A Book of Ghosts: 12
Author: Various authors
Date: 1835-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: A collection of ten stories of the supernatural and the macabre by various authors, compiled by ECM.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA

A BOOK OF GHOSTS
– 12 –

THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT

MobileRead Edition
2021

A collection of ten stories of the supernatural and the macabre by various authors, compiled by ECM.

Contents were originally published 1836 ~ 1904. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- The Drunkard’s Death  –1836
by Charles Dickens
(1812–1870)

- The Cold Embrace  –1860
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
(1835–1915)

- A Life-Watch  –1867
by Georgina C. Clark
(?–?)

- The Phantom ’Rickshaw  –1885
by Rudyard Kipling
(1865–1936)

- Mysterious Maisie  –1895
by Wirt Gerrare
(1862–1935)

- Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook  –1895
by M. R. James
(1862–1936)

- The Doll’s Ghost  –1896
by Francis Marion Crawford
(1854–1909)

- The Corpse Light  –1899
by Dick Donovan
(1843–1934)

- Luella Miller  –1902
by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
(1852–1930)

- A Strange Goldfield  –1904
by Guy Boothby
(1867–1905)

THE DRUNKARD’S DEATH

Charles Dickens

1836

We will be bold to say, that there is scarcely a man in the constant habit of walking, day after day, through any of the crowded thoroughfares of London, who cannot recollect among the people whom he “knows by sight,” to use a familiar phrase, some being of abject and wretched appearance whom he remembers to have seen in a very different condition, whom he has observed sinking lower and lower by almost imperceptible degrees, and the shabbiness and utter destitution of whose appearance, at last, strike forcibly and painfully upon him, as he passes by. Is there any man who has mixed much with society, or whose avocations have caused him to mingle, at one time or other, with a great number of people, who cannot call to mind the time when some shabby, miserable wretch, in rags and filth, who shuffles past him now in all the squalor of disease and poverty, was a respectable tradesman, or a clerk, or a man following some thriving pursuit, with good prospects, and decent means; – or cannot any of our readers call to mind from among the list of their quondam acquaintance, some fallen and degraded man, who lingers about the pavement in hungry misery – from whom everyone turns coldly away, and who preserves himself from sheer starvation, nobody knows how? Alas! such cases are of too frequent occurrence to be rare items in any man’s experience; and but too often arise from one cause – drunkenness, – that fierce rage for the slow, sure poison, that oversteps every other consideration; that casts aside wife, children, friends, happiness, and station; and hurries its victims madly on to degradation and death.

Some of these men have been impelled by misfortune and misery, to the vice that has degraded them. The ruin of worldly expectations, the death of those they loved, the sorrow that slowly consumes, but will not break the heart, has driven them wild; and they present the hideous spectacle of madmen, slowly dying by their own hands. But, by far the greater part have wilfully, and with open eyes, plunged into the gulf from which the man who once enters it never rises more, but into which he sinks deeper and deeper down, until recovery is hopeless.

Such a man as this, once stood by the bedside of his dying wife, while his children knelt around, and mingled low bursts of grief with their innocent prayers. The room was scantily and meanly furnished; and it needed but a glance at the pale form from which the light of life was fast passing away, to know that grief, and want, and anxious care, had been busy at the heart for many a weary year. An elderly female with her face bathed in tears, was supporting the head of the dying woman – her daughter – on her arm. But it was not towards her that the wan face turned; it was not her hand that the cold and trembling fingers clasped; they pressed the husband’s arm; the eyes so soon to be closed in death, rested on his face; and the man shook beneath their gaze. His dress was slovenly and disordered, his face inflamed, his eyes bloodshot and heavy. He had been summoned from some wild debauch to the bed of sorrow and death.

A shaded lamp by the bedside cast a dim light on the figures around, and left the remainder of the room in thick, deep shadow. The silence of night prevailed without the house, and the stillness of death was in the chamber. A watch hung over the mantelshelf; its low ticking was the only sound that broke the profound quiet, but it was a solemn one, for well they knew, who heard it, that before it had recorded the passing of another hour, it would beat the knell of a departed spirit.

