Then his college
life, passed in an attic in the second square, uncheered by an
invitation to the country; the gloomy summer wasted in walking up and
down the deserted streets, as his uncle would not defray the expences of
his journey;--the only intimation of his existence, received in
quarterly epistles, containing, with the scanty but punctual remittance,
complaints of the expences of his education, cautions against
extravagance, and lamentations for the failure of tenants and the fall
of the value of lands. All these recollections came over him, and along
with them the remembrance of that last scene, where his dependence on
his uncle was impressed on him by the dying lips of his father. “John, I must leave you, my poor boy; it has pleased God to take your
father from you before he could do for you what would have made this
hour less painful to him. You must look up, John, to your uncle for
every thing. He has oddities and infirmities, but you must learn to bear
with them, and with many other things too, as you will learn too soon. And now, my poor boy, may He who is the father of the fatherless look on
your desolate state, and give you favour in the eyes of your uncle.” As
this scene rose to John’s memory, his eyes filled fast with tears, which
he hastened to wipe away as the carriage stopt to let him out at his
uncle’s gate. He alighted, and with a change of linen in a handkerchief, (his only
travelling equipment), he approached his uncle’s gate. The lodge was in
ruins, and a barefooted boy from an adjacent cabin ran to lift on its
single hinge what had once been a gate, but was now a few planks so
villainously put together, that they clattered like a sign in a high
wind. The stubborn post of the gate, yielding at last to the united
strength of John and his barefooted assistant, grated heavily through
the mud and gravel stones, in which it left a deep and sloughy furrow,
and the entrance lay open. John, after searching his pocket in vain for
a trifle to reward his assistant, pursued his way, while the lad, on his
return, cleared the road at a hop step and jump, plunging through the
mud with all the dabbling and amphibious delight of a duck, and scarce
less proud of his agility than of his “sarving a gentleman.” As John
slowly trod the miry road which had once been the approach, he could
discover, by the dim light of an autumnal evening, signs of increasing
desolation since he had last visited the spot,--signs that penury had
been aggravated and sharpened into downright misery. There was not a
fence or a hedge round the domain: an uncemented wall of loose stones,
whose numerous gaps were filled with furze or thorns, supplied their
place. There was not a tree or shrub on the lawn; the lawn itself was
turned into pasture-ground, and a few sheep were picking their scanty
food amid the pebble-stones, thistles, and hard mould, through which a
few blades of grass made their rare and squalid appearance. The house itself stood strongly defined even amid the darkness of the
evening sky; for there were neither wings, or offices, or shrubbery, or
tree, to shade or support it, and soften its strong harsh outline. John,
after a melancholy gaze at the grass-grown steps and boarded windows,
“addressed himself” to knock at the door; but knocker there was none:
loose stones, however, there were in plenty; and John was making
vigorous application to the door with one of them, till the furious
barking of a mastiff, who threatened at every bound to break his chain,
and whose yell and growl, accompanied by “eyes that glow and fangs that
grin,” savoured as much of hunger as of rage, made the assailant raise
the siege on the door, and betake himself to a well-known passage that
led to the kitchen. A light glimmered in the window as he approached: he
raised the latch with a doubtful hand; but, when he saw the party
within, he advanced with the step of a man no longer doubtful of his
welcome. Round a turf-fire, whose well-replenished fuel gave testimony to the
“master’s” indisposition, who would probably as soon have been placed on
the fire himself as seen the whole _kish_ emptied on it once, were
seated the old housekeeper, two or three _followers_, (_i. e._ people
who ate, drank, and lounged about in any kitchen that was open in the
neighbourhood, on an occasion of grief or joy, all for his honor’s sake,
and for the great rispict they bore the family), and an old woman, whom
John immediately recognized as the doctress of the neighbourhood,--a
withered Sybil, who prolonged her squalid existence by practising on the
fears, the ignorance, and the sufferings of beings as miserable as
herself. Among the better sort, to whom she sometimes had access by the
influence of servants, she tried the effects of some simples, her skill
in which was sometimes productive of success. Among the lower orders she
talked much of the effects of the “evil eye,” against which she boasted
a counter-spell, of unfailing efficacy; and while she spoke, she shook
her grizzled locks with such witch-like eagerness, that she never failed
to communicate to her half-terrified, half-believing audience, some
portion of that enthusiasm which, amid all her consciousness of
imposture, she herself probably felt a large share of; still, when the
case at last became desperate, when credulity itself lost all patience,
and hope and life were departing together, she urged the miserable
patient to confess “_there was something about his heart_;” and when
this confession was extorted from the weariness of pain and the
ignorance of poverty, she nodded and muttered so mysteriously, as to
convey to the bystanders, that she had had difficulties to contend with
which were invincible by human power. When there was no pretext, from
indisposition, for her visiting either “his honor’s” kitchen, or the
cottar’s hut,--when the stubborn and persevering convalescence of the
whole country threatened her with starvation,--she still had a
resource:--if there were no lives to be shortened, there were fortunes
to be told;--she worked “by spells, and by such daubry as is beyond our
element.” No one twined so well as she the mystic yarn to be dropt into
the lime-kiln pit, on the edge of which stood the shivering inquirer
into futurity, doubtful whether the answer to her question of “who
holds?” was to be uttered by the voice of demon or lover. No one knew so well as she to find where the four streams met, in which,
on the same portentous season, the chemise was to be immersed, and then
displayed before the fire, (in the name of one whom we dare not mention
to “ears polite”), to be turned by the figure of the destined husband
before morning. No one but herself (she said) knew the hand in which the
comb was to be held, while the other was employed in conveying the apple
to the mouth,--while, during the joint operation, the shadow of the
phantom-spouse was to pass across the mirror before which it was
performed.