Date: 1894-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Horror; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Victorian Gothic Fiction
Description: A double handful of stories, to entertain fans of Victorian ghosts. Specters make appearances in the land of the living (with sometimes tragic results), folk with a touch of the fey foresee deaths, and a family curse will have its way. Is the final story a tale of the supernatural? – or is it a fairytale?
Publisher: MobileRead
Rights: Public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA.

The Shadow on the Blind

AND OTHER GHOST STORIES
BY
Louisa Baldwin

Almost everyone, it has been said, would be angry if anyone else reported that he believed in ghosts; yet hardly anyone, when thinking by himself, wholly disbelieves them.

—Walter Bagehot

CONTENTS:

The Shadow on the Blind
How He Left the Hotel
The Weird of the Walfords
The Uncanny Bairn
Many Waters Cannot Quench Love
The Real and the Counterfeit
My Next-Door Neighbour
The Empty Picture Frame
Sir Nigel Otterburne’s Case
The Ticking of the Clock

…About This eBook

The Shadow on the Blind

Harbledon Hall had stood empty for seven years. For seven years no smoke had issued from its chimneys telling of the cheerful hearth within, no voice or laughter had been heard under its roof, no footstep coming or going across its threshold. A straggling growth of ivy and Virginia creeper, that covered the walls and veiled the windows, made the front of the house look forlorn and neglected, as the face of a sick man who has grown a ragged beard during a long illness. The window-sills were green with the drip of rain from the spouts choked with decaying leaves, and the brickwork was stained with dark patches of damp. The birds had built their nests undisturbed in every gable and projection of the roof, and in the wide chimneys, secure from danger of being smoked out of their comfortable quarters.

And within the house, though man had withdrawn his presence from it, other tenants were in possession. Rats and mice held revels in the empty rooms and passages, that resounded with the patter of their feet, the squeak of their voices, and the nibbling of their teeth. In the dead of night, bold as they had grown, they scared themselves by catching in wires that set bells ringing and echoing through the house, and an army of rats would rush helter-skelter down the great staircase, bounding over one another’s backs in their panic, as we see them depicted in illustrations of the famous history of Dick Whittington and his cat.

If desolation reigned in Harbledon Hall, its gardens were returning to a state of savage nature, and the rank growth of weeds choked and overtopped the flowers and shrubs. No seeds had been sown, no lawns mown, no hedges clipped or tree or bush pruned, in seven long years, and the once orderly gardens had become a tangled thicket, where the fairy prince might seek the sleeping beauty. A bramble had sprung up by the sundial, and, clasping it in its thorny arms, threw its branches about it, effectually hiding it from the light of day. The stone basin of the disused fountain had become a nursery of young frogs, that hopped, swam, and croaked undisturbed, and nature was endeavouring to re-establish her sway where man had withdrawn his cultivating and restraining hand.

It was a radiant day in June. The hot sun poured down on the tangled overgrowth in the gardens of Harbledon Hall, the birds were in a perfect riot of song, and a southwest wind rocked them on the bough. Even the old house on such a day wore its least sombre aspect. One could imagine there had been happy household life within its walls, and it was possible to conceive that they might again resound to the laughter and voices of children at play.

Some such thought as this must have entered the mind of an elderly gentleman driving in an open carriage with his wife, a pale grey-haired lady, seated beside him. Mr Stackpoole was a cheerful, energetic man of sixty years of age, of strong likes and dislikes and sudden impulses. As he caught sight of the wide front of Harbledon Hall with its red gables glowing in the sun, its confused mass of creepers almost hiding the lower storeys from view, he told the coachman to draw up at the iron gates at the entrance.

“This is a very picturesque house, my dear; I should like to have a look at it,” he said to his wife; “it may be the kind of place we are in search of,” and he alighted from the carriage as nimbly as a young man to read the notice painted on the weather-stained board fastened to the gates. “For admission to view these premises, apply to Mr Judd, sexton, by the church.” Mr Stackpoole returned to the carriage and bade the coachman drive to the church, the tower of which they could see embowered among trees, apparently not more than a quarter of a mile distant. As they drove he continued, “I like the look of the place very much. I am sure I could do something with it. I should just enjoy setting to work upon it to call order out of chaos, and in six months I would undertake to effect an entire transformation in the house and grounds, and make it one of the prettiest places in the neighbourhood. What do you think, my dear? Hey?”

The frail-looking elderly lady thus addressed made but a faint rejoinder, and her husband’s sanguine enthusiasm by no means communicated itself to her. Harbledon Hall was the sixth old house Mr Stackpoole had taken a fancy to in the last ten years, and fallen out of love with as quickly, after exercising his ingenuity in putting it in perfect order and living in it for a short time. It was his diversion, now that he had retired from business and had nothing particular to do, to hunt up old country houses, put them in thorough modern repair and working order, live in them just long enough to induce his wife to hope that he had pitched his tent finally, when the demon of unrest would break out in him once more, and he was off again on the old quest.

This hunting of houses, catching them, and then letting them go, that he might pursue game of the same kind elsewhere, was naturally more entertaining to Mr Stackpoole than it could be to his wife and daughter. But the elder lady was patient and philosophic, and when her daughter said petulantly, “Oh, mamma, what a shame it is that we have to be dragged about the country like this! We have not been a year in this lovely house, and papa is tired of it already, and looking out again for some tumble-down old place to put that in good order, and leave it too, I suppose!” Mrs Stackpoole would reply, “Never mind, Ella. Papa must do as he thinks best. The excitement and interest he finds in frequently changing house are necessary to him now that he has done with business; and remember, my dear, he has no home occupations to pass the time as you and I have.” But Ella Stackpoole was now married and settled in a home of her own, and the only other child, a son, was stationed with his regiment in Malta.

Therefore it was that when Mr Stackpoole became suddenly interested in the appearance of Harbledon Hall his wife was unable to feel any enthusiasm on the subject. Their last home had been in Cornwall, where, after six months spent in its most westerly corner, Mr Stackpoole discovered what everyone else had always known, that he was in a decidedly rainy part of England. He could scarcely have been more astonished at the quantity of rain that fell if it had been in Egypt, and he fled to London to make that his headquarters while he looked about for an old house to suit his fancy in the drier county of Surrey.

And on this bright June day he and his wife were driving through the fair country, house-hunting, and the more dilapidated a house looked, provided that his experienced eye saw capacities of improvement about it, the more attractive it appeared to Mr Stackpoole, as affording wider scope for his particular form of genius. His was a costly hobby, and strangers reaped the benefit of his lavish outlay on houses he perfected, tired of, and left so soon.

Mr Judd, the sexton, was found without difficulty, for indeed he was a conspicuous object, sitting in a large armchair by his cottage door reading the newspaper, and taking an occasional sip from a glass of cold brandy-and-water that stood beside him on the window-sill. He was a person of dignity in the village, accustomed to waste his own time and that of others, but Mr Stackpoole hurried him off to the carriage as soon as he had found the keys, and compelled him to unwonted activity. “The garden be a wilderness, sir,” said the old man, opening one of the great iron gates, “and it’s four ’ears since e’er an inquiry was made about the place.”

“It wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, you see; it’ll need a considerable outlay before it is fit for habitation,” said Mr Stackpoole complacently as he stooped to disentangle a briar from his wife’s skirt.

“Who were the last tenants, and how long did they live here?” he said, turning to the old man and asking two questions at once.

“Sir Roland Shawe and his family had it last, sir. They took the place on a twenty-one years’ lease, and they left uncommon sudden when it had five years and more to run. There was a deal o’ talk about what made them leave i’ that way,” and Judd opened wide the front door as he spoke, and they entered a large, lofty hall, smelling mouldy as though there were vaults below.

“Folks did say there was reasons more’n what they’s own up to, for a large fam’ly to turn out all of a sudden, as if they was running away from the plague,” and the old sexton looked mysterious, and as though he longed to be questioned on the subject. Mr Stackpoole, however, was too much interested in pacing the length of the dining-room to notice any hints he might throw out.

“My dear,” he said to his wife, who was resting on the low window-seat, “we will have the whole of this oak floor polished, and Turkish rugs laid down at intervals.”

“That was what we did in our house in Cumberland,” said Mrs Stackpoole gently, “and if you remember you were not pleased with it when it was done; ” then, turning to the old man: “You were going to tell us why Sir Roland Shawe left so suddenly.”

“Forbid, ma’am, as I should say definite why he left, not knowing for certain,” said Mr Judd, swelling with importance as he spoke. “I never believe more’n ’alf o’ what I hear, and puts no faith in tales, whether master’s or man’s. But by what I can make out—and old Jemmy Judd can see through a stone wall as fer as most folks—I should say as ghosts was at the bottom of the whole kick-up.”

Mrs Stackpoole smiled at the old man’s mode of expressing himself, and then looked anxiously towards her husband, who laughed heartily, and they left the dining-room for the upstairs regions, which he was impatient to explore.

“They fled before ghosts, did they?” said Mr Stackpoole, still laughing at the idea. “If the house is supposed to be haunted I should like it all the better for its reputation,” and he swung open the door of a large, low room, with a deep projecting chimney-place and wide window letting in a flood of sunshine.

“This is certainly a very cheerful aspect,” said his wife, stepping to the window and looking out upon the wild garden enclosed by ragged yew hedges; “there is nothing ghostly about this room, at all events!”

“Pooh! Ghosts indeed! those who believe in them deserve to see them,” said Mr Stackpoole contemptuously. “If we take the house this shall be your morning room; you’ll get plenty of sunshine, which is a great thing for you; and if I like the room under it I will have it done up for a business room for myself.” And they wandered from cellar to attic of the big house, Mr Stackpoole delighted with the possibilities of the place, and noting in his pocket book the dimensions of the chief rooms and of the entrance hall.

“At all events I shall enquire on what terms the place is to be let,” he said, after spending two hours in energetically inspecting the premises, and as he slipped five shillings into Mr Judd’s expectant palm, “By the way, I have not asked who is the landlord?”

“The landlord, sir, be a many and not one,” and the old man named a well-known city Company to which the property belonged.

“I’ve rented from landlords, landladies, and trustees, but never yet from a Company: it’s all one to me, and I’ll see their agent in town to-morrow.” Then Mr Stackpoole took a farewell look at the room on the ground floor, immediately under the cheerful room at the head of the stairs that he has assigned to his wife’s prospective use, and decided that it was exactly adapted to his requirements. After which they threaded their way back to the gates through the neglected maze of the garden.

“And how do you like the look of Harbledon Hall?” he asked his wife as they drove away; “what do you think of the old place?”

“I confess that it does not impress me very favourably, though it is a handsome, well-built house, and might be made very comfortable, no doubt. But it struck me with a kind of chill.”

“So would any place, my dear, that had been shut up for seven years. I feel it in my back now; I wish it may not mean an attack of lumbago for me.” Mrs Stackpoole smiled at the literal interpretation of her words.

“I don’t mean that kind of chill, but a sort of depressed foreboding feeling that I have never had before in any of the houses that you and I have been over together, and their name is legion.”

“Why, Anna, you don’t mean to say that the old sexton has frightened you with his silly gossip! It was merely some nonsense or other he had made up to increase his importance. If I take the place I shall put in an army of workmen at once, and when next you see it, with good fires drying the rooms, windows bright and clean, and painters and paperers at work upon it, it will look very different, I can assure you. Any house that has been uninhabited as long as Harbledon Hall wears a forlorn look, but for all that I see the possibilities of it, and I could make it the prettiest place we have lived in yet.” And Mrs Stackpoole felt certain that her husband would take the old house.

The following day, when Mr Stackpoole saw the Company’s agent, he was surprised at the very moderate rent asked for the house. Whether he wished to take it on lease or as a yearly tenant, the sum demanded was small enough to arouse suspicion in the most unwary.

“Why do you ask such a low rent for a fine old place like that?” he asked.

“It is so much out of repair from standing empty so long, I suppose the Company is willing to submit to a certain loss for the sake of having it inhabited again.” “But with such a tempting low rent, how is it that it has not been taken long ago?”

“There have been any number of applications for it.”

“Indeed! The old fellow in charge of the keys who showed me over the house yesterday said that no one had inquired about it for four years.”

A peculiar expression passed over the agent’s face, but it was not one of surprise. “He said so, did he? I’ve had plenty of enquiries.”

“He certainly said so. He was a talkative old man and anxious to impress us with the idea that Sir Roland Shawe left Harbledon Hall suddenly, some considerable time before his lease was up, in consequence of an absurd notion that the house was haunted. Now, personally, I care nothing about it, but my wife is sometimes nervous, and I thought I would ask you if you know anything of any unusual circumstances connected with his leaving so abruptly.”

“Judd is a chattering old fool! Did he tell you anything definite about it himself?” asked the agent.

“Nothing whatever, but he said some nonsense about ghosts driving them away from the place.”

“Of course there was an absurd story that got about at the time. It was some hocus-pocus about a magic-lantern, I believe, got up by the young fellows to frighten the servants, with pictures of a skeleton on a sheet hung up somewhere or other. The whole thing was a stupid practical joke, only too successful, for the scare spread to the ladies of the house, and of course Sir Roland had to leave; they made the place too hot for him,” and the agent laughed uproariously. “I remember all about it now that you ask me. The young Shawes got up the panic for their own purposes. They found the country too slow for them, they wanted to live in London, so with the simple apparatus of a magic-lantern and a sheet they frightened the family back into town, and got what they wanted. Naturally Sir Roland used not to speak of it when he found it out, for no one is proud of being made a fool of. And now, my dear sir,” he said, with an air of great candour, “you know as much about this childish folly as I do myself. It has been magnified into something wonderful, till we’ve had that tempting property on our hands for all these years in consequence.”

Mr Stackpoole was pleased and amused with the agent’s frank explanation of the basis of Mr Judd’s mysterious allusions, and he and his wife laughed at it together over their dinner in the evening. Mrs Stackpoole was now willing that her husband should take Harbledon Hall, which he did as a yearly tenant, with the right of taking the property on a lease if at the end of three years he felt inclined to prolong his stay.

Then began the delightful bustle that Mr Stackpoole’s soul loved—the drying, warming, painting, lighting, decorating and furnishing of the house, the taming and reclaiming of the garden; the stubbing up of old lawns and laying down of new turf; the cleaning and re-gravelling of weed-grown paths. Such an army of workmen was engaged that Mr Stackpoole calculated that in less than five months the house would be ready to go into, and the gardens be looking clean and bare in their winter tidiness.

“It must be finished by the middle of December,” he said, “that I may keep Christmas here with my family; and if every man has done his work well, and is out of the house by the twelfth of December, I will give each a bonus on his wages and a Christmas supper to you all.”

No wonder that the workmen caught something of Mr Stackpoole’s enthusiasm, and that every time he brought his wife to see what was going on she was astonished with the progress made. All their friends were informed of the lucky find of the old house in Surrey, and invitations were issued long before for a series of entertainments, dances and private theatricals they intended to give at Harbledon Hall in the following January, when their daughter, Mrs Beaumont, and her husband would be staying with her parents.

Shortly before Mr and Mrs Stackpoole removed into Harbledon Hall they were dining out one evening, and after the ladies had left the room and the gentlemen had comfortably rearranged their chairs and were seated at their wine, Mr Stackpoole began on his favourite theme, the furnishing and repairing of the old house. As most of those present had frequently heard him on the same subject before, he was not much heeded, and prosed on without interruption till a tall, bald-headed gentleman opposite to him caught the words Harbledon Hall and at once became an attentive listener.

“Harbledon Hall did you say? Do you mean the old gabled, red brick house, three miles from Mendleton? I hope no friend of yours is thinking of taking it.”

Mr Stackpoole smiled. “Not exactly a friend of mine, though probably I know him better than anyone else. I have taken Harbledon Hall myself, and intend moving into it in December.”

“The deuce you do!” said the bald gentleman setting down his glass.

“I don’t know why it should surprise you,” said Mr Stackpoole.

“Surprise me? Certainly not. Only I thought that the house was empty and likely to remain so.”

“Surely it has stood empty long enough—seven years. It requires an immense deal doing to it, of course, but I took a fancy to the place, and am putting it into thorough repair, introducing the electric light among other modern improvements; in fact I am sparing no expense. Do you know anything about Harbledon Hall?”

“I used to do. Sir Roland Shawe, the last tenant, is my brother,” and the bald-headed gentleman spoke in a dry and uncommunicative manner.

But a hint was not enough for Mr Stackpoole.

“Then you are the very person to tell me about an absurd story I have heard—it had something to do with a magic-lantern, I believe; some kind of scare the young people got up to pretend there were bogies in the house, and frighten their parents back to town, where they preferred to live. You see, I’ve heard all about it, and I only want it corroborated by a member of the family,” and he laughed heartily, as though it were the best joke in the world.

But the gentleman opposite him grew grave to severity and said, “I am unable to understand your allusion to a magic-lantern performance which is supposed to have tried my brother’s nerves, and absurd is the last word applicable to the circumstances under which Sir Roland was compelled to leave Harbledon Hall.”

“Then I must have been misinformed,” replied the undaunted Mr Stackpoole, whose curiosity was now thoroughly aroused. “As I am about to live in the house, will you not tell me the real circumstances, that I may be able to contradict the foolish stories that one hears?”

“Why should it be necessary for you to contradict gossip on the subject? Sir Roland never mentions it. It is possible that some time you may learn for yourself why my brother left the house; then I think you will be satisfied that he acted wisely, and if not, I should be sorry to prejudice you against Harbledon Hall.” And the gentlemen rose to join the ladies, and Mr Stackpoole remained in a state of mystification. Evidently something had happened to drive Sir Roland Shawe and his family from Harbledon Hall, with which neither old Judd nor the agent were acquainted. What could it be? For himself, so long as it was neither rats nor drains, he did not care, but with his wife it was different. If she had an inkling that there was anything uncanny about the house, she would refuse to go into it at the eleventh hour, or, if she went, would make a point of seeing a ghost the very first dark night.

But she must hear no silly talk about it. Any ghosts that former inhabitants of the Hall had imagined they saw was when they went about the house starting at their own shadows by the dim light of oil lamps. The electric light would put all that to rights. It was the best cure for such preposterous folly, and in its illumination Mr Stackpoole felt that he should be more than a match for all the powers of darkness.

But shortly after meeting Sir Roland Shawe’s brother an odd coincidence happened that drew his attention again to the subject of their conversation. Mrs Stackpoole had written to her son at Malta telling him that his father had taken an old house in Surrey with which he had fallen in love, how beautifully he was fitting it up, that they expected to keep Christmas in it, and that it was at Harbledon Hall they hoped to welcome him on his return to England.

In reply Jack wrote,

“So my father is again on the wing. Well, this time I am glad he is taking you to a thoroughly accessible place, and not to Cornwall or Cumberland. But is the old house he has taken a fancy to not far from Mendleton? I suppose there can’t be two Harbledon Halls in the same county, but it is odd if it is the house of that name that I have lately heard something about. There was a young civilian out here for his health—he has gone to Egypt now—and he told me that his uncle, Sir Roland Smith, or some such name, had been fairly driven out of an old house in Surrey by ghosts. I’m sure he called it Harbledon Hall, and he said that his uncle was not in the least a nervous man, but it was more than he could stand, and he had to leave. I wish now that I had asked him all about it, but he was such a dull chap, nothing he said interested me, so I lost the chance of learning particulars. Don’t be timid, dear mother. Let me tackle the bogies when I come home; I should enjoy nothing better.”

Mrs Stackpoole did not like this at all. It produced an eerie and creepy sensation, and her husband took care not to increase her discomfort by telling her of his conversation with Mr Shawe.

“It is odd, my dear, very odd,” he said, in his most cheerful tones; “and we are obliged to admit that, somehow or other, someone or other received some sort of a fright at Harbledon Hall. Nothing can be more vague, yet that is all that is known about it. A pity the whole silly business was not inquired into on the spot, for of course it would admit of a perfectly simple solution. Very likely one of the maids had supped rather more heavily than usual on cold pork, and in a paroxysm of indigestion walked in her sleep; someone saw her in her white night gown, took her for a ghost, and got up a scare—for it is always easier to cry out than to investigate. And there you have the history of a ghost story in a nutshell, my dear—in a nutshell.”

The workmen were punctually out of Harbledon Hall on the day agreed upon, and as punctually received their pay and Christmas supper, and the house was ready for the reception of the new tenant, with the good wishes of all who had helped to prepare it for him. Mr Stackpoole arranged that his family should arrive after dark, that he might surprise his wife with the electric light in every room and passage, and introduce her to her new home under its most cheerful and attractive aspect.

As they approached the house both Mrs Stackpoole and her daughter exclaimed with delight, and Ella said it was too pretty to be real, it was like something on the stage. From every window, from the basement to the garrets, streamed the pure radiance of the electric light, undimmed by curtain or blind, sending shafts of light far into the surrounding darkness. From the porch the white light illumined the drive like a cold sunshine, and showed every pebble on the ground and every twig on the bare boughs.

“There, my dears,” said Mr Stackpoole triumphantly, as he led his wife and daughter into the brilliant hall; “this is how modern science drives away foolish fears of darkness by turning night into day. No one could be nervous or afraid of ghosts in a house like this.”

“No, indeed, the thing would be impossible,” replied Mrs Stackpoole, her daughter, and son-in-law in confident chorus.

Christmas was kept with much festivity at Harbledon Hall, and it was impossible to say who was most delighted with the house—the host or hostess, or the guests under its hospitable roof. Each was charmed with his own room, but Mrs Stackpoole’s morning room was the general favourite, and afternoon tea was frequently taken there in preference to the more stately drawing-room. The grandchildren played in the empty rooms upstairs on rainy days, and every evening watched the miracle of lighting the house with the electric light with breathless interest. They regarded grandpapa as a light-producing wizard, so that something of awe was mingled with their wildest frolics, and they did not dare to open the door of his own particular room, which was respectfully called the study, though its principal use was to smoke in, or to take a quiet nap in before dinner.

It was the end of January, and the Stackpooles were daily congratulating themselves on their good fortune in meeting with a house so perfectly suited to their requirements, when they wound up their festivities with a fancy ball. Several young people were staying in the house for the occasion, who were to depart the day after the ball, leaving their host and hostess for the first time alone in their new home. Numbers of guests were coming from a distance, many of whom had accepted the invitation out of curiosity, as a dance afforded a good opportunity of spending a night under cheerful auspices in a house with the reputation of being haunted.

All their entertainments had so far been successful, but the last was to be the best, and Mr and Mrs Stackpoole threw their whole souls into the preparations to ensure its complete success. The room was charming, the floor perfect, the band that came from town the most renowned of the season. The costumes to be worn were of no special period or country, and the Stackpooles themselves set an example of reckless catholicity in the matter, the hostess being dressed as Queen Elizabeth, and her husband as an Admiral of the Fleet of to-day, while Mr and Mrs Beaumont figured respectively as a Japanese lady and Spanish matador! By the time that the guests had arrived, clad in the garb of all ages and countries, the ballroom appeared to contain such a motley throng as only the Day of Judgment could bring together. Here an ancient Greek danced with a Swedish peasant, and the Black Prince with a female captain of the Salvation Army, and there a clown and a nun waltzed gaily past Mahomet and a ballet-girl.

The electric light was a greater novelty then than it is now, and the guests were loud in their admiration of the fairy-palace appearance of the house as they approached, and of its brilliance within. Mr Stackpoole was as delighted as a child with a new toy, and led his friends about showing them how, by merely turning a button on the wall, he could plunge a room in darkness, or flood it with radiant light.

Dancing was kept up with great spirit till the small hours, and as the clock in the hall chimed a quarter-past three, the old house resounded to the half sad and wholly romantic strains of a waltz by Waldteufel. The guests who came from a distance had begun to depart, and Mr Beaumont stood in the porch laughingly seeing Lady Jane Grey and Flora Macdonald into their carriage. Just then a maid gave a message to one of the footmen for Mrs Beaumont, who sat fanning herself near the door of the ball-room. “If you please, nurse says Master Harry won’t go to sleep till he sees you, ma’am.”

“Tell nurse I will come directly,” and, excusing herself to the lady who sat next to her, she slipped out of the room. In the hall she met her father as he was entering his study.

“I’m going to put this miserable encumbrance by,” he said, smiling and flourishing the Admiral’s cocked hat, which he had gallantly carried the whole evening to his great inconvenience.

“And I am on my way to the nursery to see little Harry,” and Mrs Beaumont ran upstairs, singing softly to the sweet music that came floating from the ball-room below. Mr Stackpoole laid his hat on the table, and looked at the clock on the mantel-piece. “A quarter-past three! I’m tired, and the young people ought to be. Heigh-ho! I’d rather give ten dinners than one dance,” and he sank into a low chair by the fire, yawned profoundly, stretched his legs out before him, and closed his eyes. Sleep fell upon him instantly, and for a few minutes he was lost in its depths, light and sound had ceased to exist for him, his brain was steeped in silent darkness.

Mr Beaumont still stood in the porch; the servants had returned to the house, and he was alone. It was a mild winter’s night. He flung a cloak over his shoulders, and stepped into the open air. “I shan’t be missed for five minutes,” he said to himself, “while I smoke a cigarette,” and he walked briskly along a broad path some thirty yards from the house, from which he had a perfect view of Harbledon Hall. And very pretty its cheerful brightness looked against the dark background of star-set sky. Brilliant rays of light shot from the undraped windows, and those that had the blinds drawn down showed the outline of objects in the room thrown upon them in shadow, as clearly as from a magic-lantern.

Involuntarily, he raised his eyes to the window of Mrs Stackpoole’s sitting-room, and stood rooted to the spot. Two figures as clearly defined as silhouettes were visible on the pure square of the blind—the shadows of an old man and a young man struggling together. From the shape of the heads, George Beaumont saw that they wore wigs, and there was the clearly-cut shadow of the ruffles at the wrists, and the younger and taller man wore a large Steinkirk with laced ends round his neck. At first he thought that they were guests dressed in the costume of the early Georgian period, though how they had gone upstairs into that room, or why there was a deadly struggle between them, he did not know. But wonder and speculation were swallowed up in terrified interest as he watched the course of the brief conflict.

The elder and shorter man, who stooped considerably, appeared to be unarmed, and seized the younger man by the throat, when he shook himself free, stepped quickly back, drew his sword, and, plunging forward on his right foot, ran his opponent through the body. He staggered backward and fell out of sight below the level of the window, and there remained only the shadow of the younger man in clear profile on the blind. He stood for a minute looking down, and George Beaumont had time to observe the finely cut features of a total stranger. Then he wiped the blade of his sword, turned and walked away, and his shadow passed out of sight, leaving the window blind a blank, luminous square.

Indoors at the same time Mr Stackpoole had been waked from his short sleep by a sound in his wife’s sitting-room overhead, and he sprang to his feet with every faculty concentrated in listening. A noise as of chairs pushed back and upset on the polished floor, and a scuffling of feet as though two men were struggling together. Then a moment of silence, a loud stamp, and a heavy fall that seemed to shake the ceiling, followed by deep groans.

“Good God! what can be the matter!” cried Mr Stackpoole, and he rushed out of the room into the hall.

The front door stood open, though the inner glass doors were closed, and neither his son-in-law nor any of the servants were there. He stopped to call nobody, but ran upstairs to his wife’s room as his daughter came downstairs from the storey above with a white and terrified face. “Oh, Papa, someone has just frightened me so, but whoever he is he is in there! I saw him go into Mamma’s room a few minutes ago, and I’m so glad you’ve come, for I dare not follow him,” and without asking her of whom she was speaking, Mr Stackpoole flung the door wide open and rushed into the room. No one was there. Not a chair or table displaced, and the electric light illuminating every corner of the room forbade the possibility of any one being in hiding.

“It is the most extraordinary thing!” he exclaimed, wiping the moisture of terror from his brow as he spoke. “I would not have your mother know of it for the world!”

“Have you seen him too?” said his daughter faintly.

“Seen whom, child? Seen what? No, I’ve seen nothing, but I’ve heard enough to last me my lifetime. God forbid that I should hear it again!” and he looked about the room and under the table, fairly stupefied with amazement.

“He passed me on the stairs just as I came out of the night nursery,” said Mrs Beaumont, anxious to tell her experience without waiting to hear her father’s. “A tall young man ran quickly by me dressed in a blue coat, with ruffles at the wrists and a great laced cravat and a wig tied with ribbon at the back. He carried a long thin sword in his hand. At first I thought it was Arthur Newton, who wore a powdered wig like his this evening, but I remembered his coat was black, and that he left early. When I saw his face it was a stranger’s, and he looked cruel and passionate. I followed him till I saw him go into this room and shut the door after him.”

“Then where the devil is he now?” said Mr Stackpoole. “This is some miserable practical joke, but I’ll get to the bottom of it and be even with them yet—I’ll get to the bottom of it!” and as he spoke the door that he had taken the precaution to close burst open, and his son-in-law entered in his matador’s dress, pale and breathless, as if the bull had turned and given him chase.

“Oh, George, have you seen him too?” said his wife.

“Did you hear anything?” asked Mr Stackpoole. “Sit down, man; you are trembling like a leaf.”

“There were two of them, an old man and a young man, in this room a minute ago! In God’s name, who were they, and why did you not stop them before murder was done?” he said excitedly.

Mr Stackpoole grew quiet and self-collected at the sight of his son-in-law’s agitation. “Pull yourself together, George, and tell me what you mean. There is something up to-night that needs explaining.”

“But where are they? They were in this room, and if you were with them you must have witnessed what happened, or if you only came upstairs this minute, you must have met the young man leaving the room. The old man will never stir again,” and he lifted the tablecloth and looked under the table.

“How come you to speak confidently of who was in this room a few minutes ago, when you were downstairs all the while?” asked Mr Stackpoole.

“I was smoking a cigarette in the garden after seeing the Westons off, walking in the broad path, when I looked up at mamma’s sitting-room window and saw the shadow of two men on the blind, shown up by the electric light as clear and sharp as in a magic-lantern. I saw their profiles perfectly, but I did not know their faces. They wore wigs tied behind, and ruffles at their wrists, and the younger, taller man, as I saw by the shadow, had a laced Steinkirk round his neck. They struggled together, and the old man grasped the young man by the throat. But he tore himself free, drew his sword and ran him through the body, then moved away, and left the blind a blank sheet of white.”

“Good God! and I heard it all in my room below, the struggle and the fall, and deep groans!” said Mr Stackpoole.

“And I met the young man—if it was anything human—he passed me on the stairs!” said his daughter, seizing her father by the arm. “Oh, papa, Harbledon Hall is haunted; people were right about it! Do let us leave this dreadful place to-morrow!” And the concluding notes of the Waldteufel waltz sighed through the house as she spoke.

Mr Stackpoole shook his head. “I don’t know how that is to be done, for your mother must not be frightened. For heaven’s sake try to look as if nothing had happened. We shall be missed downstairs; I’ll go, and you two must manage to bid our guests good-night decently, and not to alarm those who remain till to-morrow. We must rouse no suspicions. George, fetch Ella a glass of champagne, it will do her good.”

“Oh, don’t leave me alone!” cried Mrs Beaumont like a frightened child. “Then I’ll send wine up for you both,” said her father, “and mind, you must follow me directly.”

Mr Stackpoole rejoined his guests, who had not missed him, and had begun the last dance with as much freshness and enjoyment as though it were the first in the evening. At length all the guests had departed except those composing the house party, and the ladies retired, leaving the gentlemen to have a smoke in the billiard-room.

