the
petal, and falling forever, while tenuous threads of
water shot forth in pistil and stamen, and with the
perpetual drops wrapped this upper figure in torrents,
and powdered, as they fell, to a drizzling
rain that bathed the others in a veil of mist, till
they all seemed like dimmest, farthest shadows
risen from watery depths at some mortal call. In
the silent basin at their feet were tender aquatics,
the gems of Indian archipelagos and remoter seas;
and the canals into which it ran lost themselves,
without borders, in a soft green moss. Beyond
this, baskets of roses, comprising all shades from
black over sanguine and damask to purest white,
transfigured themselves through the vapor into a
splendid fleece; and flaming cacti made a rich

background for the noiseless fountain, and asserted
their own identity more vigorously because
robbing a hill of heliotropes behind of theirs.

While Miriam sat surveying this pandemonium
of scent and tint, the heat and fragrance had become
oppressive, her sense reeled under so strong
a cordial; the sun, calling forth the heavy incense
of every leaf, threw his own life into theirs, and
when the gardener came and went, having drawn
the canvas awning over the roof, it seemed to shut
in. the whole soul of the ascending atmosphere
and press it upon her.

She leaned back in her chair, inhaling the perfumes
like a voluptuary, yet half doubting if the
enjoyment were healthy. Her eyes were partially
closed; but in an instant they sprung wide open.
Something in the softened light, through the fulvid
noon, was moving here, was taking shape, rising
from the gray heliotropes and bringing their
passionate fragrance with her. Something so
pale, so fair, so thin, so sad, requiring no room,
yet making all room, where she once was felt, a
desert. Something floating toward her, never
tinged by any of the gorgeous shades under which
she passed; white, through all the lurid changes

of purple and gold and scarlet. Something that
seemed to imply strength for so much direr a form,
should she choose. Something still advancing,
till the heat became as if an iceberg had melted
in it; pausing; gazing at her with such infinite
tenderness and pity and mournful beauty; passing
on, and fading like a moonbeam into the sun.

Miriam sunk back again, dazzled and dizzy; a
distant shout met her ear, — she thought they
laughed at her dream, and wondered had she
really slept.

The only thing to contradict such supposition
was a purple heart's-ease, — which she was sure
she had never plucked, she said, — lying in her
lap, pricked and threaded with the finest, finest,
long, dark, human hair. But as if seized by a
wind, when she would have touched it, it whirled
from her finger and disappeared.

She was frightened and trembling, faint with
awe; all her muscles were relaxed, — either the
close air or the vision had rendered her powerless;
she felt abstractly that the position was
becoming perilous, when suddenly some one
dropped the sashes of the roof with a clang, and
a free current of cool wind swept gloriously in,

tossing all the blooms, ruffling the smooth masses,
bringing forth new splendor and freshness and life
at every sigh. The reviving gale fanned Miriam's
temples a moment; then, without seeking the
cause, she clasped her bible and ran.

The cause was Sir Rohan; he had unconsciously
drawn near the conservatory, had beheld
Miriam as the vision took shape, had watched her
through it, had withdrawn the sashes to relieve
her, and now himself stood pale, cold, and cursing
fate. For no magnetism was delicate enough
to impress upon her sight this burden of his
thoughts, and Miriam for the first and last time
had seen the Ghost.

In an hour or two Miriam re-entered the dining-room,
and finding no one, stepped into the
garden, where the two gentlemen were walking
and leaving fragrant wreaths of blue smoke behind
them as they walked.

“I wonder why people will make perambulating
chimneys of themselves,” she exclaimed, as they
abandoned that occupation. “You, for one, sir,
promised to show me those south rooms at the top
of the house, where the sea is so plainly to be
seen. Come now!”

“With pleasure. St. Denys, will you join us?
I fear you disappoint yourself, Miss Miriam.”

“O no, that is not possible,” she cried. “I
never have passed any time before under the same
roof that sheltered crumbling walls, forsaken
rooms, and deserts of dust. There will be unexplored
closets, and old escritoires bursting with
lost records, and when we have broken out the
blackened panes, — the prospect.”