It is a dreadful thing to wait and watch for the approach of death; to know that hope is gone, and recovery impossible; and to sit and count the dreary hours through long, long, nights – such nights as only watchers by the bed of sickness know. It chills the blood to hear the dearest secrets of the heart, the pent-up, hidden secrets of many years, poured forth by the unconscious helpless being before you; and to think how little the reserve, and cunning of a whole life will avail, when fever and delirium tear off the mask at last. Strange tales have been told in the wanderings of dying men; tales so full of guilt and crime, that those who stood by the sick person’s couch have fled in horror and affright, lest they should be scared to madness by what they heard and saw; and many a wretch has died alone, raving of deeds, the very name of which, has driven the boldest man away.

But no such ravings were to be heard at the bedside by which the children knelt. Their half-stifled sobs and moanings alone broke the silence of the lonely chamber. And when at last the mother’s grasp relaxed; and turning one look from the children to their father, she vainly strove to speak, and fell backwards on the pillow, all was so calm and tranquil that she seemed to sink to sleep. They leant over her; they called upon her name, softly at first, and then in the loud and piercing tones of desperation. But there was no reply. They listened for her breath, but no sound came. They felt for the palpitation of the heart, but no faint throb responded to the touch. That heart was broken, and she was dead!

The husband sunk into a chair by the bedside, and clasped his hands upon his burning forehead. He gazed from child to child, but when a weeping eye met his, he quailed beneath its look. No word of comfort was whispered in his ear, no look of kindness lighted on his face. All shrunk from, and avoided him; and when at last he staggered from the room, no one sought to follow, or console the widower.

The time had been, when many a friend would have crowded round him in his affliction, and many a heartfelt condolence would have met him in his grief. Where were they now? One by one, friends, relations, the commonest acquaintance even, had fallen off from and deserted the drunkard. His wife alone had clung to him in good and evil, in sickness and poverty; and how had he rewarded her? He had reeled from the tavern to her bedside, in time to see her die.

He rushed from the house, and walked swiftly through the streets. Remorse, fear, shame, all crowded on his mind. Stupefied with drink, and bewildered with the scene he had just witnessed, he re-entered the tavern he had quitted shortly before. Glass succeeded glass. His blood mounted, and his brain whirled round. Death. Everyone must die, and why not she. She was too good for him, her relations had often told him so. Curses on them! Had they not deserted her, and left her to while away the time at home? Well she was dead, and happy perhaps. It was better as it was. Another glass – one more! Hurrah! It was a merry life while it lasted; and he would make the most of it.

Time went on; the three children who were left to him, grew up, and were children no longer; – the father remained the same – poorer, shabbier, and more dissolute-looking, but the same confirmed and irreclaimable drunkard. The boys had, long ago, run wild in the streets, and left him; the girl alone remained, but she worked hard, and words or blows could always procure him something for the tavern. So he went on in the old course, and a merry life he led.

One night, as early as ten o’clock – for the girl had been sick for many days, and there was, consequently, little to spend at the public-house – he bent his steps homewards, bethinking himself that if he would have her able to earn money, it would be as well to apply to the parish surgeon, or, at all events, to take the trouble of inquiring what ailed her, which he had not yet thought it worth while to do. It was a wet December night; the wind blew piercing cold, and the rain poured heavily down. He begged a few halfpence from a passer by, and having bought a small loaf (for it was his interest to keep the girl alive, if he could); he shuffled onwards, as fast as the wind and rain would let him.

At the back of Fleet Street, and lying between it, and the waterside, are several mean and narrow courts, which form a portion of Whitefriars; it was to one of these, that he directed his steps.

The alley into which he turned, might, for filth and misery, have competed with the darkest corner of this ancient sanctuary in its dirtiest and most lawless time. The houses, varying from two stories in height to four, were stained with every indescribable hue that long exposure to the weather, damp, and rottenness can impart to tenements composed originally of the roughest and coarsest materials. The windows were patched with paper, and stuffed with the foulest rags; the doors were falling from their hinges; poles with lines, on which to dry clothes, projected from every casement, and sounds of quarrelling or drunkenness issued from every room.

The solitary oil lamp in the centre of the court had been blown out, either by the violence of the wind or the act of some inhabitant who had excellent reasons for objecting to his residence being rendered too conspicuous; and the only light which fell upon the broken and uneven pavement, was derived from the miserable candles that here and there twinkled in the rooms of such of the more fortunate residents as could afford to indulge in so expensive a luxury. A gutter ran down the centre of the alley – all the sluggish odours of which had been called forth by the rain; and as the wind whistled through the old houses, the doors and shutters creaked upon their hinges, and the windows shook in their frames, with a violence which every moment seemed to threaten the destruction of the whole place.

