When Mr. Goodchild had looked out of the Lancaster Inn window for two hours on end, with great perseverance, he begun to entertain a misgiving that he was growing industrious.  He therefore set himself next, to explore the country from the tops of all the steep hills in the neighbourhood.

He came back at dinner-time, red and glowing, to tell Thomas Idle what he had seen.  Thomas, on his back reading, listened with great composure, and asked him whether he really had gone up those hills, and bothered himself with those views, and walked all those miles?

‘Because I want to know,’ added Thomas, ‘what you would say of it, if you were obliged to do it?’

‘It would be different, then,’ said Francis.  ‘It would be work, then; now, it’s play.’

‘Play!’ replied Thomas Idle, utterly repudiating the reply.  ‘Play!  Here is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and putting himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always under articles to fight a match for the champion’s belt, and he calls it Play!  Play!’ exclaimed Thomas Idle, scornfully contemplating his one boot in the air.  ‘You can’t play.  You don’t know what it is.  You make work of everything.’

The bright Goodchild amiably smiled.

‘So you do,’ said Thomas.  ‘I mean it.  To me you are an absolutely terrible fellow.  You do nothing like another man.  Where another fellow would fall into a footbath of action or emotion, you fall into a mine.  Where any other fellow would be a painted butterfly, you are a fiery dragon.  Where another man would stake a sixpence, you stake your existence.  If you were to go up in a balloon, you would make for Heaven; and if you were to dive into the depths of the earth, nothing short of the other place would content you.  What a fellow you are, Francis!’  The cheerful Goodchild laughed.

‘It’s all very well to laugh, but I wonder you don’t feel it to be serious,’ said Idle.  ‘A man who can do nothing by halves appears to me to be a fearful man.’

‘Tom, Tom,’ returned Goodchild, ‘if I can do nothing by halves, and be nothing by halves, it’s pretty clear that you must take me as a whole, and make the best of me.’

With this philosophical rejoinder, the airy Goodchild clapped Mr. Idle on the shoulder in a final manner, and they sat down to dinner.

‘By-the-by,’ said Goodchild, ‘I have been over a lunatic asylum too, since I have been out.’

‘He has been,’ exclaimed Thomas Idle, casting up his eyes, ‘over a lunatic asylum!  Not content with being as great an Ass as Captain Barclay in the pedestrian way, he makes a Lunacy Commissioner of himself—for nothing!’

‘An immense place,’ said Goodchild, ‘admirable offices, very good arrangements, very good attendants; altogether a remarkable place.’

‘And what did you see there?’ asked Mr. Idle, adapting Hamlet’s advice to the occasion, and assuming the virtue of interest, though he had it not.

‘The usual thing,’ said Francis Goodchild, with a sigh.  ‘Long groves of blighted men-and-women-trees; interminable avenues of hopeless faces; numbers, without the slightest power of really combining for any earthly purpose; a society of human creatures who have nothing in common but that they have all lost the power of being humanly social with one another.’

‘Take a glass of wine with me,’ said Thomas Idle, ‘and let us be social.’

‘In one gallery, Tom,’ pursued Francis Goodchild, ‘which looked to me about the length of the Long Walk at Windsor, more or less—’

‘Probably less,’ observed Thomas Idle.

‘In one gallery, which was otherwise clear of patients (for they were all out), there was a poor little dark-chinned, meagre man, with a perplexed brow and a pensive face, stooping low over the matting on the floor, and picking out with his thumb and forefinger the course of its fibres.  The afternoon sun was slanting in at the large end-window, and there were cross patches of light and shade all down the vista, made by the unseen windows and the open doors of the little sleeping-cells on either side.  In about the centre of the perspective, under an arch, regardless of the pleasant weather, regardless of the solitude, regardless of approaching footsteps, was the poor little dark-chinned, meagre man, poring over the matting.  “What are you doing there?” said my conductor, when we came to him.  He looked up, and pointed to the matting.  “I wouldn’t do that, I think,” said my conductor, kindly; “if I were you, I would go and read, or I would lie down if I felt tired; but I wouldn’t do that.”  The patient considered a moment, and vacantly answered, “No, sir, I won’t; I’ll—I’ll go and read,” and so he lamely shuffled away into one of the little rooms.  I turned my head before we had gone many paces.  He had already come out again, and was again poring over the matting, and tracking out its fibres with his thumb and forefinger.  I stopped to look at him, and it came into my mind, that probably the course of those fibres as they plaited in and out, over and under, was the only course of things in the whole wide world that it was left to him to understand—that his darkening intellect had narrowed down to the small cleft of light which showed him, “This piece was twisted this way, went in here, passed under, came out there, was carried on away here to the right where I now put my finger on it, and in this progress of events, the thing was made and came to be here.”  Then, I wondered whether he looked into the matting, next, to see if it could show him anything of the process through which he came to be there, so strangely poring over it.  Then, I thought how all of us, God help us! in our different ways are poring over our bits of matting, blindly enough, and what confusions and mysteries we make in the pattern.  I had a sadder fellow-feeling with the little dark-chinned, meagre man, by that time, and I came away.’