“Probably the storms have saved us that
trouble. We may capture a swallow skimming
round there, or waylay a little owl.”

“Then we will believe some damsel of the
Ladies Belvidere has been cruelly enchanted into
that form, and we are the powers come to loosen
the spell. Upon which the lady will leave the
owl, and live happily all her days, as the storybooks
used to say.”

“God forbid!” said Sir Rohan, more heartily
than appeared reason, before she concluded. But
Miriam only laughed, and tripped on before them
up the stairway with the keys, which Mrs. Redruth
had given her, in her hand. At last, however, she
resigned them to their owner, who threw open
door after door into rooms destitute of furniture,

where the paper hung peeling from the wall; but
Miriam found them all too small, and flitted restlessly
forward.

“Here is one,” she said, as Sir Rohan would
have passed a door; and so pertinaciously and like
a spoiled child did she return to the attack, that,
after hesitating till he was embarrassed, he turned
the key, and they entered one in full as ruinous a
condition as the others. The curiously netted
rafters overhead had been eaten by worms into the
similitude of quaint and delicate carving. The
floor was warped and depressed at the sides, and
heavy articles slanted against the wainscot or had
pitched forward and fallen into fragments. One
large window lighted it, glass and sash quite gone,
and moss bedded upon the stone lintel within.
Adjoining this window was a diagonal closet built
in one of the octagons of the wall, with two oaken
doors, looking through the collected deposits and
rusty hinges as if unopened since the erection of
the house.

“This promises more than any other,” said Miriam;
“were you ever in it before, Sir Rohan?”

“Once or twice I may have been,” he answered,
involuntarily glancing at one of the closet doors.

“I should think it was a place of pharmacy,”
she added. “See that furnace and its little stone
crucible, and those phials and retorts upon the
table.”

“Doubtless it was.”

“Ah!” said she, pulling a ribbon that lay on the
floor at the foot of the closet door, half escaped
therefrom. “And was any woman the victim of
their cabalistic arts? We are approaching the
mystery, Sir Rohan.” And she examined the
ribbon, once some bright-colored thing, that yielded
to her grasp and hung in threads across her
fingers. “What did it belong to?” she asked.
“I wonder who wore it.”

There is always something touching in decay,
and this little faded ribbon seemed to impart to
Miriam, for a moment, an air of sad sobriety.
But with his first glance Sir Rohan had endeavored
to withdraw her attention, and approaching
the window, said: “But the prospect! In your
sentimental lute-string you will lose it,” and he
tore aside the sheltering ivy. Miriam bent forward,
rapt an instant in the glory of the great
unrest before her.

“Come, papa. See it!” she exclaimed, drawing

St. Denys toward her. “It is scarcely better
than when out of sight of land one feels in dark
nights a world of water slipping under the keel;
but what else equals it? What color! What
expanse! What light!”

Indeed there were few scenes to compare with
this; for isolated from all surrounding scenery, the
bowery tree-tops of Sir Rohan's grounds tossing
below, and the whole set in the ivied framework
of the great window, you saw only the vast
loneliness, and heard only the tireless song of
illimitable sea. A narrow strip of yellow sand
bound the shore, washed by broad creamy waves,
breaking, without sparkles, in low humming
tones, and sobbing back into the gulfs again
with a stifled sough. Long blue lines of depth
and richness, as one sees the channels of rivers,
trailed across the ever shoreward advance; and
beyond these, purple fields of stillness inflected
its surface, and further yet, where some island
cliff towered to the winds and turbulence of weather,
great sheets of foam aslant took the stray sunbeams
into their bosom and produced a miracle
of radiance. Overhead the sky soared faint yet
clear, with the dim haze upon its skirt that ever
haunts a sea-horizon.

“And it is always so, Sir Rohan,” said Miriam,
glancing at him a moment; “all summer long, all
day, till the moon comes with her white sereneness,
and swings it to and fro upon her queenly
will. And in clear nights of sweet darkness how
it must brood to itself, and what calm and hush
come instead, and overshadow it with unwavering
wings!”