The man whom we have followed into this den, walked on in the darkness, sometimes stumbling into the main gutter, and at others into some branch repositories of garbage which had been formed by the rain, until he reached the last house in the court. The door, or rather what was left of it, stood ajar, for the convenience of the numerous lodgers; and he proceeded to grope his way up the old and broken stair, to the attic storey.

He was within a step or two of his room door, when it opened, and a girl, whose miserable and emaciated appearance was only to be equalled by that of the candle which she shaded with her hand, peeped anxiously out.

“Is that you, father?” said the girl.

“Who else should it be?” replied the man gruffly. “What are you trembling at? It’s little enough that I’ve had to drink today, for there’s no drink without money, and no money without work. What the devil’s the matter with the girl?”

“I am not well father – not at all well,” said the girl, bursting into tears.

“Ah!” replied the man, in the tone of a person who is compelled to admit a very unpleasant fact, to which he would rather remain blind, if he could. “You must get better somehow, for we must have money. You must go to the parish doctor, and make him give you some medicine. They’re paid for it, damn ’em. What are you standing before the door for? Let me come in, can’t you?” “Father,” whispered the girl, shutting the door behind her, and placing herself before it, “William has come back.”

“Who!” said the man, with a start.

“Hush,” replied the girl, “William; brother William.”

“And what does he want?” said the man, with an effort at composure – “money? meat? drink? he’s come to the wrong shop for that, if he does. Give me the candle – give me the candle, fool – I ain’t going to hurt him.” He snatched the candle from her hand, and walked into the room.

Sitting on an old box, with his head resting on his hand, and his eyes fixed on a wretched cinder fire that was smouldering on the hearth, was a young man of about two-and-twenty, miserably clad in an old coarse jacket and trousers. He started up when his father entered.

“Fasten the door, Mary,” said the young man hastily – “Fasten the door. You look as if you didn’t know me, father. It’s long enough, since you drove me from home; you may well forget me.”

“And what do you want here, now?” said the father, seating himself on a stool, on the other side of the fireplace. “What do you want here, now?”

“Shelter,” replied the son, “I’m in trouble; that’s enough. If I’m caught I shall swing; that’s certain. Caught I shall be, unless I stop here; that’s as certain. And there’s an end of it.”

“You mean to say, you’ve been robbing, or murdering, then?” said the father.

“Yes, I do,” replied the son. “Does it surprise you, father?” he looked steadily in the man’s face, but he withdrew his eyes, and bent them on the ground.

“Where’s your brothers?” he said, after a long pause.

“Where they’ll never trouble you,” replied his son: “John’s gone to America, and Henry’s dead.”

“Dead!” said the father, with a shudder, which even he could not repress.

“Dead,” replied the young man. “He died in my arms – shot like a dog, by a game-keeper. He staggered back, I caught him, and his blood trickled down my hands. It poured out from his side like water. He was weak, and it blinded him, but he threw himself down on his knees, on the grass, and prayed to God, that if his mother was in Heaven, He would hear her prayers for pardon for her youngest son. ‘I was her favourite boy, Will,’ he said, ‘and I am glad to think, now, that when she was dying, though I was a young child then, and my little heart was almost bursting, I knelt down at the foot of the bed, and thanked God for having made me so fond of her as to have never once done anything to bring the tears into her eyes. Oh, Will, why was she taken away, and father left!’ There’s his dying words, father,” said the young man; “make the best you can of ’em. You struck him across the face, in a drunken fit, the morning we ran away; and here’s the end of it.”

The girl wept aloud; and the father, sinking his head upon his knees, rocked himself to and fro.

“If I am taken,” said the young man, “I shall be carried back into the country, and hung for that man’s murder. They cannot trace me here, without your assistance, father. For aught I know, you may give me up to justice; but unless you do, here I stop, until I can venture to escape abroad.”

For two whole days, all three remained in the wretched room, without stirring out. On the third evening, however, the girl was worse than she had been yet, and the few scraps of food they had were gone. It was indispensably necessary that somebody should go out; and as the girl was too weak and ill, the father went, just at nightfall.

He got some medicine for the girl, and a trifle in the way of pecuniary assistance. On his way back, he earned sixpence by holding a horse; and he turned homewards with enough money to supply their most pressing wants for two or three days to come. He had to pass the public-house. He lingered for an instant, walked past it, turned back again, lingered once more, and finally slunk in. Two men whom he had not observed, were on the watch. They were on the point of giving up their search in despair, when his loitering attracted their attention; and when he entered the public-house, they followed him.