“You don’t look very well, Beaumont,” said a young man dressed as a Tyrolean peasant, as he lit a cigar and looked up at his friend’s pale face.

“It’s nothing, only waltzing makes me giddy,” and he mixed himself some brandy and soda.

One by one the guests bade good-night and left the room, till there remained only Mr Stackpoole, his son-in-law, and Mr Liston, a gentleman with very long legs, wearing tights that displayed them to advantage.

“Did your father-in-law know when he took Harbledon Hall that it was supposed to be haunted?” he said in a low voice to Mr Beaumont. Mr Stackpoole happened to hear the question and replied to it himself.

“We heard some foolish gossip on the subject, for of course no place stands empty so long without legends being invented to account for the fact. But I am not the man to listen to vulgar chatter. I took the house, and have been highly delighted with it.” And Mr Beaumont could only admire his father-in-law’s admirable self-possession.

“Just so, and the electric light is the true cure for the supposed supernatural. Of course you know how suddenly Sir Roland Shawe left the place?”

“O yes, we’ve heard all about that,” said Mr Stackpoole, forcing a laugh.

“Do you know, I doubt whether you have heard all about it; at least if you have, you must be a cheerful sort of person if you can laugh at it,” said Mr Liston.

“Why, of course the whole thing was a foolish practical joke, something connected with a magic-lantern, if I remember rightly.”

“Magic-lantern! I never even heard the word mentioned. No; if you care to hear the truth about it, I think I can tell it you. I’ve lived in the county all my life, and I know the story of Harbledon Hall by heart. I only wonder you don’t. I should not tell it you now if I thought it would make you nervous; but since you’ve put in the electric light, and done up the house in such cheerful modern style, the whole place is changed, and anyone might enjoy living here.”

“Let us hear the story,” said Mr Stackpoole abruptly.

“I see I’ve roused your curiosity. The story goes that some hundred and fifty years ago there lived in this house a certain father and son who hated one another like the devil, and it is needless to say there was a woman in the case and a fortune at stake. The old man must have been an uncommonly bad lot, and he is said to have grossly insulted the young lady his son was about to marry, having in the first instance proposed to her himself and been refused. The two men had a deadly quarrel about it in this very house, and the upshot was that the son, mad with passion, ran his father through the body, and killed him on the spot. There, I shan’t say anything more about it, if it is too much for you,” said Mr Liston, struck by the blanched faces before him.

“Go on, go on,” said Mr Stackpoole.

“Well, one winter’s night, now eight years ago, as Sir Roland Shawe was coming home late, walking across the garden, he looked up at a window on the first floor where a light was burning, and he saw on the blind, in clear outline, the shadows of the old man and his son struggling together, and he saw the young man run his father through the body with his rapier.”

“I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it!” said George Beaumont, pale as death, and looking ready to faint.

“You could but say that if you had seen the grim shadows yourself. It certainly is a horrid story, and though I can’t say that I believe in ghosts myself, I can offer no explication of the details I have given you. Sir Roland believed it, and he was a clear-headed, matter-of-fact sort of person. Other members of his family, too, saw and heard unaccountable sights and sounds that night. One of his sons who was sitting up late for his father, met the shadow of an evil-looking fellow dressed in a blue coat and wearing a powdered tie-wig, hurrying along an upper passage, carrying a naked rapier in his hand. And Lady Shawe was waked by a sound in the room next hers, which was the room where the shadows were seen on the blind—a sound of struggling and upsetting of chairs, followed by a heavy fall and deep groans. Now, if only one person had thought he had heard or seen unaccountable things, Sir Roland would have made the best of it and stayed on at Harbledon Hall; but, by Jove! when three rational beings are each an eye or ear-witness it becomes intolerable. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, you can’t put up with a thing like that!”

“By Heaven, you can’t, that’s true!” said Mr Stackpoole, wiping his moist brow. “And now, Liston, that you have told me this, I’ll tell you something in return. I and my family leave Harbledon Hall to-morrow for the precise reasons that drove Sir Roland Shawe out of it eight years ago.”

“Never!”

“As sure as I’m alive we leave here tomorrow! I must find some reason for our sudden flight, but go we must, and I cannot have my wife alarmed.”

“I would not spend another night in the house for the world!” said Mr Beaumont.

“But, my dear Mr Stackpoole, I hope that nothing that I have said leads you to make this extraordinary resolution. Your imagination is excited by what you have heard; there cannot be any cause why you should leave this charming place that you have just fitted up to your own taste,” said Mr Liston soothingly.

“The story you have told us has only helped to explain what we already know. I tell you that this very night, not a couple of hours ago, in the blaze of the electric light and with the house full of company, Beaumont, my daughter and myself have seen and heard the sights and sounds that drove Sir Roland Shawe out of Harbledon Hall; and we leave to-morrow—or rather to-day, for it is nearly six o’clock now—never to spend another night under this accursed roof!” and Mr Stackpoole’s voice shook as he spoke. “I have only to request,” he added, “that you will treat this communication as confidential, for neither Beaumont nor I shall care to speak or to be spoken to about what has occurred to-night.”

Where was Mr Stackpoole’s intelligent curiosity on the subjects of ghosts, and what had become of his courage? The one had been satisfied and the other daunted, and he had not the slightest desire to remain and investigate the mystery.

At late breakfast Mrs Stackpoole was shocked by the appearance of her family. It would have been difficult to say which was most pale and haggard, her husband, her daughter, or her son-in-law. They made the poor excuse that late hours did not suit them and that dancing knocked them up, and she told them that they looked like young children who had been to their first pantomime the night before. When the last guest was gone Mrs Stackpoole saw that there was something seriously amiss with her husband, and was at a loss to account for his changed humour.

“My dear, we will go up to town with George and Ella,” he said, with quick decision.

“Impossible,” replied his wife calmly. “You, of course, will go if you like to do so, but I really cannot.”

“Oh, do come with us, mamma? You know how much papa wishes it,” said her daughter.

“Yes, do come with us,” urged her son-in-law with unwonted ardour, “it is so long since we met,” forgetting that they had spent the last month together.

Mrs Stackpoole laughed. “There is evidently some deep laid plot among you to hurry me off. Well, if you will be any the happier for my coming with you, I will do so, though it is most inconvenient to leave home in this sudden way,” said the good-tempered lady.

And they travelled up to London that day, never to return to Harbledon Hall. Mr Stackpoole so managed it that his wife did not know the reason for so soon quitting the most delightful house they had ever lived in. He preferred that she should attribute it to his restlessness and caprice, anything rather than that her nerves should be shaken by hearing the truth.

He consulted a fashionable physician, first giving him a hint that he wished to be ordered to the South of France immediately, and the hint being taken he told his long-suffering wife that Dr Blank had recommended him to go at once, and in two days they were en route for Marseilles.

Mrs Stackpoole was used to her husband’s impulsive, angular movements, so that it did not greatly disturb her; but when a week later he said that he had decided to give up Harbledon Hall and to look for a place somewhere in the eastern counties which were as yet untrodden ground, she shed tears of present disappointment and prospective fatigue. When the much enduring lady had dried her eyes and her husband had enumerated to her in detail every reason but the real one for which he was leaving their beautiful home, she said, “My dear, if I did not know better, I should be forced to believe that you too had seen the ghost that frightened Sir Roland Shawe out of Harbledon Hall eight years ago!”

How He Left the Hotel

I used to work the passenger lift in the Empire Hotel, that big block of building in lines of red and white brick like streaky bacon, that stands at the corner of Bath Street. I’d served my time in the army and got my discharge with good conduct stripes, and how I got the job was in this way. The hotel was a big company affair, with a managing committee of retired officers and such like, gentlemen with a bit o’ money in the concern and nothing to do but fidget about it, and my late Colonel was one of ’em. He was as good tempered a man as ever stept when his will wasn’t crossed, and when I asked him for a job, “Mole,” says he, “you’re the very man to work the lift at our big hotel. Soldiers are civil and business-like, and the public like ’em only second best to sailors. We’ve had to give our last man the sack, and you can take his place.”

I liked my work well enough, and my pay, and kept my place a year, and I should have been there still if it hadn’t been for a circumstance—but no more about that just now. Ours was a hydraulic lift. None o’ them ricketty things swung up like a poll-parrot’s cage in a well staircase, that I shouldn’t care to trust my neck to. It ran as smooth as oil, a child might have worked it, and safe as standing on the ground. Instead of being stuck full of advertisements like a’ omnibus, we’d mirrors in it, and the ladies would look at themselves, and pat their hair, and set their mouths when I was taking ’em downstairs drest of an evening. It was a little sitting room with red velvet cushions to sit down on, and you’d nothing to do but get into it, and it ’ud float you up, or float you down, as light as a bird.

All the visitors used the lift one time or another, going up or coming down. Some of them was French, and they called the lift the “assenser,” and good enough for them in their language no doubt, but why the Americans, that can speak English when they choose, and are always finding out ways o’ doing things quicker than other folks, should waste time and breath calling a lift an “elevator,” I can’t make out.

I was in charge of the lift from noon till midnight. By that time the theatre and dining-out folks had come in, and any one returning later walked upstairs, for my day’s work was done. One of the porters worked the lift till I came on duty in the morning, but before twelve there was nothing particular going on, and not much till after two o’clock. Then it was pretty hot work with visitors going up and down constant, and the electric bell ringing you from one floor to another like a house on fire. Then came a quiet spell while dinner was on, and I’d sit down comfortable in the lift and read my paper, only I mightn’t smoke. But nobody else might neither, and I had to ask furren gentlemen to please not to smoke in it, it was against the rule. I hadn’t so often to tell English gentlemen. They’re not like furreners, that seem as if their cigars was glued to their lips.

I always noticed faces as folks got into the lift, for I’ve sharp sight and a good memory, and none of the visitors needed to tell me twice where to take them. I knew them, and I knew their floor as well as they did themselves.

It was in November that Colonel Saxby came to the Empire Hotel. I noticed him particularly because you could see at once that he was a soldier. He was a tall, thin man about fifty, with a hawk nose, keen eyes, and a grey moustache, and walked stiff from a gunshot wound in the knee. But what I noticed most was the scar of a sabre cut across the right side of the face. As he got in the lift to go to his room on the fourth floor, I thought what a difference there is among officers. Colonel Saxby put me in mind of a telegraph post for height and thinness, and my old Colonel was like a barrel in uniform, but a brave soldier and a gentleman all the same. Colonel Saxby’s room was number 210, just opposite the glass door leading to the lift, and every time I stopt on the fourth floor Number 210 stared me in the face.

The Colonel used to go up in the lift every day regular, though he never came down in it, till—but I’m coming to that presently. Sometimes, when we was alone in the lift, he’d speak to me. He asked me in what regiment I’d served, and said he knew the officers in it. But I can’t say he was comfortable to talk to. There was something stand off about him, and he always seemed deep in his own thoughts. He never sat down in the lift. Whether it was empty or full he stood bolt upright, under the lamp, where the light fell on his pale face and scarred cheek.

One day in February I didn’t take the Colonel up in the lift, and as he was regular as clock work, I noticed it, but I supposed he’d gone away for a few days, and I thought no more about it. Whenever I stopt on the fourth floor the door of Number 210 was shut, and as he often left it open, I made sure the Colonel was away. At the end of a week I heard a chambermaid say that Colonel Saxby was ill, so thinks I, that’s why he hadn’t been in the lift lately.

It was a Tuesday night, and I’d had an uncommonly busy time of it. It was one stream of traffic up and down, and so it went on the whole evening.

It was on the stroke of midnight, and I was about to put out the light in the lift, lock the door, and leave the key in the office for the man in the morning, when the electric bell rang out sharp. I looked at the dial, and saw I was wanted on the fourth floor. It struck twelve as I stept into the lift. As I passed the second and third floors I wondered who it was that had rung so late, and thought it must be a stranger that didn’t know the rule of the house. But when I stopt at the fourth floor and flung open the door of the lift, Colonel Saxby was standing there wrapt in his military cloak. His room door was shut behind him, for I read the number on it. I thought he was ill in his bed, and ill enough he looked, but he had his hat on, and what could a man that had been in bed ten days want with going out on a winter midnight? I don’t think he saw me, but when I’d set the lift in motion, I looked at him standing under the lamp, with the shadow of his hat hiding his eyes, and the light full on the lower part of his face that was deadly pale, the scar on his cheek shewing still paler.

“Glad to see you’re better, sir,” but he said nothing, and I didn’t like to look at him again. He stood like a statue with his cloak about him, and I was downright glad when I opened the door for him to step out in the hall. I saluted as he got out, and he went past me towards the door.

“The Colonel wants to go out,” I said to the porter, who stood staring. He opened the front door and Colonel Saxby walked out into the snow.

“That’s a queer go,” said the porter.

“It is,” said I. “I don’t like the Colonel’s looks; he doesn’t seem himself at all. He’s ill enough to be in his bed, and there he is, gone out on a night like this.”

“Anyhow he’s got a famous cloak to keep him warm. I say, supposing he’s gone to a fancy ball and got that cloak on to hide his dress,” said the porter, laughing uneasily. For we both felt queerer than we cared to say, and as we spoke there came a loud ring at the door bell. “No more passengers for me,” I said, and I was really putting the light out this time, when Joe opened the door and two gentlemen entered that I knew at a glance were doctors. One was tall and the other short and stout, and they both came to the lift.

“Sorry, gentlemen, but it’s against the rule for the lift to go up after midnight.”

“Nonsense!” said the stout gentleman, “it’s only just past twelve, and it’s a matter of life and death. Take us up at once to the fourth floor,” and they were in the lift like a shot.

When I opened the door, they went straight to Number 210. A nurse came out to meet them, and the stout doctor said, “No change for the worse, I hope.” And I heard her reply, “The patient died five minutes ago, sir.”

Though I’d no business to speak, that was more than I could stand. I followed the doctors to the door and said, “There’s some mistake here, gentlemen; I took the Colonel down in the lift since the clock struck twelve, and he went out.”

The stout doctor said sharply, “A case of mistaken identity. It was someone else you took for the Colonel.”

“Begging your pardon, gentlemen, it was the Colonel himself, and the night porter that opened the door for him knew him as well as me. He was drest for a night like this, with his military cloak wrapt round him.”

“Step in and see for yourself,” said the nurse. I followed the doctors into the room, and there lay Colonel Saxby looking just as I’d seen him a few minutes before. There he lay, dead as his forefathers, and the great cloak spread over the bed to keep him warm that would feel heat and cold no more.

I never slept that night. I sat up with Joe, expecting every minute to hear the Colonel ring the front door bell. Next day every time the bell for the lift rang sharp and sudden, the sweat broke out on me and I shook again. I felt as bad as I did the first time I was in action. Me and Joe told the manager all about it, and he said we’d been dreaming, but, said he, “Mind you, don’t you talk about it, or the house’ll be empty in a week.”

The Colonel’s coffin was smuggled into the house the next night. Me and the manager, and the undertaker’s men, took it up in the lift, and it lay right across it, and not an inch to spare. They carried it into Number 210, and while I waited for them to come out again, a queer feeling came over me. Then the door opened softly, and six men carried out the long coffin straight across the passage, and set it down with its foot towards the door of the lift, and the manager looked round for me.

“I can’t do it, sir,” I said. “I can’t take the Colonel down again, I took him down at midnight yesterday, and that was enough for me.”

“Push it in!” said the manager, speaking short and sharp, and they ran the coffin into the lift without a sound. The manager got in last, and before he closed the door he said, “Mole, you’ve worked this lift for the last time, it strikes me.” And I had, for I wouldn’t have stayed on at the Empire Hotel after what had happened, not if they’d doubled my wages, and me and the night porter left together.

The Weird of the Walfords

On a summer’s day in the year 1860, I, Humphrey Walford, did a deed for which I should have been disinherited by my father and disowned by my ancestors. I laid sacrilegious hands on the old carved oak four-post family bedstead and destroyed it.

Alone I could not have accomplished the work of destruction. The massive posts, canopy, and panels would have resisted my single efforts; but I compelled two reluctant men to lend me their aid, and by the help of saws and hatchets we reduced the whole structure to billets of wood such as one might kindle a cheerful flame with in the parlour grate on a damp summer evening.

It was a bed with a history to me so unspeakably melancholy that I had resolved when I was my own master I would destroy the gloomy structure, and rid me of the nightmare-like feeling with which the sight of it never failed to inspire me.

The bed itself was upwards of three hundred years old, carved in oak grown on our land, while the heavy dark-green hangings, faded and musty-smelling, dated only from the time of my great-grandfather Walford. I have the dimensions of the huge hearse-like thing by heart. It was ten feet long by eight feet wide, and ten feet high; and when as a small child I was brought to see my young mother die in the recesses of the vast bed, I looked up at its tall posts with something of the awe with which I should now regard the loftiest tree.

For three centuries this bed had been the cradle and grave of our family. Its heavy drapery had deadened the sound of the first cry and the last groan of the generations of Walfords who had been born or died in Walford Grange. In its solemn depths the newly-wedded brides of the family lay the first few nights in their new home, till the wedding festivities were ended, and the squire and his wife began their every-day married life by occupying a less stately but more comfortable bed.

I knew the history of the gloomy old piece of furniture as family tradition had preserved it for three centuries. Ten Squire Walfords had either died in that bed or had lain on it after death awaiting their burial. I was the eleventh squire dating from the epoch of the bed, and I would neither die in it nor be laid upon it after my death. And to make sure of this there was no way but now, in my youth and strength, to fall upon it with hatchet and saw and utterly destroy it.

I did not fear death more than my forefathers, but I resented being bidden by family tradition and custom to die in a given spot. I rebelled at having a definite place assigned to me to lie down in and die—a place so fraught with dismal associations as the ancient, hearse-like bed. I could not endure to think that, wander wide as I would, I must return to this bed of death at last, and here, among stifling pillows and heavy curtains, end my life precisely where it began.

Must this ghastly horror of my childhood be the goal towards which I tend? When I am sailing on mid-ocean, the ship ploughing her way through the furrows of the sea, shall I only be speeding, sooner or later, towards this dismal bed? When I climb mountains and breathe the keen air of the heights, is it but to end in the exclusion of light and air? must every step I take, every journey I make, be but a stage on the road that ends in the stifling pillows of this bed of death? No, a thousand times no, and I brought my axe down on the footboard with a crash.

How vividly both the dead and living who had occupied this ancient bed rose before my mind’s eye! Here had lain Ralph Walford, killed in the Civil Wars, fighting for the king, and his wounded body was brought home and stretched on what had been his bridal bed to await his burial. And here died Squire Ralph’s young widow, who, a short time after her husband’s sad home-coming, gave birth to his posthumous child, and never again left this ill-omened bed till they carried her out feet foremost. Ralph Walford’s brother Heneage, the next Squire, thought to make the old bed festive with gold and crimson hangings, to forget that his brother’s corpse had lain on it, his orphan child been born in it, and his widow died in it, and by the upholsterer’s wit to convert a hearse into a bridal bower.

Brighter times came to our family with the Restoration. We had spent our blood and treasure in the king’s cause, for which he did not suffer us to go unhonoured; for shortly after his joyful restoration his gracious majesty was travelling within ten miles of Walford Grange, and, the weather proving stormy, and there being no other Royalist house of consideration near, he made shift to pass a night under the roof of his faithful servant Heneage Walford.

My father often told me the history of that memorable visit, as it had been handed down from generation to generation. How gracious and witty was the king’s majesty, how merry and light-hearted, as little troubled by the murder of his royal father and the heavy misfortunes of his house as by the brave lives lost and families impoverished in his cause!

Squire Heneage was as loyal a man as ever drew sword for the king, yet he was heard to say that it was a cursed day for him when his gracious majesty honoured him by being his guest, for it turned his wife Mistress Johanna’s head, and she was never again the woman she had been. She grumbled and bemoaned herself that the king had not knighted her husband, so that she might have ruffled it a step above the squirearchy. But one abiding comfort remained with her from the royal visit. And this was that both at coming and going the king had saluted her, and she ever after prettily described the royal manner of kissing, which she affirmed to differ from that practised by ordinary men. Mistress Johanna’s serving woman, Anne Grimshaw, said that the king had saluted her too; but this her mistress would not hear of, and when she appealed to Squire Heneage he set the vexed question at rest by giving his opinion that, judging it as a matter of probability, it was more likely that a vain woman should lie, than that his sacred majesty should kiss Anne Grimshaw, who had a foul face of her own.

If I have somewhat enlarged on the fact of the king’s visit to Walford Grange, it is not so much on account of any tokens of his royal favour that he was pleased to bestow on my ancestors, as because he lay in the best chamber, in the great oak bed with its brave new hangings. But the king was tormented by terrible dreams, and woke in the morning haggard and weary, as though he had been ridden by witches. And that I attributed to a malign influence in the hearse-like bed itself, and with that I crashed into it afresh.

I had long promised myself this fierce destructive joy, when I in my turn should be master of Walford Grange. My father had died in this bed three years ago, and I had been travelling in the south of Europe ever since, urged partly by the restless curiosity of youth, and partly by the belief that no Squire Walford had ever crossed the seas before. Some younger sons and thriftless members of our family, in pursuit of the fortune denied them at home, had ventured into foreign lands, but the head of the house never. My father met any wishes or arguments I advanced on the subject of travel by a statement that seemed to him conclusive—that a man sees enough in his own country that he can’t understand, without going abroad to complete his confusion. But now on my return home I hastened to carry out my design on the hated ancestral bed.

What consternation prevailed in the house when it was understood what I was about, and when I and Gillam the carpenter and his man, having stripped the great bed of its drapery, proceeded to take to pieces the panels of the carved oak canopy! Mrs Barrett, the old housekeeper, stood wiping her honest eyes and bewailing my impiety.

“Don’t ’ee do it, squire, don’t ’ee do it! You may come to know the want of a good feather bed to die in yet! Such a bed as it’s been for lyings in and layings out, and I’d hoped to ha’ seen you laid in it, like your poor father before you.”

What Mrs Barrett’s expectation of life may have been I know not, but she was sixty-five, and I twenty-four years of age.

“My good Barrett, I have determined that this bed shall utterly perish. We will not contribute one more corpse to its greedy maw. But if it be its feathers that you bewail, you are welcome to its pillows to line your nest with, but the bed itself must perish.”

“What, squire, the bed that your great uncle Geoffrey was found dead in, when he’d gone upstairs over-night as well and as hearty as ever man was, and making his ungodly jokes, the Lord forgive him! The very bed as your grandfather lay in two whole years before he died, and all the house heard his groans; and where your Aunt Hester was laid with the water drip, drip, from every limb, just as they brought her in drowned from the brook!”

“Yes, my good Barrett, because of these very things the bed must perish.”

Then Gillam began, as he took off his paper cap and wiped his brow:

“If it’s as the bed don’t seem nateral like to sleep in after so many o’ your kin has laid stiff and stark in it, won’t you sell it, squire, to them as knows nothing of its ways? That there panel with the berried ivy on it is a deal too pretty a bit of carving to make firewood on.”

“No, Gillam, I shall not sell it. The man who would take money for the bed his ancestors died in, would sell their bones to make knife-handles of. Besides, the bed has existed long enough; it has served my family to die in for ten generations. It’s my own property, Gillam; mayn’t I do what I will with my own?”

“Ay, surely, squire; there’s no law to hinder a man making any fool of hisself as he pleases wi’ what’s his own. But I sides with the chap as made the bedstead, and I shouldn’t like to think as in a matter o’ two or three hundred years a bit o’ my work ’ud be chopped up for firing.”

“Be under no uneasiness, Gillam; you and I do not live in an age that produces lasting work. Our glue-and-tintack carpentry is not done with a view to posterity.”

“Well, squire,” continued Gillam, returning to his first idea, “if you won’t sell the bedstead whole nor piecemeal, you might give me them panels with the carved ivy on ’em. I could find you some bits o’ wood as ’ud burn brighter and better.”

“I don’t mind giving you the old ivy carving, Gillam,” I said, “but only on condition that I shall never see anything more of it, in any shape or form.”

“That’s easy promised, sir, and thank you kindly. I’ll make it up into something as’ll surprise itself.”

Having weakly consented to his request, I saw him lay aside two or three beautiful panels, richly carved with branches of berried ivy, as salvage from the general wreck. If the gloomy horrors of the old bed had not eaten into my very heart, I could never have lent a hand at such a work of destruction. I should at least have saved the footboard with its carving in high relief of Adam and Eve under the tree, a man-headed serpent twining round the trunk, and the branches bending beneath their load of fruit. But I could not look at it without thinking of the dying eyes that had fixed their fading gaze on it, so my axe and saw made havoc of a work of art. When the floor was littered over with billets of wood, and the men were wiping their hot faces, I felt a strange lightness of heart, a comfortable sense of work postponed at length happily accomplished.

“Gillam,” I said, “there was timber enough in that huge thing to build a man-of-war, drapery to make her sails, and rope enough for all her rigging.”

“Ay, there was a’most; ” and, hastily throwing his tools into his basket, he added, sarcastically I thought, “there’ll be nothing else I can help you to pull down or to smash up, squire?”

I soon found that my destructive toil had benefited me in more ways than one. Not only had it freed me from an intolerable oppression of spirit, but it had established for me in the neighbourhood a reputation for eccentricity, which I maintained afterwards at the smallest cost, and found of great service. The carrying out of my long-cherished purpose was regarded as evidence of a wild and lawless disposition, bordering on mental derangement. Night after night at the alehouse Gillam recounted to a breathless audience the story of the scene of destruction at which he had assisted professionally. And it grew in the telling till, without the slightest intention of lying, he added that the squire’s rage against the old place was such, that he had been obliged to menace him with the screwdriver to keep him from tearing down the mantelshelf and wainscot.

I was evidently a man whom it was not wise to thwart or contradict. My servants flew at my least word with an alacrity I had not before observed. My bidding was promptly done, my orders were not disputed, and whatever I said was agreed to with servility. While enjoying the sweets of mental health, as my neighbours voted me on such insufficient grounds on the borderland of insanity, I availed myself of the liberty it gave me to speak and act as I chose. Their hasty judgment had made me free of the wide domain of conduct. There was nothing I could do, however extravagant, but was clearly shadowed forth in the destruction of the ancestral oak bed.

I began to grow lonely in Walford Grange. My good Barrett died suddenly, and in my solitude I wanted someone to sit and talk with me in the long evenings, for even the bright wood fire flickering on the hearth could not satisfy all my desires for cheerful companionship. I should not have wished to marry if I had had a brother to live with me, to share my thoughts and occupations, and who would himself marry and preserve the name. But I was the last of the family, and I did not mean to let an ancient race die out.

I began seriously to think of marrying, though whom, I had not an idea, for so far I had not seen the woman I should care to marry, nor could I suppose that anyone looked with an eye of favour upon me. But when a man makes up his mind to marry, and sets out on his travels by land and sea, resolved never to return to his home till he brings a wife with him, it would be hard if he could not effect his purpose.

It happened that I met with my wife unexpectedly, and where I should have thought I was least likely to meet her—in a log house in the far west of America. Her name was Grace Calvert, and she was only eighteen years old, fair and fresh as an unfolding flower, and full of the high spirits and delight of life suited to her age and her free and simple bringing up. I fell in love with her at first sight, and we were married after a short courtship, for I had obtained the object of my travel, and my little wife was wild with curiosity and impatience to see England. She had a most romantic conception of the land of her forefathers, and delighted me by her belief that every village in England contained a church, vast and venerable as Westminster Abbey, and was engirt with hills crowned by frowning fortresses.

Grace had never seen houses built either of brick or stone, and had I not been able to show her a photograph of Walford Grange, it would have been impossible to give her any idea of an object so strange that there was nothing within the narrow limits of her experience with which to compare it. Her imagination was greatly stirred by the picture of the old house. Not a detail escaped her, from the fluted chimneys to the stone seats in the wide porch. The oriel windows, with their diamond panes, pleased my young wife more than anything, and especially she admired the broad windows of the best bed-chamber, in which some two years before I had wrought my destructive will on the ancestral bed. The room was now bare and stripped of furniture, and since Mrs Barrett’s death I had kept it constantly locked.

Grace was fascinated with the position of the room, with its large window over the porch, looking down the avenue of limes by which the house was approached, to the open country, and the line of low hills that bounded the horizon.

“That room must be lighter than those on the ground floor,” she said, “see how the upper story projects and throws a shadow over the lower rooms. We will make it our sitting-room, will we not?”

The request gave me a strange sinking of heart, and I felt that not even the society of my young wife could induce me to live in the room that had so long contained the hearse-like bed. I temporised with her in a vague manner, neither granting nor denying her request. I begged her to wait till she could see for herself how much better adapted to the comfort of daily life were the rooms on the ground-floor than those on the upper story. In all her short life, Grace had not been further than twenty miles from the spot where she was born, and I feared lest taking her away from all she loved, and from everything with which she was familiar, might prove too keen a pain.

There was a brief tempest of tears at parting with the dear ones she was never to meet again, but it was an April shower succeeded by smiles. Each outburst of weeping was of shorter duration, and the sunny intervals between them were longer, till in a few days Grace was her bright self again. The excitement of the journey was so overwhelming as to swallow up every other feeling.

We reached our home one November afternoon, as the setting sun looked out through a rift in the clouds, and his level beams lighted up every casement with a red glow. As we drove up the leafless avenue, heavy drops fell from the bare boughs overhead, and Grace, clinging to my arm, said in a frightened whisper—

“O Humphrey, that light in the window is not like sunshine! It looks as if your old house was on fire!” and raising my eyes I caught for one moment the full effect of the illusion. But, the sun sinking into his bed of cloud, the red glow faded from the windows and left them dark and dim. “Welcome, my darling, to your English home!” I said, and I took my little wife by the hand and led her up the wide oak staircase; and before we sat down to our evening meal I had taken her over the house from garret to basement, preceding her, candle in hand, through the darkening rooms.

She expressed unbounded admiration for the house and its furniture, but the old family portraits and pictures excited her utmost enthusiasm, for Grace had never seen anything more venerable or older than her grandparents and the log house in which she was born. When her raptures had toned down sufficiently to allow her to eat a little, and we were seated at supper in the oak parlour, my little wife suddenly said:

“Humphrey, there ought to be a ghost in a house like this.”

“Why should there be?” I asked, while I smiled at her extreme gravity.

“Because so many generations of men and women cannot have been born and died in this house without leaving some trace of themselves for us who come after;” and I saw that works of fiction had penetrated into the far west, for Grace had certainly been reading romances.

“I object to talking about ghosts at supper,” I said; “breakfast is the best time for such conversation, and not a word should be uttered on the subject later than twelve o’clock at noon; ” and I rose, and taking one of the candles with me, and holding it so as to throw the light on a dark painting over the mantelshelf, I asked—

“Do you know who that is?”

My little wife looked earnestly at the portrait, with her head inclined dubiously, and with a puzzled expression of face.

“I am not surprised that you do not know who that dark sinister-looking man is, for the backwoods of America are not hung with portraits of Charles the Second. Yes, that is King Charles; and the melancholy cast of his features must be merely an inherited expression—certainly nothing in his nature answered to it—for he passed through grief and tragedy with a light heart. He once spent a night in this very house; we have the tradition of his visit, with many quaint details, preserved to this day.”

