The Evil Guest

The Evil Guest, by J. Sheridan
Le Fanu

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Title: The Evil Guest
Author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Release Date: December 3, 2003 [EBook #10377] [Date last updated:
January 22, 2005]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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The Evil Guest

By J. Sheridan LeFanu
1895

"When Lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth Sin: and Sin, when it is
finished, bringeth forth Death."

About sixty years ago, and somewhat more than twenty miles from the
ancient town of Chester, in a southward direction, there stood a large,
and, even then, an old-fashioned mansion-house. It lay in the midst of a
demesne of considerable extent, and richly wooded with venerable
timber; but, apart from the somber majesty of these giant groups, and
the varieties of the undulating ground on which they stood, there was
little that could be deemed attractive in the place. A certain air of
neglect and decay, and an indescribable gloom and melancholy, hung
over it. In darkness, it seemed darker than any other tract; when the
moonlight fell upon its glades and hollows, they looked spectral and
awful, with a sort of churchyard loneliness; and even when the blush of
the morning kissed its broad woodlands, there was a melancholy in the
salute that saddened rather than cheered the heart of the beholder.
This antique, melancholy, and neglected place, we shall call, for
distinctness sake, Gray Forest. It was then the property of the younger
son of a nobleman, once celebrated for his ability and his daring, but
who had long since passed to that land where human wisdom and
courage avail naught. The representative of this noble house resided at
the family mansion in Sussex, and the cadet, whose fortunes we mean
to sketch in these pages, lived upon the narrow margin of an
encumbered income, in a reserved and unsocial discontent, deep among
the solemn shadows of the old woods of Gray Forest.
The Hon. Richard Marston was now somewhere between forty and fifty
years of age--perhaps nearer the latter; he still, however, retained, in an
eminent degree, the traits of manly beauty, not the less remarkable for
its unquestionably haughty and passionate character. He had married a

beautiful girl, of good family, but without much money, somewhere
about eighteen years before; and two children, a son and a daughter,
had been the fruit of this union. The boy, Harry Marston, was at this
time at Cambridge; and his sister, scarcely fifteen, was at home with
her parents, and under the training of an accomplished governess, who
had been recommended to them by a noble relative of Mrs. Marston.
She was a native of France, but thoroughly mistress of the English
language, and, except for a foreign accent, which gave a certain
prettiness to all she said, she spoke it as perfectly as any native
Englishwoman. This young Frenchwoman was eminently handsome
and attractive. Expressive, dark eyes, a clear olive complexion, small
even teeth, and a beautifully-dimpling smile, more perhaps than a
strictly classic regularity of features, were the secrets of her
unquestionable influence, at first sight, upon the fancy of every man of
taste who beheld her.
Mr. Marston's fortune, never very large, had been shattered by early
dissipation. Naturally of a proud and somewhat exacting temper, he
actively felt the mortifying consequences of his poverty. The want of
what he felt ought to have been his position and influence in the county
in which he resided, fretted and galled him; and he cherished a resentful
and bitter sense of every slight, imaginary or real, to which the same
fruitful source of annoyance and humiliation had exposed him. He held,
therefore, but little intercourse with the surrounding gentry, and that
little not of the pleasantest possible kind; for, not being himself in a
condition to entertain, in that style which accorded with his own ideas
of his station, he declined, as far as was compatible with good breeding,
all the proffered hospitalities of the neighborhood; and, from his wild
and neglected park, looked out upon the surrounding world in a spirit
of moroseness and defiance, very unlike, indeed, to that of neighborly
good-will.
In the midst, however, of many of the annoyances attendant upon
crippled means, he enjoyed a few of those shadowy indications of
hereditary importance, which are all the