Chapter 2

You that wander, scream, and groan,
Round the mansions once your own.

ROWE.

A few days after the funeral, the will was opened before proper
witnesses, and John was found to be left sole heir to his uncle’s
property, which, though originally moderate, had, by his grasping
habits, and parsimonious life, become very considerable.

As the attorney who read the will concluded, he added, “There are some
words here, at the corner of the parchment, which do not appear to be
part of the will, as they are neither in the form of a codicil, nor is
the signature of the testator affixed to them; but, to the best of my
belief, they are in the hand-writing of the deceased.” As he spoke he
shewed the lines to Melmoth, who immediately recognized his uncle’s
hand, (that perpendicular and penurious hand, that seems determined to
make the most of the very paper, thriftily abridging every word, and
leaving scarce an atom of margin), and read, not without some emotion,
the following words: “I enjoin my nephew and heir, John Melmoth, to
remove, destroy, or cause to be destroyed, the portrait inscribed J.
Melmoth, 1646, hanging in my closet. I also enjoin him to search for a
manuscript, which I think he will find in the third and lowest left-hand
drawer of the mahogany chest standing under that portrait,--it is among
some papers of no value, such as manuscript sermons, and pamphlets on
the improvement of Ireland, and such stuff; he will distinguish it by
its being tied round with a black tape, and the paper being very mouldy
and discoloured. He may read it if he will;--I think he had better not.
At all events, I adjure him, if there be any power in the adjuration of
a dying man, to burn it.”

After reading this singular memorandum, the business of the meeting was
again resumed; and as old Melmoth’s will was very clear and legally
worded, all was soon settled, the party dispersed, and John Melmoth was
left alone.

We should have mentioned, that his guardians appointed by the will (for
he was not yet of age) advised him to return to College, and complete
his education as soon as proper; but John urged the expediency of paying
the respect due to his uncle’s memory, by remaining a decent time in the
house after his decease. This was not his real motive. Curiosity, or
something that perhaps deserves a better name, the wild and awful
pursuit of an indefinite object, had taken strong hold of his mind. His
guardians (who were men of respectability and property in the
neighbourhood, and in whose eyes John’s consequence had risen rapidly
since the reading of the will), pressed him to accept of a temporary
residence in their respective houses, till his return to Dublin. This
was declined gratefully, but steadily. They called for their horses,
shook hands with the heir, and rode off--Melmoth was left alone.

The remainder of the day was passed in gloomy and anxious
deliberation,--in traversing his late uncle’s room,--approaching the
door of the closet, and then retreating from it,--in watching the
clouds, and listening to the wind, as if the gloom of the one, or the
murmurs of the other, relieved instead of increasing the weight that
pressed on his mind. Finally, towards evening, he summoned the old
woman, from whom he expected something like an explanation of the
extraordinary circumstances he had witnessed since his arrival at his
uncle’s. The old woman, proud of the summons, readily attended, but she
had very little to tell,--her communication was nearly in the following
words: (We spare the reader her endless circumlocutions, her Irishcisms,
and the frequent interruptions arising from her applications to her
snuff-box, and to the glass of whiskey punch with which Melmoth took
care to have her supplied). The old woman deposed, “That his honor (as
she always called the deceased) was always intent upon the little room
inside his bed-chamber, and reading there, within the last two
years;--that people, knowing his honor had money, and thinking it must
be there, had broke into that room, (in other words, there was a robbery
attempted there), but finding nothing but some papers, they had
retired;--that he was so frightened, he had bricked up the window; but
_she thought there was more in it than that_, for when his honor missed
but a half-penny, he would make the house ring about it, but that, when
the closet was bricked up, he never said a word;--that afterwards his
honor used to lock himself up in his own room, and though he was never
fond of reading, was always found, when his dinner was brought him,
hanging over a paper, which he hid the moment any one came into the
room, and once there was a great bustle about a picture that he tried to
conceal;--that knowing there was an _odd story in the family_, she did
her best to come at it, and even went to Biddy Brannigan’s, (the medical
Sybil before mentioned), to find out the rights of it; but Biddy only
shook her head, filled her pipe, uttered some words she did not
understand, and smoked on;--that it was but two evenings before his
honor _was struck_, (_i. e._ took ill), she was standing at the door of
the court, (which had once been surrounded by stables, pigeon-house, and
all the usual etceteras of a gentleman’s residence, but now presented
only a ruinous range of dismantled out-offices, thatched with thistles,
and tenanted by pigs), when his honor called to her to lock the door,
(his honor was always _keen_ about locking the doors early); she was
hastening to do so, when he snatched the key from her, swearing at her,
(for he was always very keen about locking the doors, though the locks
were so bad, and the keys so rusty, that it was always like _the cry of
the dead_ in the house when the keys were turned);--that she stood aside
for a minute, seeing he was angry, and gave him the key, when she heard
him utter a scream, and saw him fall across the door-way;--that she
hurried to raise him, _hoping_ it was a fit;--that she found him stiff
and stretched out, and called for help to lift him up;--that then people
came from the kitchen to assist;--that she was so bewildered and
terrified, she hardly knew what was done or said; but with all her
terror remembered, that as they raised him up, the first sign of life he
gave was lifting up his arm, and pointing it towards the court, and at
that moment she saw the figure of a tall man cross the court, and go out
of the court, she knew not where or how, for the outer gate was locked,
and had not been opened for years, and they were all gathered round his
honor at the other door;--she saw the figure,--she saw the shadow on the
wall,--she saw him walk slowly through the court, and in her terror
cried, “Stop him,” but nobody minded her, all being busy about her
master; and when he was brought to his room, nobody thought but of
getting him to himself again. And further she could not tell. His honor
(young Melmoth) knew as much as she,--he had witnessed his last illness,
had heard his last words, he saw him die,--how could she know more than
his honor.”