Now and then a little shallop furrowed some
cove, and again, from a misty distance a broad
white sail broke into life, and tacking through the
sunshine, buried itself from view in other firmaments.

“The sky is as worthy of study,” said Sir Rohan.
“Observe how the sea near the shore borrows
its hues and changes, but further out and
near the horizon, the sky borrows those of the sea.
The beauty here, one could swear, is eternal. It
is because we see it in the vast, the mass; the details
are not so pleasant.”

“O, do you think so? Don't you find any beauty
in those sea-anemones, and madrepores, and nettles
with their fine scarlet and cool purple? I
believe there are no such shades on your easel.
Surely you 've seen the sun-fish shining white and

lucid, like a ghost under water, and the dying
colors of the mackerel along these shores.”

“I did not think of those in speaking, and they
are hardly what I mean. Perhaps it is a peculiar
prejudice. In the midst of a thing, one can hardly
form a correct idea of it. One needs almost the
supremacy where may be seen the earth rocking
her great tides now on the long coast-line of the
Americas, now on all the broken gulfs and reaches
from Africa to Thule. We must come up here
some dark night, Miss Miriam, and see the briony,”
he added. “Redruth and his boys shall go out in
their skiffs and whip the water till it is all aflame,
and over the sea of fire you will look to have the
heavens roll together like a scroll, and the last day
dawn upon us.”

“Don't send them, then. I will enjoy here a
little longer. I don't care, yet, for that Last
Day.”

“Miriam,” said St. Denys, “why do you persist
in speaking so lightly?”

“I never thought, papa, — please forgive me,”
she answered, turning quickly toward him. “You
won't be angry with me, frowning Puritan?”

But the indulgent smile was reply enough, and

her sole care dismissed, she returned to the enjoyment
of her view, while St. Denys moved away to
examine the garniture of the room.

“There was always a charm to me,” said Sir
Rohan, “in the myths of those old existences of
ocean. Not Neptune, nor yet Nereids, and hardly
Mermen, but Spirits of the Sea.”

“Yes,” answered Miriam, “and I have frequently
thought, if I were not a woman, — which
is a state so much sweeter, you know, — that I
would choose my metempsychosis to be into a
water-mist, or any part of its great source.”

“The sea is, nevertheless, foreign to me. It
seems when sparkling, too much like a living
thing rejoicing in the hurry and bustle of the
great world.”

“To me it is a Beneficence.”

“What! with its caprice and treachery, its hollows
of green darkness beneath the shining shield
that sleeps in the sun, its rage and its laughter; —
remorseless, and yet, I can fancy, kind.”

“All that is because you must float on it some
calm noon, in the shallows, where the sunbeams
bend into it and stain it a mort d'ore, as if yellow
waves were rising and falling below the skin of

brown ripples, and every instant you might see
some glorious creature come sliding up their
under swell, all radiant with these Murillo tints,
these browns and gold.”

“Like yourself, Miss Miriam.”

Thus speaking, the dialogue paused, and they
continued for a time silent, together watching dim
purple vapors that rose as Thetis rose to Achilles,
— yet uncertainly, like smoke, — and then crept
in silently over the land. For Miriam it was
the incense of the ocean, but for Sir Rohan the
palest and mournfulest of shadows fashioned herself
from the ascending cloud to gaze at him,
vanishing as it spread, and gathering form again
in each succeeding one.

“We must wait till sunset,” said Miriam;
“how kind to bring me here!”

“You have an artist's eye,” he rejoined; but
looking at her to avoid the phantom, the relics
of the old ribbon caught his own again. Miriam
observed the glance, and immediately returned
to the topic from which he had so successfully
diverted her. “I wonder who wore it,” she repeated.
“May I open this closet, Sir Rohan?”

