I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter TalesQuiller-Couch, Arthur
General
I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales
Quiller-Couch, Arthur
Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
"Ne'er a soul knows; for ne'er a soul saw his face again. Year after
year, old Parkyn, his tenant, took the rent of Tremenhuel out of his
right pocket and paid it into his left: and in time, there being no
heir, he just took over the property and stepped into Cardinnock's shoes
with a 'by your leave' to nobody, and there his grandson is to this
day."
"What became of the young lady--of Miss Cicely Williams?" I asked.
"Died an old maid. There was something curious between her and her only
brother who had helped to stop the runaway match. Nobody knows what it
was: but when Sir Felix died--as he did about ten years after--
she packed up and went somewhere to the North of England and settled.
They say she and her brother never spoke: which was carrying her anger
at his interference rather far, 'specially as she remained good friends
with her father."
He broke off here to fetch up the second course. We talked no more, for
I was pondering his tale and disinclined to be diverted to other topics.
Nor can I tell whether the rest of the meal was good or ill. I suppose
I ate: but it was only when the landlord swept the cloth, and produced a
bottle of port, with a plate of biscuits and another of dried raisins,
that I woke out of my musing. While I drew the arm-chair nearer the
fire, he pushed forward the table with the wine to my elbow.
After this, he poured me out a glass and fell to dusting a high-backed
chair with vigour, as though he had caught it standing at ease and were
giving it a round dozen for insubordination in the ranks. "Was there
anything more?" "Nothing, thank you." He withdrew.
I drank a couple of glasses and began meditatively to light my pipe.
I was trying to piece together these words "Philip Cardinnock--
Cicely Williams--_fui_," and to fit them into the tune that kept running
in my head.
My pipe went out. I pulled out my pouch and was filling it afresh when
a puff of wind came down the chimney and blew a cloud of blue smoke out
into the room.
The smoke curled up and spread itself over the face of the mirror
confronting me. I followed it lazily with my eyes. Then suddenly I
bent forward, staring up. Something very curious was happening to the
glass.
II.
WHAT I SAW IN THE MIRROR.
The smoke that had dimmed the mirror's face for a moment was rolling off
its surface and upwards to the ceiling. But some of it still lingered
in filmy, slowly revolving eddies. The glass itself, too, was stirring
beneath this film and running across its breadth in horizontal waves
which broke themselves silently, one after another, against the dark
frame, while the circles of smoke kept widening, as the ripples widen
when a stone is tossed into still water.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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