“You’ll drink with me, master,” said one of them, proffering him a glass of liquor.

“And me too,” said the other, replenishing the glass as soon as it was drained of its contents.

The man thought of his hungry children, and his son’s danger. But they were nothing to the drunkard. He did drink; and his reason left him.

“A wet night, Warden,” whispered one of the men in his ear, as he at length turned to go away, after spending in liquor one-half of the money on which, perhaps, his daughter’s life depended.

“The right sort of night for our friends in hiding, Master Warden,” whispered the other.

“Sit down here,” said the one who had spoken first, drawing him into a corner. “We have been looking arfter the young un. We came to tell him, it’s all right now, but we couldn’t find him ’cause we hadn’t got the precise direction. But that ain’t strange, for I don’t think he know’d it himself, when he come to London, did he?”

“No, he didn’t,” replied the father.

The two men exchanged glances.

“There’s a vessel down at the docks, to sail at midnight, when it’s high water,” resumed the first speaker, “and we’ll put him on board. His passage is taken in another name, and what’s better than that, it’s paid for. It’s lucky we met you.”

“Very,” said the second.

“Capital luck,” said the first, with a wink to his companion.

“Great,” replied the second, with a slight nod of intelligence.

“Another glass here; quick” – said the first speaker. And in five minutes more, the father had unconsciously yielded up his own son into the hangman’s hands.

Slowly and heavily the time dragged along, as the brother and sister, in their miserable hiding – place, listened in anxious suspense to the slightest sound. At length, a heavy footstep was heard upon the stair; it approached nearer; it reached the landing; and the father staggered into the room.

The girl saw that he was intoxicated, and advanced with the candle in her hand to meet him; she stopped short, gave a loud scream, and fell senseless on the ground. She had caught sight of the shadow of a man, reflected on the floor. They both rushed in, and in another instant the young man was a prisoner, and handcuffed.

“Very quietly done,” said one of the men to his companion, “thanks to the old man. Lift up the girl, Tom – come, come, it’s no use crying, young woman. It’s all over now, and can’t be helped.”

The young man stooped for an instant over the girl, and then turned fiercely round upon his father, who had reeled against the wall, and was gazing on the group with drunken stupidity.

“Listen to me, father,” he said, in a tone that made the drunkard’s flesh creep. “My brother’s blood, and mine, is on your head: I never had kind look, or word, or care, from you, and alive or dead, I never will forgive you. Die when you will, or how, I will be with you. I speak as a dead man now, and I warn you, father, that as surely as you must one day stand before your Maker so surely shall your children be there, hand in hand, to cry for judgment against you.” He raised his manacled hands in a threatening attitude, fixed his eyes on his shrinking parent, and slowly left the room; and neither father nor sister ever beheld him more, on this side of the grave.

When the dim and misty light of a winter’s morning penetrated into the narrow court, and struggled through the begrimed window of the wretched room, Warden awoke from his heavy sleep, and found himself alone. He rose, and looked round him; the old flock mattress on the floor was undisturbed; everything was just as he remembered to have seen it last; and there were no signs of anyone, save himself, having occupied the room during the night. He inquired of the other lodgers, and of the neighbours; but his daughter had not been seen or heard of. He rambled through the streets, and scrutinized each wretched face among the crowds that thronged them, with anxious eyes. But his search was fruitless, and he returned to his garret when night came on, desolate and weary.

For many days he occupied himself in the same manner, but no trace of his daughter did he meet with, and no word of her reached his ears. At length he gave up the pursuit as hopeless. He had long thought of the probability of her leaving him, arid endeavouring to gain her bread in quiet, elsewhere. She had left him at last to starve alone. He ground his teeth, and cursed her!

He begged his bread from door to door. Every halfpenny he could wring from the pity or credulity of those to whom he addressed himself, was spent in the old way. A year passed over his head; the roof of a jail was the only one that had sheltered him for many months. He slept under archways, and in brickfields – any where, where there was some warmth or shelter from the cold and rain. But in the last stage of poverty, disease, and houseless want, he was a drunkard still.

At last, one bitter night, he sank down on a doorstep faint and ill. The premature decay of vice and profligacy had worn him to the bone. His cheeks were hollow and livid; his eyes were sunken, and their sight was dim. His legs trembled beneath his weight, and a cold shiver ran through every limb.