“Oh how wonderful to think of it!” said Grace eagerly; “and would the king sup in this very room where you and I are now?”

“Yes, in this very room, and would you like to know what he had for supper?”

“No, that is not the kind of thing that makes me curious. I want to know how the king looked, how he was dressed, and in which of those solemn-looking old bedrooms upstairs he slept. No doubt you still have the bed the king slept in?”

“No,” I replied with decision, “that I am sure we have not.”

“Then to-morrow, Humphrey, you will show me the room the king slept in, and the bed I can imagine for myself.”

The bed she could imagine for herself! My little wife did not know what she was talking about. The next day the event occurred which might have been expected. I was walking in the garden, when Grace came to me, and slipping her hand through my arm, drew me towards the porch.

“You see that large window,” she said, pointing towards it as she spoke; “that is the one I admired so much in the picture of the house. I have looked out of every window but that, and I fancy the room must be locked, for I cannot open it, so I have fetched you to unlock it for me.”

I walked in silence by her side while she led me into the house and upstairs to the door of the hated room, talking with so much animation herself that she did not notice that I had not spoken a word.

“This is the room,” she said gaily, and she turned the latch of the door to and fro, saying as she did so, “You see it is locked.”

“I know it is,” I said sullenly.

“Then fetch the key and open it,” and Grace gave the door-handle a little impetuous shake.

“My dearest, don’t ask me again to open that door, for I shall not do it.”

“Not do what I ask you to do? How cruel of you!” and her eyes filled with tears.

I knew that my young wife thought me brutal, but I could only say “Anything else in my power I will do for you, only this one thing, this one little thing, I beg you will not ask me to do.”

“If you admit that it is such a very small thing, there can be no reason why you should refuse to grant me such a trivial request,” persisted Grace; “when I ask you simply to unlock a door in your own house, and you refuse to do it, I can only think that you do not love me, or else that there is some horrid mystery about the room that you wish to keep hidden from me; ” and she wiped away a hasty tear, that proceeded rather from indignation than from grief.

“My dear Grace, do not let us be tragic about nothing. There is no secret connected with this room that I have ever heard of, and I love you so much that I cannot bear to see you troubling yourself with absurd imaginations. The fact is this. I have a feeling—call it superstition, what you will—but I have a feeling that would make it very painful to me to open this door and take you into the room. And what pleasure could there be in seeing a bare, unfurnished room, precisely like any other empty room?”

“But I should set about furnishing it at once.”

“Let us come away,” I said, gently removing her dear obstinate hand from the lock. “I repeat, I have a feeling about that room that would prevent my ever being happy in it,” and, I added lightly, “Don’t let my Eve spoil our paradise by longing after the forbidden fruit.”

But Grace said quickly, “It was not Adam who forbade Eve to eat of the fruit. If it had been, I can’t see that there would have been any great harm in disobeying him.” And we said no more about the locked door, but a cloud had come between us, and the unalloyed sweetness of our first happiness was lost.

One day, a few weeks after this folly, when I was beginning to hope that my little wife had forgotten her curiosity, I saw from her constrained and uneasy manner that something had happened to disturb her.

“My dear Grace, you certainly are not happy this morning—will you not tell me what ails you?” I asked.

Her voice trembled and her face flushed as she replied. “Humphrey, I did not think you could tell me an untruth.”

“My child, what do you mean? We are playing at cross purposes. Be so good as to explain your meaning, that we may not misunderstand each other for a moment.”

“You told me that the big bedroom you keep locked was empty.”

“So it is,” I said, growing impatient at this childish scene, “but what is the untruth I have told you?”

“Why, the room is not empty. I can prove what I say.”

“The room not empty! Nonsense! I keep the key, and none but myself has entered it these two years.”

“How can you persist in such an untruth, Humphrey? I am not ashamed to confess that I looked through the keyhole—I wonder I did not do it before—and I saw in the middle of the room, between the door and the window, an enormous old bed. I could only see the two foot-posts, but they went up to the ceiling, and the footboard was high and richly carved, and the curtains a gloomy, dark green. So you have deceived me about the room, and I am afraid there is some secret connected with it that you dare not tell me. What ails you, Humphrey?” and my wife rose with a terrified exclamation, for I thought I was fainting, and all the life seemed to have gone out of the air.

“Grace,” I said, when I had shaken off the sense of oppression, “let us go at once to that unlucky room, and settle this preposterous dispute. You say that the room has furniture in it—I say that it is empty. We will see which of us is right, and then we will never mention the subject again; ” and I asked my wife to come with me and assure herself that the room was, as I said, absolutely bare and unfurnished.

My hand shook as I turned the key, and, flinging the door open till it strained on its hinges, we entered the room together.

Grace shrank back with a low cry, and covered her face with her hands.

“Where is it gone to, the great bed that I saw standing on this very spot? I cannot have been deceived. O Humphrey! why do you play me such cruel tricks? You terrify me.”

“My little wife,” I said, assuming an air of cheerfulness I was far from feeling, “this comes of what I must call your overweening curiosity. If my dear girl had been content to let me keep this door locked, she would not have grown so curious that her little brain is almost turned, and she has taken to seeing housewifely spectral illusions of domestic furniture. Depend upon it, what you think you saw was nothing but the creature of your own imagination, that has dwelt so long on the idea of furnishing the room that you have only to peep through the keyhole, and, hey, presto! the thing is done, and beds and tables start forward at your bidding. But hence-forward you can enter the room as often as you like, only we will not live in it, and I will not have it furnished.”

This appeared to satisfy Grace, and though I could not fully persuade her that the great bed she had seen when she peeped through the keyhole was an illusion begotten of curiosity and a lively imagination, yet with the door of the room unlocked, she felt that she had some control over any tricks I might play her in the future.

I was deeply disturbed by what she had told me. I had not breathed a word to my wife about the destruction of the ancestral bed. Mrs Barrett was dead before we were married, and I had changed my servants since her death, and, as we saw nothing of our neighbours, Grace could not have heard from anyone of the ghastly old bed, which nevertheless she had accurately described to me.

I could never tell her the truth now. It would shake her nerves, and impress her with the idea that there was something weird about the house. I wished I had not destroyed the old bed. Better far that she should have known the gloomy reality than behold a presentment of it that was neither an embodiment of memory nor a vivid picturing of it from imagination. I tried if I could summon up a like hallucination, but in vain. Though my memory of the ancient bed was perfect, and every detail stamped on my mind, never could I call it up before my external vision, however earnestly I tried to do so.

Grace completely regained her accustomed cheerfulness, and in the spring was busy making a thousand little preparations for the expected arrival of an infant, which was to surpass any yet born into this world. I could hardly believe the gentle obstinacy of my wife, when, after all I had said about the empty room, she asked one day if she might not make it into a nursery.

“Do you not remember, dear, that I said we would not furnish that room?” I said.

“Oh, of course, not furnish it; a nursery needs no furniture; but it is much the most cheerful and sunny room in the house.”

And again I had to appear inhuman and refuse my little wife a trivial request.

One morning as I sat in my room busy with my accounts, Grace came to tell me that she was going to drive to the county town, some eight miles distant, for a round of shopping, such as her soul loved. I said that if she would wait till the next day I should be able to take her myself, but she tapped the barometer on the wall, that had stood for sometime at “set fair,” and assured me it would rain to-morrow, and that she must avail herself of the fine weather to-day. So away drove my self-willed darling, nodding a gay farewell as the carriage drove away from the house.

Grace returned late in the afternoon in the best of spirits, bringing with her an enormous package, such as none but a country woman, or one, like my little wife from the far west, would dream of bringing with her in an open carriage. It must have broken the coachman’s heart to drive with it through the streets of the county town.

“What in the name of wonder have you brought home with you?” I asked.

“Ah!” she said, laughing, “it is a trial for your curiosity now! Anything else you may ask me I will tell you, only I cannot let you know anything about this mysterious package.” “Then have it put out of sight,” I said, “or depend upon it I shall find some hole in the wrapper to peep through. You ought to know what a devouring passion curiosity is.”

As the unwieldy bundle was carried upstairs, its cover slipped aside and revealed a pair of black oak rockers. But I said nothing; Grace should tell me her little secret in her own way, and at her own time.

We thought ourselves the happiest creatures in the world when our little son Heneage was born. The gloom that brooded over the house from the death of many generations was lessened by the joy of birth, and my young son’s life was like the sprouting acorn that sends up its vigorous shoot through the earth, fed by the fallen leaves of a hundred autumns. On the third day of our happiness my wife sent for me, and told me she had a very pretty surprise for me.

“I can tell you all about the big mysterious package now. It was a beautiful old-fashioned cradle that I bought in Carlyon from a man called Gillam, who keeps an old furniture shop here. I fell in love with it at once, for I knew how well it would suit this house with its old oak. Gillam said he could swear it was old work; in fact, he said it was originally part of a fine old bedstead a poor mad gentleman in the neighbourhood actually destroyed in a fit of frenzy, but he was lucky enough to secure a portion of the wreck, and made it up into that cradle, and baby looks lovely in it. I’m afraid I gave a great deal of money for it, but one does not meet with such a beautiful thing every day:” and the nurse removed a screen from before the cradle, that its beauties might burst upon me suddenly and with the more effect.

Cold drops stood on my brow as I recognised, in the high sides and head of the cradle, the carving of ivy branches and berries I had so madly given Gillam when I destroyed the old bed.

“I thought you would have been so pleased,” said Grace, disappointed by my silence as I stood spell-bound, my eyes following every line of the hated carving. “I thought you would have been so pleased to see baby in a cradle really worthy of him.”

But I could not speak; I was oppressed by a sense of coming doom.

“It is very unkind of you,” said Grace. “I had prepared a pretty surprise for you, and instead of being pleased, you stand and sigh and look as if you saw a ghost. Nurse, take baby out of his lovely cradle; we must get him a common wicker thing to lie in instead!”

And the nurse did as her mistress bade her, and lifted little Heneage from his cradle of death, for while we talked the child had slept his feeble life away.

I have no memory of what happened day by day during the few weeks following. It was one consuming fear lest my wife too should die. Six weeks after our child’s death I carried her downstairs, and this was the only progress made towards recovery. She remained at the same stage of convalescence, made wayward by grief, with shattered nerves, and so weak in mind and body that I dared not thwart her in anything. As the dim, sunless days of autumn drew on, my little wife said to me as though we had never spoken on the subject before—

“I want the big empty room furnished for my sitting-room, Humphrey. I shall have a little sunshine there sometimes to cheer me in your dismal English winter, and it will amuse me to furnish it.”

As I looked at her white wistful face, I felt that nothing mattered to me now, and I said, “Do exactly as you like, dear, in everything,” and she was too listless to thank me.

But the work of transforming the sombre room into a bright boudoir proceeded rapidly, for Grace said with a shudder, “I will have no more old oak furniture.”

My little wife always went to extremes, and now, in her antipathy to old oak, she filled the room with tawdry chips of furniture, chairs made of gilded match-sticks tied together with ribbons, that must sink into feeble ruins if a cat so much as jumped on them.

I entered into all her little fancies, and feigned excessive admiration of each fresh idea she had on the subject of decoration. I did her bidding, even to placing her couch on the very spot where the hated bed had stood. Thus was my resistance broken down, and I, who three years ago had tried by sheer physical force to thwart destiny, was now unconsciously working to bring about its fulfilment. It did not tarry long.

One gloomy November afternoon, Grace lay on her couch covered with soft shawls, and the window curtains were drawn back to give as much light as possible. The glow of the setting sun illuminated the room, and lent a more living hue to the grey pallor of her face. “How like the day when I first came to Walford Grange!” she said; “the sun is setting with the same fiery light. Do go into the garden, Humphrey, and see if the windows are aglow with red light as they were then.”

And I left her to do as she asked me.

Seen from the garden, the house looked precisely as it had done on the day of our homecoming. From garret to basement every window glowed red in the light of the setting sun, as though from fire within. Everything that my eyes rested on was as it had been a year ago. Grace and I only were changed—changed in ourselves and changed to each other. I felt impatient of the changeless aspect of nature and of inanimate things around me, and I entered the house, now dark in contrast with the twilight without, and returned to my wife’s room with a heavy heart.

“The house looks as it did when you first saw it,” I said. “Till the sun sank behind the hill, the windows were lighted up with the same strange effect of fire that you noticed a year ago,” and I threw a fresh log on the embers as I spoke, sending a bright train of sparks up the wide chimney. “Shall I light the candles?” I asked, turning towards my wife’s couch; “the room is growing dark.” But there was no reply. I was speaking to the dead.

In vain I had baulked the old bed of its prey, for there on the very spot where it had stood for three centuries and generations of my ancestors had died, the wife of the last of the Walfords lay dead.

I buried my sweet Grace by our little son, and on the night of the funeral, alone in my desolate home, I conceived the idea of freeing myself for ever from the horror of darkness that had fallen on Walford Grange. I sent every servant away. I would have the house and my sorrow to myself.

When I was assured that I was alone in the house, I went rapidly from room to room in a strange exultation, speaking aloud and flinging open doors and windows till the cold night air rushed through chambers and passages, and curtains and hangings flapped in the wind.

“When I destroyed the old bed of death,” I said, “I thought to restore joy and brightness to Walford Grange. But I should have destroyed not it alone, but the room in which it stood, and the very house of which it formed a part. Never more shall man dwell in this house glutted with death. Never more shall the voice of the bride and bridegroom be heard in its chambers, or footsteps of children be heard on its stairs. Never more shall fire, subdued to harmless household use be kindled on its hearth, but fire untamed in its ferocity shall devour the accursed pile.” And I seized the burning log from the hearth and threw it on the couch where Grace had died.

Carrying a lighted brand, I sped from room to room of the doomed house, leaving in each a fiery token of my presence, and then, descending the wide staircase, where flickering shadows were cast from every open, door, and the silence was broken by the crackling sound of flames, I let myself out into the darkness, closing the heavy door behind me with a crash.

On through the cold damp air I ran, the moon through a rift in the clouds guiding me by her fitful light, till, drawing her shroud around her, she left me again in darkness. Not once did I turn to right or left or look behind me till I had gained the summit of the hills that bounded the valley. Then I stood and turned to take a last look at the home of my fathers. Just then the moon, issuing forth in cold splendour from her bed of cloud, shed a solemn lustre far and wide. And I saw for the last time the house of my birth, the cradle and grave of my race, and every window from basement to garret glowed with fire, no mere reflected glare, but red from the raging fire within, and keen flames darted from the casement of the room above the porch.

I stood long to watch the fire of my own kindling, till when a sudden burst of light and leaping splendour of flame showed me that the gabled roof had fallen in, I shouted, took off my hat, and waved a last farewell to Walford Grange.

The Uncanny Bairn

(A STORY OF THE SECOND SIGHT)

David Galbraith owned a compact estate in East Lothian which he farmed at a considerable profit. The land had passed from father to son for a couple of hundred years. It had always yielded a good livelihood to the owner, but never had it been so highly cultivated or produced such abundant crops as under David Galbraith’s liberal and skilful management. The oats and potatoes grown on his farm commanded the highest prices in the market, and his root crops were superior to any in the district. The large, solidly built stone house in which generations of Galbraiths had lived and died stood in the midst of the property, sheltered by a belt of trees on rising ground from the sweeping east wind. And the labourers’ cottages, equally well constructed to resist the gales that blew across the Frith of Forth, were models of decent comfort. The live stock on the farm was well fed and cared for. The whole property bore evidence to the wealth, thrift, and intelligence of its owner.

And David Galbraith’s wife was well-to-do and thrifty like himself. She too was the child of a Lowland landowner and farmer, and brought her husband no inconsiderable tocher [dowry?], while her industry and housewifely accomplishments might in themselves have served as a marriage portion. She too, like her husband, came of a douce Presbyterian stock, worthy, upright folk, holding by the faith and practice of their forbears; orthodox and thrifty, worshipping as their fathers had done, and hauding the gear as tightly, nothing doubting but that to them was especially assigned not only the good things of this world, but also of that which is to come.

Galbraith did not marry till he was a middle-aged man. But he had long had the cares of a family on his shoulders without its pleasures to lighten the burden. He was the eldest of six orphan sisters and brothers, to whom he had acted the part of a father. And it was not till Colin, the last and youngest, had left Scotland for a sheep run in Australia, with money lent him by his brother, that he felt himself at liberty to marry. But now that his pious duty towards his family was fulfilled, David Galbraith did not hesitate to take to himself a wife in the person of Miss Alison McGilivray, a lady of some five-and-thirty years of age, with large hands and feet, small grey eyes, high cheek bones, and a complexion betokening exposure to a harsh climate. She was well educated and intelligent, and in talking with her servants and poor neighbours, commonly fell into the comfortable Lowland Scotch that her father and mother had taken a pride in speaking.

Only one child was born to David and his wife in the ample home where there was space, maintenance, and welcome for a dozen. Yet this one was a son, and the Galbraiths were not doomed to die out. The boy was christened Alexander, after his two grandfathers, both of whom were Alexanders, so that there was no chance of dispute as to which side of the house should have the naming of the child.

And a poor, wee, frail child he was, apparently inheriting nothing of the strength and vigour of the Galbraiths and McGilivrays, nor did he resemble father or mother in feature. He seemed a little foreigner that had come to stay with them for awhile, and often in his feeble infancy he bade fair to depart and leave his parents childless. The shrewd bracing winds, that were life and health to them, nipped and shrivelled him. He took every ailment that was to be had, and when there was nothing catching in the neighbourhood, he would originate some illness of his own, severe enough to have shaken the constitution of any but a seasoned weakling like himself. The Lowland farmer would hangover the cradle of his waxen-faced baby, holding his breath for very fear as he looked at the puny thing, and would say, dropping into broad Scotch, as his wont was when strongly moved, “Wha wad ken this for a bairn o’ mine, sae strang and bonny and weel set up as the Galbraiths have aye been?”

But the babe won through the troubles and perils of his sickly infancy, and at six years of age had grown into a delicate slip of a child, with an interesting pair of grey eyes in his pale face, and a bright spark of intellect in his big head. The family doctor, to whose unceasing care Sandie owed his life almost as much as to his mother’s devoted nursing, forbade his parents to attempt anything in the way of systematic education till the boy was eight or nine years of age.

“Canna ye be content to let weel alane,” he would say, “and bide till the bairn’s strang and healthy before ye trouble him to read and write? Gin ye set his brains ableeze wi’ letters and figures, ye’ll just be burnin’ down the house that’s meant to be the habitation of a fine soul; gin ye wad haud your hands aff it, and leave it alane!”

And little Sandie did very well, though unable to read or write till long after the age at which the children of his father’s labourers could spell out a psalm, and sign their names in a big round hand. But the child had a memory such as must have been commoner in the world before there were books to refer to at every turn than it is now, and his mind was stored with fairy tales and old border ballads that his mother and his nurse told or sung to him in the winter evenings.

But Mrs Galbraith and Effie were careful never to tell him stories of a weird or ghostly nature, for the doctor had impressed upon them before all things that Sandie must never be frightened. “For gin the bairn be frighted he will na sleep,” said the astute mistress to the maid, “and ye’ll just ha’e to sit the lang mirk evenings by his bed, while ye hear the maids daffin’ by candlelicht below, or walking wi’ their laddies; but gin ye never let him hear o’ ghaists and wraiths, he’ll just sleep like a bird wi’ its head under its wing, and whiles ye’ll be able to leave him and hae a crack wi’ your neebors like ony ither body!”

Though mother and nurse, actuated by different but equally strong motives, kept all knowledge of the supernatural from the child, there came a day when his father accused them both of poisoning his mind with stories of witches, warlocks and ghosts, and making an uncanny bairn of the boy.

When Sandie was seven years of age, a lean and overgrown child without his front teeth, and any comeliness he might possess existed only in his mother’s eyes, a strange circumstance happened that greatly perplexed and distressed his parents. One cold afternoon late in October Mrs Galbraith told Effie to take a pudding and a can of broth to an old and very poor woman, called Elspeth McFie, who lived in a lone cottage a mile from the farm, and Sandie was to go with her for the sake of the walk. The trees were already stripped by the autumn gales, to which a dead calm succeeded, and a cold fog had crept up from the sea and brooded over the bare fields, settling on the naked boughs in chilly drops of moisture. The careful mother wrapped a plaid round the boy, and bade him run as he went, to keep himself warm. Away sped Sandie along the high road, driving a ball before him, running after it to send it flying again with a dexterous blow of his stick, till his pale cheeks glowed with exercise, and he overshot his mark, ran past old Elspeth’s cottage, and had to be recalled by Effie.

“Ye maun pit the basket in her hand your ain sel’,” she said, as she led the reluctant child into the dark close room where the old woman sat shivering by the fire, spreading her skinny hands over the dying embers. But Sandie held back, and neither threatening nor coaxing would induce him to move a step nearer to Elspeth, so that, stigmatising him as “a dour limb,” Effie was obliged to set the basket on the table herself.

“It’s just a pudding and a few broth that Mistress Galbraith has sent ye, for she’s aye mindfu’ o’ the puir,” she said, as she set out the can and bowl before the old woman. Elspeth looked with a bitter smile at the good things spread before her.

“It’s a’ verra gude sae far as it gaes, but gin I’d been the rich body, and Mistress Galbraith the puir carline, I wad hae sent her a mutchkin o’ something stronger than mutton broth. Does she no warm her ain thrapple wi’ a drap whusky hersel’?”

“For shame, Elspeth! Ye maun just tak’ what’s sent ye and be thankfu’!” said Effie sharply; and turning to Sandie, who stood gazing intently at the old woman, “What ails the bairn that he canna tak’ his eyes aff your face? It’s no your beauty, I’m thinking Elspeth, that draws him sae!”

The ill-favoured old woman cackled to herself, displaying a few yellow tusks, the last survivors of a set of teeth that had once been as white and strong as Effie’s.

“It’s lang since manor bairn looked at auld Elspeth wi’ sic a gaze. What does the bairn see in an auld wife’s face? Ye suld look at the lasses, Sandie, lad,” and Elspeth stretched out her lean arm, caught the boy by the wrist, and drew him towards her. She was a hideous old woman, and in the gathering twilight, when the red glare of the embers shed a glow on her harsh features, she appeared positively witch-like. Sandie suffered himself to be drawn close to her as one who walks in his sleep, with wide open eyes void of expression, and then stood opposite her for a moment pale and silent. Before either of the women could speak, the child’s voice was heard.

“What for ha’e ye bawbees on your een, Elspeth McFie, and a white claith lappit under your chin?”

Old Elspeth dropped Sandie’s hand and sank back with a groan.

“Effie, Effie, hark till him! The bairn has the second sight, and he sees me stricket for the grave, aye, and ye’ll all see it sune! I feel the mouls upon me a’ready! Tak’ him awa’, tak’ him awa’, he’s an awesome bairn!” and Sandie quietly put on his cap and went out into the cold mist. Effie followed him, and relieved her fright and agitation by speaking sharply to the child.

“For shame of yoursel’, Sandie, to fright an old woman wi’ gruesome words that ye never heard from your mither nor me!”

“But what for suld Elspeth be frighted? There were bawbees on her een, and a white claith round her heid, and I just tauld her aboot it; and gin I see the like of it on your face, Effie, I will tell ye!”

“My certie! but ye’ll be burnt for a warlock gin ye read folks’ deaths on their faces, and ye’d best haud your clavers!” and Effie said no more, but thought much on her way back to the farm. She was sure that Sandie did not know the meaning of his own words. He had never seen a dead body, and he did not know how a corpse is prepared for the grave, and he certainly had no information on the subject from books, for he could not read. And the appearance he described on old Elspeth’s face did not seem to frighten him. He had gazed at her from the moment in which they entered the cottage till they left it, but with wonder and interest rather than fear. The fright was for Elspeth McFie and herself, and as she watched the child, unconscious of the death wound he had given, bounding along the road still playing with his ball and stick, Effie shuddered with vague and nameless fears.

That night at supper Effie told her fellow-servants of Sandie’s weird words, and they took counsel together whether his mother should be told about it or not, and they decided only to speak to her if anything untoward happened to old Elspeth. It was on Thursday that Effie had been sent to Elspeth McFie’s cottage, and she resolved to go there again on her own account on the following Sunday afternoon. Her native superstitions were strong upon her, though she had never imparted them to her young charge and she drew near to Elspeth’s cottage with a boding heart. It scarcely surprised her when she entered to find old Elspeth lying dead on the bed, with coins on her eyes and a white cloth bound round her head, precisely as Sandy had seen her on Thursday.

Two women were in the room with the dead, eager to tell how Elspeth had taken to her bed on Thursday evening, refused bit or sup, and had died early that morning. Effie trembled, but merely asked of what old Elspeth had died, for three days before she seemed in no likelihood of death. But the only account the women could give of her sudden death was that she appeared to have had no illness at all, and that she had said, “I’m no a sick woman, but a dying, and I maun gae!”

Effie hastened home to tell her mistress everything, repeating faithfully every word that old Elspeth and Sandie had said on the previous Thursday. And Mrs Galbraith listened with a white and awe-struck face.

“Ye’ll just say naething about it, Effie; it’ll be a sair prejudice against the poor bairn, and stand in his way, gin folks think Sandie has the second sight.” And Effie did not think it necessary to mention that every servant in the house was acquainted with the result of her visit to old Elspeth’s cottage. But she hinted that if she continued to wait on such an awesome bairn, that might see the death tokens on her face any day, and fright her into an early grave, her wages should be raised in proportion to the danger of her service.

When Mrs Galbraith told her husband of Sandie’s ghastly remark, its tragic result, and the child’s unconsciousness in the matter, he disguised the fears that possessed him beneath a bluster of wrath, and rated her and Effie soundly.

“It stands to reason that the bairn canna speak o’ what he does na ken, and you and Effie, but mair likely Effie than you—for I was used to think you a woman of sense—hae been telling Sandie auld wives’ tales about the second sight, till he thinks it a fine thing to practice what ye’ve taught him, and the auld doitered fule Elspeth dies out o’ sheer fright in consequence, and ye maun see for your ain sel’ what your ain folly has brought about!”

But Mrs Galbraith protested that neither she nor Effie had ever uttered a word about the second sight in the boy’s hearing. And David, who in his heart believed his wife, though he did not deem it consistent with his dignity to own as much, abruptly ended the unpleasant affair by saying peremptorily, “I’ll no permit the bairn to be tauld any mair ungodly superstitions and auld wives’ tales. Effie may gang to the de’il, and Sandie sail be wi’ me in his walks and rides, and I’se warrant ye’ll hear naething from him but what he learns fra’ me, guid sense and sound doctrine!”

And Effie was dismissed, to her own great relief, and from that day forth Sandie became his father’s outdoor companion, to the visible benefit of his health and spirits.

But no one was so really alarmed at Sandie’s uncanny remark and its consequences as David Galbraith himself. His grandmother, a Highland woman, had had the second sight, and his father had told him how she lived to become the terror of her family. Her premonitions of death and calamity were unfailingly true, and the spirit within her never enlightened her as to how the impending evil might be averted. She was simply the medium of announcing approaching doom. What if her ghostly gift had descended to her grandson, a barren heritage, that would make him shunned by his kind!

Poor Alison Galbraith, finding her husband irritable and unreasonable on the subject of Sandie’s weird speech, sought comfort in pouring out her fears to their minister, the Rev. Ewan Macfarlane, who gave ear to her with as much patience as could be expected from a man whose chief business it was in life to speak and not to listen.

He drew the very worst inference from what he heard. “It’s a clear case o’ the second sight, and I canna but fear that there may be waur to come. When the uncanny spirit lights on a body, there’s nae predicting what its manifestations may be, and for aught that we ken it may be you or me that Sandie’ll see the death tokens on neist. And if ye continue to bring him to the kirk, I wad request that ye’ll no let him sit glowering at me, for though sudden death wad doubtless be sudden glory to me, it wad no be consistent wi’ the dignity of a Minister o’ the Free Kirk that he suld be harried untimely into his grave by an uncanny bairn, that wad hae been burnt for a warlock in times gane by. And if I was spared such a sair visitation, the bairn might yet be permitted to wark a certain perturbation of spirit in me, that wad cause me to curtail the word of God, and bring my discourse to a premature end, to the grievous loss of them that hear. And, Mistress Galbraith, let me tell ye, ye’ll fa’ into disrepute wi’ your neighbours gin Sandie sees bawbees on your minister’s honoured een, and aught came of it to his prejudice!”

In the following spring David Galbraith’s youngest brother Colin returned, after an absence of ten years, to spend a few months with his relations in Scotland. His industry had been prospered in Australia, and he was in a better position than he could have attained by any exertions of his own in the old country. He and his nephew struck up a warm friendship together, and it was a pretty sight to see them golfing on the links at North Berwick, the strong man accommodating his play to that of the puny boy by his side, and restraining his speech so that not a word fell from his lips but what was fit for a child to hear.

One day when they had played till Sandie was tired, they sauntered down to the beach, Uncle Colin to sit on the rocks smoking his morning pipe, his nephew to perch beside him and amuse himself with the shells and seaweed that abound there. Presently Sandie grew weary of sitting still, threw away the handful of shells he had picked up, and proposed that they should go further along the sands to where the children were bathing.

“And gi’e me your hand, Uncle Colin, and I’ll tell ye something while we walk that I canna just understand mysel’. I’ve seen an unco’ strange thing; I’ve seen your house in Australia!”

“Hoot, mon! what havers are ye talking? Ye’ve been dreaming!” said Uncle Colin cheerily.

“Na, I saw it. It was no dream; I ken weel the difference between dreaming and seeing. Your house has na slates on the roof, like our house; it was theckit like a hay-rick, and it had a wide place round it covered with another little theckit roof, and windows like big glass doors opened on it. And there was fire all about, and tall grass all ableeze, and sheep rinning hither and thither frighted, and a man with a black beard and a gun in his hand ran out o’ the house and shouted: ‘O’Grady, save the mare and foal! if they’re lost, the master will never forgi’e ye!’ What ails ye, Uncle Colin, that ye look sae gash?” and the boy looked up in his uncle’s face with wonder.

“It’s no canny to see such a sight, Sandie! What do ye ken o’ bush fires? and ye’ve never seen a picture of my house; and who tauld ye that my groom is an Irishman named O’Grady? for I’ve tauld naebody here, and the man with the black beard is my Scotch shepherd.”

“There was no need to tell me onything about it, Uncle Colin, for I saw it a’; but if the man at the door had na shouted O’Grady, then I suld na hae kenned his name.”

Colin made a poor attempt at laughter, that he might hide from the child how shocked and startled he was. But as soon as they reached home he told his brother about his son’s vision, and heard from him in return the story of Sandie and old Elspeth. A few days later Colin Galbraith received a telegram from his head shepherd informing him of the heavy loss he had just sustained from a very serious bush fire, and both he and David were convinced that Sandie was an uncanny bairn.

Colin returned to Australia immediately afterwards, and as he parted from his brother and sister-in-law he said with a melancholy smile, “If ony mischance befa’s me, ye’ll ken as sune as I do mysel’. Your awesome bairn will see it a’, and ye may tak’ for gospel aught tauld ye by ane that has the second sight.”