Without waiting for his response, she turned

the rusty key quickly, and looked within. A
gray cloak lay on the floor, and a cap, linen and
once white, of some rustic pattern. Sir Rohan
could neither move nor speak; too well he remembered
the day in which he had thrown those
garments here, too homely grown for their wearer's
use; and now was this strange girl, — inquisitively
raising them, throwing the cloak round
her, setting the tattered cap gravely on her hair
and holding it by its single string, — was she their
angel of resurrection? — to drag them into what
judgment! What right had she to come and
search his wounds with her curious fingers? — perhaps,
he thought on the moment, to heal them
with “sweet inspersion of fit balms.”

Miriam had laughingly displayed herself to St.
Denys, while Sir Rohan repeated another question
which again and again had recurred; but
quickly dropping them off, she exclaimed:

“And now I wonder what is in the other closet.
There is no key to it; was it never opened?”

“Never, to my knowledge.”

“But can't you open it, Sir Rohan?”

There was nothing more which he dreaded to
have her see; indeed, he did not suppose there

was anything else to be found there, and with his
knee against the panel, he shook it lightly and
brought away, as it unclosed, the lock and a part
of the rotten case. Immediately a great cloud of
offensive dust blew wildly out, seeking freedom
in the room; flew into his eyes and nostrils,
suffocating and blinding him. He half turned for
breath, and at the motion some shelf gave way
with a little crash, and countless yellow bones
tumbled rattling upon the floor, into his bosom,
striking his face and his extended arm; and a
human skull rolled away, splintering to fragments
at Miriam's feet.

“Fanchon! Fanchon!” he exclaimed, shaking
them off with a fierce gesture.

“What does it mean, Sir Rohan? What does
it mean?” cried Miriam, springing back.

“You must ask Redruth!” he retorted, scarcely
knowing what he said, and striding from the
room. “Let him look to it!”

They followed noiselessly, St. Denys first pausing
to lock the door; but Sir Rohan had preceded
them with such rapidity that he was out of sight
when they resumed, and at the grand staircase
they met Redruth ascending with a box, and a

pale, shivering housemaid with dust-pan and brush,
the teeth of the girl chattering in her head.

At dinner Miriam was surprised to see their host
cool as usual, and hurried that she might ask
Redruth to explain it; moreover, the silence she
kept concerning the hour in the conservatory
excited her.

“I am afraid Miss Miriam is frightened,” said
Sir Rohan, when she had gone. “She was so different,
so still.”

“She may be a little curious,” replied the
other, cracking his nuts, — “not much more.”

“It was very singular. You remember I once
told you the little legend, — but never put faith
in it.”

“This confirms it, then?”

“Yes. See that; the maid found it among
those bones;” and he put into St. Denys's hand a
gold girdle-clasp once set with jewels, and wearing
in old English text the word Fanchon.

Miriam found Redruth in the housekeeper's
room, looking over an old gazette that St. Denys
had brought with him.

“You are pale, Miss Miriam, — paler than
usual,” he said, putting it aside.

“Truly I may be,” she replied. “I think the
whole house is paler; I can't stay in it, — I shall
have to run away.”

She sat down on a stool near him, and resting
her head in her hands, said: —

“When I asked Sir Rohan what it meant, he
said, `You must ask Redruth! let him look to it!'
So you may tell me why he cried, `Fanchon! Fanchon!'
— Pah!” she declared, shaking her head
and making a wry face, “I can smell it now, —
that dust!”

“You might ask me? Sir Rohan said you
might ask me?” he replied. “Why, Miss, it 's
not much to tell. You must know, in the first
place, that Sir Rohan and I, though I am far the
elder, are a sort of foster-brothers; for his mother
died before he was a weanling, and mine had just
lost her own child. Well do I remember this
little dark baby crying pitifully in so strange a
world, as my mother held it. I was a tall younker
then, and something taller when his father sent
him away to school, and me with him; and there
I picked up a little learning myself, as you may
guess. And when Sir Rohan went to the university,
another servant was sent him, and I returned