And now the long-forgotten scenes of a misspent life crowded thick and fast upon him. He thought of the time when he had a home – a happy, cheerful home – and of those who peopled it, and flocked about him then, until the forms of his elder children seemed to rise from the grave, and stand about him – so plain, so clear, and so distinct they were that he could touch and feel them. Looks that he had long forgotten were fixed upon him once more; voices long since hushed in death sounded in his ears like the music of village bells. But it was only for an instant. The rain beat heavily upon him; and cold and hunger were gnawing at his heart again.

He rose, and dragged his feeble limbs a few paces further. The street was silent and empty; the few passengers who passed by, at that late hour, hurried quickly on, and his tremulous voice was lost in the violence of the storm. Again that heavy chill struck through his frame, and his blood seem to stagnate beneath it. He coiled himself up in a projecting doorway, and tried to sleep.

But sleep had fled from his dull and glazed eyes. His mind wandered strangely, but he was awake, and conscious. The well-known shout of drunken mirth sounded in his ear, the glass was at his lips, the board was covered with choice rich food – they were all before him: he could see them all, he had but to reach out his hand, and take them – and, though the illusion was reality itself, he knew that he was sitting alone in the deserted street, watching the raindrops as they pattered on the stones; that death was coming upon him by inches – and that there were none to care for or help him.

Suddenly, he started up, in the extremity of terror. He had heard his own voice shouting in the night air, he knew not what, or why. Hark! A groan! – another! His senses were leaving him: half-formed and incoherent words burst from his lips; and his hands sought to tear and lacerate his flesh. He was going mad, and he shrieked for help till his voice failed him.

He raised his head, and looked up the long dismal street. He recollected that outcasts like himself, condemned to wander day and night in those dreadful streets, had sometimes gone distracted with their own loneliness. He remembered to have heard many years before that a homeless wretch had once been found in a solitary corner, sharpening a rusty knife to plunge into his own heart, preferring death to that endless, weary, wandering to and fro. In an instant his resolve was taken, his limbs received new life; he ran quickly from the spot, and paused not for breath until he reached the riverside.

He crept softly down the steep stone stairs that lead from the commencement of Waterloo Bridge, down to the water’s level. He crouched into a corner, and held his breath, as the patrol passed. Never did prisoner’s heart throb with the hope of liberty and life half so eagerly as did that of the wretched man at the prospect of death. The watch passed close to him, but he remained unobserved; and after waiting till the sound of footsteps had died away in the distance, he cautiously descended, and stood beneath the gloomy arch that forms the landing-place from the river.

The tide was in, and the water flowed at his feet. The rain had ceased, the wind was lulled, and all was, for the moment, still and quiet – so quiet that the slightest sound on the opposite bank, even the rippling of the water against the barges that were moored there, was distinctly audible to his ear. The stream stole languidly and sluggishly on. Strange and fantastic forms rose to the surface, and beckoned him to approach; dark gleaming eyes peered from the water, and seemed to mock his hesitation, while hollow murmurs from behind, urged him onwards. He retreated a few paces, took a short run, desperate leap, and plunged into the river.

Not five seconds had passed when he rose to the water’s surface – but what a change had taken place in that short time, in all his thoughts and feelings! Life – life – in any form, poverty, misery, starvation – anything but death. He fought and struggled with the water that closed over his head, and screamed in agonies of terror. The curse of his own son rang in his ears. The shore – but one foot of dry ground – he could almost touch the step. One hand’s breadth nearer, and he was saved – but the tide bore him onward, under the dark arches of the bridge, and he sank to the bottom.

Again he rose, and struggled for life. For one instant – for one brief instant – the buildings on the river’s banks, the lights on the bridge through which the current had borne him, the black water, and the fast flying clouds, were distinctly visible – once more he sank, and once again he rose. Bright flames of fire shot up from earth to heaven, and reeled before his eyes, while the water thundered in his ears, and stunned him with its furious roar.

A week afterwards the body was washed ashore, some miles down the river, a swollen and disfigured mass. Unrecognised and unpitied, it was borne to the grave; and there it has long since mouldered away!

THE COLD EMBRACE

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

1860

He was an artist – such things as happened to him happen sometimes to artists.

He was a German – such things as happened to him happen sometimes to Germans.

He was young, handsome, studious, enthusiastic, metaphysical, reckless, unbelieving, heartless.

And being young, handsome, and eloquent, he was beloved.

