第87章

You don't fancy you ARE as you seem to them? No such thing, my man.Put away that monstrous conceit, and be thankful that THEYhave not found you out.

The Notch on the Ax A Story a la Mode*

* (Here Thackeray reduces to an absurdity the literary fashion of the day--the vogue for startling stories and "Tales of Terror,"which was high in his time, and which influenced several of the stories which precede in this volume.But while Dickens made fun, with mental reservations; while Bulwer Lytton tried to explain by rising to the heights of natural philosophy, and Maturin did not explain at all, but let his extravagant genius roam between heaven and earth--Thackeray's keen wit saw mainly one chance for exquisite literary satire and parody.At one point or another in this skit, the style of each principal sensational novelist of the day is delightfully imitated.--EDITOR.)I

Every one remembers in the Fourth Book of the immortal poem of your Blind Bard (to whose sightless orbs no doubt Glorious Shapes were apparent, and Visions Celestial), how Adam discourses to Eve of the Bright Visitors who hovered round their Eden--'Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth, Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.'

"'How often,' says Father Adam, 'from the steep of echoing hill or thicket, have we heard celestial voices to the midnight air, sole, or responsive to each other's notes, singing!' After the Act of Disobedience, when the erring pair from Eden took their solitary way, and went forth to toil and trouble on common earth--though the Glorious Ones no longer were visible, you cannot say they were gone.It was not that the Bright Ones were absent, but that the dim eyes of rebel man no longer could see them.In your chamber hangs a picture of one whom you never knew, but whom you have long held in tenderest regard, and who was painted for you by a friend of mine, the Knight of Plympton.She communes with you.She smiles on you.When your spirits are low, her bright eyes shine on you and cheer you.Her innocent sweet smile is a caress to you.

She never fails to soothe you with her speechless prattle.You love her.She is alive with you.As you extinguish your candle and turn to sleep, though your eyes see her not, is she not there still smiling? As you lie in the night awake, and thinking of your duties, and the morrow's inevitable toil oppressing the busy, weary, wakeful brain as with a remorse, the crackling fire flashes up for a moment in the grate, and she is there, your little Beauteous Maiden, smiling with her sweet eyes! When moon is down, when fire is out, when curtains are drawn, when lids are closed, is she not there, the little Beautiful One, though invisible, present and smiling still? Friend, the Unseen Ones are round about us.

Does it not seem as if the time were drawing near when it shall be given to men to behold them?"The print of which my friend spoke, and which, indeed, hangs in my room, though he has never been there, is that charming little winter piece of Sir Joshua, representing the little Lady Caroline Montague, afterwards Duchess of Buccleuch.She is represented as standing in the midst of a winter landscape, wrapped in muff and cloak; and she looks out of her picture with a smile so exquisite that a Herod could not see her without being charmed.

"I beg your pardon, Mr.PINTO," I said to the person with whom Iwas conversing.(I wonder, by the way, that I was not surprised at his knowing how fond I am of this print.) "You spoke of the Knight of Plympton.Sir Joshua died 1792: and you say he was your dear friend?"As I spoke I chanced to look at Mr.Pinto; and then it suddenly struck me: Gracious powers! Perhaps you ARE a hundred years old, now I think of it.You look more than a hundred.Yes, you may be a thousand years old for what I know.Your teeth are false.One eye is evidently false.Can I say that the other is not? If a man's age may be calculated by the rings round his eyes, this man may be as old as Methuselah.He has no beard.He wears a large curly glossy brown wig, and his eyebrows are painted a deep olive-green.It was odd to hear this man, this walking mummy, talking sentiment, in these queer old chambers in Shepherd's Inn.

Pinto passed a yellow bandanna handkerchief over his awful white teeth, and kept his glass eye steadily fixed on me."Sir Joshua's friend?" said he (you perceive, eluding my direct question)."Is not everyone that knows his pictures Reynolds's friend? Suppose Itell you that I have been in his painting room scores of times, and that his sister The has made me tea, and his sister Toffy has made coffee for me? You will only say I am an old ombog." (Mr.Pinto, I remarked, spoke all languages with an accent equally foreign.)"Suppose I tell you that I knew Mr.Sam Johnson, and did not like him? that I was at that very ball at Madame Cornelis', which you have mentioned in one of your little--what do you call them?--bah!

my memory begins to fail me--in one of your little Whirligig Papers? Suppose I tell you that Sir Joshua has been here, in this very room?""Have you, then, had these apartments for--more--than--seventy years?" I asked.

"They look as if they had not been swept for that time--don't they?

Hey? I did not say that I had them for seventy years, but that Sir Joshua has visited me here.""When?" I asked, eying the man sternly, for I began to think he was an impostor.

He answered me with a glance still more stern: "Sir Joshua Reynolds was here this very morning, with Angelica Kaufmann and Mr.Oliver Goldschmidt.He is still very much attached to Angelica, who still does not care for him.Because he is dead (and I was in the fourth mourning coach at his funeral) is that any reason why he should not come back to earth again? My good sir, you are laughing at me.He has sat many a time on that very chair which you are now occupying.

There are several spirits in the room now, whom you cannot see.