Mr. Idle diverting the conversation to grouse, custards, and bride-cake, Mr. Goodchild followed in the same direction.  The bride-cake was as bilious and indigestible as if a real Bride had cut it, and the dinner it completed was an admirable performance.

The house was a genuine old house of a very quaint description, teeming with old carvings, and beams, and panels, and having an excellent old staircase, with a gallery or upper staircase, cut off from it by a curious fence-work of old oak, or of the old Honduras Mahogany wood.  It was, and is, and will be, for many a long year to come, a remarkably picturesque house; and a certain grave mystery lurking in the depth of the old mahogany panels, as if they were so many deep pools of dark water—such, indeed, as they had been much among when they were trees—gave it a very mysterious character after nightfall.

When Mr. Goodchild and Mr. Idle had first alighted at the door, and stepped into the sombre, handsome old hall, they had been received by half-a-dozen noiseless old men in black, all dressed exactly alike, who glided up the stairs with the obliging landlord and waiter—but without appearing to get into their way, or to mind whether they did or no—and who had filed off to the right and left on the old staircase, as the guests entered their sitting-room.  It was then broad, bright day.  But, Mr. Goodchild had said, when their door was shut, ‘Who on earth are those old men?’  And afterwards, both on going out and coming in, he had noticed that there were no old men to be seen.

Neither, had the old men, or any one of the old men, reappeared since.  The two friends had passed a night in the house, but had seen nothing more of the old men.  Mr. Goodchild, in rambling about it, had looked along passages, and glanced in at doorways, but had encountered no old men; neither did it appear that any old men were, by any member of the establishment, missed or expected.

Another odd circumstance impressed itself on their attention.  It was, that the door of their sitting-room was never left untouched for a quarter of an hour.  It was opened with hesitation, opened with confidence, opened a little way, opened a good way,—always clapped-to again without a word of explanation.  They were reading, they were writing, they were eating, they were drinking, they were talking, they were dozing; the door was always opened at an unexpected moment, and they looked towards it, and it was clapped-to again, and nobody was to be seen.  When this had happened fifty times or so, Mr. Goodchild had said to his companion, jestingly: ‘I begin to think, Tom, there was something wrong with those six old men.’

Night had come again, and they had been writing for two or three hours: writing, in short, a portion of the lazy notes from which these lazy sheets are taken.  They had left off writing, and glasses were on the table between them.  The house was closed and quiet.  Around the head of Thomas Idle, as he lay upon his sofa, hovered light wreaths of fragrant smoke.  The temples of Francis Goodchild, as he leaned back in his chair, with his two hands clasped behind his head, and his legs crossed, were similarly decorated.

They had been discussing several idle subjects of speculation, not omitting the strange old men, and were still so occupied, when Mr. Goodchild abruptly changed his attitude to wind up his watch.  They were just becoming drowsy enough to be stopped in their talk by any such slight check.  Thomas Idle, who was speaking at the moment, paused and said, ‘How goes it?’

‘One,’ said Goodchild.

As if he had ordered One old man, and the order were promptly executed (truly, all orders were so, in that excellent hotel), the door opened, and One old man stood there.

He did not come in, but stood with the door in his hand.

‘One of the six, Tom, at last!’ said Mr. Goodchild, in a surprised whisper.—‘Sir, your pleasure?’

‘Sir, your pleasure?’ said the One old man.

‘I didn’t ring.’

‘The bell did,’ said the One old man.

He said Bell, in a deep, strong way, that would have expressed the church Bell.

‘I had the pleasure, I believe, of seeing you, yesterday?’ said Goodchild.

‘I cannot undertake to say for certain,’ was the grim reply of the One old man.

‘I think you saw me?  Did you not?’

‘Saw you?’ said the old man.  ‘O yes, I saw you.  But, I see many who never see me.’

A chilled, slow, earthy, fixed old man.  A cadaverous old man of measured speech.  An old man who seemed as unable to wink, as if his eyelids had been nailed to his forehead.  An old man whose eyes—two spots of fire—had no more motion than if they had been connected with the back of his skull by screws driven through it, and rivetted and bolted outside, among his grey hair.

The night had turned so cold, to Mr. Goodchild’s sensations, that he shivered.  He remarked lightly, and half apologetically, ‘I think somebody is walking over my grave.’

‘No,’ said the weird old man, ‘there is no one there.’

Mr. Goodchild looked at Idle, but Idle lay with his head enwreathed in smoke.

‘No one there?’ said Goodchild.

