J. S. Le Fanus Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 | Page 8

straight before you, you have the lake, and
then the fells; and five miles from the foot of the mountain at the other
side, before you reach Fottrell--and that is twenty-five miles by the
road----"
"Dear me! how far apart they are set! My gardener told me this
morning that asparagus grows very thinly in this part of the world. How
thinly clergymen grow also down here--in one sense," he added politely,
for the vicar was stout.
"We were looking out of the window--we amused ourselves that way
before you came--and your view is certainly the very best anywhere
round this side; your view of the lake and the fells--what mountains
they are, Sir Bale!"
"'Pon my soul, they are! I wish I could blow them asunder with a
charge of duck-shot, and I shouldn't be stifled by them long. But I
suppose, as we can't get rid of them, the next best thing is to admire
them. We are pretty well married to them, and there is no use in
quarrelling."
"I know you don't think so, Sir Bale, ha, ha, ha! You wouldn't take a
good deal and spoil Mardykes Hall."
"You can't get a mouthful or air, or see the sun of a morning, for those
frightful mountains," he said with a peevish frown at them.
"Well, the lake at all events--that you must admire, Sir Bale?"
"No ma'am, I don't admire the lake. I'd drain the lake if I could--I hate
the lake. There's nothing so gloomy as a lake pent up among barren
mountains. I can't conceive what possessed my people to build our
house down here, at the edge of a lake; unless it was the fish, and
precious fish it is--pike! I don't know how people digest it--I can't. I'd

as soon think of eating a watchman's pike."
"I thought that having travelled so much abroad, you would have
acquired a great liking for that kind of scenery, Sir Bale; there is a great
deal of it on the Continent, ain't there?" said Mrs. Bedel. "And the
boating."
"Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don't you
think so? Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy the
shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we
have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly. For my part I
hate boating, and I hate the water; and I'd rather have my house, like
Haworth, at the edge of a moss, with good wholesome peat to look at,
and an open horizon--savage and stupid and bleak as all that is--than be
suffocated among impassable mountains, or upset in a black lake and
drowned like a kitten. O, there's luncheon in the next room; won't you
take some?"

CHAPTER V
Mrs. Julaper's Room
Sir Bale Mardykes being now established in his ancestral house, people
had time to form conclusions respecting him. It must be allowed he was
not popular. There was, perhaps, in his conduct something of the
caprice of contempt. At all events his temper and conduct were
uncertain, and his moods sometimes violent and insulting.
With respect to but one person was his conduct uniform, and that was
Philip Feltram. He was a sort of aide-de-camp near Sir Bale's person,
and chargeable with all the commissions and offices which could not
be suitably intrusted to a mere servant. But in many respects he was
treated worse than any servant of the Baronet's. Sir Bale swore at him,
and cursed him; laid the blame of everything that went wrong in house,
stable, or field upon his shoulders; railed at him, and used him, as
people said, worse than a dog.

Why did Feltram endure this contumelious life? What could he do but
endure it? was the answer. What was the power that induced strong
soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be
tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an
air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an
unconscious calculation of chances which satisfies them that it is
ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative.
These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us,
and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that
there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see,
and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible
power.
A man of spirit would rather break stones on the highway than eat that
bitter bread, was the burden of every man's song on Feltram's bondage.
But he was not so sure that even