One fine afternoon, some .three weeks after Colin had sailed, David having just then no particular work to keep him on the farm all day, proposed for a great treat to row Sandie to the Bass Rock. Oat-cutting would shortly begin, and then he would not have a spare hour from morning to night. But to-day he and his son would enjoy a holiday together, and Sandie was to take with him the small gun that his father gave him on his last birthday, for he was now nine years of age, and high time that he set about learning to kill something or other. All the latent boy seemed developed in the delicate child by the possession of the small fowling-piece, and he blazed away at the rats under the hay-ricks and at the sparrows on the roof, to the peril alike of the poultry and of the bedroom windows. “Mother, mother, I’ll shoot ye a gannet and mak’ ye a cushion o’ the down!” he shouted in wild excitement as he set forth on the expedition.

Mrs Galbraith stood on the doorstep watching her husband and son leave the house together, David a stout, tall man in the prime of late middle life, red faced and grey haired, and Sandie a lanky lad with pale freckled face, but with more vigour in his step than the fond mother had ever expected to see. He carried his gun over his shoulder and strode along by his father’s side, glancing up at him frequently to try to imitate his every look and gesture. David Galbraith was fond of rowing, and as it was a very calm day he dismissed the man in charge of the boat, and taking the oars himself said it would do him good to row as far as the Bass Rock and back again.

The sea was like a mill-pond, a glassy stretch of water with here and there a wind flaw wrinkling its smooth surface. There was not a wave that could have displaced a pebble on the beach, and masses of olive-green seaweed floated motionless in its clear depths. To the left, high above them, stood the ruins of Tantallon Castle, bathed in August sunshine, its grey walls taking warmth and colour from the glow of light that softened and beautified its rugged outline. Before them the sullen mass of the Bass Rock towered above the blue water, circled by countless thousands of sea birds, the glitter of whose white wings was seen as silvery flashes of light, from a distance too great to distinguish the birds themselves.

They were near enough to the shore to hear voices and laughter borne over the water from the grassy enclosure before Tantallon Castle, and lowing of kine in the pastures, and as they neared the Bass Rock these sounds were exchanged for the squealing of wild fowl and the clang of their wings.

To Sandie’s delight he was allowed to shoot from the boat, which he did with as little danger to the birds as to the fishes, and the only condition his father imposed was that he should fire with his back towards him, “till your aim is mair preceese, mon.” Though it soon became evident even to the sanguine Sandie that he would bring home neither gannet nor kittiwako, it was a rapturous delight to be rowed about the island by his father, who told him the name of every bird he saw, and pointed out their nests on the precipitous face of the rock. Then David rested on his oars, and the boat scarcely moved on the still water while Sandie ate the oatcake and drank the milk provided for him by his mother, and his father took a deep draught from his flask till his face grew crimson.

“Father, gi’e me a drink, too,” said Sandie, stretching out his hand.

“Na, na; ye’ll stick to your milk-drinking till ye ha’e built up a strong frame, and then ye may tak’ as much whusky as ye wull to keep it in guid repair.”

And now the boat was turned landward once more, and they soon lost sound of the clang of the sea bird’s wings, and the lowing of kine was again heard, and David rowed slowly past the rock of Tantallon. Sandie had fallen silent, and sat leaning his arm on the gunwale of the boat looking into the limpid water, dipping his hand into a soft swelling wave, and scattering a shower of glittering drops from his fingers.

Suddenly he ceased his play, and kneeling in the bottom of the boat, clung firmly to the side with both hands, leaned over and gazed intently in the water. His father, who was always on the alert where his son was concerned, at once noticed the change that had come over him, rowed quicker, and said cheerily, “What are ye glowering at, mon? Did ye never see a herring in the sea before?”

Sandie neither spoke nor stirred, and David took comfort in thinking that after all the lad could see nothing uncanny in the water; it was just some daft folly or other he was after, best unnoticed. But when Sandie did speak it was to utter words for which he was unprepared.

“Father, I see Uncle Colin in the water wi’ his face turned up to me, and his een wide open, but he canna see wi’ them.” And the boy did not raise his head, but continued to gaze into the water. Drops of sweat broke out on Galbraith’s brow, and he lifted the dripping oars high in the rowlocks and leaned towards Sandie, his red face now as white as the boy’s.

“Whether it’s God or the de’il speaks in ye, I dinna ken, but ye’ll drive me mad wi’ your gruesome clavers! Haud up, man! and fling yoursel’ back in the boat, where ye’ll see naething waur than yoursel’.”

But Sandie did not stir. “It’s Uncle Colin that I see floating in the water, lappit in sea weed, and he’s nae sleeping, for his een stare sae wide;” and Galbraith, who would not have looked over the gunwale of the boat for his life, with an oath plunged the oars deep into the water and rowed with furious strokes.

“Ye’ve struck the oar on his white face!” shrieked the boy, and fell back crying in the boat.

A heavy gloom settled on the Galbraiths, and this last hideous vision of Sandie’s they kept strictly to themselves. They did not seek counsel of their minister or of anyone. They were certain that Colin was drowned. It was a mere question of time when they could hear how it had happened, but hear it they assuredly would. And Sandie, too, was gloomy and depressed.

“The bairn has frighted himself this time as weel as others,” said his father, “and sma’ blame to him. But I would rather follow him to the kirk-yard than that he suld grow up wi’ the second sight! It may ha’e been a’ verra weel in a breekless, starving Hielander a hundred years ago, but it’s no consistent for a well-fed Lowlander in these days o’ trousers and high farming. How is Sandie to do justice to the land and mind the rotation of crops if he goes daft wi’ the second sight?”

The oat harvest was plentiful and got together in fine condition, but neither David nor his wife had any heart to enjoy it. They simply lived through each day waiting for the tidings that must come. Nor had they long to wait. A month after Sandie’s vision David read in the newspaper of the safe arrival of his brother’s ship at its destination. It reported a prosperous voyage with but one casualty during its course. On the twenty-fourth day after sailing, a passenger booked for Sydney had mysteriously fallen overboard in perfectly calm weather and was drowned. The gentleman’s name was Mr Colin Galbraith, and his sudden untimely end had cast a gloom over the ship’s company. So far the newspaper report, which, brief as it was, was all that David and Alison could ever learn of their poor brother’s fate. They carefully compared the dates, and found that Colin had been drowned three days after Sandie had seen the vision of the body in the sea.

“I winna tell the bairn that puir Colin is dead,” said David gloomily.

“Ye’ll just tell the bairn he’s dead, but you’ll say naething of drowning.”

“Ye maun do as ye think best, but I canna mention puir Colin’s name to him.” And it was from his mother that Sandie heard of his Uncle Colin’s death. He listened gravely and thoughtfully to the tidings. “Aye, it was him that I saw in the water.” And that was all that he had to say about the death of his favourite uncle. He asked no question and made no further remark.

From this time forward a great change came over David Galbraith. From being wholly matter of fact and little inclined to believe more than his senses could attest, he became credulous and superstitious. He trembled at omens, and was unnerved for his day’s work if his dreams overnight were unpropitious. He disliked being out on dark nights, and cast uneasy glances over his shoulder as though he heard steps behind him. At times when he was riding he thought that he heard some one following hard on his heels, and he would gallop for miles and reach home, horse and rider both in a sweat of fear. And Sandie, the unconscious cause of the evil change in his father, mutely wondered what had come over him. David scarcely let the boy out of his sight, though his society was a torment to him, and he was always wondering what would be the next shock he would receive. Unhappily he tried to restore tone to his shaken nerves by drinking, and the habit grew quickly on him, to his good wife’s great distress. And times were now so changed that Sandie was often more frightened of his father than his father was of him.

Mrs Galbraith proposed sending Sandie to stay with some relations of her own at Linlithgow, thinking that it would do her husband good to have the strain of the boy’s constant society removed for awhile. But he would not hear of it, and merely said, “The bairn sail bide at hame. It’s my ain weird, and I maun dree it.”

Some two years passed by in which Sandie had no visions, and grew steadily healthier and stronger and more like other boys of his age, so that his mother began to think they should make a man of him yet. But though his father noticed the physical improvement in his son with pride, nothing could persuade him that the dreaded gist had departed from him. In vain his wife tried to convince him that there was no further cause for anxiety. He shook his head and said, “Ye’ll no get rid of an ill gift sae lightly. It’s a fire that burns low, but it’ll burst out into flame for a’ that.”

In the third summer after Colin Galbraith was lost at sea, on a lovely summer evening, Mrs Galbraith sat at the open window, knitting and smiling placidly, as she watched her son at work in his little plot of garden watering the tufts of pinks and pansies. She laid her work in her lap, and her eyes followed his every movement with quiet pleasure. Sandie would make a good gardener. There was not a weed nor a straggling growth in his plot, all was neat and trim. And the flower-beds were prettily bordered with shells he had collected on the beach at North Berwick.

He was gathering a posy with fastidious care, and his mother knew that it was for her, and thought to herself that if he had been uncanny in time past, he was a good boy, his heart was in the right place. But something disturbed him in his work. He rose from stooping over the bed, dropped his flowers to the ground, and Alison thought he was listening to some far-away sound, till a change that passed over his face showed her that she was mistaken. Sandie was not listening, he was seeing. His face grew pale and his features pinched, his grey eyes were fixed while the colour faded out of them till they were almost white, and he shuddered as though a cold wind blew over him.

Mrs Galbraith rose silently, and assured by the deep breathing of her husband, who was sitting in an arm-chair by the hearth, that he was asleep, opened the door, softly left the room and hurried into the garden. There in the sunshine surrounded by summer sights and summer scents, stood Sandie, a very image of midnight terror. His mother laid her large warm hands on his shoulders, and gently shook him.

“Sandie, Sandie, if you’re seeing again, for God’s sake say nothing to your father! He canna bear it; ye’ll tell me,” she said in a frightened whisper.

The boy gave a sigh, passed his hands over his eyes, and staggered as though he were dizzy. Alison grasped her son firmly by the arm. “Come awa’! if your father wakes and goes to the window he’ll see us; come awa’!” and she hurried the boy through the warm evening sunshine that had suddenly grown cold and dim to her, and led him to a retired part of the garden.

“And now what was it that ye saw?” and looking at her with a strange expression of fear and compassion, Sandie said, “I saw my father lying on the road at the foot of the steep brae by Sir Ewen Campbell’s gates, and his een were shut, but for a’ that he was the same as Uncle Colin!”

The self-controlled, unemotional Alison Galbraith gave a smothered scream as she listened to her son, and seizing his arm in a passion of fear, with a grip like a vice, said, “Elspeth McFie was right when she called you an awesome bairn! What for has God in His wrath given me such a child?” and she shook him off, and left him alone in his confused misery.

If David Galbraith had not been overcome with drink that night, he would have seen that something terrible had occurred to agitate his wife. But when the drunken fit was spent he noticed that she looked white and ill. “Alison, woman, you keep too close in the house,” he said; “ye should walk to the sea and breathe the caller air, to bring the colour back to your cheeks.”

The following Friday was the corn market at Haddington, and David Galbraith, sober, shrewd, and business-like, set out to attend it, bent on driving a hard bargain. Alison stood at the gate as he mounted his horse to wish him good luck, and to add a word of wifely admonition as to the advisability of not drinking too much whisky before the return journey, and “Ye’ll no be late coming home the night, Davie?”

“There is no night at this time o’ year, Alison.”

“And ye’ll mind to come by the level road, There’s the steep brae beyond the Campbell’s gates, and I’d rather ye gave it a wide berth, and came by the long road.”

“Not I, woman! Do ye expect me to mak’ a midnight ride a mile longer just to avoid a brae that I ken as weel as my ain doorstep? Kelpie’ll be sober, douce beast, if his master’s not, and he kens every stane on the brae. Ye’ll go to bed and leave the house door unlocked for me,” and David gave his horse a touch with the whip and away he trotted.

Alison stood till the sound of hoofs had died away and then went back into the house with a boding heart. Sandie returned from school at noon in high spirits, and asked his mother’s leave to bring home a schoolfellow to play with him in the afternoon. It was wonderful how his spirits had rallied since his vision of a few days before. It seemed as though his body had now grown strong enough to shake off the ghastly influence entirely. But his mother was shattered both by memory and apprehension.

A dreadful restlessness possessed her as night drew on, and after the shouts of the boys at play were over, and silence fell on house and garden, she slipped out unnoticed and walked in the twilight to the beach. It was high midsummer, when in those latitudes the sunset lingers on the western horizon till in the east the vigorous dawn breaks to quench its lesser light. The crescent moon hung low in the sky over the gently murmuring sea that glimmered mysteriously in the diffused twilight, and the brown rocks loomed dark above the water. A time and a place to suggest eerie feelings to the most unimpressionable.

But Alison’s whole mind was so filled with apprehensions of approaching doom that the scene had no effect upon her—she scarcely noticed where she was. The fear that possessed her was an inward fear, neither suggested nor increased by the aspect of familiar things. She did not meet a soul in her restless wanderings. As she opened the house door on her return the clock struck twelve. Oh, when would David be home? He was seldom later than midnight. Alison needed no light, and creeping softly upstairs she entered Sandie’s room, and drawing aside the curtain, by the solemn twilight of the northern night she saw his sleeping face calm and peaceful as an infant’s. Did she grudge him his untroubled slumber, that she would rather have found him awake and oppressed with terror as herself?

While she stood listening to the beating of her own heart, that sounded louder than the breathing of her child, she heard the first distant sound of approaching hoofs, and as they rapidly drew nearer she recognised Kelpie’s familiar steps.

“Thank God, he is safe home!” she said, and lest her husband should be displeased to find her sitting up for him she hastened to her room and lighted a candle. The horse had stopped opposite the house, and David had had time to dismount, but he had not opened the gate. Some one might be detaining him there. Yet there was no sound of voices to be heard, only Kelpie impatiently striking the ground with one of his fore feet. Alison looked out of the window, but could see nothing for the high wall. As several minutes passed and still her husband did not come, and the horse stamped with increasing impatience, she slipped downstairs out of doors and across the garden to the gate. So deadly a fear lay upon her spirit that when she flung the gate open and saw Kelpie standing riderless on the dusky highway she felt no surprise, only an assurance that Sandie’s vision was about to come true.

“Oh, Kelpie lad, your master’s no far to seek!” she said as she led the trembling, sweating beast towards the stable yard. Then, without calling up any of the men, just as she was with uncovered head, Alison Galbraith sped through the dusk and silence of the summer night.

“The steep brae by Sir Ewen Campbell’s gates! the steep brae by Sir Ewen Campbell’s gates!” she said to herself as she ran, and when the dark firs and high wall bounding the park came in sight her limbs almost gave way beneath her. Then she reached the great iron gates between granite pillars, and in the twilight she caught sight through their bars of the black avenue within, and heard the wind sigh in the boughs. Alison pressed her hands to her heart and urged herself on. Now a bat cut its zig-zag flight through the air and startled her. The white scut of a frightened rabbit shone out in the dusk as it flashed across her path in search of a friendly burrow, and her echoing steps woke many a sleeping bird and set it fluttering with fear.

The next turn in the road would bring her to the foot of the brae, and to something that she dared not name that she knew was waiting for her there. She closed her eyes for an instant as she rounded the curve of the road and clenched her hands. Then the soft silence of the summer night was broken by a wailing cry, and Alison Galbraith fell senseless on the dead body of her husband.

David was sober that night, but as he rode through the mirk lanes the old horror had overtaken him. He thought that he heard a horseman following hard upon him, and clapped spurs to his beast and galloped down the hill, at the foot of which Kelpie slipped on a rolling stone, threw his rider heavily to the ground, and he neither spoke nor moved again.

Alison Galbraith did not long survive her husband, and her death took place without Sandie having any intimation of its approach. He never had vision or prophetic foresight again after his father died. The weird gist departed from him with his weakly childhood, and he grew up robust and stout, thriving and commonplace as his forebears. Sandie is even a better farmer than his father before him, and is in a fair way to solve the problem of how to make two blades of wheat grow where only one had grown before. He has married a wife, practical and matter of fact as himself, and their sons and daughters are as guiltless of imagination as they are of any touch of the uncanny. The burly Lowland farmer can never be induced to speak of the second sight, even to his most intimate friends. In the early days of their married life his young wife ventured to ask him about the visions of his childhood, of which she had heard. But he silenced her with such severity that she did not again dare to approach the subject, and she will never know whether the stories of her husband’s uncanny childhood are wild legends or plain truth.

Many Waters Cannot Quench Love

Did I not know my old friend John Horton to be as truthful as he is devoid of imagination, I should have believed that he was romancing or dreaming when he told me of a circumstance that happened to him some thirty years ago. He was at that time a bachelor, living in London and practising as a solicitor in Bedford Row. He was not a strong man, though neither nervous nor excitable, and as I said before singularly unimaginative.

If Horton told you a fact, you might be certain that it had occurred in the precise manner he stated. If he told it you a hundred times, he would not vary it in the repetition. This literal and conscientious habit of mind, made his testimony of value, and when he told me a fact that I should have disbelieved from any other man, from my friend I was obliged to accept it as truth.

It was during the long vacation in the autumn of 1857, that Horton determined to take a few weeks holiday in the country. He was such an inveterate Londoner he had not been able to tear himself away from town for more than a few days at a time for many years past. But at length he felt the necessity for quiet and pure air, only he would not go far to seek them. It was easier then than it is now to find a lodging that would meet his requirements, a place in the country yet close to the town, and it was near Wandsworth that Horton found what he sought, rooms for a single gentleman in an old farm-house. He read the advertisement of the lodgings in the paper at luncheon, and went that very afternoon to see if they answered to the tempting description given. He had some little difficulty in finding Maitland’s farm. It was not easy to find his way through country lanes that to his town eyes looked precisely alike, and with nothing to indicate whether he had taken a right or wrong turning. The railway now runs shrieking over what were then green fields, lanes have been transformed into gas-lighted streets, and Maitland’s Farm, the old red brick house standing in its high walled garden, has been pulled down long ago. The last time Horton went to look at the old place it was changed beyond recognition, and the orchard in which he had gathered pears and apples during his stay at the farm, was now the site of a public house and a dissenting chapel.

It was on a hot afternoon early in September when Horton opened the big iron gates and walked up the path bordered with dahlias and hollyhocks leading to the front door, and rang for admittance at Maitland’s Farm. The bell echoed in a distant part of the empty house and died away into silence, but no one came to answer its summons. As Horton stood waiting, he took the opportunity of thoroughly examining the outside of the house. Though it was called a farm it had not been built for one originally. It was a substantial, four-storey brick house of Queen Anne’s period, with five tall sash windows on each floor, and dormer windows in the tiled roof. The front door was approached by a shallow flight of stone steps, and above the fan-light projected a penthouse of solidly carved wood-work. On either side were brackets of wrought iron, supporting extinguishers that had quenched the torch of many a late returning reveller a century ago. Only the windows to right and left of the door had blinds or curtains, or betrayed any sign of habitation.

“Those are the rooms to be let, I wonder which is the bedroom,” thought my friend as he rang the bell for the second time. Presently he heard within the sound of approaching footsteps, there was a great drawing of bolts and after a final struggle with the rusty lock, the door was opened by an old woman of severe and cheerless aspect. Horton was the first to speak.

“I have called to see the rooms advertised to be let in this house.” The old woman eyed him from head to foot without making any reply, then opening the door wider, nodded to him to enter. He did so and found himself in a large paved hall lighted from the fan-light over the door, and by a high narrow window facing him at the top of a short flight of oak stairs. The air was musty and damp as that of an old church.

“A hall this size should have a fire in it,” said Horton, glancing at the empty rusty grate.

“Farmers and folks that work out of doors keep themselves warm without fires,” said the old woman sharply.

“This house was never built for a farm, why is it called one?” enquired Horton of his taciturn guide as she opened the door of the sitting room.

“Because it was one,” was the blunt reply. “When I was a girl it was the Manor House, and may be called that again for all I know, but thirty years since, a man named Maitland took it on a lease and farmed the land, and folks forgot the old name, and called it Maitland’s Farm.”

“When did Maitland leave?”

“About two months ago.”

“Why did he go away from a nice place like this?”

“You are fond of asking questions,” remarked the old woman drily. “He went for two good reasons, his lease was up, and his family was a big one. Nine children he had, from a girl of two-and-twenty down to a little lad of four years old. His wife and him thought it best to take ’em out to Australia, where there’s room for all. They were glad to go, all but the eldest, Esther, and she nearly broke her heart over it. But then she had to leave her sweetheart behind her. He’s a young man on a dairy farm near here, and though he’s to follow her out and marry her in twelve months, she did nothing but mourn, same as if she was leaving him altogether.”

“Ah, indeed!” said Horton, who could not readily enter into details about people whom he did not know. “So this is the sitting-room; it’s large and airy, and has as much furniture in it as a man needs by himself. Now show me the bedroom, if you please.”

“Follow me upstairs, sir,” and the old woman preceded him slowly up the oak staircase, and opened the door of the back room on the first floor.

“Then the bedroom that you let is not over the sitting-room?”

“No, the front room is mine, and the room next to it is my son’s. He’s out all day at his work, but he sleeps here, and mostly keeps me company of an evening. I’m alone here all day looking after the place, and if you take the rooms I shall cook for you and wait on you myself.”

Horton liked the look of the bedroom. It was large and airy, with little furniture in it beyond a bed and a chest of drawers. But it was delicately clean, and silent as the grave. How a tired man might sleep here! The walls were decorated with old prints in black frames of the “Rake’s Progress” and “Marriage a la Mode,” and above the high carved mantelpiece hung an engraving of the famous portrait of Charles the First, on a prancing brown horse.

“Those things were on the walls when the Maitlands took the place, and they had to leave ’em where they found ’em,” said the old woman. “And they found that sword too,” she added, pointing to a rusty cutlass that hung from a nail by the head of the bed; “but I think they’d have done no great harm if they’d sold it for old iron.”

Horton took down the weapon and examined it. It was an ordinary cutlass, such as was worn by the marines in George the Third’s reign, not old enough to be of antiquarian interest, nor of sufficient beauty of workmanship to make it of artistic value. He replaced it, and stepped to the windows and looked into the garden below. It was bounded by a high wall enclosing a row of poplars, and beyond lay the open country, visible for miles in the clear air, a sight to rest and fascinate the eye of a Londoner.

Horton made his bargain with the old woman whom the landlord had put into the house as care-taker, pending his decision about the disposition of the property. She was allowed to take a lodger for her own profit, and as soon as Mrs Belt found that the stranger agreed to her terms, she assured him that everything should be comfortably arranged for his reception by the following Wednesday.

Horton arrived at Maitland’s Farm on the evening of the appointed day. A stormy autumnal sunset was casting an angry glow on the windows of the house, the rising wind filled the air with mournful sounds, and the poplars swayed against a background of lurid sky.

Mrs Belt was expecting her lodger, and promptly opened the door, candle in hand, when she heard wheels stopping at the gate. The driver of the fly carried Horton’s portmanteau into the hall, was paid his fare, and drove away thinking the darkening lanes more cheerful than the glimpse he had had of the inside of Maitland’s Farm.

Horton was thoroughly pleased with his country quarters. The intense quiet of the almost empty house, that might have made another man melancholy, soothed and rested him. In the day time he wandered about the country, or amused himself in the garden and orchard, and he spent the long evenings alone, reading and smoking in his sitting-room. Mrs Belt brought in supper at nine o’clock, and usually stayed to have a chat with her lodger, and many a long story she related of her neighbours, and the Maitland family, while she waited upon him at his evening meal.

On several occasions she told him that Esther Maitland’s sweetheart, Michael Winn, had come to talk with her about the Maitlands, or to bring her a newspaper containing tidings that their ship had reached some point on its long voyage in safety.

“You see the ‘Petrel’ is a sailing vessel, sir, and there’s no saying how long she’ll take getting to Australia. The last news Michael had, she’d got as far as some islands with an outlandish name, and he’s had a letter from Esther posted at a place called Madeira. And now he gives himself no peace till he can hear that the ship’s safe as far as—somewhere, I think he said, in Africa.”

“It would be the Cape, Mrs Belt.”

“That’s the name, sir, the Cape, and he werrits all the time for fear of storms and shipwrecks. But I tell him the world’s a wide place, and the sea wider than all, and very likely when the chimney pots is flying about our heads in a gale here, the ‘Petrel’s’ lying becalmed somewhere. And then he takes up my thought and turns it against me. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and when it’s a dead calm here on shore, the ship may be sinking in a storm, and my Esther being drowned.’”

“Michael Winn must be a very nervous young man.”

“That’s where it is, sir, and I tell him when he follows the Maitlands it’s a good job that he leaves no one behind him that’ll werrit after him, same as he’s werrited after Esther.”

It was the middle of October, and Horton had been a month at the farm. The weather was now cold and wet, and he began to think it was time he returned to his snug London home, for the autumn rain made everything at Maitland’s Farm damp and mouldy. It had blown half a gale all day, and the rain had fallen in torrents, keeping him a prisoner indoors. But he occupied himself in writing letters, and reading some legal documents his clerk had brought out to him, and the time passed rapidly. Indeed the evening flew by so quickly he had no idea it was nine o’clock, when Mrs Belt entered the room to lay the cloth for supper.

“It’s stopped raining now, sir,” she said, as she poked the fire into a cheerful blaze, “and a good job too, for Michael Winn brings me word the Wandle’s risen fearful since morning, and it’s out in places more than it’s been for years. But there’s a full moon to-night, so no one need walk into the water unless they’ve a mind to.”

Horton’s head was too full of a knotty legal point to pay much heed to Mrs Belt, and the old woman, seeing that he was not in a mood for conversation, said nothing further. At half-past ten she brought her lodger some spirits and hot water, and his bedroom candle, and wished him good night. Horton sat reading for some time, and then made an entry in his diary concerning a day of which there was absolutely nothing to record, lighted his candle, and went upstairs. I am familiar with the precise order of each trifling circumstance. My friend has so often told me the events of that night, and never with the slightest addition or omission in the telling. It was his habit, the last thing at night, to draw up the blinds. He looked out of the window, and though the moon was at the full, the clouds had not yet dispersed, and her light was fitful and obscure. It was twenty minutes to twelve as he extinguished the candle by his bedside. Everything was propitious for rest. He was weary, and the house profoundly silent. The rain had stopped, the wind fallen to a sigh, and it seemed to him that as soon as his head pressed the pillow he sank into a dreamless slumber.

Shortly after two o’clock, Horton awoke suddenly, passing instantaneously from deep sleep to the possession of every faculty in a heightened degree, and with an insupportable sense of fear weighing upon him like a thousand nightmares. He started up and looked around him. The perspiration poured from his brow, and his heart beat to suffocation. He was convinced that he had been waked by some strange and terrible noise, that had thrilled through the depths of sleep, and he dreaded the repetition of it inexpressibly. The room was flooded with moonlight streaming through the narrow windows, lying like sheets of molten silver on the floor, and the poplars in the garden cast tremulous shadows on the ceiling.

Then Horton heard through the silence of the house a sound that was not the moan of the wind, nor the rustling of trees, nor any sound he had heard before. Clear and distinct, as though it were in the room with him, he heard a voice of weeping and lamentation, with more than human sorrow in the cry, so that it seemed to him as though he listened to the mourning of a lost soul. He leaped up, struck a match, and lighted the candle, and seizing the cutlass that hung by the bed, unlocked the door, and opened it to listen.

So far as all ordinary sounds were concerned, the house was silent as death, and the moonlight streamed through the staircase window in a flood of pale light. But the unearthly sound of weeping, thrilling through heart and soul, came from the hall below, and Horton walked downstairs to the landing at the top of the first flight. There, on the lowest step, a woman was seated with bowed head, her face hidden in her hands, rocking to and fro in extremity of grief. The moonlight fell full on her, and he saw that she was only partly clothed, and her dark hair lay in confusion on her bare shoulders.

“Who are you, and what is the matter with you?” said Horton, and his trembling voice echoed in the silent house.

But she neither stirred nor spoke, nor abated her weeping.

Slowly he descended the moon-lit staircase till there were but four steps between him and the woman. A mortal fear was growing upon him. “Speak! if you are a living being!” he cried.

The figure rose to its full height, turned and faced him for a moment that seemed an eternity, and rushed full on the point of the cutlass Horton involuntarily presented. As the impalpable form glided up the blade of the weapon, a cold wave seemed to break over him, and he fell in a dead faint on the stairs.

How long he remained insensible he could not tell. When he came to himself and opened his eyes, the moon had set, and he groped his way in darkness to his room, where the candle had burnt itself out.

When Horton came down to breakfast, he looked as though he had been ill for a month, and his hands trembled like a drunkard’s. At any other time Mrs Belt would have been struck by his appearance, but this morning she was too much excited by some bad news she had heard, to notice whether her lodger was looking well or ill. Horton asked her how she had slept, for if she had not heard the terrible sounds that waked him, it still seemed impossible she should not have heard his heavy fall on the stairs. Mrs Belt replied, with some astonishment at her lodger’s concern for her welfare, that she had never had a better night, it was so quiet after the wind fell.

“But did your son think the house was quiet, did he sleep too?” asked Horton with feverish eagerness.

Mrs Belt was yearning to impart her bad news to her lodger, and remarking that she had something else to do than ask folks how they slept o’ nights, she said a neighbour had just told her that Michael Winn had fallen into the Wandle during the night—no one knew how—and was drowned, and they were carrying his body home then.

“What a terrible blow for his sweetheart,” said Horton, greatly shocked.

“Aye! there’s a pretty piece of news to send her, when she’s expecting to see poor Michael himself soon.”

“Mrs Belt, have you any portrait of Esther Maitland you could show me? I’ve heard the girl’s name so often I’m curious to know what she is like.”

And the old woman retired to hunt among her treasures for a small photograph on glass, that Esther had given her before she went away. Presently Mrs Belt returned, polishing the picture with her apron.

“It’s but a poor affair, sir, taken in a caravan on the Common, yet it’s like the girl, it’s very like.”

It was a miserable production, a cheap and early effort in photography, and Horton rose from the table with the picture in his hand to examine it at the window. And there, surrounded by the thin brass frame, he recognised the face of all faces that had dismayed him, the face he beheld in the vision of the preceding night. He suppressed a groan, and turned from the window with a face so white, that, as he handed the picture back to Mrs Belt, she said, “You’re not feeling well this morning, sir.”

“No, I’m feeling very ill. I must get back to town to-day to be near to my own doctor. You shall be no loser by my leaving you so suddenly, but if I am going to be ill, I am best in my own home.” For Horton could not have stayed another night at Maitland’s Farm to save his life.

He was at his office in Bedford Row by noon, and his clerks thought that he looked ten years older for his visit to the country.

A little more than three weeks after Horton returned to town, when his nerves were beginning to recover their accustomed tone, his attention was unexpectedly recalled to the abhorrent subject of the apparition he had seen. He read in his daily paper that the mail from the Cape had brought news of the wreck of the sailing vessel ‘Petrel’ bound for Australia, with loss of all on board, in a violent storm off the coast, shortly before the steamer left for England.

By a careful comparison of dates, allowing for the variation of time, the conviction was forced upon John Horton that the ill-fated ship foundered at the very hour in which he beheld the wraith of Esther Maitland. She and her lover, divided by thousands of miles, both perished by drowning at the same time—Michael Winn in the little river at home, and Esther Maitland in the depths of a distant ocean.

