--"lips hideously red and large, with the whitest teeth inside them.--I give you the description," said his lordship, who evidently lingered not without pleasure on the details of his recital, "just as I used to hear it from my old nurse, who had been all her life in the family, and had it from her mother who was in it at the time.--His great passion, his keenest delight, was animal food. He ate enormously--more, it was said, than three hearty men. An hour after he had gorged himself, he was ready to gorge again. Roast meat was his main delight, but he was fond of broth also.--He must have been more like Mrs. Shelley's creation in Frankenstein than any other. All the time I read that story, I had the vision of my far-off cousin constantly before me, as I saw him in my mind's eye when my nurse described him; and often I wondered whether Mrs.
Shelley could have heard of him.--In an earlier age and more practical, they would have got rid of him by readier and more thorough means, if only for shame of having brought such a being into the world, but they sent him with his keeper, a little man with a powerful eye, to that same house down in the town there: in an altogether solitary place they could persuade no man to live with him. At night he was always secured to his bed, otherwise his keeper would not have had courage to sleep, for he was as cunning as he was hideous. When he slept during the day, which he did frequently after a meal, his attendant contented himself with locking his door, and keeping his ears awake. At such times only did he venture to look on the world: he would step just outside the street-door, but would neither leave it, nor shut it behind him, lest the savage should perhaps escape from his room, bar it, and set the house on fire.
"One beautiful Sunday morning, the brute, after a good breakfast, had fallen asleep on his bed, and the keeper had gone down stairs, and was standing in the street with the door open behind him. All the people were at church, and the street was empty as a desert. He stood there for some time, enjoying the sweet air and the scent of the flowers, went in and got a light to his pipe, put coals on the fire, saw that the hugh cauldron of broth which the cook had left in his charge when he went to church--it was to serve for dinner and supper both--was boiling beautifully, went back, and again took his station in front of the open door. Presently came a neighbour woman from her house, leading by the hand a little girl too young to go to church. She stood talking with him for some time.
"Suddenly she cried, 'Good Lord! what's come o' the bairn?' The same instant came one piercing shriek--from some distance it seemed. The mother darted down the neighbouring close. But the keeper saw that the door behind him was shut, and was filled with horrible dismay.
He darted to an entrance in the close, of which he always kept the key about him, and went straight to the kitchen. There by the fire stood the savage, gazing with a fixed fishy eye of rapture at the cauldron, which the steam, issuing in little sharp jets from under the lid, showed to be boiling furiously, with grand prophecy of broth. Ghastly horror in his very bones, the keeper lifted the lid--and there, beside the beef, with the broth bubbling in waves over her, lay the child! The demon had torn off her frock, and thrust her into the boiling liquid!
"There rose such an outcry that they were compelled to put him in chains and carry him no one knew whither; but nurse said he lived to old age. Ever since, the house has been uninhabited, with, of course, the reputation of being haunted. If you happen to be in its neighbourhood when it begins to grow dark, you may see the children hurry past it in silence, now and then glancing back in dread, lest something should have opened the never-opened door, and be stealing after them. They call that something The Red Etin,--only this ogre was black, I am sorry to say; red was the proper colour for him."
"It is a horrible story!" said Donal.
"I want you to go to the house for me: you do not mind going, do you?"
"Not in the least," answered Donal.
"I want you to search a certain bureau there for some papers.--By the way, have you any news to give me about Forgue?"
"No, my lord," answered Donal. "I do not even know whether or not they meet, but I am afraid."
"Oh, I daresay," rejoined his lordship, "the whim is wearing off!
One pellet drives out another. Behind the love in the popgun came the conviction that it would be simple ruin! But we Graemes are stiff-necked both to God and man, and I don't trust him much."
"He gave you no promise, if you remember, my lord."
"I remember very well; why the deuce should I not remember? I am not in the way of forgetting things! No, by God! nor forgiving them either! Where there's anything to forgive there's no fear of my forgetting!"
He followed the utterance with a laugh, as if he would have it pass for a joke, but there was no ring in the laugh.