He was an orphan, under the guardianship of his dead father’s brother, his uncle Wilhelm, in whose house he had been brought up from a little child; and she who loved him was his cousin – his cousin Gertrude, whom he swore he loved in return.

Did he love her? Yes, when he first swore it. It soon wore out, this passionate love; how threadbare and wretched a sentiment it became at last in the selfish heart of the student! But in its first golden dawn, when he was only nineteen, and had just returned from his apprenticeship to a great painter at Antwerp, and they wandered together in the most romantic outskirts of the city at rosy sunset, by holy moonlight, or bright and joyous morning, how beautiful a dream!

They keep it a secret from Wilhelm, as he has the father’s ambition of a wealthy suitor for his only child – a cold and dreary vision beside the lover’s dream.

So they are betrothed; and standing side by side when the dying sun and the pale rising moon divide the heavens, he puts the betrothal ring upon her finger, the white and taper finger whose slender shape he knows so well. This ring is a peculiar one, a massive golden serpent, its tail in its mouth, the symbol of eternity; it had been his mother’s, and he would know it amongst a thousand. If he were to become blind tomorrow, he could select it from amongst a thousand by the touch alone.

He places it on her finger, and they swear to be true to each other for ever and ever – through trouble and danger – in sorrow and change – in wealth or poverty. Her father must needs be won to consent to their union by and by, for they were now betrothed, and death alone could part them.

But the young student, the scoffer at revelation, yet the enthusiastic adorer of the mystical, asks:

“Can death part us? I would return to you from the grave, Gertrude. My soul would come back to be near my love. And you – you, if you died before me – the cold earth would not hold you from me; if you loved me, you would return, and again these fair arms would be clasped round my neck as they are now.”

But she told him, with a holier light in her deep-blue eyes than had ever shone in his – she told him that the dead who die at peace with God are happy in heaven, and cannot return to the troubled earth; and that it is only the suicide – the lost wretch on whom sorrowful angels shut the door of Paradise – whose unholy spirit haunts the footsteps of the living.

•   •   •   •   •

The first year of their betrothal is passed, and she is alone, for he has gone to Italy, on a commission for some rich man, to copy Raphaels, Titians, Guidos, in a gallery at Florence. He has gone to win fame, perhaps; but it is not the less bitter – he is gone!

Of course her father misses his young nephew, who has been as a son to him; and he thinks his daughter’s sadness no more than a cousin should feel for a cousin’s absence.

In the meantime, the weeks and months pass. The lover writes – often at first, then seldom – at last, not at all.

How many excuses she invents for him! How many times she goes to the distant little post-office, to which he is to address his letters! How many times she hopes, only to be disappointed! How many times she despairs, only to hope again!

But real despair comes at last, and will not be put off any more. The rich suitor appears on the scene, and her father is determined. She is to marry at once. The wedding-day is fixed – the fifteenth of June.

The date seems burnt into her brain.

The date, written in fire, dances forever before her eyes.

The date, shrieked by the Furies, sounds continually in her ears.

But there is time yet – it is the middle of May – there is time for a letter to reach him at Florence; there is time for him to come to Brunswick, to take her away and marry her, in spite of her father – in spite of the whole world.

But the days and weeks fly by, and he does not write – he does not come. This is indeed despair which usurps her heart, and will not be put away.

It is the fourteenth of June. For the last time she goes to the little post-office; for the last time she asks the old question, and they give her for the last time the dreary answer, “No; no letter.”

For the last time – for tomorrow is the day appointed for her bridal. Her father will hear no entreaties; her rich suitor will not listen to her prayers. They will not be put off a day – an hour; tonight alone is hers – this night, which she may employ as she will.

She takes another path than that which leads home; she hurries through some by-streets of the city, out onto a lonely bridge, where he and she had stood so often in the sunset, watching the rose-coloured light glow, fade, and die upon the river.

•   •   •   •   •

He returns from Florence. He had received her letter. That letter, blotted with tears, entreating, despairing – he had received it, but he loved her no longer. A young Florentine, who had sat to him for a model, had bewitched his fancy – that fancy which with him stood in place of a heart – and Gertrude had been half forgotten. If she had a richer suitor, good; let her marry him; better for her, better far for himself. He had no wish to fetter himself with a wife. Had he not his art always? – his eternal bride, his unchanging mistress.

Thus he thought it wiser to delay his journey to Brunswick, so that he should arrive when the wedding was over – arrive in time to salute the bride.