‘There is no one at your grave, I assure you,’ said the old man.

He had come in and shut the door, and he now sat down.  He did not bend himself to sit, as other people do, but seemed to sink bolt upright, as if in water, until the chair stopped him.

‘My friend, Mr. Idle,’ said Goodchild, extremely anxious to introduce a third person into the conversation.

‘I am,’ said the old man, without looking at him, ‘at Mr. Idle’s service.’

‘If you are an old inhabitant of this place,’ Francis Goodchild resumed.

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps you can decide a point my friend and I were in doubt upon, this morning.  They hang condemned criminals at the Castle, I believe?’

‘I believe so,’ said the old man.

‘Are their faces turned towards that noble prospect?’

‘Your face is turned,’ replied the old man, ‘to the Castle wall.  When you are tied up, you see its stones expanding and contracting violently, and a similar expansion and contraction seem to take place in your own head and breast.  Then, there is a rush of fire and an earthquake, and the Castle springs into the air, and you tumble down a precipice.’

His cravat appeared to trouble him.  He put his hand to his throat, and moved his neck from side to side.  He was an old man of a swollen character of face, and his nose was immoveably hitched up on one side, as if by a little hook inserted in that nostril.  Mr. Goodchild felt exceedingly uncomfortable, and began to think the night was hot, and not cold.

‘A strong description, sir,’ he observed.

‘A strong sensation,’ the old man rejoined.

Again, Mr. Goodchild looked to Mr. Thomas Idle; but Thomas lay on his back with his face attentively turned towards the One old man, and made no sign.  At this time Mr. Goodchild believed that he saw threads of fire stretch from the old man’s eyes to his own, and there attach themselves.  (Mr. Goodchild writes the present account of his experience, and, with the utmost solemnity, protests that he had the strongest sensation upon him of being forced to look at the old man along those two fiery films, from that moment.)

‘I must tell it to you,’ said the old man, with a ghastly and a stony stare.

‘What?’ asked Francis Goodchild.

‘You know where it took place.  Yonder!’

Whether he pointed to the room above, or to the room below, or to any room in that old house, or to a room in some other old house in that old town, Mr. Goodchild was not, nor is, nor ever can be, sure.  He was confused by the circumstance that the right forefinger of the One old man seemed to dip itself in one of the threads of fire, light itself, and make a fiery start in the air, as it pointed somewhere.  Having pointed somewhere, it went out.

‘You know she was a Bride,’ said the old man.

‘I know they still send up Bride-cake,’ Mr. Goodchild faltered.  ‘This is a very oppressive air.’

‘She was a Bride,’ said the old man.  ‘She was a fair, flaxen-haired, large-eyed girl, who had no character, no purpose.  A weak, credulous, incapable, helpless nothing.  Not like her mother.  No, no.  It was her father whose character she reflected.

‘Her mother had taken care to secure everything to herself, for her own life, when the father of this girl (a child at that time) died—of sheer helplessness; no other disorder—and then He renewed the acquaintance that had once subsisted between the mother and Him.  He had been put aside for the flaxen-haired, large-eyed man (or nonentity) with Money.  He could overlook that for Money.  He wanted compensation in Money.

‘So, he returned to the side of that woman the mother, made love to her again, danced attendance on her, and submitted himself to her whims.  She wreaked upon him every whim she had, or could invent.  He bore it.  And the more he bore, the more he wanted compensation in Money, and the more he was resolved to have it.

‘But, lo!  Before he got it, she cheated him.  In one of her imperious states, she froze, and never thawed again.  She put her hands to her head one night, uttered a cry, stiffened, lay in that attitude certain hours, and died.  And he had got no compensation from her in Money, yet.  Blight and Murrain on her!  Not a penny.

‘He had hated her throughout that second pursuit, and had longed for retaliation on her.  He now counterfeited her signature to an instrument, leaving all she had to leave, to her daughter—ten years old then—to whom the property passed absolutely, and appointing himself the daughter’s Guardian.  When He slid it under the pillow of the bed on which she lay, He bent down in the deaf ear of Death, and whispered: “Mistress Pride, I have determined a long time that, dead or alive, you must make me compensation in Money.”’

‘So, now there were only two left.  Which two were, He, and the fair flaxen-haired, large-eyed foolish daughter, who afterwards became the Bride.

‘He put her to school.  In a secret, dark, oppressive, ancient house, he put her to school with a watchful and unscrupulous woman.  “My worthy lady,” he said, “here is a mind to be formed; will you help me to form it?”  She accepted the trust.  For which she, too, wanted compensation in Money, and had it.

‘The girl was formed in the fear of him, and in the conviction, that there was no escape from him.  She was taught, from the first, to regard him as her future husband—the man who must marry her—the destiny that overshadowed her—the appointed certainty that could never be evaded.  The poor fool was soft white wax in their hands, and took the impression that they put upon her.  It hardened with time.  It became a part of herself.  Inseparable from herself, and only to be torn away from her, by tearing life away from her.