The Real and the Counterfeit

Will Musgrave determined that he would neither keep Christmas alone, nor spend it again with his parents and sisters in the south of France. The Musgrave family annually migrated southward from their home in Northumberland, and Will as regularly followed them to spend a month with them in the Riviera, till he had almost forgotten what Christmas was like in England. He rebelled at having to leave the country at a time when, if the weather was mild, he should be hunting, or if it was severe, skating, and he had no real or imaginary need to winter in the south. His chest was of iron and his lungs of brass. A raking east wind that drove his parents into their thickest furs, and taught them the number of their teeth by enabling them to count a separate and well-defined ache for each, only brought a deeper colour into the cheek, and a brighter light into the eye of the weather-proof youth. Decidedly he would not go to Cannes, though it was no use annoying his father and mother, and disappointing his sisters, by telling them beforehand of his determination.

Will knew very well how to write a letter to his mother in which his defection should appear as an event brought about by the overmastering power of circumstances, to which the sons of Adam must submit. No doubt that a prospect of hunting or skating, as the fates might decree, influenced his decision. But he had also long promised himself the pleasure of a visit from two of his college friends, Hugh Armitage and Horace Lawley, and he asked that they might spend a fortnight with him at Stonecroft, as a little relaxation had been positively ordered for him by his tutor.

“Bless him,” said his mother fondly, when she had read his letter, “I will write to the dear boy and tell him how pleased I am with his firmness and determination.” But Mr Musgrave muttered inarticulate sounds as he listened to his wife, expressive of incredulity rather than of acquiescence, and when he spoke it was to say, “Devil of a row three young fellows will kick up alone at Stonecroft! We shall find the stables full of broken-kneed horses when we go home again.”

Will Musgrave spent Christmas day with the Armitages at their place near Ripon. And the following night they gave a dance at which he enjoyed himself as only a very young man can do, who has not yet had his fill of dancing, and who would like nothing better than to waltz through life with his arm round his pretty partner’s waist.

The following day, Musgrave and Armitage left for Stonecroft, picking up Lawley on the way, and arriving at their destination late in the evening, in the highest spirits and with the keenest appetites. Stonecroft was a delightful haven of refuge at the end of a long journey across country in bitter weather, when the east wind was driving the light dry snow into every nook and cranny. The wide, hospitable front door opened into an oak panelled hall with a great open fire burning cheerily, and lighted by lamps from overhead that effectually dispelled all gloomy shadows. As soon as Musgrave had entered the house he seized his friends, and before they had time to shake the snow from their coats, kissed them both under the mistletoe bough and set the servants tittering in the background.

“You’re miserable substitutes for your betters,” he said, laughing and pushing them from him, “but it’s awfully unlucky not to use the mistletoe. Barker, I hope supper’s ready, and that it is something very hot and plenty of it, for we’ve travelled on empty stomachs and brought them with us,” and he led his guests upstairs to their rooms.

“What a jolly gallery!” said Lawley enthusiastically as they entered a long wide corridor, with many doors and several windows in it, and hung with pictures and trophies of arms.

“Yes, its our one distinguishing feature at Stonecroft,” said Musgrave. “It runs the whole length of the house, from the modern end of it to the back, which is very old, and built on the foundations of a Cistercian monastery which once stood on this spot. The gallery’s wide enough to drive a carriage and pair down it, and it’s the main thoroughfare of the house. My mother takes a constitutional here in bad weather, as though it were the open air, and does it with her bonnet on to aid the delusion.”

Armitage’s attention was attracted by the pictures on the walls, and especially by the life-size portrait of a young man in a blue coat, with powdered hair, sitting under a tree with a stag-hound lying at his feet.

“An ancestor of yours?” he said, pointing at the picture.

“Oh, they’re all one’s ancestors, and a motley crew they are, I must say for them. It may amuse you and Lawley to find from which of them I derive my good looks. That pretty youth whom you seem to admire is my great-great-grandfather. He died at twenty-two, a preposterous age for an ancestor. But come along Armitage, you’ll have plenty of time to do justice to the pictures by daylight, and I want to show you your rooms. I see everything is arranged comfortably, we are close together. Our pleasantest rooms are on the gallery, and here we are nearly at the end of it. Your rooms are opposite to mine, and open into Lawley’s in case you should be nervous in the night and feel lonely so far from home, my dear children.”

And Musgrave bade his friends make haste, and hurried away whistling cheerfully to his own room.

The following morning the friends rose to a white world. Six inches of fine snow, dry as salt, lay everywhere, the sky overhead a leaden lid, and all the signs of a deep fall yet to come.

“Cheerful this, very,” said Lawley, as he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out of the window after breakfast. “The snow will have spoilt the ice for skating.”

“But it won’t prevent wild duck shooting,” said Armitage, “and I say, Musgrave, we’ll rig up a toboggan out there. I see a slope that might have been made on purpose for it. If we get some tobogganing, it may snow day and night for all I care, we shall be masters of the situation anyway.”

“Well thought of, Armitage,” said Musgrave, jumping at the idea.

“Yes, but you need two slopes and a little valley between for real good tobogganing,” objected Lawley, “otherwise you only rush down the hillock like you do from the Mount Church to Funchal, and then have to retrace your steps as you do there, carrying your car on your back. Which lessens the fun considerably.”

“Well, we can only work with the material at hand,” said Armitage; “let’s go and see if we can’t find a better place for our toboggan, and something that will do for a car to slide in.”

“That’s easily found—empty wine cases are the thing, and stout sticks to steer with,” and away rushed the young men into the open air, followed by half a dozen dogs barking joyfully.

“By Jove! if the snow keeps firm, we’ll put runners on strong chairs and walk over to see the Harradines at Garthside, and ask the girls to come out sledging, and we’ll push them,” shouted Musgrave to Lawley and Armitage, who had outrun him in the vain attempt to keep up with a deer-hound that headed the party.

After a long and careful search they found a piece of land exactly suited to their purpose, and it would have amused their friends to see how hard the young men worked under the beguiling name of pleasure. For four hours they worked like navvies making a toboggan slide. They shovelled away the snow, then with pickaxe and spade, levelled the ground, so that when a carpet of fresh snow was spread over it, their improvised car would run down a steep incline and be carried by the impetus up another, till it came to a standstill in a snow drift.

“If we can only get this bit of engineering done to-day,” said Lawley, chucking a spadeful of earth aside as he spoke, “the slide will be in perfect order for to-morrow.”

“Yes, and when once it’s done, it’s done for ever,” said Armitage, working away cheerfully with his pick where the ground was frozen hard and full of stones, and cleverly keeping his balance on the slope as he did so. “Good work lasts no end of a time, and posterity will bless us for leaving them this magnificent slide.”

“Posterity may, my dear fellow, but hardly our progenitors if my father should happen to slip down it,” said Musgrave.

When their task was finished, and the friends were transformed in appearance from navvies into gentlemen, they set out through thick falling snow to walk to Garthside to call on their neighbours the Harradines. They had earned their pleasant tea and lively talk, their blood was still aglow from their exhilarating work, and their spirits at the highest point. They did not return to Stonecroft till they had compelled the girls to name a time when they would come with their brothers and be launched down the scientifically prepared slide, in wine cases well padded with cushions for the occasion.

Late that night the young men sat smoking and chatting together in the library. They had played billiards till they were tired, and Lawley had sung sentimental songs, accompanying himself on the banjo, till even he was weary, to say nothing of what his listeners might be. Armitage sat leaning his light curly head back in the chair, gently puffing out a cloud of tobacco smoke. And he was the first to break the silence that had fallen on the little company.

“Musgrave,” he said suddenly, “an old house is not complete unless it is haunted. You ought to have a ghost of your own at Stonecroft.”

Musgrave threw down the yellow-backed novel he had just picked up, and became all attention.

“So we have, my dear fellow. Only it has not been seen by any of us since my grandfather’s time. It is the desire of my life to become personally acquainted with our family ghost.”

Armitage laughed. But Lawley said, “You would not say that if you really believed in ghosts.”

“I believe in them most devoutly, but I naturally wish to have my faith confirmed by sight. You believe in them too, I can see.”

“Then you see what does not exist, and so far you are in a fair way to see ghosts. No, my state of mind is this,” continued Lawley, “I neither believe, nor entirely disbelieve in ghosts. I am open to conviction on the subject. Many men of sound judgment believe in them, and others of equally good mental capacity don’t believe in them. I merely regard the case of the bogies as not proven. They may, or may not exist, but till their existence is plainly demonstrated, I decline to add such an uncomfortable article to my creed as a belief in bogies.”

Musgrave did not reply, but Armitage laughed a strident laugh.

“I’m one against two, I’m in an overwhelming minority,” he said. “Musgrave frankly confesses his belief in ghosts, and you are neutral, neither believing nor disbelieving, but open to conviction. Now I’m a complete unbeliever in the supernatural, root and branch. People’s nerves no doubt play them queer tricks, and will continue to do so to the end of the chapter, and if I were so fortunate as to see Musgrave’s family ghost to-night, I should no more believe in it than I do now. By the way, Musgrave, is the ghost a lady or a gentleman?” he asked flippantly.

“I don’t think you deserve to be told.”

“Don’t you know that a ghost is neither he nor she?” said Lawley. “Like a corpse, it is always it.”

“That is a piece of very definite information from a man who neither believes nor disbelieves in ghosts. How do you come by it, Lawley?” asked Armitage.

“Mayn’t a man be well informed on a subject although he suspends his judgment about it? I think I have the only logical mind among us. Musgrave believes in ghosts though he has never seen one, you don’t believe in them, and say that you would not be convinced if you saw one, which is not wise, it seems to me.”

“It is not necessary to my peace of mind to have a definite opinion on the subject. After all, it is only a matter of patience, for if ghosts really exist we shall each be one in the course of time, and then, if we’ve nothing better to do, and are allowed to play such unworthy pranks, we may appear again on the scene, and impartially scare our credulous and incredulous surviving friends.”

“Then I shall try to be beforehand with you, Lawley, and turn bogie first; it would suit me better to scare than to be scared. But, Musgrave, do tell me about your family ghost; I’m really interested in it, and I’m quite respectful now.”

“Well, mind you are, and I shall have no objection to tell you what I know about it, which is briefly this: Stonecroft, as I told you, is built on the site of an old Cistercian Monastery destroyed at the time of the Reformation. The back part of the house rests on the old foundations, and its walls are built with the stones that were once part and parcel of the monastery. The ghost that has been seen by members of the Musgrave family for three centuries past, is that of a Cistercian monk, dressed in the white habit of his order. Who he was, or why he has haunted the scenes of his earthly life so long, there is no tradition to enlighten us. The ghost has usually been seen once or twice in each generation. But as I said, it has not visited us since my grandfather’s time, so, like a comet, it should be due again presently.”

“How you must regret that was before your time,” said Armitage.

“Of course I do, but I don’t despair of seeing it yet. At least I know where to look for it. It has always made its appearance in the gallery, and I have my bedroom close to the spot where it was last seen, in the hope that if I open my door suddenly some moonlight night I may find the monk standing there.”

“Standing where?” asked the incredulous Armitage.

“In the gallery, to be sure, midway between your two doors and mine. That is where my grandfather last saw it. He was waked in the dead of night by the sound of a heavy door shutting. He ran into the gallery where the noise came from, and, standing opposite the door of the room I occupy, was the white figure of the Cistercian monk. As he looked, it glided the length of the gallery and melted like mist into the wall. The spot where he disappeared is on the old foundations of the monastery, so that he was evidently returning to his own quarters.”

“And your grandfather believed that he saw a ghost?” asked Armitage disdainfully.

“Could he doubt the evidence of his senses? He saw the thing as clearly as we see each other now, and it disappeared like a thin vapour against the wall.”

“My dear fellow, don’t you think that it sounds more like an anecdote of your grandmother than of your grandfather?” remarked Armitage. He did not intend to be rude, though he succeeded in being so, as he was instantly aware by the expression of cold reserve that came over Musgrave’s frank face. “Forgive me, but I never can take a ghost story seriously,” he said. “But this much I will concede—they may have existed long ago in what were literally the dark ages, when rush-lights and sputtering dip candles could not keep the shadows at bay. But in this latter part of the nineteenth century, when gas and the electric light have turned night into day, you have destroyed the very conditions that produced the ghost—or rather the belief in it, which is the same thing. Darkness has always been bad for human nerves. I can’t explain why, but so it is. My mother was in advance of the age on the subject, and always insisted on having a good light burning in the night nursery, so that when as a child I woke from a bad dream I was never frightened by the darkness. And in consequence I have grown up a complete unbeliever in ghosts, spectres, wraiths, apparitions, dopplegangers, and the whole bogie crew of them,” and Armitage looked round calmly and complacently.

“Perhaps I might have felt as you do if I had not begun life with the knowledge that our house was haunted,” replied Musgrave with visible pride in the ancestral ghost. “I only wish that I could convince you of the existence of the supernatural from my own personal experience. I always feel it to be the weak point in a ghost story, that it is never told in the first person. It is a friend, or a friend of one’s friend, who was the lucky man, and actually saw the ghost.”

And Armitage registered a vow to himself, that within a week from that time Musgrave should see his family ghost with his own eyes, and ever after be able to speak with his enemy in the gate.

Several ingenious schemes occurred to his inventive mind for producing the desired apparition. But he had to keep them burning in his breast. Lawley was the last man to aid and abet him in playing a practical joke on their host, and he feared he should have to work without an ally. And though he would have enjoyed his help and sympathy, it struck him that it would be a double triumph achieved, if both his friends should see the Cistercian monk. Musgrave already believed in ghosts, and was prepared to meet one more than half way, and Lawley, though he pretended to a judicial and impartial mind concerning them, was not unwilling to be convinced of their existence, if it could be visibly demonstrated to him.

Armitage became more cheerful than usual as circumstances favoured his impious plot. The weather was propitious for the attempt he meditated, as the moon rose late and was approaching the full. On consulting the almanac he saw with delight that three nights hence she would rise at 2 a.m., and an hour later the end of the gallery nearest Musgrave’s room would be flooded with her light. Though Armitage could not have an accomplice under the roof, he needed one within reach, who could use needle and thread, to run up a specious imitation of the white robe and hood of a Cistercian monk. And the next day, when they went to the Harradines to take the girls out in their improvised sledges, it fell to his lot to take charge of the youngest Miss Harradine. As he pushed the low chair on runners over the hard snow, nothing was easier than to bend forward and whisper to Kate, “I am going to take you as fast as I can, so that no one can hear what we are saying. I want you to be very kind, and help me to play a perfectly harmless practical joke on Musgrave. Will you promise to keep my secret for a couple of days, when we shall all enjoy a laugh over it together?”

“O yes, I’ll help you with pleasure, but make haste and tell me what your practical joke is to be.”

“I want to play ancestral ghost to Musgrave, and make him believe that he has seen the Cistercian monk in his white robe and cowl, that was last seen by his respected credulous grand-papa.”

“What a good idea! I know he is always longing to see the ghost, and takes it as a personal affront that it has never appeared to him. But might it not startle him more than you intend?” and Kate turned her glowing face towards him, and Armitage involuntarily stopped the little sledge. “For it is one thing to wish to see a ghost, you know, and quite another to think that you see it.”

“Oh, you need not fear for Musgrave! We shall be conferring a positive favour on him, in helping him to see what he’s so wishful to see. I’m arranging it so that Lawley shall have the benefit of the show as well, and see the ghost at the same time with him. And if two strong men are not a match for one bogie, leave alone a home-made counterfeit one, it’s a pity.”

“Well, if you think it’s a safe trick to play, no doubt you are right. But how can I help you? With the monk’s habit, I suppose?”

“Exactly. I shall be so grateful to you if you will run up some sort of garment, that will look passably like a white Cistercian habit to a couple of men, who I don’t think will be in a critical frame of mind during the short time they are allowed to see it. I really wouldn’t trouble you if I were anything of a sempster (is that the masculine of sempstress?) myself, but I’m not. A thimble bothers me very much, and at college, when I have to sew on a button, I push the needle through on one side with a threepenny bit, and pull it out on the other with my teeth, and it’s a laborious process.”

Kate laughed merrily. “Oh, I can easily make something or other out of a white dressing gown, fit for a ghost to wear, and fasten a hood to it.”

Armitage then told her the details of his deeply laid scheme, how he would go to his room when Musgrave and Lawley went to theirs on the eventful night, and sit up till he was sure that they were fast asleep. Then when the moon had risen, and if her light was obscured by clouds he would be obliged to postpone the entertainment till he could be sure of her aid, he would dress himself as the ghostly monk, put out the candles, softly open the door and look into the gallery to see that all was ready. “Then I shall slam the door with an awful bang, for that was the noise that heralded the ghost’s last appearance, and it will wake Musgrave and Lawley, and bring them both out of their rooms like a shot. Lawley’s door is next to mine, and Musgrave’s opposite, so that each will command a magnificent view of the monk at the same instant, and they can compare notes afterwards at their leisure.”

“But what shall you do if they find you out at once?”

“Oh, they won’t do that! The cowl will be drawn over my face, and I shall stand with my back to the moonlight. My private belief is, that in spite of Musgrave’s yearnings after a ghost, he won’t like it when he thinks he sees it. Nor will Lawley, and I expect they’ll dart back into their rooms and lock themselves in as soon as they catch sight of the monk. That would give me time to whip back into my room, turn the key, strip off my finery, hide it, and be roused with difficulty from a deep sleep when they come knocking at my door to tell me what a horrible thing has happened. And one more ghost story will be added to those already in circulation,” and Armitage laughed aloud in anticipation of the fun.

“It is to be hoped that everything will happen just as you have planned it, and then we shall all be pleased. And now will you turn the sledge round and let us join the others; we have done conspiring for the present. If we are seen talking so exclusively to each other, they will suspect that we are brewing some mischief together. Oh, how cold the wind is! I like to hear it whistle in my hair!” said Kate as Armitage deftly swung the little sledge round and drove it quickly before him, facing the keen north wind, and she buried her chin in her warm furs.

Armitage found an opportunity to arrange with Kate, that he would meet her half way between Stonecroft and her home, on the afternoon of the next day but one, when she would give him a parcel containing the monk’s habit. The Harradines and their house party were coming on Thursday afternoon to try the toboggan slide at Stonecroft. But Kate and Armitage were willing to sacrifice their pleasure to the business they had in hand.

There was no other way but for the conspirators to give their friends the slip for a couple of hours, when the important parcel would be safely given to Armitage, secretly conveyed by him to his own room, and locked up till he should want it in the small hours of the morning.

When the young people arrived at Stonecroft, Miss Harradine apologised for her younger sister’s absence, occasioned, she said, by a severe headache. Armitage’s heart beat rapidly when he heard the excuse, and he thought how convenient it was for the inscrutable sex to be able to turn on a headache at will, as one turns on hot or cold water from a tap.

After luncheon, as there were more gentlemen than ladies, and Armitage’s services were not necessary at the toboggan slide, he elected to take the dogs for a walk, and set off in the gayest spirits to keep his appointment with Kate. Much as he enjoyed maturing his ghost plot, he enjoyed still more the confidential talks with Kate that had sprung out of it, and he was sorry that this was to be the last of them. But the moon in heaven could not be stayed for the performance of his little comedy, and her light was necessary to its due performance. The ghost must be seen at three o’clock next morning, at the time and place arranged, when the proper illumination for its display would be forthcoming.

As Armitage walked swiftly over the hard snow, he caught sight of Kate at a distance. She waved her hand gaily and pointed smiling to the rather large parcel she was carrying. The red glow of the winter sun shone full upon her, bringing out the warm tints in her chestnut hair, and filling her brown eyes with soft lustre, and Armitage looked at her with undisguised admiration.

“It’s awfully good of you to help me so kindly,” he said as he took the parcel from her, “and I shall come round to-morrow to tell you the result of our practical joke. But how is the headache?” he asked smiling, “you look so unlike aches or pains of any kind, I was forgetting to enquire about it.”

“Thank you, it is better. It was not altogether a made-up headache, though it happened opportunely. I was awake in the night, not in the least repenting that I was helping you, of course, but wishing it was all well over. One has heard of this kind of trick sometimes proving too successful, of people being frightened out of their wits by a make-believe ghost, and I should never forgive myself if Mr Musgrave or Mr Lawley were seriously alarmed.”

“Really, Miss Harradine, I don’t think that you need give yourself a moment’s anxiety about the nerves of a couple of burly young men. If you are afraid for anyone, let it be for me. If they find me out, they will fall upon me and rend me limb from limb on the spot. I can assure you I am the only one for whom there is anything to fear,” and the transient gravity passed like a cloud from Kate’s bright face. And she admitted that it was rather absurd to be uneasy about two stalwart young men compounded more of muscle than of nerves. And they parted, Kate hastening home as the early twilight fell, and Armitage, after watching her out of sight, retracing his steps with the precious parcel under his arm.

He entered the house unobserved, and reaching the gallery by a back staircase, felt his way in the dark to his room. He deposited his treasure in the wardrobe, locked it up, and attracted by the sound of laughter, ran downstairs to the drawing-room. Will Musgrave and his friends, after a couple of hours of glowing exercise, had been driven indoors by the darkness, nothing loath to partake of tea and hot cakes, while they talked and laughed over the adventures of the afternoon.

“Wherever have you been, old fellow?” said Musgrave as Armitage entered the room. “I believe you’ve a private toboggan of your own somewhere that you keep quiet. If only the moon rose at a decent time, instead of at some unearthly hour in the night, when it’s not of the slightest use to anyone, we would have gone out looking for you.”

“You wouldn’t have had far to seek, you’d have met me on the turnpike road.”

“But why this subdued and chastened taste? Imagine preferring a constitutional on the high road when you might have been tobogganing with us! My poor friend, I’m afraid you are not feeling well!” said Musgrave with an affectation of sympathy that ended in boyish laughter and a wrestling match between the two young men, in the course of which Lawley more than once saved the tea table from being violently overthrown.

Presently, when the cakes and toast had disappeared before the youthful appetites, lanterns were lighted, and Musgrave and his friends, and the Harradine brothers, set out as a bodyguard to take the young ladies home. Armitage was in riotous spirits, and finding that Musgrave and Lawley had appropriated the two prettiest girls in the company, waltzed untrammelled along the road before them lantern in hand, like a very will-o’-the-wisp.

The young people did not part till they had planned fresh pleasures for the morrow, and Musgrave, Lawley, and Armitage returned to Stonecroft to dinner, making the thin air ring to the jovial songs with which they beguiled the homeward journey.

Late in the evening, when the young men were sitting in the library, Musgrave suddenly exclaimed, as he reached down a book from an upper shelf, “Hallo! I’ve come on my grandfather’s diary! Here’s his own account of how he saw the white monk in the gallery. Lawley, you may read it if you like, but it shan’t be wasted on an unbeliever like Armitage. By Jove! what an odd coincidence! It’s forty years this very night, the thirtieth of December, since he saw the ghost,” and he handed the book to Lawley, who read Mr Musgrave’s narrative with close attention.

“Is it a case of ‘almost thou persuadest me’?” asked Armitage, looking at his intent and knitted brow.

“I hardly know what I think. Nothing positive either way at any rate.” And he dropped the subject, for he saw Musgrave did not wish to discuss the family ghost in Armitage’s unsympathetic presence.

They retired late, and the hour that Armitage had so gleefully anticipated drew near. “Good-night both of you,” said Musgrave as he entered his room, “I shall be asleep in five minutes. All this exercise in the open air makes a man absurdly sleepy at night,” and the young men closed their doors, and silence settled down upon Stonecroft Hall.

Armitage and Lawley’s rooms were next to each other, and in less than a quarter of an hour Lawley shouted a cheery good-night, which was loudly returned by his friend. Then Armitage felt somewhat mean and stealthy. Musgrave and Lawley were both confidingly asleep, while he sat up alert and vigilant maturing a mischievous plot that had for its object the awakening and scaring of both the innocent sleepers. He dared not smoke to pass the tedious time, lest the tell-tale fumes should penetrate into the next room through the keyhole, and inform Lawley if he woke for an instant that his friend was awake too, and behaving as though it were high noon.

Armitage spread the monk’s white habit on the bed, and smiled as he touched it to think that Kate’s pretty fingers had been so recently at work upon it. He need not put it on for a couple of hours yet, and to occupy the time he sat down to write. He would have liked to take a nap. But he knew that if he once yielded to sleep, nothing would wake him till he was called at eight o’clock in the morning. As he bent over his desk the big clock in the hall struck one, so suddenly and sharply it was like a blow on the head, and he started violently. “What a swinish sleep Lawley must be in that he can’t hear a noise like that!” he thought, as snoring became audible from the next room. Then he drew the candles nearer to him, and settled once more to his writing, and a pile of letters testified to his industry, when again the clock struck. But this time he expected it, and it did not startle him, only the cold made him shiver. “If I hadn’t made up my mind to go through with this confounded piece of folly, I’d go to bed now,” he thought, “but I can’t break faith with Kate. She’s made the robe and I’ve got to wear it, worse luck,” and with a great yawn, he threw down his pen, and rose to look out of the window.

It was a clear frosty night. At the edge of the dark sky, sprinkled with stars, a faint band of cold light heralded the rising moon. How different from the grey light of dawn, that ushers in the cheerful day, is the solemn rising of the moon in the depth of a winter night. Her light is not to rouse a sleeping world and lead men forth to their labour, it falls on the closed eyes of the weary, and silvers the graves of those whose rest shall be broken no more. Armitage was not easily impressed by the sombre aspect of nature, though he was quick to feel her gay and cheerful influence, but he would be glad when the farce was over, and he no longer obliged to watch the rise and spread of the pale light, solemn as the dawn of the last day.

He turned from the window, and proceeded to make himself into the best imitation of a Cistercian monk that he could contrive. He slipped the white habit over all his clothing, that he might seem of portly size, and marked dark circles round his eyes, and thickly powdered his face a ghastly white.

Armitage silently laughed at his reflection in the glass, and wished that Kate could see him now. Then he softly opened the door and looked into the gallery. The moonlight was shimmering duskily on the end window to the right of his door and Lawley’s. It would soon be where he wanted it, and neither too light nor too dark for the success of his plan. He stepped silently back again to wait, and a feeling as much akin to nervousness as he had ever known came over him. His heart beat rapidly, he started like a timid girl when the silence was suddenly broken by the hooting of an owl. He no longer cared to look at himself in the glass. He had taken fright at the mortal pallor of his powdered face. “Hang it all! I wish Lawley hadn’t left off snoring. It was quite companionable to hear him.”

And again he looked into the gallery, and now the moon shed her cold beams where he intended to stand. He put out the light and opened the door wide, and stepping into the gallery threw it to with an echoing slam that only caused Musgrave and Lawley to start and turn on their pillows. Armitage stood dressed as the ghostly monk of Stonecroft, in the pale moonlight in the middle of the gallery, waiting for the door on either side to fly open and reveal the terrified faces of his friends.

He had time to curse the ill-luck that made them sleep so heavily that night of all nights, and to fear lest the servants had heard the noise their master had been deaf to, and would come hurrying to the spot and spoil the sport. But no one came, and as Armitage stood, the objects in the long gallery became clearer every moment, as his sight accommodated itself to the dim light.

“I never noticed before that there was a mirror at the end of the gallery! I should not have believed the moonlight was bright enough for me to see my own reflection so far off, only white stands out so in the dark. But is it my own reflection? Confound it all, the thing’s moving and I’m standing still! I know what it is! It’s Musgrave dressed up to try to give me a fright, and Lawley’s helping him. They’ve forestalled me, that’s why they didn’t come out of their rooms when I made a noise fit to wake the dead. Odd we’re both playing the same practical joke at the same moment! Come on, my counterfeit bogie, and we’ll see which of us turns white-livered first!”

But to Armitage’s surprise, that rapidly became terror, the white figure that he believed to be Musgrave disguised, and like himself playing ghost, advanced towards him, slowly gliding over the floor which its feet did not touch. Armitage’s courage was high, and he determined to hold his ground against the something ingeniously contrived by Musgrave and Lawley to terrify him into belief in the supernatural.

But a feeling was creeping over the strong young man that he had never known before. He opened his dry mouth as the thing floated towards him, and there issued a hoarse inarticulate cry, that woke Musgrave and Lawley and brought them to their doors in a moment, not knowing by what strange fright they had been startled out of their sleep. Do not think them cowards that they shrank back appalled from the ghostly forms the moonlight revealed to them in the gallery. But as Armitage vehemently repelled the horror that drifted nearer and nearer to him, the cowl slipped from his head, and his friends recognised his white face, distorted by fear, and, springing towards him as he staggered, supported him in their arms. The Cistercian monk passed them like a white mist that sank into the wall, and Musgrave and Lawley were alone with the dead body of their friend, whose masquerading dress had become his shroud.

My Next-Door Neighbour

Some years ago it was my doleful hap to spend five months as a patient in one of our London hospitals. They were the dreariest months in the whole year, from November to February, when the great city is shorn of its summer attractions, and rain, fog, and frost alternately strive for the supremacy, so that I did not lose many out-door pleasures owing to my illness. My life had been an up-and-down-hill journey, full of varied experiences. I had travelled much and seen many peoples and countries; I had had wealth and squandered it, and now at length poverty and I were fairly face to face. I had only myself to thank for my reverse of fortune, and I could not complain of the result of my own actions. The boon companions who helped me to spend my money forsook me at the approach of adversity, as midges that dance in the sunshine disappear when the sky is overcast.

I could not but admire the symmetry and completeness of my misfortunes. Penniless, friendless, and for the first time in my life, at thirty-five years of age, fallen seriously ill. Health, without which I could do nothing and be nothing, was drawn precisely at the time when it was the one thing needful to enable me to retrieve my position. I had wealthy relations, but as I had not cared to know them in my prosperity I had no claim on them in my adversity, nor any desire to imitate the return of the Prodigal Son on the baseless presumption that a fatted calf would be killed for me. I remember it struck me as odd, when the doctor who visited me in my cheap lodgings gave me an in-patient’s ticket for the hospital, whose pleasant lot it had been hitherto to bestow, instead of receive favours. But there was no flavour of private charity in the proffered aid. I accepted it as coming from that great impersonal body, the public, towards whom no one ever felt a burdensome sense of obligation,

The principle on which I had always chosen my friends probably made it easier than it would have been to most men of my education, to pass twenty weeks on amicable terms with the very mixed specimens of humanity that passed through the hospital ward as my fellow-patients. If a man pleased and interested me, that was his letter of recommendation. I enjoyed his society regardless of social distinctions. I thought no more of him if he happened to be a duke, or less if he chanced to be a cabman.

Many were the changes I saw during my long stay in the hospital. Some of my fellow-patients died, but most recovered and went away, while I remained till the population of the beds had changed repeatedly, and I grew to be the oldest inhabitant and father of the house. Our ward was a long narrow room with folding doors at each end, a large fireplace in the middle, with four high windows at either side, six beds under each row of windows, and twelve beds along the opposite side of the room, making twenty-four in all. The walls were stained a cheerful blue, and hung with engravings of more or less merit, and garnished here and there with texts and mottoes inciting us to be very joyful, or, where that was not possible, to try resignation as a useful work-a-day substitute. The floor was of polished wood, unrelieved by carpet or rug. The windows opened easily by an arrangement of ropes and pulleys, and ventilators close under the ceiling at the opposite side of the ward ensured a thorough current of air when it was necessary to change the atmosphere. But nothing can prevent the peculiar flatness of hospital air. I never lost the consciousness of it while the smell of carbolic filled me with loathing. It is supposed to overpower other and so-called worse odours than itself; but to me it seemed merely a substituting of one evil for another.