“True,” said Melmoth, “I certainly saw him die; but--you say _there was
an odd story in the family_, do you know any thing about it?” “Not a
word, it was long before my time, as old as I am.” “Certainly it must
have been so; but, was my uncle ever superstitious, fanciful?”--and
Melmoth was compelled to use many synonymous expressions, before he
could make himself understood. When he did, the answer was plain and
decisive, “No, never, never. When his honor sat in the kitchen in
winter, to save a fire in his own room, he could never bear the talk of
the old women that came in to light their pipes _betimes_, (from time to
time). He used to shew such impatience of their superstitious nonsense,
that they were fain to smoke them in silence, without the consolatory
accompaniment of one whisper about a child that the evil eye had looked
on, or another, that though apparently a mewling, peevish, crippled brat
all day, went regularly out at night to dance with the _good people_ on
the top of a neighbouring mountain, summoned thereto by the sound of a
bag-pipe, which was unfailingly heard at the cabin door every night.”
Melmoth’s thoughts began to take somewhat of a darker hue at this
account. If his uncle was not superstitious, might he not have been
guilty, and might not his strange and sudden death, and even the
terrible visitation that preceded it, have been owing to some wrong that
his rapacity had done the widow and the fatherless. He questioned the
old woman indirectly and cautiously on the subject,--her answer
completely justified the deceased. “He was a man,” she said, “of a hard
hand, and a hard heart, but he was as jealous of another’s right as of
his own. He would have starved all the world, but he would not have
wronged it of a farthing.”

Melmoth’s last resource was to send for Biddy Brannigan, who was still
in the house, and from whom he at least hoped to hear the odd story that
the old woman confessed was in the family. She came, and, on her
introduction to Melmoth, it was curious to observe the mingled look of
servility and command, the result of the habits of her life, which was
alternately one of abject mendicity, and of arrogant but clever
imposture. When she first appeared, she stood at the door, awed and
curtseying in the presence, and muttering sounds which, possibly
intended for blessings, had, from the harsh tone and witch-like look of
the speaker, every appearance of malediction; but when interrogated on
the subject of the story, she rose at once into consequence,--her figure
seemed frightfully dilated, like that of Virgil’s Alecto, who exchanges
in a moment the appearance of a feeble old woman for that of a menacing
fury. She walked deliberately across the room, seated, or rather
squatted herself on the hearth-stone like a hare in her form, spread her
bony and withered hands towards the blaze, and rocked for a considerable
time in silence before she commenced her tale. When she had finished it,
Melmoth remained in astonishment at the state of mind to which the late
singular circumstances had reduced him,--at finding himself listening
with varying and increasing emotions of interest, curiosity, and terror,
to a tale so wild, so improbable, nay, so actually incredible, that he
at least blushed for the folly he could not conquer. The result of these
impressions was, a resolution to visit the closet, and examine the
manuscript that very night.

This resolution he found it impossible to execute immediately, for, on
inquiring for lights, the gouvernante confessed the very last had been
burnt at _his honor’s_ wake; and a bare-footed boy was charged to run
for life and death to the neighbouring village for candles; and if you
could _borry_ a couple of candlesticks, added the housekeeper. “Are
there no candlesticks in the house?” said Melmoth. “There are, honey,
plinty, but it’s no time to be opening the old chest, for the plated
ones, in regard of their being at the bottom of it, and the brass ones
that’s _in it_ (in the house), one of them has no socket, and the other
has no bottom.” “And how did you make shift yourself,” said Melmoth. “I
stuck it in a potatoe,” quoth the housekeeper. So the _gossoon_ ran for
life and death, and Melmoth, towards the close of the evening, was left
alone to meditate.

