Nightmare Abbey | Page 6

of the crazy fabric of human
nature.
* * * * *

CHAPTER III
Mr Glowry returned from London with the loss of his lawsuit. Justice
was with him, but the law was against him. He found Scythrop in a
mood most sympathetically tragic; and they vied with each other in
enlivening their cups by lamenting the depravity of this degenerate age,
and occasionally interspersing divers grim jokes about graves, worms,
and epitaphs. Mr Glowry's friends, whom we have mentioned in the
first chapter, availed themselves of his return to pay him a simultaneous
visit. At the same time arrived Scythrop's friend and fellow-collegian,
the Honourable Mr Listless. Mr Glowry had discovered this
fashionable young gentleman in London, 'stretched on the rack of a too
easy chair,' and devoured with a gloomy and misanthropical nil curo,
and had pressed him so earnestly to take the benefit of the pure country
air, at Nightmare Abbey, that Mr Listless, finding it would give him
more trouble to refuse than to comply, summoned his French valet,
Fatout, and told him he was going to Lincolnshire. On this simple hint,
Fatout went to work, and the imperials were packed, and the
post-chariot was at the door, without the Honourable Mr Listless
having said or thought another syllable on the subject.
Mr and Mrs Hilary brought with them an orphan niece, a daughter of
Mr Glowry's youngest sister, who had made a runaway love-match
with an Irish officer. The lady's fortune disappeared in the first year:
love, by a natural consequence, disappeared in the second: the Irishman
himself, by a still more natural consequence, disappeared in the third.
Mr Glowry had allowed his sister an annuity, and she had lived in
retirement with her only daughter, whom, at her death, which had
recently happened, she commended to the care of Mrs Hilary.
Miss Marionetta Celestina O'Carroll was a very blooming and
accomplished young lady. Being a compound of the Allegro Vivace of
the O'Carrolls, and of the Andante Doloroso of the Glowries, she
exhibited in her own character all the diversities of an April sky. Her
hair was light-brown; her eyes hazel, and sparkling with a mild but
fluctuating light; her features regular; her lips full, and of equal size;
and her person surpassingly graceful. She was a proficient in music.

Her conversation was sprightly, but always on subjects light in their
nature and limited in their interest: for moral sympathies, in any general
sense, had no place in her mind. She had some coquetry, and more
caprice, liking and disliking almost in the same moment; pursuing an
object with earnestness while it seemed unattainable, and rejecting it
when in her power as not worth the trouble of possession.
Whether she was touched with a penchant for her cousin Scythrop, or
was merely curious to see what effect the tender passion would have on
so _outré_ a person, she had not been three days in the Abbey before
she threw out all the lures of her beauty and accomplishments to make
a prize of his heart. Scythrop proved an easy conquest. The image of
Miss Emily Girouette was already sufficiently dimmed by the power of
philosophy and the exercise of reason: for to these influences, or to any
influence but the true one, are usually ascribed the mental cures
performed by the great physician Time. Scythrop's romantic dreams
had indeed given him many pure anticipated cognitions of
combinations of beauty and intelligence, which, he had some
misgivings, were not exactly realised in his cousin Marionetta; but, in
spite of these misgivings, he soon became distractedly in love; which,
when the young lady clearly perceived, she altered her tactics, and
assumed as much coldness and reserve as she had before shown ardent
and ingenuous attachment. Scythrop was confounded at the sudden
change; but, instead of falling at her feet and requesting an explanation,
he retreated to his tower, muffled himself in his nightcap, seated
himself in the president's chair of his imaginary secret tribunal,
summoned Marionetta with all terrible formalities, frightened her out of
her wits, disclosed himself, and clasped the beautiful penitent to his
bosom.
While he was acting this reverie--in the moment in which the awful
president of the secret tribunal was throwing back his cowl and his
mantle, and discovering himself to the lovely culprit as her adoring and
magnanimous lover, the door of the study opened, and the real
Marionetta appeared.
The motives which had led her to the tower were a little penitence, a

little concern, a little affection, and a little fear as to what the sudden
secession of Scythrop, occasioned by her sudden change of manner,
might portend. She had tapped several times unheard, and of course
unanswered; and at length, timidly and cautiously opening the door, she
discovered him standing up