The illness that kept me so long in the hospital was a surgical case of great interest to the doctors and considerable suffering to myself, but gratifying to my invalid’s egotism, because it was the only case of the kind in the ward, where nine diseases were apportioned among twenty-four patients. To have one all to oneself out of that limited number conferred a certain distinction upon one.

An Anglican sisterhood was in charge of the nursing at the hospital, and splendidly they performed their duties. I think of them still with respect and gratitude. The nurses were strong, capable women, for the most part wonderfully forbearing with ill-tempered and thankless patients. During the time I spent under their care I gained some insight into the trials and difficulties of a hospital nurse’s life. I came to the conclusion that, if I were a woman, I would do or be anything that was honest, except stewardess on board ship, rather than nurse sick people for a livelihood.

It is a marvel to me how anyone used to quiet and privacy in his own home when he is ill ever recovers in a hospital, where he has neither one nor the other. But I had such a splendid nervous system that it was only on days of prostration following an operation that I really suffered from living in public, and then I did so acutely. In spite of the screen put round my bed to form a make-believe room to myself, in imagination I still saw the seven faces on the pillows to my right hand and four to my left in the long row of beds. I heard every groan, every impatient exclamation of the weary sufferers, and at night I listened with a frightfully exalted sense of hearing to the long-drawn snores of such of them as were happy enough to be able to sleep. The crowd of medical students, who accompanied and thronged about the doctors when they made the round of the wards, was in itself enough to kill a sensitive and nervous patient. They clustered like bees round any especially interesting case, and the more hideous the sights they saw, or the details they listened to, the happier they were and the more notes they took. I looked at the dignified bearing and fine face of the celebrated operating surgeon to whom they were listening by a patient’s beside, and wondered could he ever have been an uncouth lad like so many of his pupils. Could those penetrating eyes, full of the fire of genius, ever have winked at a fellow-student behind the back of the great doctor of the day some forty years ago?

I soon became interested in the routine of hospital life, and on those days when I was fairly well and free from pain I should never wish to be better entertained than I was in studying my fellow-patients.

We were a motley crew, surely the oddest four-and-twenty men that circumstances could have thrown together. The changes in our population were so rapid that a bed had scarcely time to grow cold before it was in possession of a fresh occupant. We were of all ages, shapes and sizes, and of a variety of nationalities; being, I think, at our most representative when our company consisted of Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen, with a choleric little Welshman, Germans, a Yankee, a Frenchman, a Swede, a Lascar seaman, a Jew and a Negro. By chance the Yankee on the day of his arrival was put in the next bed to the Negro; but after much nasal vituperation, the arrangement was altered for peace and quiet’s sake. We also represented many trades, and had amongst us tailors, policemen, costermongers, postmen, a butler, cabmen, a grave digger, a sugar refiner, shoemakers, and an omnibus conductor.

We also had some of those mysterious gentlemen of no particular calling or visible means of sustenance, who live at the back of everywhere, that a crowd or an accident brings into the street in swarms, as heavy rain brings worms to the surface of the soil. They are always open to an odd job, when it is highly paid for and not of an arduous nature. They spend their Sunday afternoons demonstrating in the park, clothed in long topcoats and woollen comforters, and never without a short pipe and tobacco, which presumably cost money. Where they sleep at night when they were not in hospital I have no idea. One of our company, who afforded me much amusement, was a genteel and sensitive young clerk, who had it on his mind to explain to me how he came to be in such a vulgar institution as a public hospital. He was consumed by a haunting dread lest, when he had recovered and returned to his place in the office of Messrs Scrawley and McNib in Lincoln’s Inn, he might be recognised in the street and spoken to by one of his fellow-patients, a chimney-sweep of too friendly a disposition. “His face, sir, would be black in the pursuit of his avocation and I shouldn’t know him, but he’d see me a mile off and run after me; and if a man in my position is seen talking to a sweep I shall be ruined,” said my sensitive little clerk.

I made a great variety of friends among my fellow-patients who stayed long enough to feel some interest in others, as the terrible egotism of their own sufferings abated. I parted on excellent terms with a butler, who taught me the kind of whistle I must give at the area gate when I called to see him after nightfall. A hansom-driver, bidding me good-bye, in the fullness of his heart, offered to take me in his cab down Piccadilly for my first airing after I left the hospital. A thoughtful little German baker with whom I talked metaphysics in accordance with the definition, that, “when a man talks to you in a way that you don’t understand, about a thing which he doesn’t understand, them’s metaphysics,” as a parting gift presented me with a list of shops whose bread one would do well to avoid, from the baker’s custom of working the sponge with unwashed hands, and I thanked him. A costermonger acquaintance taught me how, when buying fruit off a barrow in the street, to detect the tricks of the trade. In short, I picked up a great deal of information that, if it was not useful, amused me and afforded me a glimpse into the lives of other men.

I had been three months in bed, and was recovering from the effects of an operation, when I became acquainted with a man who interested me more than any other of my fellow-patients. I remember the day that he came into the hospital. It was in the first week of the new year, and a nurse had congratulated me on the good luck of having had the bed to the right of mine standing empty for two whole days. Its last occupant had been a dull, heavy fellow, absorbed in the contemplation of his own symptoms and doggedly convinced that he was the head martyr in the universe, unable perhaps, and certainly unwilling, to take part in the courtesies and amenities of invalid life. We did not miss him when he left, and the blank pillow was a pleasanter object to look at than the furrowed, irritable face and bald head that had lain upon it. It occurred to me, how fortunate I should be if the fates should send me an intelligent, sympathetic fellow-sufferer in the bed that I had seen so diversely occupied during the past twelve weeks.

The previous night my rest had been troubled, and in the forenoon, between the disturbance of the doctor’s visit and dinner being brought to us, I fell asleep. When I awoke I was astonished to find the bed that an hour and a half before had been empty occupied by a fresh patient, looking as comfortable and established as though he had been there a week.

The newcomer was a tall, swarthy-complexioned man of about thirty years of age. He lay on his back with his eyes closed and his head inclined towards me, so that I had a good view of his very remarkable face. That he was not an Englishman I felt sure, though to what country he belonged I could not tell. He was clean shaven as I thought, but I afterwards found that no hair grew on his face, and a month without a razor did not darken his lip or chin. His skin was of a yellowish-brown, and his straight black hair that covered his ears and lay on his cheek was cut square across the forehead. The nose was large and prominent, the mouth large, thin-lipped and well-shaped, and the jaw formed a powerful angle from the ear. The length of the face from the eyes to the mouth was greater than is usual, and the finely-modelled long hollow of the cheek gave a melancholy and dignified outline to his countenance. I wondered what he would be like when he awoke, and as I watched he opened his dark eyes, large and set wide apart, with a clear and penetrating expression.

As I looked in his face, that in spite of its smoothness was essentially masculine, and in expression a quaint mixture of shrewdness and childlike simplicity, I said to myself, “My friend, I cannot off-hand assign you to any particular country, but I can date your type of face for you. You have no business at all wandering about in the nineteenth century. You ought never to have stirred from the fourteenth, nor emerged from the pages of Froissart, to which you really belong.”

There was a quiet dignity about the man that forbade me to ask the usual questions that inaugurate a hospital acquaintance, such as, “What’s your name? where do you come from? and what’s the matter with you?” and I waited my time for a favourable opportunity of speaking to him.

When the nurse gave me my dinner I asked her, “Who is the man in the next bed?”

“A Frenchman; he was brought here while you were asleep.”

“Good,” thought I; “then I shall amuse myself by rubbing up my rusty French with him. Can you tell me his name?”

“No, I can’t remember French names, and besides, he has a string of them, those foreigners always have.”

I reached paper and pencil from the locker by my side and gave them to the nurse. “Just oblige me by copying his name from the card over his bed and bring it to me, will you?” She did as she was requested, and returning handed me the paper, on which she had written the names Jean Marie Thégonnec Pipraic. “Why, the man must be a Breton,” said I, repeating the two last names to myself.

“A Briton! A Frenchman never yet was a Briton, and couldn’t be if he tried,” said the nurse promptly, her national susceptibilities rubbed the wrong way in an instant through her misapprehension.

“A Breton, my good woman, a Breton, not a Briton,” said I; “and a Breton is no more a Frenchman, though he may happen to speak French, than a Welshman is an Englishman, even if he talks English. When did that solemn, dignified, fourteenth century face ever belong to a Frenchman, I should like to know?” and I wished to argue with my nurse concerning racial differences. But she cut the matter short by turning to the new patient and asking him plainly whether he was a Frenchman or what, for an Englishman in the next bed would not take her word for it. Our stranger, who was sitting up with his table across his knees, waiting for dinner, bowed gravely, first to the nurse and then to me.

“I am a Breton, madame, and I come from Roscoff, in the department of Finistère,” he said in a low, melancholy voice, speaking with a strong foreign accent; and he added with dignified simplicity: “My name is Jean Marie Thégonnec Pipraic, but I am everywhere called Jean Marie.”

“I thought you a Breton from your name,” I said. “I know your part of Brittany very well. I used to know Finistère and Morbihan from end to end. I once spent a summer there.”

“Does monsieur know Bretagne?” said my new acquaintance, with flashing eyes. “Has he been to Morlaix, Landenau, Quimper, S. Pol de Léon, Carnac, Plougastel?” and then followed a torrent of names of places, some on the coast and some inland, just as they rushed into his mind.

“I know them all my friend,” I said, smiling at his eagerness, “and when you have eaten your dinner you shall ask me as many questions as you please, and see if I speak the truth.”

“I should not doubt that monsieur spoke the truth, but it is wonderful; it is wonderful!”

I noticed that Jean Marie, as I already called him to myself, devoutly crossed himself on the forehead and on the breast, before and after he took food. I tried to talk French with him, though not always with lucid results, for he had learned French as a second language, and spoke a strange patois, while mine, such as it was, had been acquired in Paris. An acquaintance sprang up rapidly between us, founded on my knowledge of the scenes of his childhood, and the places dearest to him in his manhood. And I grew fond of Jean Marie, so that my heart sank when I learnt how badly the doctors thought of his case. By degrees he told me the simple story of his life.

Jean Marie Thégonnec Pipraic was the son of a poor fisherman and his wife who lived near Roscoff, on the coast of Finistère. He and his younger sister, Anne— namesake of La Bonne Duchesse, who after four centuries is still spoken of in Brittany as though she had been dead but a generation or so—were the only children, and had been brought up in such poverty and hard work as sounded incredible to my pampered English ears. They never tasted meat. Their food was the coarsest bread, with onions and potatoes, and occasionally on festival days a little fish and milk. They rose at four in the morning to make or mend fishing-nets, or to work on the small plot of ground surrounding the hut in which they lived. The father was out fishing every night, and the mother burnt a taper in the window that in calm weather he could see as a glimmering point of light, when his boat was tossing on the water far from shore. When he came safely home out of the teeth of the western gales that ravage that coast, the pious mother took her children to the church, to thank the Blessed Virgin for her protection. Once when the husband and father had been miraculously preserved in a storm, they made a votive offering of a model of a fishing boat, which was hung suspended from the roof of the chancel before the altar of their patron saint, in visible token of the mercy of Heaven and the gratitude of man.

But there came a fearful night in autumn when a sudden squall of wind struck the little fleet of fishing boats, and in the dismal dawn, when stormy sea and sky seemed torn together in one grey mist, out of the welter of devouring waves, the drowned bodies of brave fishermen were washed ashore. And among them that of Thégonnec Pipraic, the father of Jean Marie.

“The sea is cruel on the coast of Finistère, monsieur; it makes many widows and orphans; and on winter nights we hear it howling like a hungry wolf at our door. But in the summer it is often still and blue as the sky above, and the little islands are like clouds floating on its surface. In the summer, monsieur, the sea is like the love of the Bon Dieu; in the winter it is like his wrath, and we tremble before it.”

Jean Marie was to have been a fisherman, like his father before him. But the mother, dreading lest the cruel sea should take from her her son as well as her husband, moved a short distance to S. Pol de Leon, where she found work for herself and little Anne in the fields. Jean Marie, only ten years old, worked his twelve hours daily as a farm labourer for a trifling pittance; but, as he said, “the Bon Dieu saw that I wanted for nothing. I had bread; I had health and strength; and as I grew older I was able to succour my mother and my sister.”

Jean Marie saw the Bon Dieu in everything. I have never met man or woman with the same childlike faith.

When he was twenty years of age his mother died, worn out with toil and scanty living. Work as they would, the three of them, they could not earn more than enough to meet each day’s recurring want. They could not lay by a sou against sickness or accident, or afford the weary mother a little rest before she died. Shortly after her death her daughter married a fisherman and went to live on the island of Batzoff, the soil of which is tilled by the women, while the men plough the sea. And there she still lives in many-childed poverty.

“How come you to speak English, Jean Marie?” I asked him one day when he was free from pain and able to enjoy conversation.

“Monsieur, I learnt it from an excellent compatriot of yours, who lived for many years at Carnac, trying to find out the meaning of the great stones there. Monsieur Smitt was like a father to me. I was his servant, I dug his garden and tended his horse and cow, and he taught me to speak his difficult language. For several years I lived with my master. He was not Catholic, monsieur; Pere Croisac would have it that he was not even Christian, but the Bon Dieu had given him a good heart, and the poor prayed for him. I tried to convert my master, and I assured him of the miracles that the holy saints still work in Bretagne. But Monsieur Smitt would not be convinced. He had a way like so many Englishmen—pardon me, monsieur, but it is not a good way of jesting at holy things. But in his heart I think my master believed, for he let me go all the way to Helgoet when our cow had cast her calf, and was suffering like a Christian, to intercede with Saint Herbot for the poor beast.”

“I remember Saint Herbot’s church perfectly well,” I said. “He has taken the cattle under his special protection, and I saw tufts of the hair of sick animals laid on his altar by their unfortunate owners, who had come to pray for their recovery.”

“Then monsieur must have seen the very wisp of hair from our poor cow’s tail that I laid on the altar of the holy saint myself,” said Jean Marie with animation. “It was red, with here and there a white hair mixed; monsieur could not forget it.”

I was obliged to evade the difficulty by saying that when I visited Saint Herbot’s church, the altar was so thickly covered with tufts of goats’, horses’, and cows’ hair that Jean Marie’s lock must have been hidden beneath them.

“And did the cow recover?” I asked.

“Monsieur, when I returned from my pilgrimage on the third day the poor beast was dead.”

“What, when you had walked two whole days to lay a tuft of her hair before Saint Herbot? What could the saint be dreaming of?”

“Monsieur, the Holy Saint Herbot has two ways of answering prayer for les pauvres bestiaux malades. If he judges it best for them to recover, they will get better; but if not, they will die,” and as though unwilling further to discuss the saint with an unbeliever, Jean Marie passed on to other reminiscences.

“When I was twenty-five years of age my master took me with him to Paris; the first time that I had left my native Bretagne. But, monsieur, what a thing it was, the people there treated me as if I was a savage. They laughed at me in the street, at my long hair, my wide hat, my excellent bragous bras—breeches is your English word for them, monsieur, of the pattern that my forefathers had worn since the days of La Bonne Duchesse. They jeered at me when I went to mass, and their churches were empty; in Bretagne they are crowded with men. My money was stolen from me, and when I politely asked my way in the street, I was directed to the wrong place. The very children used vile words, and the young girls said things to me that a man in Bretagne would blush to think of.”

One day when we had grown quite intimate, Jean Marie confided to me the love he had borne to his fellow servant Françoise.

“Monsieur, I have never loved but one woman, my Françoise. For five years we ate at the same table, we worked in the same garden, we went to mass together, we prayed together. We were not married because I desired to save a little money first, that my wife might not have to toil as my poor mother had done. Monsieur, I cannot tell you whether my Françoise was beautiful or not, but the Bon Dieu had given her to me, and I never looked in another woman’s face. We were to be married: Monsieur Smitt would still keep me as his servant, and we were to live in a little cottage near him, and he would have another woman for his cook, though my Françoise was still to help in the housework. Within a fortnight of our intended marriage our good master fell ill of a fever, and my Françoise nursed him, and took it from him and died. They both died, monsieur, my master and my Françoise, and I tried to take the fever from them that I might die too, but the fever had no more power to kill me than fire has to burn the holy saints. And to think, monsieur, that we might have been man and wife if I had not loved my Françoise so well. Monsieur, this rosary is all that I have that belonged to my Françoise, for she was as poor as the Blessed Virgin herself.”

And Jean Marie stretched his long, thin arm towards me, and laid on the locker by my bedside a cheap rosary, made of a string of small berries, with a crucifix attached to it.

After the death of his master and Françoise, Jean Marie returned to the neighbourhood of Roscoff and worked under a well-to-do farmer, who grew great quantities of the onions for which that part of Finistère is renowned. He was an enterprising man, and anxious to find the best market for his produce. Jean Marie served him faithfully and intelligently, and when he had been with him three years he increased his wages, and as he spoke English he sent him to London, to negotiate for the sale of his onions with English dealers. I was astounded to find how astute my fourteenth-century friend was in business matters. He had made bargains profitable to his employer and to himself, and Monsieur Ploumel was highly satisfied with the honesty and ability of his agent.

And now, on his third journey to England, Jean Marie was smitten with a mortal illness, and would never return to his native land.

“I have been ill for more than a year, monsieur. I know it by the pain I have suffered. But it does not matter; it is over now. I have finished my work. The day before I came into this hospital I sent to Monsieur Ploumel every sou I had made for him, and a draft for three hundred francs that I had saved for my poor sister and her children. I have come here to die,” he said, in quiet unemotional tones, as though he were speaking of a stranger.

I listened in silence, for I knew what the doctors thought of his case; that nothing could be done to cure, but only to palliate the disease. Never had there been a more patient sufferer in the hospital. In spite of his mediaeval superstition, Jean Marie was a most courageous Christian, and put us all to shame. When he was sufficiently free from pain to speak, it was with a gentle courtesy, and no word of complaint or of impatience ever escaped his lips. He was always ready to listen to the egotistic grumbling of his fellow-patients, though he tried, by example and precept, to lift us out of the narrow groove of self-centred suffering.

One day I saw that he was enduring agony. His dark face was livid, and when he could speak he said quietly, “Monsieur, these pains are pin-pricks compared with those the Blessed Redeemer suffered for us.”

That night Jean Marie was very ill, and I lay awake, partly from sympathy with him, partly because his restlessness made it difficult for me to sleep, as he muttered and talked to himself without ceasing. The nurse was in constant attendance upon him, and she said to me: “His sleeping draught has not suited him to-night; he is terribly restless.”

Between two and three o’clock in the morning I thought that she was again leaning over Jean Marie. On the opposite side of his bed, facing me, a woman stood wearing a white cap, but not such as our nurses wore, and she was bending over Jean Marie as though she would kiss him. Then she knelt, holding his hand in hers, and the light in the ward was sufficient for me to see that she wore the costume of a Brittany peasant, with the coloured cotton kerchief on the shoulders, tucked into the bib of the black apron in front. I raised myself in bed, and a nurse, who was sitting by the fire, came to me at once.

“Do you want anything?” she asked.

“Yes; who is that woman?” and I pointed to the figure still standing by Jean Marie.

“What woman?” she said, looking in the direction I indicated.

“That Brittany peasant woman, to be sure, by Jean Marie’s bedside, talking to him and holding his hand.”

“You have been dreaming!” said the nurse; “there is no one there. Lie down and try to go to sleep, though I daresay that poor fellow makes it hard for you to rest.”

I had not been dreaming, though Jean Marie had, for afterwards he awoke with a little sigh as if he were sorry to return to consciousness, and said in his quiet tones, “Monsieur, the Bon Dieu has been very good to me. He has sent my Françoise to me in a dream, and I have seen her and held her hand in mine. I am only to suffer three days more, for on Sunday morning at two o’clock my Françoise is to fetch me!” And he laughed to himself, a little laugh of incomparable happiness, and soon afterwards became again delirious.

All Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, my friend grew steadily worse, though the doctors did not anticipate an immediate end of his sufferings. His mind wandered the whole time, and he talked to himself incessantly in Breton. When occasionally he dropped into French, and I understood what he said, he was imagining he was a child again, playing on the sands, or sitting on the rocks with his little sister, mending their father’s fishing-nets. I grew feverish with excitement and anticipation of what would happen to Jean Marie. I had certainly seen his Françoise, and I dreaded her return. But I did not dare confide in either doctor or nurse. My strange experience could only be regarded by them as a sick man’s fancy. But my state of nervous excitement was duly noticed and commented on by one of the house surgeons, a pleasant young man who had shown me much kindness.

“What in the world are you exciting yourself about?” he asked me on the Saturday afternoon. “You haven’t had a pulse like this since before your first operation, and you’ve nothing of the kind in anticipation to account for it now.”

But I could not tell him the truth, because from me it would appear incredible. I said that I had slept badly for several nights past, and that might account for my not being so well as usual. And I wound up with the apparently inconsequent request, “Do come and see Jean Marie at two o’clock in the morning, doctor.”

I spoke so earnestly that the surgeon ceased tapping his palm with the stethoscope he held in his right hand. “I shall be in the ward at four o’clock under any circumstances, so that unless you have any very good reasons for asking me to see him earlier, your request is absurd. If I could do the poor fellow any good by seeing him, then it would be another thing. And I’m almost run off my legs as it is.”

“But I have a perfectly valid reason for asking you to see Jean Marie precisely at that hour,” I urged. “I cannot tell you now what it is, but I will do so afterwards, if you will only come.” And he felt my pulse again, and I knew that he thought I was wandering in my mind.

“Well, well,” he said, good humouredly, “if I can wake myself at that hour—two o’clock, I think you said—I’ll run in and have a look at Jean Marie.”

About eleven o’clock, when the lights were turned low and all was quiet for the night, Jean Marie’s mind for a short time became clear and tranquil. He was like a man about to set forth on a delightful journey to some place and friends he longed to see; he was full of deep, happy excitement. When the nurse asked him if he wanted anything, his answer was always the same, “Mon ami, my wanting days are over; I have everything.” Then he spoke to me. “I am ready to go when my Franchise fetches me. Monsieur, if I may leave to you my rosary I shall be glad. It may be that the Bon Dieu will lead you by it to become Catholic,” and he looked wistfully.

“Jean Marie, I would become anything that would give me your peace and courage,” I said. But I do not think that he heard my reply, for he was again wandering—talking to himself and singing snatches of old Breton songs, that were not unlike Gregorian tones.

“I wish that French fellow would be quiet and let me go to sleep,” whimpered a fretful voice from my left-hand neighbour.

“It is the last night that he will disturb you; have a little patience,” I said.

•    •    •    •

Midnight had long passed, and in due course I heard the church clocks for a mile round strike one, like irregular file firing. I had not long to wait before I should know whether Jean Marie’s prophetic dream was true or not. In the exalted stated of my senses every sound in the ward, every footfall of the nurses, seemed unnaturally loud, as I lay watching in the subdued light the old-world features of Jean Marie. He was lying on his back with closed eyes, his long, brown fingers telling his beads and his lips moving rapidly. Just then a nurse approached his bedside with a dose of medicine so nauseous that the smell of it as it wafted by made me feel ill.

“Must you disturb him to give him that vile stuff?” I asked, as I looked with compassion on Jean Marie, tranquil for the first time in many hours.

“Doctor’s orders,” she replied briefly, and raised the patient’s head to put the glass to his lips. He opened his eyes, and I saw by his expression that his soul revolted at the loathsome draught. Then, with the meekness of a little child, he drained it to the dregs.

It was a few minutes to two o’clock, and I was strung up to an almost intolerable pitch of excitement. When a cinder fell from the grate it sounded like thunder, and I started and trembled. Jean Marie had fallen into a restless sleep, but he no longer muttered and talked to himself. I could hardly believe my eyes, though I firmly expected what I saw—by the side of Jean Marie’s bed stood the same form I had seen three nights ago, the Brittany peasant woman. Her plain, swarthy face was covered with the sweetest smiles, and she leaned her dark head in its snowy cap over Jean Marie till her cheek almost touched his. My heart beat to suffocation, and I leaned upon my elbow, determined to watch closely. It was seldom that everyone was asleep in the ward at the same time, and the sister in charge and the nurses were certainly awake. Did no one but myself see the tall figure by Jean Marie’s bed? It must have been full ten minutes that I saw the woman both standing and leaning over him in her quaint dress, and at length she knelt by his side and I heard him say in a low voice of ecstasy, “Oh, ma Françoise! ma Françoise!” as he sighed away his last breath.

“Nurse, nurse,” I cried, “Jean Marie is dying!” and she hastened to him in a moment, as she did so unconsciously passing through the shadowy form that still hovered over him. Just then the door at the end of the ward opened and the house surgeon entered.

“What is the matter?” he said as he saw me out of bed and the nurse feeling Jean Marie’s pulse.

“Jean Marie is dead—very suddenly; I only gave him his draught half-an-hour ago,” said the nurse.

Then I told the doctor as collectedly as I could what I had seen on Thursday night and how Jean Marie had told me of his dream, which I had seen fulfilled, and of the ghostly figure of the Breton peasant woman that had but that moment faded from my sight. I dared not tell him the night before, but now that there was confirmation of it he must see for himself that it was true, and I pointed to poor Jean Marie’s corpse.

He listened with the greatest attention. “If it had been any other patient that had told me such a thing,” he said at length, “I should have known that he was delirious, and have ordered ice to his head, and I don’t say but that it mightn’t be a good thing for even you. Still, when an educated man like yourself is convinced that he has been brought face to face with the supernatural, he is entitled to a hearing. It is strange, very strange. Jean Marie was a remarkable man; I have never met a patient like him. There is only one thing that I can be sure of in the whole affair, and that is, that I must have you out of this ward the first thing in the morning, or your nerves will be shattered in addition to your other troubles.”

The body of my poor friend was removed before any of the patients were aware that a death had occurred. In a few hours I found myself in another ward of the hospital, surrounded by fresh faces, and I could hardly be certain whether or not I had dreamed the strange story of Jean Marie Thégonnec Pipraic.

The Empty Picture Frame

It was a wild day in September. An equinoctial gale had raged since dawn, shaking doors and windows, and battering the walls of Eastwick Court. The orchards were strewed with bruised fruit plucked by the rude hand of the wind. The gardens that yesterday, neat and trim, basked in autumn sunshine, to-day were littered with branches stripped from the trees, and melancholy with uprooted flowers. The paths were cut into channels by torrents of rain, that washed the loose sand on the grass, where, as the water subsided, it lay in red patches. At sunset there came a sudden lull. The gale fell to a whisper, and the rain ceased. But no flush of light overspread the grey sky. No western glow shone on the sombre walls, or reflected its red light on the rain-washed windows of the old house.

Within doors it was too dark to read or work, and in the enforced idleness of twilight, Miss Swinford laid down her book, and seated herself on a low chair by the fire.

Katherine Swinford was alone in the great drawing-room. As she leaned forward with hands clasped in her lap, watching the bickering flames that played about the logs on the hearth, there was something pathetic as well as dignified in her appearance. The mistress of Eastwick Court was no longer young. Her thick hair was streaked with white, and sundry lines on her brow, and about her clear grey eyes, showed where time’s finger had touched her and left its mark. Her features were large but finely formed, her expression firm and self-reliant. Miss Swinford had lived so long alone, mistress of a large property, and a law unto herself in her own domain, that she had acquired the somewhat imperious manner of one who exercises a benevolent tyranny, and has an unquestioned right to be obeyed. She was the only child and heiress of Sir John Swinford who had been dead some twelve years, and she had lost her mother in her infancy.

No one could have supposed that Miss Swinford, like Queen Elizabeth, was destined to reign alone. She had had as many suitors as the Virgin Queen herself, and they might be classed in three orders. The first, and most numerous, was attracted by the estate to which the lady seemed but the necessary appendage. The second felt the charm of the heiress, and the still greater charm of her wealth, while the third order of suitor was represented by one man only, who loved Katherine for her own sake, and would have sought her for his wife if she had been penniless. No need to tell the story—“es ist ein altes Liedchen”—the true love died long ago, and his fever-worn body lay buried in the hot sand of a tropic shore, and Katherine Swinford was still and would always remain Katherine Swinford.

Perhaps as she sat by her lonely hearth in the gathering dusk, she was thinking of what might have been, of the strong arm she might have leaned on, of the children that might have called her mother. She sighed, and rising abruptly, rang for lights.

“This will never do! I shall grow melancholy if I sit by myself in the twilight. It is peopled with ghosts, and with might-have-beens, the worst of all ghosts. I have been too much alone lately. I ought to keep up a succession of visitors. By the way, I wonder why I have not heard from Sir Piers Hammersley. It is ten days since I wrote to him inviting his daughter to come and stay with me.” And an air of bright energy succeeded to her momentary depression, and when the lamps were brought into the room Miss Swinford was looking ten years younger than she had done a short time before.

Sir Piers Hammersley was a cousin of the late Sir John Swinford, and both descended from a common ancestor, Sir Miles Swinford, who lived at Eastwick Court in the time of Charles the First. The Hammersleys were originally Swinfords. But Sir Miles’ second son Adam had married an heiress in Cumberland, Anne Hammersley, on the condition that he should bear her name as well as share her fortune. When Adam went to live in the north he took with him his sister Joceline, whose lover Colonel Dacres had been wounded fighting for his king, and died in her father’s house, since when she had pined and drooped at Eastwick Court. Joceline was only three-and-twenty years old, and her family thought that absence from home and its tragic associations would restore her to health and cheerfulness. And in this hope she made what was then the long wild journey out of Herefordshire into Cumberland. But no change of air or scene could arrest the decline into which she had fallen. Before the spring came she was laid in the vault of the Hammersleys.

Her sad story and the tradition of her beauty, confirmed by a portrait still preserved at Eastwick Court, had caused her to be remembered both by the Swinfords and Hammersleys, and the name of Joceline had not been allowed to die out in the family. The very reason why Miss Swinford had bestirred herself to write to her father’s cousin whom she had not seen since she was a girl, was that his only daughter was named Joceline. Her heart had warmed towards her unknown kinswoman in her loneliness, and she had written asking Sir Piers to allow his daughter to visit her at the house that was the birthplace of the original Joceline. The Hammersleys still lived in Cumberland, and Miss Swinford’s letter must have reached its destination the day after it was posted. But she had received no answer to her friendly invitation. She was astonished and almost affronted by chilling silence where she had hoped to meet with a cordial response.

“My cousin Joceline is so much younger than I that perhaps she does not feel very eager about spending a few weeks alone with me,” she argued with herself. “But at least she should be wishful to see the home of her ancestors, and the portrait of Joceline Swinford, whom she is fortunate if she resembles in personal appearance.”

Here Miss Swinford’s soliloquy was cut short by an unexpected interruption. A sound of heavy wheels driving slowly up the avenue by which the house was approached from the high road, and the carriage, waggon, or whatever it was that could be so ponderous, came to a standstill at the front door.