‘Eleven years she had lived in the dark house and its gloomy garden.  He was jealous of the very light and air getting to her, and they kept her close.  He stopped the wide chimneys, shaded the little windows, left the strong-stemmed ivy to wander where it would over the house-front, the moss to accumulate on the untrimmed fruit-trees in the red-walled garden, the weeds to over-run its green and yellow walks.  He surrounded her with images of sorrow and desolation.  He caused her to be filled with fears of the place and of the stories that were told of it, and then on pretext of correcting them, to be left in it in solitude, or made to shrink about it in the dark.  When her mind was most depressed and fullest of terrors, then, he would come out of one of the hiding-places from which he overlooked her, and present himself as her sole resource.

‘Thus, by being from her childhood the one embodiment her life presented to her of power to coerce and power to relieve, power to bind and power to loose, the ascendency over her weakness was secured.  She was twenty-one years and twenty-one days old, when he brought her home to the gloomy house, his half-witted, frightened, and submissive Bride of three weeks.

A submissive bride

‘He had dismissed the governess by that time—what he had left to do, he could best do alone—and they came back, upon a rain night, to the scene of her long preparation.  She turned to him upon the threshold, as the rain was dripping from the porch, and said:

‘“O sir, it is the Death-watch ticking for me!”

‘“Well!” he answered.  “And if it were?”

‘“O sir!” she returned to him, “look kindly on me, and be merciful to me!  I beg your pardon.  I will do anything you wish, if you will only forgive me!”

‘That had become the poor fool’s constant song: “I beg your pardon,” and “Forgive me!”

‘She was not worth hating; he felt nothing but contempt for her.  But, she had long been in the way, and he had long been weary, and the work was near its end, and had to be worked out.

‘“You fool,” he said.  “Go up the stairs!”

‘She obeyed very quickly, murmuring, “I will do anything you wish!”  When he came into the Bride’s Chamber, having been a little retarded by the heavy fastenings of the great door (for they were alone in the house, and he had arranged that the people who attended on them should come and go in the day), he found her withdrawn to the furthest corner, and there standing pressed against the paneling as if she would have shrunk through it: her flaxen hair all wild about her face, and her large eyes staring at him in vague terror.

‘“What are you afraid of?  Come and sit down by me.”

‘“I will do anything you wish.  I beg your pardon, sir.  Forgive me!”  Her monotonous tune as usual.

‘“Ellen, here is a writing that you must write out to-morrow, in your own hand.  You may as well be seen by others, busily engaged upon it.  When you have written it all fairly, and corrected all mistakes, call in any two people there may be about the house, and sign your name to it before them.  Then, put it in your bosom to keep it safe, and when I sit here again to-morrow night, give it to me.”

‘“I will do it all, with the greatest care.  I will do anything you wish.”

‘“Don’t shake and tremble, then.”

‘“I will try my utmost not to do it—if you will only forgive me!”

‘Next day, she sat down at her desk, and did as she had been told.  He often passed in and out of the room, to observe her, and always saw her slowly and laboriously writing: repeating to herself the words she copied, in appearance quite mechanically, and without caring or endeavouring to comprehend them, so that she did her task.  He saw her follow the directions she had received, in all particulars; and at night, when they were alone again in the same Bride’s Chamber, and he drew his chair to the hearth, she timidly approached him from her distant seat, took the paper from her bosom, and gave it into his hand.

‘It secured all her possessions to him, in the event of her death.  He put her before him, face to face, that he might look at her steadily; and he asked her, in so many plain words, neither fewer nor more, did she know that?

‘There were spots of ink upon the bosom of her white dress, and they made her face look whiter and her eyes look larger as she nodded her head.  There were spots of ink upon the hand with which she stood before him, nervously plaiting and folding her white skirts.

‘He took her by the arm, and looked her, yet more closely and steadily, in the face.  “Now, die!  I have done with you.”

‘She shrunk, and uttered a low, suppressed cry.

‘“I am not going to kill you.  I will not endanger my life for yours.  Die!”

‘He sat before her in the gloomy Bride’s Chamber, day after day, night after night, looking the word at her when he did not utter it.  As often as her large unmeaning eyes were raised from the hands in which she rocked her head, to the stern figure, sitting with crossed arms and knitted forehead, in the chair, they read in it, “Die!”  When she dropped asleep in exhaustion, she was called back to shuddering consciousness, by the whisper, “Die!”  When she fell upon her old entreaty to be pardoned, she was answered “Die!”  When she had out-watched and out-suffered the long night, and the rising sun flamed into the sombre room, she heard it hailed with, “Another day and not dead?—Die!”

‘Shut up in the deserted mansion, aloof from al............