And the vows – the mystical fancies – the belief in his return, even after death, to the embrace of his beloved? Oh, gone out of his life; melted away forever, those foolish dreams of his boyhood.

So on the fifteenth of June he enters Brunswick, by that very bridge on which she stood, the stars looking down on her, the night before. He strolls across the bridge and down by the water’s edge, a great rough dog at his heels, and the smoke from his short meerschaum pipe curling in blue wreaths fantastically in the pure morning air. He has his sketchbook under his arm, and, attracted now and then by some object that catches his artist’s eye, stops to draw: a few weeds and pebbles on the river’s brink – a crag on the opposite share – a group of pollard willows in the distance. When he has done, he admires his drawing, shuts his sketchbook, empties the ashes from his pipe, refills from his tobacco-pouch, sings the refrain of a gay drinking-song, calls to his dog, smokes again, and walks on. Suddenly he opens his sketch-book again; this time that which attracts him is a group of figures: but what is it?

It is not a funeral, for there are no mourners.

It is not a funeral, but it is a corpse lying on a rude bier, covered with an old sail, carried between two bearers.

It is not a funeral, for the bearers are fishermen – fishermen in their everyday garb.

About a hundred yards from him they rest their burden on a bank – one stands at the head of the bier, the other throws himself down at the foot of it.

And thus they form a perfect group; he walks back two or three paces, selects his point of sight, and begins to sketch a hurried outline. He has finished it before they move; he hears their voices, though he cannot hear their words, and wonders what they can be talking of. Presently he walks on and joins them.

“You have a corpse there, my friends?” he says.

“Yes; a corpse washed ashore an hour ago.”

“Drowned?”

“Yes, drowned; – a young girl, very handsome.”

“Suicides are always handsome,” says the painter; and then he stands for a little while idly smoking and meditating, looking at the sharp outline of the corpse and the stiff folds of the rough canvas-covering.

Life is such a golden holiday for him – young, ambitious, clever – that it seems as though sorrow and death could have no part in his destiny.

At last he says that, as this poor suicide is so handsome, he should like to make a sketch of her.

He gives the fishermen some money, and they offer to remove the sailcloth that covers her features.

No; he will do it himself. He lifts the rough, coarse, wet canvas from her face. What face?

The face that shone on the dreams of his foolish boyhood; the face which once was the light of his uncle’s home. His cousin Gertrude – his betrothed!

He sees, as in one glance, while he draws one breath, the rigid features – the marble arms – the hands crossed on the cold bosom; and, on the third finger of the left hand, the ring which had been his mother’s – the golden serpent; the ring which, if he were to become blind, he could select from a thousand others by the touch alone.

But he is a genius and a metaphysician – grief, true grief, is not for such as he. His first thought is flight – flight anywhere out of that accursed city – anywhere far from the brink of that hideous river – anywhere away from memory, away from remorse – anywhere to forget.

•   •   •   •   •

He is miles on the road that leads away from Brunswick before he knows that he has walked a step.

It is only when his dog lies down panting at his feet that he feels how exhausted he is himself, and sits down upon a bank to rest. How the landscape spins round and round before his dazzled eyes, while his morning’s sketch of the two fishermen and the canvas-covered bier glares redly at him out of the twilight!

At last, after sitting a long time by the roadside, idly playing with his dog, idly smoking, idly lounging, looking as any idle, light-hearted travelling student might look, yet all the while acting over that morning’s scene in his burning brain a hundred times a minute; at last he grows a little more composed, and tries presently to think of himself as he is, apart from his cousin’s suicide. Apart from that, he was no worse off than he was yesterday. His genius was not gone; the money he had earned at Florence still lined his pocketbook; he was his own master, free to go whither he would.

And while he sits on the roadside, trying to separate himself from the scene of that morning – trying to put away the image of the corpse covered with the damp canvas sail – trying to think of what he should do next, where he should go, to be farthest away from Brunswick and remorse, the old diligence comes rumbling and jingling along. He remembers it; it goes from Brunswick to Aix-la-Chapelle.

He whistles to his dog, shouts to the postillion to stop, and springs into the coupé.

During the whole evening, through the long night, though he does not once close his eyes, he never speaks a word; but when morning dawns, and the other passengers awake and begin to talk to each other, he joins in the conversation. He tells them that he is an artist, that he is going to Cologne and to Antwerp to copy the Rubenses, and the great picture by Quentin Matsys, in the museum. He remembered afterwards that he talked and laughed boisterously, and that when he was talking and laughing loudest, a passenger, older and graver than the rest, opened the window near him, and told him to put his head out. He remembered the fresh air blowing in his face, the singing of the birds in his ears, and the flat fields and roadside reeling before his eyes. He remembered this, and then falling in a lifeless heap on the floor of the diligence.