“The storm must have cut the gravel up terribly,” thought Miss Swinford; “I never heard wheels sound so heavy in the avenue before. Who can be paying an afternoon call so late, just when I am about to dress for dinner!” and the heavy carriage drove slowly away. Immediately afterwards the drawing-room door was thrown open, and Bennet the old butler announced “Miss Hammersley.” Miss Swinford started with surprise, and advanced to welcome a young and tall lady dressed in black, some fifteen years her junior. She was of a mortal pallor of complexion, with dreamy brown eyes and fair hair, and bearing the most extraordinary resemblance to the portrait of Joceline Swinford.

“My dear cousin! You have dropped upon me from the clouds! I have received no intimation that I should have the pleasure of seeing you to-day, or I would have driven to the station to meet you myself,” and she kissed her young kins-woman’s pale cheek.

“How cold you are, my dear! Come and sit near the fire before you take off your cloak.” And she led Joceline to a low chair, and she sat down by the flickering fire, with her back to the lamp.

“What sort of a journey have you had this stormy day? I’m afraid you had to change trains rather often between Cumberland and our little village station.”

Joceline Hammersley raised her eyes with a strange uncomprehending gaze, as though she were listening to a language she did not understand, and instead of replying to her question merely said, “I have come a long way, I am very tired.”

“You are not strong, my dear, I am afraid, you look so pale and weary. It is a pity I cannot give you a little of my superfluous strength,” and Miss Swinford smiled kindly on her young cousin. She could not take her eyes from the white oval face with its high marble brow, large dark eyes and heavy eyelids, delicate nose and small mouth with lips too pale for health.

“It is astounding, perfectly astounding!” at length she said. “Do you know that you are the living image of our common ancestress Joceline Swinford! You are exactly like the VanDyke portrait in the library! I must show it to you!”

“Oh, not to-night! not to-night!” pleaded her cousin.

“Very well then, not to-night, but first thing in the morning. By candle-light it might startle you, it would be like looking at the reflection of your face in a mirror. But let me unfasten your cloak for you, my dear.” For her guest was enveloped in a long black silk cloak, with a hood drawn over her fair curls, a quaint garment becoming her so well as to suggest the idea, that the pale silent lady was an artist in dress, and studied effects very successfully.

“Do not let me trouble you,” she replied, throwing her hood back upon her shoulders, “my waiting woman will give me the help I require.”

“Your waiting woman! Dear child, what an antiquated phrase! But I suppose odd words and expressions still linger in the wilds of Cumberland. Your maid, yes, I will ring for her, and I will show you to your room, where I am afraid the fire can hardly be lighted yet. It should have been burning all day if you had only done me the honour to announce your arrival beforehand.” And Miss Swinford opened the drawing room door, when to her amazement her guest with unhesitating step as though she knew her way perfectly, turned towards the old part of the house, that was full of empty rooms. “Not that way, my dear! You are going to the disused part of the building, that has not been inhabited since my grandfather’s time, and belongs now-a-days entirely to ghosts and rats. Let me lead you to our comfortable modern rooms, less historically interesting, but better suited to the requirements of a tired traveller like yourself.” And her guest turned to follow her with an expression of disappointment on her pale face. “May I not see the old rooms?”

“Certainly. I will show you everything, beginning with your own portrait, to-morrow morning. But here is your maid and this is your room; as we dine in half an hour I will leave you now to dress.” And mistress and maid were left together.

Miss Hammersley’s maid was no less remarkable looking than her mistress, with the same extreme pallor, though here the resemblance ended, for the mistress was beautiful and the maid distinctly ugly. Her grey hair was drawn away from her dark bony forehead under a close fitting white cap. Her eyes were small and black, and her mouth large, with thin compressed lips. Like her mistress, she was dressed in entire disregard of existing fashion, in a dark woollen material, with a deep linen collar and long white apron. At first the sight of a maid wearing a cap that a modern cook would scorn, and an apron suitable in size for a scullion, occasioned rude mirth among Miss Swinford’s servants. But their laughter was brief, and succeeded by uneasy fear, for Mistress Galt (as Miss Hammersley called her maid) had queer unaccountable ways, in harmony with her strange and repellent appearance.

The morning after Miss Hammersley’s arrival at Eastwick Court, the sun shone brightly on the destruction caused by the storm of the previous day, and the gardeners were busy repairing the damage done by the wind and rain.

When Miss Swinford entered the breakfast room, her guest was walking on the terrace, dressed in a white close-fitting gown low and open at the front, and her bare neck exposed to the chilly morning air. Miss Swinford hastened to her from the open window, exclaiming, “My dear child, you will catch your death of cold! Come back and put a shawl over your neck. Is it still the fashion to come down to breakfast in a low dress as my grandmother used to do!” and she led her into the house, and wrapped a soft shawl about her shoulders.

“How cold you are! And the morning air has brought no colour to your face! My dear child, are you always as cold as this?”

“Yes, always,” she replied quietly. Then adding as though speaking to herself, “yet I am clothed in woollen and sheltered from wind and rain.”

“Drink your coffee, you make me cold to look at you! And after breakfast I will take you upstairs to the library to show you the portrait of your namesake, and you shall tell me if you see the resemblance to yourself which I think so striking. It is an odd coincidence, the dress you are wearing might have been copied from that in the picture. But you shall see for yourself,” and Miss Swinford, pleased to have someone to talk to, continued chatting, and did not notice how silent her cousin remained.

After breakfast she took Joceline’s cold hand in hers, and led her upstairs.

“The library was my father’s favourite room, and I have made no alteration in it since his time. It was there that I last saw your father, and I remember how greatly he admired Joceline Swinford’s portrait. He said he should like to have a copy of it, but he does not need that as long as he has you to look at, my dear.” And Miss Swinford flung the door of the library wide open with a triumphant “there!”

But she started with astonishment, for over the fireplace, where the portrait of Joceline Swinford had been, hung only the empty frame, its tarnished gilding in sombre harmony with the square of blackened wall that had been covered by the canvas.

Miss Swinford rang the bell impetuously, and ran into the corridor to second its summons with her voice.

“Bennet, Bennet! there is the most extraordinary thing! The old portrait of Miss Joceline Swinford has been taken out of the frame, and carried away bodily! The house has been broken into during the night! Search everywhere, and find out by what door or window it has been entered.”

The servants gathered in a cluster round the library door, looking up at the empty frame with awe-stricken faces, and Miss Swinford sat down and fairly burst into tears. Joceline gently laid her hand on her shoulder, and said in a low voice, “Do not weep, the picture will be restored to you!” and raising her eyes, her cousin beheld the very embodiment of Joceline Swinford’s portrait standing beside her. The shawl had slipped from her shoulders, leaving her neck uncovered, and in face, attitude, and costume, she was so amazingly like the figure in the missing picture that Miss Swinford started. And the servants, still peering in at the door, looked from the empty frame to the pale lady, and then at each other with indefinable fear.

No trace of the thieves could be discovered. No lock, bolt or bar on door or window had been tampered with, and the picture was hung so high that whoever had stolen it, must have accomplished the theft by the help of a ladder. The local superintendent of police came to examine the house, and to take down a description of the missing picture from Miss Swinford’s lips, and she advertised a large reward for its discovery or for such information as should lead to the detection of the thief.

“The picture will be restored to you,” repeated Joceline.

“I am afraid not, my dear. The stolen portrait of the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire has never been recovered, and how can I hope to get my picture back again, and to unravel the mystery of its disappearance?” Miss Swinford telegraphed tidings of her loss to her lawyer in London, and followed it up by a long letter of instructions. He was to send a description of the missing portrait to all the picture dealers, and an advertisement was put in the papers warning pawnbrokers to detain the bearer, as well as the picture, if it was offered to them. And having done everything in her power to recover her treasure, Miss Swinford remained inconsolable under her loss.

The excitement in the servants’ hall was intense, and the physical difficulty of abstracting from its frame, a picture hung at such a height was dilated upon at great length. Finally they all agreed with old Bennet when he gave it as his opinion, “that it was like as if it had been sperited away!”

Only one person in the house appeared indifferent to the prevailing distress and anxiety, and this was Mistress Galt, who went about chuckling to herself with eldrich laughter.

Several days passed in which Miss Swinford did little but lament her loss, and exhaust conjecture as to how the picture could have been so mysteriously removed. But neither search nor enquiry threw any light on the matter. The portrait had vanished, leaving no more trace than if it had melted into thin air.

Her distraction of mind at first prevented Miss Swinford from noticing her guest, as she otherwise would have done. But as she became less preoccupied, she observed in Joceline Hammersley numberless little peculiarities, that, taken all together, convinced her she was unlike anyone she had ever met before. She had none of the ardour and impetuosity of youth, she was silent and reticent. She was ignorant of everyday matters that a child would know, and yet surprised her by considerable out of the way knowledge, and acquaintance with by-gone times, though she knew nothing of contemporary history. Her phraseology was often amusingly antiquated. Sometimes too she would misunderstand the plainest language, and require it to be translated into another form before she appeared to grasp its meaning.

“Does your father never take you to London, my dear?” asked Miss Swinford, thinking it a pity that so lovely a young creature should not see more society than her country home afforded.

“He took me thither once on a time when I was but a child, and I call to mind that while we were at our lodging in Whitehall the Queen was brought to bed of a son, and the rejoicing thereat.”

“My dear Joceline, you positively must not make use of such an old-fashioned, countrified expression as ‘brought to bed!’” said Miss Swinford, “it is only fit for an old nurse! Ladies may have spoken in that way a century ago, but it is purely rustic now. If you must date your visit to London by royal domestic events, you should say you were there when the Queen was confined.”

“But that would not be the truth,” replied Joceline, raising her dark eyes and folding her hands in her lap, “for it was not the Queen’s but the King’s majesty that was confined in Carisbrook Castle,” and she sighed heavily.

Miss Swinford was confounded. Could it be that her beautiful young kinswoman was mildly deranged? She looked into the dreamy brown eyes fixed upon her, and merely saying, “I think you have lived too much alone in the country,” lapsed into thoughtful silence.

That night when Miss Swinford was retiring to rest and her maid was about to leave the room, she lingered at the door and said, “There’s something I want to speak to you about, miss, but I hardly know how to, for it’s about Miss Hammersley.”

“What is it, Dapper? What can you have to say that concerns my cousin?”

“There’s something strange about the young lady, miss, and about Mistress Galt too, as she calls her. They walk in their sleep or something as bad. Last night when I was lying awake I heard footsteps, and I got up and opened my door, and crossed the gallery and looked over the bannisters, and there below if there wasn’t Miss Hammersley and her maid going into the empty rooms in the old part of the house. I saw them quite plain in the moonlight through the big window. They were in their day dresses, they hadn’t undressed for bed though it was past two o’clock, and Miss Hammersley was crying and sobbing. They seemed to know their way about the house in the dark as well as we do by daylight! I felt frightened and went back to bed, and it would be a good half hour before I heard them creep back to their rooms again. I thought I’d better tell you about it, miss.”

“You amaze me, Dapper! It’s impossible that they both walk in their sleep. But perhaps my cousin does, and her maid follows her lest she should meet with some accident, or wake suddenly and be alarmed.”

“I hope, miss, that if you hear anything to-night you’ll please to get up and see for yourself. I’ll put your dressing-gown by the candle and matches, and if you want me I’m a light sleeper, I should wake if you only scratched on the door.” And Dapper retired, leaving her mistress profoundly uneasy.

Many uncomfortable thoughts were suggested to Miss Swinford’s mind by what she had heard. She rose and locked the door, that if Joceline walked in her sleep, at all events she would not be startled by her entering the room in the night with wide unseeing eyes. She thought over all her cousin’s peculiarities, her strange inanimate expression, her deadly pallor and coldness, her silence and dreamy look, and decided that she was a very likely subject to be a somnambulist. Having settled this painful matter to her satisfaction, Miss Swinford’s mind reverted to its favourite theme—the inexplicable loss of the portrait. And she fell asleep to dream that her cousin stood in the tarnished frame over the library mantel-shelf, saying, “I told you that Joceline Swinford’s portrait would come back to you!” when she woke suddenly, the clock struck two, and she heard gentle steps in the carpeted gallery.

In a moment she had put on her dressing-gown and opened the door. Dapper had left a lamp burning, and by its light she saw Joceline Hammersley in the gallery on the opposite side of the hall, followed by her maid, walking towards the door leading to the old part of the house.

Miss Swinford hastened along the gallery that ran round the four sides of the hall, till she was close behind the dim figures that had now past beyond the light of the lamp. Mistress Galt was silent and rigid, but Joceline, pale as death, walked with clasped hands, moaning to herself. They left the door open as they entered the deserted rooms, and Miss Swinford followed unperceived. They passed quickly across stretches of pallid moonlight falling through the dusty windows, alternating with breadths of blackest shadow, opening door after door till they came to a corner room, looking out to the front and end of the house. Then they paused, and Joceline lifted up her face that no moonlight could bleach whiter, and cried, “It was here that he died! On this spot my love died! Here he lay till they bore him to his last resting place, but far from me! I lie alone in my narrow bed!” and Miss Swinford, terrified, and convinced that her cousin was either a mad woman or a somnambulist, turned and fled.

She did not pause or look behind her till she had locked herself in her room, when she fell half fainting upon the bed. “My poor cousin is insane! She has heard the story of the death of Joceline Swinford’s lover in this house, and has brooded over it, till with her peculiar temperament it has turned her brain. And that strange woman Galt is her keeper, I see it all now! How shall I get rid of her? I shall become mad myself if we stay together much longer in this old house. How could she know the room in which Colonel Dacres died? I have not told her, and she has not been at Eastwick Court before. It is hateful, it is uncanny!” and Miss Swinford shuddered.

Presently she heard light footsteps once more, and opening the door saw the dim figures of her cousin and her maid returning to their room. They had made a complete circuit of the house, and regained the gallery by means of a disused staircase, the door leading to which was kept locked. When all was once more silent, Miss Swinford crossed the gallery, candle in hand, to examine for herself if the lock had been tampered with. But the door was fastened as it had been for many years, and the paper pasted round it to prevent draughts was undisturbed. Yet there was no other means of reaching the side of the gallery by which Joceline Hammersley and Mistress Galt had returned to their rooms, except by this staircase.

Miss Swinford slept no more that night, and when she closed her eyes, it was only to open them and assure herself that the pale-faced Joceline was not standing by her side. At length when morning light filled the room, she drew aside the curtain and looked into the garden. She was startled to see Joceline and Mistress Galt standing together under the window. Neither of them wore hood or kerchief in the keen morning air, and Joceline’s bare neck looked white and cold as marble. “She is as like the old portrait as though she were the original Joceline come back from the dead!” exclaimed Miss Swinford.

Mistress and maid were looking fixedly at a spot in the garden, towards which first one pointed and then another, and in the silence of the early morning Miss Swinford could hear every word.

“And I say, Mistress Joceline, that the bowling green lay yonder!”

“Nay, be not so confident. You were here but for a few months when all was sorrow and confusion, while I dwelt here for three-and-twenty years, and till the cruel wars came had great joy and pleasure in my home. The bowling green was by the sundial, and lay to the north of the maze. But that is gone too. All is changed, the very flowers wear strange faces.”

“Shall you not rest, Mistress, since you have seen that which you prayed to see once more?”

“Yes, I shall rest. I shall sleep till we all wake together.”

“Mad! Stark mad!” ejaculated her cousin as she dropped the curtain and turned from the window.

The day proved wet and stormy, and Miss Swinford had to pass the heavy hours indoors with her uncanny guest. She was now so fully convinced of her cousin’s insanity that she felt nervous in her presence, and unable to question her about her mysterious conduct. Joceline was, if possible, quieter and more reserved than ever. She looked fearfully ill, at times scarcely conscious, and as though her dark eyes moved with difficulty from one object to another.

“I am afraid you did not rest well last night, you seem so tired,” Miss Swinford ventured to say.

“I have not slept of late, but soon I shall rest again.” And she seemed almost to fall asleep as she spoke. Only once did she show spontaneous interest in anything, when turning over the leaves of a book, she came upon an engraving of the celebrated portrait of Strafford. Then her pale face seemed to radiate light. “My Lord Strafford!” she exclaimed, “and yet how unlike, for no picture can give the dark fire of his eye! O noble soul, that gave thy life for thy king, and yet wast powerless to avert his doom!”

At length the tedious day drew to an end. The two ladies were sitting in silence in the drawing-room, Miss Swinford wondering when her strange cousin would depart. She was resolved that she would write to Sir Piers to say that the change back to the bracing air of the north would be beneficial to his daughter’s health, when Joceline rose noiselessly and left the room.

“How shall I get through another night with that unaccountable being wandering about the house, asleep or insane!” she thought looking after her with a troubled expression. “I cannot bear the strain of her company! It will be long indeed before I invite a stranger again to pay me a visit!” when the door opened and her cousin stood before her pale as a lily, dressed in her black travelling cloak and hood. Miss Swinford rose in amazement. “My dear, what is the meaning of this! You came unannounced, you cannot surely be leaving me as abruptly as you arrived!”

“I must go, I am wanted” she said. And as she spoke the sound of heavy wheels was heard approaching the house. An inexplicable fear fell upon Miss Swinford.

“But how shall you travel? You are too late for any train to-night.”

“I go as I came. I shall soon be at my journey’s end. Farewell, cousin Katherine, and be of good cheer, the portrait of Joceline Swinford will be restored to you!”

Miss Swinford mechanically followed her downstairs, where Mistress Galt was already waiting, and the servants peering over the bannisters to watch the departure. Miss Swinford stepped into the porch with her guest, and there stood waiting a huge coach, drawn by four black horses. By the light of the moon, issuing from beneath a cloud, she saw that the coachman was dressed in as antique a style as his mistress, and that his face like hers was deadly pale.

“Farewell, cousin, farewell!” said Joceline, touching Miss Swinford’s cheek with her cold lips, “the missing picture will be restored to its place.” And, followed by Mistress Galt,she stepped into the coach, in which six persons could have seated themselves with ease. She leaned out of the window, and bowed to her hostess with solemn formality.

Then the horses moving at a heavy trot drew the lumbering vehicle down the avenue towards the high road. Miss Swinford, Bennet, Dapper and a couple of grooms attracted by the extraordinary sound of the heavy carriage approaching the house, stood awestruck watching it depart. Not one of them could have expressed his fear in words, and the terror each felt was the greater for being unspoken. The huge coach rumbled along the avenue, when it turned into the high road, and still they could hear the heavy waggon-like sound of its wheels.

“They have taken the turning to the left!” cried Miss Swinford, the first to break silence. “That great carriage and four horses can never cross the Brook Bridge. They should have turned to the right. See if you can overtake them before the road is too narrow for them to turn!” and the grooms ran down a side path that was used as a short cut to the road. The heavy sound of wheels grew duller and more distant, and suddenly ceased.

“Thank goodness they are stopped in time, they will turn now!” said Miss Swinford. But still no sound was heard. Presently the grooms came back breathless with running, the younger of them looking ready to faint.

“You stopped them in time, Landon, I hope?” asked Miss Swinford of the elder of the two men. “O Lord, O Lord, ma’am, there’s no coach nor nothing to stop! As I’m a living sinner there’s nothing but a three mile stretch o’ road clear as day in the moonlight, and not so much as a wheelbarrow on it, and neither man nor beast to be seen! That big coach and four’s clean gone, same as if it had sunk into the ground!”

“Come into the house, madam,” said Dapper, supporting her mistress, for she staggered as though she would fall “and thank God, however they’re gone, those white-faced witches are out of the place at last!” And sick with amazement Miss Swinford suffered herself to be led indoors.

When she had recovered herself, she said with her usual determination, “Dapper and Bennet, come with me into the library, I want you both!” And they followed their mistress in silence. Miss Swinford paused for an instant on the threshold, then opening wide the door all three entered the room. The lamp stood on the table, a cheerful fire burned on the hearth. Everything was in its accustomed order, and Dapper and Bennet looked vaguely about them wondering why they were wanted. But their mistress pointed to the wall above the mantelshelf. From its tarnished frame the portrait of Joceline Swinford looked down on them once more, as though it had never been missing from its place. Dapper screamed shrilly, Bennet gazed openmouthed, Miss Swinford buried her face in her hands and said in a tremulous voice, “This is dreadful! What does it mean, what can it mean!”

The next morning’s post brought Miss Swinford a letter from Sir Piers Hammersley, at Carlsbad, where he and his daughter were staying, apologising for her letter remaining so long unanswered, but it had been carelessly overlooked and only forwarded to him that day. He was exceedingly annoyed to think how uncourteous he must have appeared. Joceline, too, was as sorry as himself. She hoped that her cousin would renew her kind invitation some future time, to give her the pleasure of making her acquaintance, and of visiting the old home of the family.

Then the strange beautiful girl who had come and gone so mysteriously, whose visit had corresponded with the absence of the portrait of Joceline Swinford, was not her cousin after all! Who then was she, or what was she? Miss Swinford believed that she knew who her strange guest had been. But she dared not express her conviction in words. Her friends would have thought her mad. She kept her secret locked in her breast. But she was a changed woman from that time forward, and within twelve months the last of the Swinfords was laid to rest in the family burial place. The old servants still tell the story of the pale lady’s visit, and her weird ways, and how their mistress fell into pining health from the very night of her mysterious departure.

Sir Nigel Otterburne’s Case

It is thirty years since I completed my career at the Eastminster Hospital. I had passed all my examinations successfully, and taken more than my share of medical honours, when one of our most celebrated physicians, Dr Grindrod, asked me to watch an important case for him, the study of which I should find of the deepest professional interest.

Dr Grindrod’s patient was suffering from an obscure form of malaria, contracted abroad, which had developed into an extremely rare form of intermittent fever, with really beautiful complications, such as he had never met with before in all his wide practice. But Sir Nigel Otterburne lived a three hours’ journey from town in Hampshire, and when the doctor went to see him it practically took a whole day of his valuable time, which was more than he could afford to devote to any one case. Dr Grindrod therefore proposed that he should see the patient himself once a week, and send down one of the most promising of the hospital students to watch the case under him, and to take minute medical notes of its progress.

I was the fortunate man selected for the work, and was to go into the country with Dr Grindrod, taking with us a couple of our most trustworthy nurses. I can never again feel as important as I did on that first day of August when I entered upon my onerous duty. The doctor and I were met at the station, and driven through lovely country to the Hammel, which was the name of Sir Nigel Otterburne’s house. It was a fine specimen of Jacobean architecture, and, externally at least, had undergone but little change for a couple of centuries past. It was a three-storeyed building, with tall fluted chimneys, and dormer windows in its high-pitched roof. The front of the house was nine windows wide—narrow sash windows with a great deal of framework in proportion to the glass. The front of the house, with its wings to right and left, made three sides of a quadrangle, the fourth side of which was formed by wrought-iron railings, with great gates in the centre.

Leaving the carriage outside for fear of disturbing the patient by the sound of our arrival, we crossed the wide courtyard on foot. The front door was approached by shallow steps, and sheltered by a richly carved penthouse of black oak. Upon the wall between the second and third storeys was a sundial, and the bright August sunshine threw the sharply defined shadow of the gilded gnomon on the figure denoting the hour of four o’clock in the afternoon.

Above the dial a small turret rose from the centre of the roof surmounted by an elaborate piece of ironwork, with quaintly twisted letters N. S. E. and W., and a glittering arrow for a weather-vane.

I was struck by the appearance of the house, at once stately and homely. But I received from it an impression of melancholy which was not lessened when the door was opened by a grey-headed servant, who led us across the panelled hall into a vast and dreary dining-room. It contained nothing in the way of furniture except a long table with a row of high-backed chairs pushed close against it on either side, and a sideboard of carved oak, on which stood a row of silver flagons. A china bowl on the middle of the table, filled with roses and white lilies, made the atmosphere of the room heavy with their perfume. A few gloomy old portraits looked down from their tarnished frames, some with faces austere and rigid as though they had been painted after death.

Dr Grindrod had acquainted me with the details of Sir Nigel Otterburne’s case on our journey, and having nothing further to say till we had seen the patient, he stood with his hands behind his back, looking at the portrait of a lady over the mantelpiece, so lavish of her charms that I assigned her at a glance to Charles the Second’s period.

“That is what I call a magnificent woman,” said the doctor, waving his hand sumptuously towards the expanse of bare neck and bosom depicted on the canvas. But I should have rather applied the words to the lady who entered the room while he was speaking, and whom he introduced to me as Miss Otterburne. The Doctor had told me that Sir Nigel Otterburne was a widower with an only daughter, but he had said nothing to prepare me for the appearance of so amazingly handsome a creature.

I have never met a woman who so completely fascinated and interested me at first sight. Miss Otterburne was not a girl. She was in the ripe beauty of womanhood, and with a most dignified and haughty carriage. She covered me with a glance of her beautiful dark eyes, and curtsied so low that it was almost a sarcasm to a young man like myself. She was tall and slender, of an ivory pallor of complexion, with fine sensitive features, and a mass of dark hair worn high on her head. She was dressed in some soft, cream-coloured fabric, and her sleeves came only to the elbow, displaying to the utmost advantage her beautifully formed hands and arms.

“I promised you, Miss Otterburne, that I would bring one of our hospital students to watch Sir Nigel’s case for me,” said Dr Grindrod. “You must not mistrust Mr Caxton because he is young. He has had experience in the hospital which many older men might envy. He will post to me daily notes of the patient’s condition. I shall be down myself once a week, and you would telegraph for me in any emergency. Indeed, my dear young lady, I can assure you that Sir Nigel is in good hands,” and Dr Grindrod smiled, and attempted a light and easy manner. But Miss Otterburne was entirely irresponsive.

“Heaven grant that you may be right,” she said in chilling tones, and she led us upstairs to the patient’s room. As she walked erect before us, there was that in her bearing and appearance which reminded me of some distinguished Frenchwoman at the time of the Revolution, and I thought how many a proud head like hers had fallen from its white shoulders under the guillotine.

Sir Nigel’s room was dark and dreary, and he lay in a funereal bed with heavy hangings, and I mentally vowed to have him out of it and in a more cheerful room within four-and-twenty hours. If the house did not contain some light, undraped bedstead, I would send to the hospital for one such as we use for our patients.

Sir Nigel Otterburne was in a half comatose state when I first saw him, and I judged him to be about sixty-two or three years of age. He was tall and thin, and looking at his face I saw at a glance whence Miss Otterburne derived her fine features. His hair and moustache were thick and grey, and he looked what he was, a soldier. In his lucid intervals there was a dignity and self-restraint in his manner which again reminded me of his daughter.

The local practitioner, Mr Walton, was present in the room, a good-humoured, rustic-looking man, more like a farmer than a doctor, but who, if he was unprofessional in appearance, luckily for me had less than the usual amount of professional jealousy. So far from being annoyed at seeing me installed in the house to watch the case of his distinguished patient for Dr Grindrod, he expressed his approval of an arrangement that relieved him of so much responsibility. But he said nothing before Miss Otterburne, and I saw that she exercised the same repressive influence over him that I felt so strongly myself. But when we were in the dining-room again, and I was receiving my final instructions from Dr Grindrod, Mr Walton said, as he poured himself out a glass of sherry:

“I don’t profess that single-handed I could pull Sir Nigel round. I’ve not had the opportunity of studying malarious fevers. But if you gentlemen succeed in curing the patient, I share the glory of it, and if he slips through your fingers Miss Otterburne cannot reproach me, for nothing could be expected of me where Dr Grindrod failed.”

“Is Miss Otterburne likely to reproach you if the case ends fatally?” I asked.

Mr Walton looked round to see if the door was shut, emptied another glass of wine before he spoke, and said in a low voice: “Miss Otterburne is Miss Otterburne, and it would be unprofessional to gossip about any member of my patient’s family. Eyes and ears open, and mouth shut at the Hammel, is my advice.”

After Dr Grindrod’s departure I went upstairs to make arrangements for my first night in charge of Sir Nigel. A small room leading out of the patient’s had been assigned to my use, and I went to the window to look at the view. My eyes never rested on a more peaceful scene. Immediately in front of the house, bounded on either side by its projecting wings, was the great courtyard, with its wide grass borders bathed in sunshine, and beyond the iron palisades and the high gates stretched an expanse of undulating country thickly wooded with trees in their heaviest summer foliage. On the brow of a gentle ascent, some quarter of a mile distant, stood a grey church with an ivy-grown tower, and the evening sunshine was glittering on the weather-vane.

When I had seen the night nurse enter upon her duties, I went for a stroll in the open air, leaving the house by a door at the back of the hall. I found myself in an old-fashioned garden with grass terraces and clipped yew hedges. I thought that I was alone in the garden, when suddenly I caught sight of Miss Otterburne’s light dress, white and ghostly in the gathering gloom, and in a moment we were face to face in the path. I raised my hat and stood aside for her to pass, and I felt the blood mount to my cheeks. She might think that I was intruding on her privacy, and following her on her evening walk. Miss Otterburne did not quicken her pace as she passed me. She regarded me with grave intensity. But her eyes were void of speculation, like those of one who was walking in her sleep. I watched her stately figure recede among the darkening alleys, and heard the door close as she entered the house. I felt chilled and disconcerted, why I could not tell; but I would run no second risk of appearing to intrude upon Miss Otterburne.

At eleven o’clock Miss Otterburne entered her father’s room to bid him good-night. He scarcely knew her, yet I fancied that he smiled faintly as she pressed his hand, or it may have been the flickering of the lamplight on his face that I mistook for a smile.

“I trust Sir Nigel will have a tranquil night,” I said.

“His nights are always tranquil,” she replied in measured tones.

“And yet he has gained no strength the five weeks he has lain here.”

“He never will,” she said in the same passionless voice.

“You speak more positively, Miss Otterburne, than any doctor would dare to do. Such an illness as Sir Nigel’s is not necessarily fatal. We do not know…”

“But I know,” and her voice sank to a whisper. “It is useless your staying here. My father will never leave this house alive.”

“It is wrong to speak so,” I said firmly. “And if Sir Nigel understands what you say, it must cause him the most exquisite pain.”

Not a line in her white handsome face softened or changed.

“My father knows it already,” she said, and swept from the room, leaving me bewildered by her manner.

I slept but little during my first night at the Hammel. My mind was so much occupied with Sir Nigel’s case, that I went frequently to see my patient, and to note any change in his condition, however slight. My obstinacy, too, was roused by Miss Otterburne’s assertion that her father would die, by the way in which she ignored anything that medical skill could do for him. Her manner was that of a person expressing a profoundly melancholy conclusion forced upon her against her will, and yet that she believed to be irrevocably true.

“If that man’s sentence has not gone forth from heaven, he shall live,” I exclaimed, “and that handsome, obstinate creature shall be taught that she is not infallible!”

My resolution being made, I tried to sleep, but tried in vain. The profound silence of the country after the roar of London had the same effect upon me that noise has upon those who are accustomed to quiet, and kept me wide awake. And from time to time I was startled by the screeching of owls, sounding like the cries of terrified children lost in the dark.

At length the dawn came, and I rose to go into Sir Nigel’s room. This time he was conscious, and as I felt his pulse he whispered, “Are they come?”

“Yes,” I replied, supposing that he alluded to me and the nurses. “We came yesterday, and we shall try to relieve you as much as we can.”

