The Penny Dreadfuls MEGAPACK™ (138 page)

“You rather ought to say, Flora, that he did not judge him generously.”

“Well, be it so.”

“And you must recollect, when you say so, that Marchdale did not love Charles Holland.”

“Nay, now,” said Flora, while there flashed across her cheek, for a moment, a heightened colour, “you are commencing to jest with me, and, therefore, we will say no more. You know, dear Henry, all my hopes, my wishes, and my feelings, and I shall therefore leave my future destiny in your hands, to dispose of as you please. Look yonder!”

“Where?”

“There. Do you not see the admiral and Mr. Chillingworth walking among the trees?”

“Yes, yes; I do now.”

“How very serious and intent they are upon the subject of their discourse. They seem quite lost to all surrounding objects. I could not have imagined any subject that would so completely have absorbed the attention of Admiral Bell.”

“Mr. Chillingworth had something to relate to him or to propose, of a nature which, perchance, has had the effect of enchaining all his attention—he called him from the room.”

“Yes; I saw that he did. But see, they come towards us, and now we shall, probably, hear what is the subject-matter of their discourse and consultation.”

“We shall.”

Admiral Bell had evidently seen Henry and his sister, for now, suddenly, as if not from having for the first moment observed them, and, in consequence, broken off their private discourse, but as if they arrived at some point in it which enabled them to come to a conclusion to be communicative, the admiral came towards the brother and sister,

“Well,” said the bluff old admiral, when they were sufficiently near to exchange words, “well, Miss Flora, you are looking a thousand times better than you were.”

“I thank you, admiral, I am much better.”

“Oh, to be sure you are; and you will be much better still, and no sort of mistake. Now, here’s the doctor and I have both been agreeing upon what is best for you.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes, to be sure. Have we not, doctor?”

“We have, admiral.”

“Good; and what, now, Miss Flora, do you suppose it is?”

“I really cannot say.”

“Why, it’s change of air, to be sure. You must get away from here as quickly as you can, or there will be no peace for you.”

“Yes,” added Mr. Chillingworth, advancing; “I am quite convinced that change of scene and change of place, and habits, and people, will tend more to your complete recovery than any other circumstances. In the most ordinary cases of indisposition we always find that the invalid recovers much sooner away from the scene of his indisposition, than by remaining in it, even though its general salubrity be much greater than the place to which he may be removed.”

“Good,” said the admiral.

“Then we are to understand,” said Henry, with a smile, “that we are no longer to be your guests, Admiral Bell?”

“Belay there!” cried the admiral; “who told you to understand any such thing, I should like to know?”

“Well, but we shall look upon this house as yours, now; and, that being the case, if we remove from it, of course we cease to be your guests any longer.”

“That’s all you know about it. Now, hark ye. You don’t command the fleet, so don’t pretend to know what the admiral is going to do. I have made money by knocking about some of the enemies of old England, and that’s the most gratifying manner in the world of making money, so far as I am concerned.”

“It is an honourable mode.”

“Of course it is. Well, I am going to—what the deuce do you call it?”

“What?”

“That’s just what I want to know. Oh, I have it now. I am going to what the lawyers call invest it.”

“A prudent step, admiral, and one which it is to be hoped, before now, has occurred to you.”

“Perhaps it has and perhaps it hasn’t; however, that’s my business, and no one’s else’s. I am going to invest my spare cash in taking houses; so, as I don’t care a straw where the houses may be situated, you can look out for one somewhere that will suit you, and I’ll take it; so, after all, you will be my guests there just the same as you are here.”

“Admiral,” said Henry, “it would be imposing upon a generosity as rare as it is noble, were we to allow you to do so much for us as you contemplate.”

“Very good.”

“We cannot—we dare not.”

“But I say you shall. So you have had your say, and I’ve had mine, after which, if you please, Master Henry Bannerworth, I shall take upon myself to consider the affair as altogether settled. You can commence operations as soon as you like. I know that Miss Flora, here—bless her sweet eyes—don’t want to stay at Bannerworth Hall any longer than she can help it.”

