Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 | Page 8

conduct,' broke in Mr Renshawe; 'and I must
again request that you will both leave the room.'
It was useless to persist, and we almost immediately went away. 'Your
impression, Mr Waters,' said the physician as he was leaving the house,
'is, I daresay, the true one; but he is on his guard now, and it will be
prudent to wait for a fresh outbreak before acting decisively; more
especially as the hallucination appears to be quite a harmless one.'
This was not, I thought, quite so sure, but of course I acquiesced, as in

duty bound; and matters went on pretty much as usual for seven or
eight weeks, except that Mr Renshawe manifested much aversion
towards myself personally, and at last served me with a written notice
to quit at the end of the term previously stipulated for. There was still
some time to that; and in the meanwhile, I caused a strict watch to be
set, as far as was practicable, without exciting observation, upon our
landlord's words and acts.
Ellen Irwin's first tumult of grief subsided, the next and pressing
question related to her own and infant son's subsistence. An elderly
man of the name of Tomlins was engaged as foreman; and it was hoped
the business might still be carried on with sufficient profit. Mr
Renshawe's manner, though at times indicative of considerable nervous
irritability, was kind and respectful to the young widow; and I began to
hope that the delusion he had for awhile laboured under had finally
passed away.
The hope was a fallacious one. We were sitting at tea on a Sunday
evening, when Mrs Irwin, pale and trembling with fright and nervous
agitation, came hastily in with her little boy in her hand. I correctly
divined what had occurred. In reply to my hurried questioning, the
astounded young matron told me in substance, that within the last two
or three days Mr Renshawe's strange behaviour and disjointed talk had
both bewildered and alarmed her. He vaguely intimated that she, Ellen
Irwin, was really Laura somebody else--that she had kept company
with him, Mr Renshawe, in Yorkshire, before she knew poor
George--with many other strange things he muttered rather than spoke
out; and especially that it was owing to her son reminding her
continually of his father, that she pretended not to have known Mr
Renshawe twelve or thirteen years ago. 'In short,' added the young
woman with tears and blushes, 'he is utterly crazed; for he asked me
just now to marry him--which I would not do for the Indies--and is
gone away in a passion to find a paper that will prove, he says, I am
that other Laura something.'
There was something so ludicrous in all this, however vexatious and
insulting under the circumstances--the recent death of the husband, and

the young widow's unprotected state--that neither of us could forbear
laughing at the conclusion of Mrs Irwin's story. It struck me, too, that
Renshawe had conceived a real and ardent passion for the very comely
and interesting person before us--first prompted, no doubt, by her
accidental likeness to the portrait; and that some mental flaw or other
caused him to confound her with the Laura who had in early life
excited the same emotion in his mind.
Laughable as the matter was in one sense, there was--and the fair
widow had noticed as well as myself--a serious, menacing expression
in the man's eye not to be trifled with; and at her earnest request, we
accompanied her to her own apartment, to which Renshawe had
threatened soon to return. We had not been a minute in the room, when
his hurried step was heard approaching, and Mrs Waters and I stepped
hastily into an adjoining closet, where we could hear and partly see all
that passed. Renshawe's speech trembled with fervency and anger as he
broke at once into the subject with which his disordered brain was
reeling.
'You will not dare to say, will you, that you do not remember this
song--that these pencil-marks in the margin were not made by you
thirteen years ago?' he menacingly ejaculated.
'I know nothing about the song, Mr Renshawe,' rejoined the young
woman with more spirit than she might have exhibited but for my near
presence. 'It is really such nonsense. Thirteen years ago, I was only
about nine years of age.'
'You persist, then, unfeeling woman, in this cruel deception! After all,
too, that I have suffered: the days of gloom, the nights of horror, since
that fearful moment when I beheld you dragged, a lifeless corpse, from
the water, and they told me you were dead!'
'Dead! Gracious goodness, Mr Renshawe, don't go on in this shocking
way! I was never dragged out of a pond, nor supposed to be
dead--never! You