It was an evening apt for meditation, and Melmoth had his fill of it
before the messenger returned. The weather was cold and gloomy; heavy
clouds betokened a long and dreary continuance of autumnal rains; cloud
after cloud came sweeping on like the dark banners of an approaching
host, whose march is for desolation. As Melmoth leaned against the
window, whose dismantled frame, and pieced and shattered panes, shook
with every gust of wind, his eye encountered nothing but that most
cheerless of all prospects, a miser’s garden,--walls broken down,
grass-grown walks whose grass was not even green, dwarfish, doddered,
leafless trees, and a luxuriant crop of nettles and weeds rearing their
unlovely heads where there had once been flowers, all waving and bending
in capricious and unsightly forms, as the wind sighed over them. It was
the verdure of the church yard, the garden of death. He turned for
relief to the room, but no relief was there,--the wainscotting dark with
dirt, and in many places cracked and starting from the walls,--the rusty
grate, so long unconscious of a fire, that nothing but a sullen smoke
could be coaxed to issue from between its dingy bars,--the crazy chairs,
their torn bottoms of rush drooping inwards, and the great leathern seat
displaying the stuffing round the worn edges, while the nails, though
they kept their places, had failed to keep the covering they once
fastened,--the chimney-piece, which, tarnished more by time than by
smoke, displayed for its garniture half a pair of snuffers, a tattered
almanack of 1750, a time-keeper dumb for want of repair, and a rusty
fowling-piece without a lock.--No wonder the spectacle of desolation
drove Melmoth back to his own thoughts, restless and uncomfortable as
they were. He recapitulated the Sybil’s story word by word, with the air
of a man who is cross-examining an evidence, and trying to make him
contradict himself.

“The first of the Melmoths, she says, who settled in Ireland, was an
officer in Cromwell’s army, who obtained a grant of lands, the
confiscated property of an Irish family attached to the royal cause. The
elder brother of this man was one who had travelled abroad, and resided
so long on the Continent, that his family had lost all recollection of
him. Their memory was not stimulated by their affection, for there were
strange reports concerning the traveller. He was said to be (like the
“damned magician, great Glendower,”) “a gentleman profited in strange
concealments.”

It must be remembered, that at this period, and even to a later, the
belief in astrology and witchcraft was very general. Even so late as the
reign of Charles II. Dryden calculated the nativity of his son Charles,
the ridiculous books of Glanville were in general circulation, and
Delrio and Wierus were so popular, that even a dramatic writer
(Shadwell) quoted copiously from them, in the notes subjoined to his
curious comedy of the Lancashire witches. It was said, that during the
life-time of Melmoth, the traveller paid him a visit; and though he must
have then been considerably advanced in life, to the astonishment of his
family, he did not betray the slightest trace of being a year older than
when they last beheld him. His visit was short, he said nothing of the
past or the future, nor did his family question him. It was said that
they did not feel themselves perfectly at ease in his presence. On his
departure he left them his picture, (the same which Melmoth saw in the
closet, bearing date 1646), and they saw him no more. Some years after,
a person arrived from England, directed to Melmoth’s house, in pursuit
of the traveller, and exhibiting the most marvellous and unappeasable
solicitude to obtain some intelligence of him. The family could give him
none, and after some days of restless inquiry and agitation, he
departed, leaving behind him, either through negligence or intention, a
manuscript, containing an extraordinary account of the circumstances
under which he had met John Melmoth the Traveller (as he was called).

The manuscript and portrait were both preserved, and of the original a
report spread that he was still alive, and had been frequently seen in
Ireland even to the present century,--but that he was never known to
appear but on the approaching death of one of the family, nor even then,
unless when the evil passions or habits of the individual had cast a
shade of gloomy and fearful interest over their dying hour.

It was therefore judged no favourable augury for the spiritual
destination of the last Melmoth, that this extraordinary person had
visited, or been imagined to visit, the house previous to his decease.”

Such was the account given by Biddy Brannigan, to which she added her
own solemnly-attested belief, that John Melmoth the Traveller was still
without a hair on his head changed, or a muscle in his frame
contracted;--that she had seen those that had seen him, and would
confirm their evidence by oath if necessary;--that he was never heard to
speak, seen to partake of food, or known to enter any dwelling but that
of his family;--and, finally, that she herself believed that his late
appearance boded no good either to the living or the dead.

John was still musing on these things when the lights were procured,
and, disregarding the pallid countenances and monitory whispers of the
attendants, he resolutely entered the closet, shut the door, and
proceeded to search for the manuscript. It was soon found, for the
directions of old Melmoth were forcibly written, and strongly
remembered. The manuscript, old, tattered, and discoloured, was taken
from the very drawer in which it was mentioned to be laid. Melmoth’s
hands felt as cold as those of his dead uncle, when he drew the blotted
pages from their nook. He sat down to read,--there was a dead silence
through the house. Melmoth looked wistfully at the candles, snuffed
them, and still thought they looked dim, (perchance he thought they
burned blue, but such thought he kept to himself.) Certain it is, he
often changed his posture, and would have changed his chair, had there
been more than one in the apartment.

He sunk for a few moments into a fit of gloomy abstraction, till the
sound of the clock striking twelve made him start,--it was the only
sound he had heard for some hours, and the sounds produced by inanimate
things, while all living beings around are as dead, have at such an hour
an effect indescribably awful. John looked at his manuscript with some
reluctance, opened it, paused over the first lines, and as the wind
sighed round the desolate apartment, and the rain pattered with a
mournful sound against the dismantled window, wished----what did he wish
for?--he wished the sound of the wind less dismal, and the dash of the
rain less monotonous.----He may be forgiven, it was past midnight, and
there was not a human being awake but himself within ten miles when he
began to read.