“Indeed I was urging upon Henry to remove,” said Flora; “but yet I cannot help feeling with him, admiral, that we are imposing upon your goodness.”

“Go on imposing, then.”

“But—”

“Psha! Can’t a man be imposed upon if he likes? damn it, that’s a poor privilege for an Englishman to be forced to make a row about. I tell you I like it. I will be imposed upon, so there’s an end of that; and now let’s come in and see what Mrs. Bannerworth has got ready for luncheon.”

* * * *

It can hardly be supposed that such a popular ferment as had been created in the country town, by the singular reports concerning Varney the Vampire, should readily, and without abundant satisfaction, subside.

An idea like that which had lent so powerful an impulse to the popular mind, was one far easier to set going than to deprecate or extinguish. The very circumstances which had occurred to foil the excited mob in their pursuit of Sir Francis Varney, were of a nature to increase the popular superstition concerning him, and to make him and his acts appear in still more dreadful colours.

Mobs do not reason very closely and clearly; but the very fact of the frantic flight of Sir Francis Varney from the projected attack of the infuriated multitude, was seized hold of as proof positive of the reality of his vampire-like existence.

Then, again, had he not disappeared in the most mysterious manner? Had he not sought refuge where no human being would think of seeking refuge, namely, in that old, dilapidated ruin, where, when his pursuers were so close upon his track, he had succeeded in eluding their grasp with a facility which looked as if he had vanished into thin air, or as if the very earth had opened to receive him bodily within its cold embraces?

It is not to be wondered at, that the few who fled so precipitately from the ruin, lost nothing of the wonderful story they had to tell, in the carrying it from that place to the town. When they reached their neighbours, they not only told what had really occurred, but they added to it all their own surmises, and the fanciful creation of all their own fears, so that before mid-day, and about the time when Henry Bannerworth was conversing so quietly in the gardens of the Hall with his beautiful sister, there was an amount of popular ferment in the town, of which they had no conception.

All business was suspended, and many persons, now that once the idea had been started concerning the possibility that a vampire might have been visiting some of the houses in the place, told how, in the dead of the night, they had heard strange noises. How children had shrieked from no apparent cause—doors opened and shut without human agency; and windows rattled that never had been known to rattle before.

Some, too, went so far as to declare that they had been awakened out of their sleep by noises incidental to an effort made to enter their chambers; and others had seen dusky forms of gigantic proportions outside their windows, tampering with their fastenings, and only disappearing when the light of day mocked all attempts at concealment.

These tales flew from mouth to mouth, and all listened to them with such an eager interest, that none thought it worth while to challenge their inconsistencies, or to express a doubt of their truth, because they had not been mentioned before.

The only individual, and he was a remarkably clever man, who made the slightest remark upon the subject of a practical character, hazarded a suggestion that made confusion worse confounded.

He knew something of vampires. He had travelled abroad, and had heard of them in Germany, as well as in the east, and, to a crowd of wondering and aghast listeners, he said—

“You may depend upon it, my friends, this has been going on for some time; there have been several mysterious and sudden deaths in the town lately; people have wasted away and died nobody knew how or wherefore.”

“Yes—yes,” said everybody.

“There was Miles, the butcher; you know how fat he was, and then how fat he wasn’t.”

A general assent was given to the proposition; and then, elevating one arm in an oratorical manner, the clever fellow continued—

“I have not a doubt that Miles, the butcher, and every one else who has died suddenly lately, have been victims of the vampire; and what’s more, they’ll all be vampires, and come and suck other people’s blood, till at last the whole town will be a town of vampires.”

“But what’s to be done?” cried one, who trembled so excessively that he could scarcely stand under his apprehension.

“There is but one plan—Sir Francis Varney must be found, and put out of the world in such a manner that he can’t come back to it again; and all those who are dead that we have any suspicion of, should be taken up out of their graves and looked at, to see if they’re rotting or not; if they are it’s all right; but, if they look fresh and much, as usual, you may depend they’re vampires, and no mistake.”