to manage the lands. And his own father,
in dying then, bade me never forget we were foster-brothers,
and serve him with the love which
one blood begets. Well — I believe I have obeyed;
and who could help it, — could help loving my
master, Miss Miriam! He went, when he finished
his studies, to a place in the North that his mother's
brother left him, for his father had been a
strange old man, and lived much as Sir Rohan
lives now; and the place was damp and full of
underbrush and mould, and when he came here,
that time I told you of, he did n't like it. But by
and by he fitted it up fine enough for a bride,
then returned and lived alone and let everything
run to seed. My dear young master!” continued
Redruth, in an altered tone, “you see him now
so sad and worn, Miss, and admire him of course.
I wonder what you 'd have thought when, so tall
and dark and slender as he is, he had a color in
his cheek and light in his eye, and though never,
may be, a handsome man, yet with a power about
him, a stern singular way of constraining you, so
that I fancy he might have won any woman's
love —”

“But what has all this to do with the bones?”

“True enough. I ramble, don't I? Only that
I am his foster-brother, and long ago, a great
many generations ago, there was another foster-brother.
But the heir then was a maiden, — Dame
Fanchon. My master is not in the direct descent
with her, for she was the last of her line, and the
title went to cousins, — the second house, I think.
But as I began to say, Dame Fanchon was accounted
beautiful, and there were many who
asked her in marriage, and her father greatly
desired to see her choose a husband. Yet she
seemed in no hurry, and time passing on, the
foster-brother got the old man somehow in his
power, and demanded Fanchon for his wife. She
refused disdainfully, to be sure, but her father
implored her, and then undertook compulsion.
She was a proud lass, but they bowed even her
spirit, and at last she yielded. So, on a time, her
women dressed her for a bride, and pinned in her
hair the wreaths and veils and gauds, and led her
down to her father and the bridegroom. And as
near as I can recollect, she said to him in French,
`My father, one foster-brother has ruined your
line, and another will bring it to dust.'

“Then she said she would yet go up to her

room and pray, before starting for the church;
and she never came down again. When they
went to seek her, my lady, she was not to be found,
and never has been found till this day.

“They searched the country through, away
beyond the Dart, and looked somewhat in the
house; but who dreamed of her hiding herself
there? Perhaps she meant to come out o' nights
for food, knowing her white raiment would startle
whoso saw her; though I can't think what she
meant to do with herself. They did n't do their
work thoroughly, Miss Miriam; one should not
half break a spirit, — it 's labor lost.

“But young Dame Fanchon never came out
again, for up there just now I found, slipped down
the crack of the closet threshold, beyond reach of
her little fingers, this key. She had locked herself
in at the sudden freak, and dropping the
key, it must have fallen there, leaving her with
nothing but despair; since, if she made any efforts,
the door resisted them, and there was no one to
hear her cries in that far corner, had she raised
her voice, — if, after all, she did not choose that
starvation to the other fate, and by losing the key
put succor beyond her reach.

“I remember now hearing that servants, sleeping
in that room, died of strange fevers or wasted
away; but how it came to be guessed where she
was, I never knew, though no one could tell exactly
in which room she had secreted herself. But
you know, Miss Miriam, murder will out. That
is why Sir Rohan called Fanchon!”

“And why must you look to it?”

“Why! O, I suppose because I am a foster-brother,
— though God knows there is no service
too great for me to render him! Bring his house
to dust? I would die before I would do him an
injury, — before I would let a sorrow reach
him!”

“You are a very good man, Mr. Redruth,” she
said. “I don't believe you ever would harm Sir
Rohan. I don't know how you can. Poor Fanchon!
Do you suppose it was her ghost I saw in
the greenhouse to-day?”

“A ghost in the daytime! Come, Miss Miriam,
that 's silly.”

“Then sunshine and blue sky are silly. I don't
believe, now, that they ever come in the night.”

“You saw a ghost?” he asked, with a singularly
perturbed air.

“Why, Mr. Redruth, you must n't laugh at me.
I don't know, — yes. Was it hers?”

“Hers? — No, not her ghost, — not hers.”

“Whose was it, then?” she said, rising. “How
absurd I am! What would papa say? Well, I
can't help it. Poor Fanchon!”