第119章

It was with a little alarm and a good deal of pleasurable excitement that I looked forward to my first grown-up visit to Mervyn Grange.I had been there several times as a child, but never since I was twelve years old, and now I was over eighteen.

We were all of us very proud of our cousins the Mervyns: it is not everybody that can claim kinship with a family who are in full and admitted possession of a secret, a curse, and a mysterious cabinet, in addition to the usual surplusage of horrors supplied in such cases by popular imagination.Some declared that a Mervyn of the days of Henry VIII had been cursed by an injured abbot from the foot of the gallows.Others affirmed that a dissipated Mervyn of the Georgian era was still playing cards for his soul in some remote region of the Grange.There were stories of white ladies and black imps, of bloodstained passages and magic stones.We, proud of our more intimate acquaintance with the family, naturally gave no credence to these wild inventions.The Mervyns, indeed, followed the accepted precedent in such cases, and greatly disliked any reference to the reputed mystery being made in their presence;with the inevitable result that there was no subject so pertinaciously discussed by their friends in their absence.My father's sister had married the late Baronet, Sir Henry Mervyn, and we always felt that she ought to have been the means of imparting to us a very complete knowledge of the family secret.But in this connection she undoubtedly failed of her duty.We knew that there had been a terrible tragedy in the family some two or three hundred years ago--that a peculiarly wicked owner of Mervyn, who flourished in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had been murdered by his wife who subsequently committed suicide.We knew that the mysterious curse had some connection with this crime, but what the curse exactly was we had never been able to discover.The history of the family since that time had indeed in one sense been full of misfortune.Not in every sense.A coal mine had been discovered in one part of the estate, and a populous city had grown over the corner of another part; and the Mervyns of to-day, in spite of the usual percentage of extravagant heirs and political mistakes, were three times as rich as their ancestors had been.But still their story was full of bloodshed and shame, of tales of duels and suicides, broken hearts and broken honor.Only these calamities seemed to have little or no relation to each other, and what the precise curse was that was supposed to connect or account for them we could not learn.When she first married, my aunt was told nothing about it.Later on in life, when my father asked her for the story, she begged him to talk upon a pleasanter subject; and being unluckily a man of much courtesy and little curiosity, he complied with her request.This, however, was the only part of the ghostly traditions of her husband's home upon which she was so reticent.The haunted chamber, for instance--which, of course, existed at the Grange--she treated with the greatest contempt.

Various friends and relations had slept in it at different times, and no approach to any kind of authenticated ghost-story, even of the most trivial description, had they been able to supply.Its only claim to respect, indeed, was that it contained the famous Mervyn cabinet, a fascinating puzzle of which I will speak later, but which certainly had nothing haunting or horrible about its appearance.

My uncle's family consisted of three sons.The eldest, George, the present baronet, was now in his thirties, married, and with children of his own.The second, Jack, was the black-sheep of the family.He had been in the Guards, but, about five years back, had got into some very disgraceful scrape, and had been obliged to leave the country.The sorrow and the shame of this had killed his unhappy mother, and her husband had not long afterwards followed her to the grave.Alan, the youngest son, probably because he was the nearest to us in age, had been our special favorite in earlier years.George was grown up before I had well left the nursery, and his hot, quick temper had always kept us youngsters somewhat in awe of him.Jack was four years older than Alan, and, besides, his profession had, in a way, cut his boyhood short.When my uncle and aunt were abroad, as they frequently were for months together on account of her health, it was Alan, chiefly, who had to spend his holidays with us, both as school-boy and as undergraduate.And a brighter, sweeter-tempered comrade, or one possessed of more diversified talents for the invention of games or the telling of stories, it would have been difficult to find.

For five years together now our ancient custom of an annual visit to Mervyn had been broken.First there had been the seclusion of mourning for my aunt, and a year later for my uncle; then George and his wife, Lucy,--she was a connection of our own on our mother's side, and very intimate with us all,--had been away for nearly two years on a voyage round the world; and since then sickness in our own family had kept us in our turn a good deal abroad.So that I had not seen my cousins since all the calamities which had befallen them in the interval, and as I steamed northwards I wondered a good deal as to the changes I should find.

I was to have come out that year in London, but ill-health had prevented me; and as a sort of consolation Lucy had kindly asked me to spend a fortnight at Mervyn, and be present at a shooting-party, which was to assemble there in the first week of October.