This was a terrific suggestion thrown amongst a mob. To have caught Sir Francis Varney and immolated him at the shrine of popular fury, they would not have shrunk from; but a desecration of the graves of those whom they had known in life was a matter which, however much it had to recommend it, even the boldest stood aghast at, and felt some qualms of irresolution.

There are many ideas, however, which, like the first plunge into a cold bath, are rather uncomfortable for the moment; but which, in a little time, we become so familiarized with, that they become stripped of their disagreeable concomitants, and appear quite pleasing and natural.

So it was with this notion of exhuming the dead bodies of those townspeople who had recently died from what was called a decay of nature, and such other failures of vitality as bore not the tangible name of any understood disease.

From mouth to mouth the awful suggestion spread like wildfire, until at last it grew into such a shape that it almost seemed to become a duty, at all events, to have up Miles the butcher, and see how he looked.

There is, too, about human nature a natural craving curiosity concerning everything connected with the dead. There is not a man of education or of intellectual endowment who would not travel many miles to look upon the exhumation of the remains of some one famous in his time, whether for his vices, his virtues, his knowledge, his talents, or his heroism; and, if this feeling exist in the minds of the educated and refined in a sublimated shape, which lends to it grace and dignity, we may look for it among the vulgar and the ignorant, taking only a grosser and meaner form, in accordance with their habits of thought. The rude materials, of which the highest and noblest feelings of educated minds are formed, will be found amongst the most grovelling and base; and so this vulgar curiosity, which, combined with other feelings, prompted an ignorant and illiterate mob to exhume Miles, the once fat butcher, in a different form tempted the philosophic Hamlet to moralise upon the skull of Yorick.

And it was wonderful to see how, when these people had made up their minds to carry out the singularly interesting, but, at the same, fearful, suggestion, they assumed to themselves a great virtue in so doing—told each other what an absolute necessity there was, for the public good, that it should be done; and then, with loud shouts and cries concerning the vampire, they proceeded in a body to the village churchyard, where had been lain, with a hope of reposing in peace, the bones of their ancestors.

A species of savage ferocity now appeared to have seized upon the crowd, and the people, in making up their minds to do something which was strikingly at variance with all their preconceived notions of right and wrong, appeared to feel that it was necessary, in order that they might be consistent, to cast off many of the decencies of life, and to become riotous and reckless.

As they proceeded towards the graveyard, they amused themselves by breaking the windows of the tax-gatherers, and doing what passing mischief they could to the habitations of all who held any official situation or authority.

This was something like a proclamation of war against those who might think it their duty to interfere with the lawless proceedings of an ignorant multitude. A public-house or two, likewise,
en route
, was sacked of some of its inebriating contents, so that, what with the madness of intoxication, and the general excitement consequent upon the very nature of the business which took them to the churchyard, a more wild and infuriated multitude than that which paused at two iron gates which led into the sanctuary of that church could not be imagined.

Those who have never seen a mob placed in such a situation as to have cast off all moral restraint whatever, at the same time that it feels there is no physical power to cope with it, can form no notion of the mass of terrible passions which lie slumbering under what, in ordinary cases, have appeared harmless bosoms, but which now run riot, and overcame every principle of restraint. It is a melancholy fact, but, nevertheless, a fact, despite its melancholy, that, even in a civilised country like this, with a generally well-educated population, nothing but a well-organised physical force keeps down, from the commission of the most outrageous offences, hundreds and thousands of persons.

We have said that the mob paused at the iron gates of the churchyard, but it was more a pause of surprise than one of vacillation, because they saw that those iron gates were closed, which had not been the case within the memory of the oldest among them.

At the first building of the church, and the enclosure of its graveyard, two pairs of these massive gates had been presented by some munificent patron; but, after a time, they hung idly upon their hinges, ornamental certainly, but useless, while a couple of turnstiles, to keep cattle from straying within the sacred precincts, did duty instead, and established, without trouble, the regular thoroughfare, which long habit had dictated as necessary, through the place of sepulture.