A Dark Mirror.

Te Aroha News, Volume VIII, Issue 491, 23 July 1890, Page 4

A Dark Mirror.

In the room of one of my friends hangs a mirror. It is an oblong eheeb of glass, set in a frame of dark, highly-varnished wood, carved in the worst taste of the Regency period, and relieved with faded gilt. Glancing at it from a distance, you would guess the thing a relic from some * genteel ’ drawing-room of Miss Austen’s time. Bub go nearer and look into the glass itself. It is worse than unflattering ; it is horrible. By some malformation or mere freak of make, the image it throws back is livid with the tint of death. Flood the room with sunshine ; stand before this glasß with youthand hob blood tingling in your cheeks; and God send you never recognise what you see. For there will bo no sun ; but your own face, blue and dead, and behind it a horror of inscrutable shadow.

Since I heard this mirror’s histery, I have stood more than once and twice before it, and peered into this shadow. And these are the simulacra I seem to have seen there darkly. I have seen a bleak stone parsonage, hemmed in on two sides by a graveyard ; and behind it for miles nothing bub sadcoloured moors climbing and stretching away. I have heard the winds moaning and ‘wubhering’ night and morning among the gravestones, and around the angles of the house ; and crossing the threshold, I know by instinct that this mirror will stand over the mantelpiece in the bare room to the left. I also know to whom those four suppressed voices will belong that greet tne while yet my hand is on the latch. Four children are within three girls and a boy —and they are disputing over a box of wooden soldiers. The eldest girl, a plain child with reddish-brown eyes, and the most wonderfully small hands, snatches up one of the wooden soldiers, crying, * This is the Duke of Wellington ! This shall be the Duke !’ and her soldier is the gayest of all, and the tallest and most perfect in every part. The second girl makes her choice, and they call him * Gravey,’ because of the solemnity of his painted features. And then all laugh at the youngest girl, for she has chosen a queer little warrior, much like herself; but she smiles at their laughter, and smiles again when they christen him * Waiting Boy.’ Lastly, the boy chooses. He is handsomer than his sisters, and their hope and pride; and has a massive brow and a mouth well formed, though a trifle coarse. His soldier shall be called Bonaparte. Though the door is closed between us, I can see these motherless children under this very blue mirror—the glas3 that had helped to pale the blood on their mother’s face after she had left the warm Cornish sea that was her home, and came to settle and die in this bleak exile. Some of her books are in the little bookcase here. They were sent round from the west by sea, and met with shipwreck. For the most part they are Methodist magazines—for, like most Cornish folk, lier parents were followers of Wesley—and the stains of the salt water are still on their pages. I know also that the father will be sitting in the room to my right—sitting at his solitary meal, for his digestion is queer, and he prefers to dine alone. A strange, small, purblind man, full of sorrow and strong will. He is a clergyman, but carries a revolver always in his pocket by day, and ; by night sleeps with it undec-Jiis pillow. He has done so ever since someone bold him that the moors above were unsafe for a person with his opinions. All this the glass shows me, and more. I see the children growing up. I see the girls droop and pine in this weary parsonage where the winds nip and the miasma from the church-yard chokes them. I see the handsome promising boy going to the devil—slowly at first, then by strides. As their hope fades from his sisters’ faces, he drinks and takes to opium-eating—-and worse. He comes home from a short absence, wrecked in body and soul. After this there is no rest in the house. He sleeps in the room with that small, strongwilled father of his, and often there are sound of horrible stragglings within it,

And the girls lie awake, sick with fear, listening, till their ears grow heavy and dull, for the report of their father’s pistol. At morning, the drunkard will stagger out, and looit perhaps into this glass, that gives him back more than all his despair. * The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it,’ he stammers; ‘ he does his best —the poor old man ! bat it’s all over with me.’

I see him go headlong at last and meet his end in the room above after twenty minutrs’ struggle, with a curious desire at the last to play the man and meet his death standing. I see the second sister fight with a swiftly wasting disease ; and because she is a solitary Titanic spirit, refuses all help and solace. She gets up one morning, insists on dressing herself, and dies ; and the youngest sister follows her, but more slowly and tranquilly, as befits her gentler nature. Two only are left now—-thestrange father and the eldest of the four children, tho red- I dish eyed girl with the small hands, the girl who ‘never talked hopofully.’ Fame has come to her and to her dead sisters. For looking from childhood into this livid glass that reflected their world, they have peopled it with strange spirits. Men and women in the real world recognise the awful power of these spirts, but cannot understand them, nob having been brought up thompelves in front of this mirror. But the survivor knows the mirror too well. ‘ Mademoiselle, vovs ties triste. * Monsieur, fen cii hien le dro'd. With a last look I see into the small, commonplace church that lies just below the parsonage ; and on a tablet by the altar I read a list of many names. And tho last is that of Charlotte Bronte. For the mirror once hung in the sittingroom at Haworth Parsonage.—“ The Speaker.”