But he sighed impatiently, closed his eyes, and turned his head from me. It was useless to lie down again, so I dressed myself, and the clock was striking four as I opened the window and leaned out to enjoy the freshness of the morning air. To my great surprise, Miss Otterburne also was looking out of her window in the centre of the right wing of the house. I drew back at once, but she had not heard me throw up the sash, and she was not looking in my direction. Her dark eyes were fixed in a trance-like gaze on the entrance to the courtyard, or on the church crowning the grassy slope. She certainly was not looking at any part of the house. She was ghastly pale, and her eyes wore the same unseeing expression that I had noticed in them on the previous evening.

For more than a quarter of an hour Miss Otterburne remained immovable, and how long she may have been at her casement before I saw her I cannot tell. She was wrapped in a white robe, and her dark hair lay in waves on her shoulders, but her face was not like that of a living woman. It seemed probable that I might have two patients in the house to look after. And I felt a distinct sense of relief when at length she withdrew from the window and I lost sight of her.

That day I carried out my intention with regard to Sir Nigel. We moved him into a small bed and carried him to a bright, cheerful sitting-room on the same floor—a room suggesting pleasant, sunny life as clearly as the gloomy bedroom had suggested death. I felt sure that the patient would appreciate the change, that it would prove beneficial to him. But to my disappointment, he did not appear to notice it, and it produced no effect on his physical condition. I heard him murmuring to himself as he lay, “It will make no difference; it will make no difference.”

It was singular, too, that Miss Otterburne seemed to take no interest in her father’s removal to more cheerful quarters. However, I had Dr Grindrod’s approval of what I had done, and I was content.

“How do you get on with Miss Otterburne?” the doctor asked me abruptly on one of his visits, when I had been more than a week in the house.

“You might as well ask me how I get on with that picture on the wall,” I replied. “But I think she is the handsomest woman I ever saw in my life.”

“You do, do you? Hum! Not my style; I prefer flesh and blood,” and Dr Grindrod shot a glance in the direction of the Charles the Second lady, and fell to talking of purely medical matters.

When I had been in hourly attendance on Sir Nigel for a fortnight, I began to realize not only that my patient was making no progress, but that I was making no progress with my patient. I expected no lively gratitude from him. But it would have been pleasant if there had been any token of recognition, either on his part or his daughter’s, that I was doing my utmost for him. I imagine that he regarded me as a servant whose attentions were indispensable to his comfort, but with whom he could not be familiar. It did not annoy me, sometimes it even amused me, for I never count a sick man in the category of sane persons, and should no more think myself insulted by an invalid than by a madman. This excuse, however, did not apply to Miss Otterburne, and I was puzzled more and more by her conduct.

Every morning at earliest dawn, if I looked out, she was leaning on her window-sill, gazing with a tragic melancholy, not, I am sure, at any tangible object, but on something that presented itself to her mental vision.

Not only did I gain no ground with Sir Nigel and his daughter, but the old housekeeper and butler, though perfectly civil to me, were both exceedingly reserved. Sometimes the housekeeper would have a short confab with me on her master’s state, consisting on her part chiefly of sighs and head-shakings, and once the butler went so far as to observe, “Master Raymond will wish that he’d parted friends with his father when he went to India!” So then Sir Nigel had a son, a fact of which I was not aware, and furthermore it would seem that father and son had had some quarrel or misunderstanding.

Meanwhile there was no disguising the unwelcome fact that my patient was steadily sinking. Dr Grindrod approved of all that I did in carrying out his instructions to the letter, but nothing we could do availed to check the downward course, and we racked our brains for treatment and remedies which should keep the enemy at bay. The disease was not running a normal course. Unexpected complications arose at an unusual period in its progress, and how interesting the battle between the force of disease and the power of science became to me none but an enthusiast in the medical profession can tell. I seldom quitted the patient’s room. Only when he was sleeping did I venture to leave him for an hour in charge of a nurse while I went for a stroll in the fresh air.

It was just before sunset one evening, when I had been nearly a month at the Hammel, that I closed the front door gently behind me, and crossing the courtyard, let myself out into the park, and made my way towards the church on the grassy slope. I was exhausted and excited, and I walked bareheaded that the cool breeze might blow about my heated temples. I hated to be baffled. I had been so sure of victory, and now defeat stared me in the face. Miss Otterburne would have a melancholy triumph. She would be right after all, and I should be wrong. I went over every event of the previous weeks in detail. I was satisfied that all that medical science could do for Sir Nigel, at the point to which it had then attained, had been done and was still being done for him. But I reflected with a crushing sense of impotence on the irresistible power of the force with which I was contending. I, a finite being, was measuring my strength against death, the conqueror of man. The contest was hideously unequal. I was sure to be worsted. Even if the patient recovered, it would be at best but a reprieve, and sooner or later he must retrace his anguished steps towards that bourne from whence I was striving with all my strength to turn him back.

I entered the churchyard in the deepest depression of spirit. It was not merely the anticipated loss of my patient that weighed on me; that was but one item in the incalculable total of human misery. In his death I saw the doom of every son of Adam—the death of the whole human race. I was ready to wish that I had died myself before I had embraced a profession which constantly brought me face to face with a terrible elementary fact in nature, with which the utmost skill of man is powerless to cope.

The church door stood hospitably open, and I entered the cool twilight within. Here were tombs of the Otterburnes, from the time when intra-mural burial was a universal custom to the present period, when a memorial tablet or monument is all that is permitted within the church itself. I thought how soon Sir Nigel would be numbered among his ancestors, and be as remote from us who still lived as his own earliest forbears were from him now.

Suddenly I heard a deep sigh, and starting, I turned and saw Miss Otterburne close to me, but almost hidden by a great pillar against which she leaned. Her dark eyes were fixed with the wide unseeing gaze which I had noticed in them each early morning as she looked from her window. I spoke to her, and when she heard my voice the pupils of her eyes dilated as though the twilight had deepened round her.

“Miss Otterburne, if there is anything that you wish to say to Sir Nigel, I should advise you to take the opportunity of his next interval of consciousness. It grieves me to be obliged to say this, but I have no choice in the matter. I must tell you the truth.”

“Yes, they will soon come: I know it,” she said with a slight shudder.

I thought that she was wandering in her mind, and, taking no notice of her incoherent reply, I continued:

“I would give my life, Miss Otterburne, if I could prolong the life of one so dear to you.”

But she looked past and through me, as though she were piercing into futurity, and I heard her say:

“When they come, you will know that I was right.”

And she glided like a ghost out of the dim church into the amber light of evening. Her manner disquieted me profoundly, and I wished that Miss Otterburne was not so lonely; that her brother in India was at home to take his share of the trouble, and to comfort his sister. I hastened back to my patient’s bedside, and, knowing that it would be impossible to leave him that night, I sat down to copy my notes of the case for my own private use. About eleven o’clock Sir Nigel rallied slightly. I administered a powerful restorative, and sent the nurse to fetch Miss Otterburne at once. As she entered the room, I said:

“If you would like to be alone with your father, I will remain within call outside the door.”

She bowed her head in assent, and I left them together. I remained waiting in my own room, listening to Miss Otterburne’s voice distinctly audible in low urgent tones. Then, as Sir Nigel again lapsed into unconsciousness, she spoke a little louder, and I heard her say: “Father, will you not forgive Raymond?” and then all was silent.

I re-entered the room, and Miss Otterburne was kneeling by her father’s bedside. She had been weeping, and I saw that beneath the armour of pride and reserve there was a woman’s tender heart. But my return was the signal for her to depart, and she left the room hastily, as though displeased that I had witnessed her emotion.

I looked at my dying patient with more regret than I should have thought possible to feel for a man who, in his short intervals of consciousness, had always treated me as a stranger. Certainly I had no affection for Sir Nigel, but I was struck by the pathos of the situation. There he lay, needing, like each one of us, both divine and human forgiveness, but unable to ask it for himself or to grant it to another, even when it was his daughter who knelt weeping by his side, imploring pardon for her brother.

Slowly the night passed, and slowly the patient died. I noted the decreasing temperature, the failing pulse, and I applied restoratives which formerly had power to rally him, though now they had lost their virtue. But the heart still beat, and now and then a sighing breath escaped his lips.

There was nothing more that I could do. But that I might leave no expedient untried, I sent the nurse into my room for an air cushion, which I told her to inflate and bring to me. If I raised the patient’s head by means of it, it was possible that he might feel a momentary ease, though he would be unconscious of its cause.

I looked at my watch. It was four o’clock, and the grey light of dawn glimmered through the curtains. I wondered whether Miss Otterburne was at her window, according to her strange custom, when the door opened swiftly and silently, and she entered the room as I had often seen her at that hour, clad in a loose white robe, and her dark hair hanging about her shoulders. There was mortal pallor on her face. She did not cast a glance in the direction of her dying father, but exclaiming in tones that chilled my blood: “They have come, they have come!” she went to the window, drew back the curtains, let in the cold light of dawn, and stood with clasped hands gazing into the courtyard below. I was by her side in an instant.

“They have come, they have come; I knew they would come!” And I heard the effort she made to speak with a tongue that was dry with terror.

In the courtyard beneath, directly opposite to the window, was a strange, silent crowd of men, women, and children, looking up at us in the faint morning light with faces of the dead. And though they pressed and thronged each other on the gravel path, not a sound was heard.

I am not a superstitious man, and in those days my nerves were of iron. But I reeled as I stood, and the blood rushed to my head with a singing sound. I saw the dead of centuries ago, and the dead of yesterday, grey-bearded men who fought in the civil wars, young men and maidens who never were contemporaries in this life, and little children, all gazing at us with upturned faces. Miss Otterburne spoke again as one speaks in nightmare, with deadly effort and oppression.

“I know them. I saw them when they came to fetch my grandfather, and when they fetched my mother. Oh, mother! mother! you are there!” And she leaned forward in an agony, and gazed with set and rigid face at a slim form that drifted through the ghostly throng and lifted its sad eyes to hers. By her side stood a tall man in uniform, whose white face I shall never forget, and he solemnly waved his hand towards us. “Oh Heaven! my brother Raymond is with them!” shrieked Miss Otterburne, and sank on the floor insensible, at the moment that Sir Nigel gave his last groan. I hastily fetched a cushion and placed it under her head, and then turned once more to the window. But the courtyard was absolutely empty, nor was there a trace of its recent occupation.

I could not have been absent from the window a couple of minutes, and the instantaneous disappearance of the ghastly throng shook my nerves fully as much as the sight of it had done. There was not a mark on the untrodden dewy grass. Not a pebble displaced on the broad gravel path that had been so crowded a moment before. On the spot where the tall figure had stood and waved its hand to us a cat was seated, licking her paws, and I heard the fitful chirp of the first awakened birds.

I felt physically ill, and turning from the window I poured out and drank a powerful cordial that restored an artificial calmness to my nerves. Just then the nurse returned. She had not been absent from the room more than five minutes.

“The patient is dead, and Miss Otterburne has fainted,” I said. “Help me to lay her on the couch.”

I have never in all my experience seen any one in so deep a swoon. The nurse and I were unspeakably relieved when at length she showed signs of returning consciousness, though I dreaded what she might say when she recovered. I gave her a composing draught which would secure her some hours’ rest, and committed her to the care of her maid.

I sent at once for the family doctor, who had seen Sir Nigel on the previous night, to acquaint him with the death of the patient. He was exceedingly inquisitive about every possible detail, and appeared to long for information concerning something he dared not enquire about directly.

“Were there any circumstances of an unusual character attending the death?” he asked anxiously.

“It was the ordinary termination of such an illness as Sir Nigel’s,” I replied guardedly.

“And Miss Otterburne, how did she bear the shock?”

“She had a severe fainting-fit, and remained insensible for fully half an hour. She appears to feel her loss acutely.”

Mr Walton agreed with me that I had better remain in the house till the following day, to make the necessary arrangements for the funeral, and to write to Miss Otterburne’s relations, with whose names and addresses the butler supplied me, to prevent his mistress from being disturbed. The old man became almost talkative for so taciturn a person.

“The family has died and died till yonder churchyard is full of them,” he said. “The very soil of it was once Otterburne flesh and blood, and there’s no one left of this branch but Miss Otterburne and the Major in India, that’s now Sir Raymond. There’s a few cousins up in the north, and a widowed sister of the master’s, and they’ll like to come for the funeral, if it’s only to see where they’ll be laid themselves when their time comes, for all the Otterburnes are brought here to be buried.”

“Will one of the ladies of the family stay with Miss Otterburne till her brother returns from India?” I said, and as it was the first question I had asked, the old man cast a suspicious glance at me, resumed his uncommunicative manner, and changed the subject of conversation.

By noon I had sent the nurses back to London. Then there remained the long afternoon and evening in which to collect my distracted thoughts and to get my nerves into something like order for a return to the active duties of life. I could not for an instant forget the horror of that early dawn. I saw, as clearly as I now see the pen with which I am writing this narrative, the ghostly throng with upturned, dead faces gazing at us, and Miss Otterburne’s words and cry still rang in my ears. Whatever the ghostly vision was, we had both of us seen it. If only one person had seen it, and that one myself, I should not have been convinced of its reality. I should have believed that I was subjected to some terrible hallucination. But we both saw it at the same moment. And Miss Otterburne had seen it twice before, and each time under the same ghastly circumstances. There was no doubt that it had been as visible to us as natural objects are. It was no picture conjured up separately in our brains.

I confess that I was so unnerved I could not look out of that window again, nor could I spend my last night at the Hammel in any room at the front of the house. I asked the housekeeper to give me a bed in one of the back rooms.

She cast a peculiar glance at me and said: “You don’t care for a room that looks out into the courtyard, and I don’t blame you for it. But you need not mind it now, sir; they won’t come again till—till they are sent.”

I made frequent enquiries during the day about Miss Otterburne. But I did not ask to see her, so fearful was I of the effect my presence might have in recalling the horror we had witnessed together. The last thing at night I sent a message to her saying that I should return to town in the morning, and I hoped that she would send for me if I could be of the slightest service to her. But she did not require me, and I retired for the night to a small back room on the second floor. Sleep was out of the question. I did not undress, but sat smoking pipe after pipe and trying to read, till when the grey dawn came a great terror took possession of me, and I shook like a man in a fit of ague. I scorned myself for my weakness. But the feeling was beyond my own control.

At length, when daylight flooded the room, I threw myself across the bed and fell into a deep sleep which must have lasted for hours, and from which I was awakened by loud knocking at the door.

“Who is there?” I said, starting to my feet, and the knock was again repeated. I ran to the door and opened it. The old butler stood before me pale and trembling.

“Miss Otterburne wishes to see you, sir, in her sitting-room.”

“Tell her I will be with her directly,” and I hastened to make myself fit to enter the presence of a lady, and went downstairs to Miss Otterburne’s room, where her maid stood waiting for me with a scared face. She said nothing, but opened the door of her mistress’s room. I entered, and she closed it after me.

Miss Otterburne was standing by the table with an open letter in her hand. I should not have known her. Her hair had turned white in the last twenty-four hours, and there was a strange glitter in her eye. She handed me the letter, saying: “It was Raymond that we saw with them; I knew it.”

I read the letter. It was very short. A few lines written in haste by a friend of the Major’s to Sir Nigel, telling him of the death of his son, of cholera at Meerut a month ago, and promising all particulars by the next mail. As my mind took in the meaning of it I grew giddy. The room became suddenly dark to me, and I groped for a chair like a blind man. Miss Otterburne laughed, the cackling laugh of insanity, and it recalled me to myself in an instant through extremity of compassion for her.

“Why do you pretend to be surprised? You knew that Raymond was dead as well as I; we both saw him. Oh, he was merry! They were all a merry company; why should we be sad?” and the poor lady laughed in such an awful fashion I could have shed tears of blood to listen to her. It was the last time that I saw Miss Otterburne. Twenty long years she continued to live at the Hammel in a state of hopeless insanity, dangerous neither to herself nor to others while she was allowed to remain there. But if any attempt was made to take her elsewhere, her frenzy became ungovernable.

“They would not know where to find me,” she would say. “They can only fetch me from here, and I want the merry, white-faced folk to come for me; ” and her anger would subside into dreadful laughter.

Every day in the early dawn she rose to look out of her window into the courtyard. But one morning she failed to do so, and her attendant was thankful to find Miss Otterburne lying peacefully dead, on the twentieth anniversary of her father’s death.

The Ticking of the Clock

Elijah Walrond, or Old ’Lijah as he was commonly called, was a small tenant farmer, who, by dint of hard work, hard living, and saving, had contrived to lay by enough money to make a frugal provision for his old age. ’Lijah’s wife died the year before he quitted the farm that had been their home for forty years, and when he lost her it was like losing a part of himself. He was never the same man again. It took the heart out of his work when there was no wife to talk it over with; he could not relish the food prepared by a strange hand, and he lay awake at nights in his loneliness, staring into the darkness with tearless eyes. There was nothing left to make life sweet to him, and his seventy years weighed on him like a hundred. Then he asked his landlord to let him off the short remainder of his lease, and he left the farm to live in the white cottage with the big garden down by the common.

His neighbours said that Old ’Lijah would go silly with loneliness all by himself, for he saw nobody and spoke to no one but the woman who came to clean and to do his bit of cooking. He seldom left the house, and never went beyond the garden, and he had not entered the church since the day of his wife’s funeral. The rector of the parish, who had known Elijah Walrond many years, called to ask him why he never saw him in his accustomed place on a Sunday, but the old man would only reply, “I canna do it, sir; I canna do it! ’Er’d used to go to church with me, and I canna go alone,” and lapse into silence again. There was no one at home now to care what he did, or whether he was well or ill, so he ceased to strive against stiffness and rheumatism, and crept along with the help of a stick, with bowed shoulders, as though he carried a heavy burden. Old ’Lijah was in a parlous state, both of body aud mind, when one day the very best thing that could happen befell him, though it came about through someone else’s sorrow.

’Lijah had an only child—a daughter—who some years previously had married a ne’er-do-well of the name of Grove, and lived with him in the north of England, where, after a short career of idleness and poverty, he died, leaving Jane a widow with one little child. Jane Grove had not a farthing in the world to call her own when she had paid her fare to travel southwards to her father, and her sticks of furniture had been sold to pay for her husband’s burial, for her honest pride revolted at a pauper’s funeral. She knew that her father had left the farm, but in how ever poor a place he lived now, he would not shut the door upon his daughter, though he had been displeased with her for marrying as she did.- But bygones were bygones, and though the mother, who would have welcomed her child, was dead, Jane could cook and work for her father, and make the meanest place seem like home; and good as her intentions were towards the old man, she could not tell—no one could have told—the kindness she was about to do him.

Jane Grove reached her father’s cottage in the grey of a summer evening, weary and footsore with her long walk from the station, carrying her sleeping child in her arms. She inquired from a man whom she met crossing the common where Elijah Walrond lived, and he pointed out to her the little white cottage with the big garden. Slowly she walked up the long, narrow path, with its straggling border of sweet-smelling pinks, wondering that the place was so untidy and ill-kept, till she stood on the threshold of the half-opened door. She tapped timidly, and no one replying to her knock, she looked into the kitchen, and there sat her father dozing in his chair by the chimney corner. She was shocked at the change in his appearance. His features were sharp and worn, his hands like birds’ claws, and a ragged growth of white beard and moustache covered his once well-shaven face; nor was old ’Lijah as clean as he might have been. His stockings were in holes and his clothes ragged and unmended. It was plain to be seen that he had lost all interest in himself, and that there was no woman to look after him. Jane entered, and quietly seated herself opposite to her father, and her tears fell fast as she took in the meaning of his forlorn and neglected aspect, and whispered to herself, “Oh, mother, mother!”

When ’Lijah opened his eyes, there sat his daughter on the other side of the hearth, nursing a child on her lap. At first he did not know who it was, and looked vaguely puzzled until he heard her voice.

“It’s me, father; it’s Jane come to live with you and make you comfortable.”

He did not seem startled, and received the announcement with the most matter-of-fact calm.

“Whatever brings you back i’ these parts? It’s trouble, I doubt,” and the old man shook a boding head.

“Aye, father, trouble enough it is! My man’s dead, and I ’aven’t a penny in the world and no home but what you’ll give me and this little lad to keep,” and the child, now wide awake, sat up on her lap and looked about him.

“What’s that you say about a little lad? You’ve got a little lad to keep?” and there was a strange stir in the old man’s heart as he uttered the words, for he had never had a son of his own, and it had been the great disappointment of his life.

For reply Jane crossed the hearth with her child in her arms, and set him on the old man’s shrunken knees—as beautiful a boy of twelve months old as a mother ever doted on. “Yes, father, that’s my little lad as I’ve got to keep; that’s little Peter, your own little grandson; and he’s rare good company a’ready for lonely folks. Many’s the time he’s dried my tears watching ’is pretty ways. ’Old ’im tight, father, for ’e isn’t used to old folks, and p’r’aps ’e mayn’t take to you.”

No need to tell ’Lijah to hold his little grandson carefully. The touch of the child’s firm young flesh, the sight of his golden hair in lamb-like curls, his gentian-blue eyes and moist, innocent breath nourished his old bones, and he felt there was vital warmth in him yet. And when little Peter put up a dimpled hand to grasp his ragged beard, and made pretty baby jabbering, and laughed in his troubled old face, displaying four pearly-white teeth like grains of rice, the frost in the grandfather’s heart, that had bound it since his wife died, melted, and he said:

“Jane, if you ’aven’t got a penny in the world, your man’s left you rich enough wi’ a little lad like this! You must bide wi’ me—both of you.”

“Aye, father, so we will. But look you how that grey wire beard o’ yourn is scratchin’ little Peter’s face! You’ll ’ave to shave it off, and poor mother always thought so much o’ your clean chin!”

The ragged beard was duly taken off, and the old man began the trouble of shaving again, and renewed his acquaintance with soap and water, for the little lad’s sake; and his daughter washed and mended his clothes, and ’Lijah looked once more himself, but old—very old.

’Lijah’s whole heart was garnered up in his little grandson, and as the boy grew older it was a pretty sight to see them in the fields together, the child bringing wild flowers to the old man to name, or a bird’s egg or nest; but whatever it was he could tell him everything about it, and nothing short of that would content little Peter. For he had a healthy child’s thirst for every kind of knowledge, so long as it was not what schoolmasters teach or what comes out of a book, and he was eager after all country lore and old-world word-of-mouth wisdom. It was wonderful how much the little lad learnt from his grandfather about four-footed creatures, from oxen to stoats and weasels, and he could have passed an examination with honours in the names, songs, and plumage of British birds.

The two were inseparable companions, and Peter would rather play with his grandfather, whom he regarded as an overgrown child with bent back and stiff legs, than with any little boy of his own age.

Jane Grove would stand on the doorstep and smile as she watched her father and his little grandson set out for a walk hand in hand, perfectly happy and content together. “They’re more like a pair o’ lovers, them two, than anything else! Father’s like wrapped up in that lad, and don’t think o’ me exceptin’ to eat the vittles I cook and set afore ’im; nor little Peter, ’e don’t think o’ me neither so long as ’e can ’ave ’is grandad! They’re both of ’em civil to me, and that’s about all they are, they’re so took up with each other.”

When little Peter had stuck to his grandfather like his shadow for five years, he began to be aware that his beloved companion could not see very far, and was shaky on his legs, got tired before they were half across the common, had a habit of falling asleep in the midst of the most interesting conversation about rooks and water rats, and was growing deaf, so that he had to speak loud to make him hear. These things grieved little Peter, and as he could not see the necessity for them he asked his grandfather what he did them for.

“Grandad,” he said, as he walked slowly by his side, having hold of his hand, “grandad, why don’t you run as quick as me?”

The old man smiled delightedly at a question that seemed to him to display little Peter’s immense intellectual powers.

“It’s seventy ’ears too late, my little lad, for grandfather to go running about like a little dog at a fair.”

“But, grandfather, you know a deal more than me; you’d ought to know how to run ever so fast, and climb the bank and gather blackberries same as me.”

“Aye, so I did when I was your age, but blackberries was bigger then than what they are now. They was worth climbing for seventy ’ears ago, I can tell you! But I’m an old man now, Peter,” and ’Lijah looked down on the child’s upturned face that was fresh and clear as a flower.

Little Peter walked on a few paces in thoughtful silence. “But, grandfather, what makes you such an old, old man?” And ’Lijah laughed with delight at the question. Oh, Peter was a rare deep little chap, he’d get to the bottom of everything if he could.

“It’s nothing but Anna Dominoes as makes me such a’ old, old man, and that’s Latin for the ’ear of the Lord. It’s Anna Dominoes, that’s the matter wi’ me, little Peter, and nothin’ else,” and the child stored up the mysterious words in his tenacious memory.

Not long afterwards Old ’Lijah, who had grown neighbourly again now that he was happy, went one evening, accompanied by his grandson, to spend an hour with his old friend, Farmer Blewitt. The two old men were seated in arm-chairs at each side of the table, with a tobacco jar and cider mugs, and a small narrow box before them. Little Peter was lying on the hearth playing with a young spaniel puppy, in whose delightful society he was wholly absorbed, till he heard Farmer Blewitt say:

“Let’s have a game o’ dominoes, ’Lijah; it’s many a day since you and me played together.”

Little Peter sat up.

“I don’t mind if I do play a game,” said his grandfather. Little Peter rose to his feet, pushed the frivolous and seductive puppy aside as being likely to interfere with serious business, and modestly, but firmly, approached the table where the old men were beginning their game. He laid his hand on his grandfather’s arm, but he did not feel it at first, so he pressed harder.

“Hallo! little chap, what’s up?”

“Don’t touch none o’ them dominoes, grandfather! Don’t touch ’em,” said little Peter urgently.

“Whatever’s to do with you, Peter? You’re onreasonable!” said ’Lijah, with as near an approach to asperity as was possible towards his little grandson.

But Peter was not to be daunted. “Grandfather, don’t you remember that day when I asked what made you such an old, old man, you said it was Anna Dominoes as did it all? Don’t touch ’em, grandfather, don’t touch one of ’em!” and Peter’s young face was full of anxiety.

Old ’Lijah and Fanner Blewitt laughed till they cried, while ’Lijah told him what he had said to the little chap in the lane about his age; “for he’s that peart, I said Anna Dominoes was the matter wi’ me, speaking Latin, and Latin or Greek he’ll get to the reason o’ things! No, little Peter, these ain’t the kind o’ dominoes that’s made an old, old man o’ your grandad; it was the ’ear of the Lord I was speaking on, and when you go to school you’ll learn all about un!”

Peter was now an active little slip of seven years of age, never still except when he was sleeping, and not knowing what it was to be tired. He had grown used to his grandfather’s increasing infirmities by now, but they irked his restless young body and spirit, and on their walks together, when the old man sat down by the way weary and breathless, little Peter beguiled the time running to and fro as fast as he could, to let off his pent-up energy, after crawling at a snail’s pace by old ’Lijah’s side.

A few weeks later and little Peter again returned with a child’s persistence to the puzzling subject of his grandfather’s decaying strength.

“Grandfather, if it isn’t the dominoes that does it, do tell me what it is that makes you such an old, old man!”

Old ’Lijah did not laugh at the boy’s question now. He felt his life feeble within him, and he did not know what to say in reply that could be intelligible to a child. They were alone in the kitchen, and no sound was heard but the loud ticking of the tall clock, the audible footstep of time. The old man looked into the child’s fresh young face as he stood between his knees waiting for an answer, and he smiled feebly, and pressed the firm round cheek with his shaking hand, but he said nothing.

“But what is it, grandfather, that makes you such an old, very old man?”

Then ’Lijah looked up at the tall clock whose loud tick tack penetrated his dull hearing, and it seemed to him as though he had heard it for eighty years, counting out aloud the minutes, hours, days, and years of his whole life.

“It’s the ticking of the clock, my little lad, the ticking of the clock, that makes grandfather such an old, old man;” and Peter was satisfied with the reply, and set his young brains to work to find out how he could baffle the evil influence of the clock.

Now the tall case clock was a very big person for a small boy to tackle. He stood six feet without his shoes, with a huge round face behind a pane of glass, and a long front door opening straight into his vitals, and Peter had peeped in on winding-up days, and seen two heavy weights hanging, and the shining brass pendulum swinging to and fro, whose everlasting tick tack had made an old man of his grandfather. Well, never mind, wait till some time when mother was out of the house, and grandfather asleep in the big arm-chair, as he was nearly all day long now, and, little Peter knew what he would do!

Not many days afterwards everything happened as Peter wished, and he looked out of the window to make sure that his mother was at a safe distance at the top of the garden, and there she was, standing with her back to the house, busy pegging clothes on the line, so that no danger need be feared from that quarter. Indoors, too, all was equally favourable to the carrying out of little Peter’s deep-laid scheme. Grandfather really was older than ever to-day. He had not stirred from the big chair since he came down in the morning, and when he was spoken to he said nothing, he only smiled and fell into a doze. He was fast asleep now, and little Peter’s heart beat with joy to think what a fine surprise he was preparing for his grandfather. What would the old man think when he felt the stiffness and trembling going out of his legs and back, his eyes growing clear and bright again, and his deafness leaving him? all which would be sure to happen if the clock would only stop ticking.

Grandfather was so fast asleep, with his head leaning forward on his breast, that little Peter was not afraid of waking him. He summoned all his courage to his aid and stepped cautiously up to the great clock, with its menacing tick tack, unlocked its front door, opened it wide, and peeped into the resonant cavern in its inside, with the heavy iron weights hanging and the bright brass pendulum swaying to and fro with its everlasting tick tack, tick tack. Then, without giving himself time to take fright at his own daring, he seized hold of the swinging pendulum and, after a brief struggle, held it in his hand, a silent, motionless thing.

Then little Peter loosed his hold, and glanced over his shoulder at the old man, but he was still quietly sleeping. He cautiously closed the door of the tall clock towering above him in silence, and seated himself on a stool at his grandfather’s feet, waiting to tell him when he awoke how he had stopped the ticking of the clock that made him such an old, old man.

There his mother found him sitting when she returned from the garden, and neither daughter nor grandson could rouse the old man from the sleep that knows no waking. When the pendulum was set swinging once more, the clock began to tick again as though nothing had happened, and it ticked out the minutes till they grew into years, and little Peter became big Peter, and then he understood what his grandfather had meant.

About this eBook

THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND
AND OTHER GHOST STORIES

BY
LOUISA BALDWIN
(1845–1925)

A double handful of stories, to entertain fans of Victorian ghosts. Specters make appearances in the land of the living (with sometimes tragic results), folk with a touch of the fey foresee deaths, and a family curse will have its way. Is the final story a tale of the supernatural? – or is it a fairytale?

* * * *

Louisa (Mrs. Alfred) Baldwin (25 August 1845 – 16 May 1925) was an English novelist, poet, and author of several popular Victorian ghost stories. She spent much of her adult life in a state of poor health, and her hatred of idleness, combined with her imagination, led her to write. She published four novels, several collections of verse, and one collection of ghost stories.

This ebook was created by ECM for MobileRead.com, November 2018, and may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

This book was first published in 1895. The text is in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA.

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EDITING NOTES

>>TOC     >>ABOUT

PDF scan of the 1895 first edition of The Shadow on the Blind was obtained from the digital archives of the British Library; “The Ticking of the Clock” from Longman’s Magazine archives at HathiTrust.

OCR errors and obvious printer’s errors were silently corrected; punctuation, diacritics, and italics formatted.

Story titles are cross-linked to table of contents.

Embedded font “Fontin” by Jos Buivenga used for titling.

Validation by Pagina Epub Checker.