It is a fever that keeps him for six long weeks laid on a bed at a hotel in Aix-la-Chapelle.

He gets well, and, accompanied by his dog, starts on foot for Cologne. By this time he is his former self once more. Again the blue smoke from his short meerschaum curls upwards in the morning air – again he sings some old university drinking-song – again stops here and there, meditating and sketching.

He is happy, and has forgotten his cousin – and so, on to Cologne.

It is by the great cathedral he is standing, with his dog at his side. It is night, the bells have just chimed the hour, and the clocks are striking eleven; the moonlight shines full upon the magnificent pile, over which the artist’s eye wanders, absorbed in the beauty of form.

He is not thinking of his drowned cousin, for he has forgotten her and is happy.

Suddenly someone, something from behind him, puts two cold arms round his neck, and clasps its hands on his breast.

And yet there is no one behind him, for on the flags bathed in the broad moonlight there are only two shadows, his own and his dog’s. He turns quickly round – there is no one – nothing to be seen in the broad square but himself and his dog; and though he feels, he cannot see the cold arms clasped round his neck.

It is not ghostly, this embrace, for it is palpable to the touch – it cannot be real, for it is invisible.

He tries to throw off the cold caress. He clasps the hands in his own to tear them asunder, and to cast them off his neck. He can feel the long delicate fingers cold and wet beneath his touch, and on the third, finger of the left hand he can feel the ring which was his mother’s – the golden serpent – the ring which he has always said he would know among a thousand by the touch alone. He knows it now!

His dead cousin’s cold arms are round his neck – his dead cousin’s wet hands are clasped upon his breast. He asks himself if he is mad. “Up, Leo!” he shouts. “Up, up, boy!” and the Newfoundland leaps to his shoulders – the dog’s paws are on the dead hands, and the animal utters a terrific howl, and springs away from his master.

The student stands in the moonlight, the dead arms round his neck, and the dog at a little distance moaning piteously.

Presently a watchman, alarmed by the howling of the dog, comes into the square to see what is wrong.

In a breath the cold arms are gone.

He takes the watchman home to the hotel with him and gives him money; in his gratitude he could have given that man half his little fortune.

Will it ever come to him again, this embrace of the dead?

He tries never to be alone; he makes a hundred acquaintances, and shares the chamber of another student. He starts up if he is left by himself in the public room at the inn where he is staying, and runs into the street. People notice his strange actions, and begin to think that he is mad.

But, in spite of all, he is alone once more; for one night the public room being empty for a moment, when on some idle pretence he strolls into the street, the street is empty too, and for the second time he feels the cold arms round his neck, and for the second time, when he calls his dog, the animal slinks away from him with a piteous howl.

After this he leaves Cologne, still travelling on foot – of necessity now, for his money is getting low. He joins travelling hawkers, he walks side by side with labourers, he talks to every foot-passenger he falls in with, and tries from morning till night to get company on the road.

At night he sleeps by the fire in the kitchen of the inn at which he stops; but do what he will, he is often alone, and it is now a common thing for him to feel the cold arms around his neck.

Many months have passed since his cousin’s death – autumn, winter, early spring. His money is nearly gone, his health is utterly broken, he is the shadow of his former self, and he is getting near Paris. He will reach that city at the time of the Carnival. To this he looks forward. In Paris, in Carnival time, he need never, surely, be alone, never feel that deadly caress; he may even recover his lost gaiety, his lost health, once more resume his profession, once more earn fame and money by his art.

How hard he tries to get over the distance that divides him from Paris, while day by day he grows weaker, and his step slower and more heavy!

But there is an end at last; the long dreary roads are passed. This is Paris, which he enters for the first time – Paris, of which he has dreamed so much – Paris, whose million voices are to exorcise his phantom.

To him tonight Paris seems one vast chaos of lights, music, and confusion – lights which dance before his eyes and will not be still – music that rings in his ears and deafens him – confusion which makes his head whirl round and round.

But, in spite of all, he finds the opera-house, where there is a masked ball. He has enough money left to buy a ticket of admission, and to hire a domino to throw over his shabby dress. It seems only a moment after his entering the gates of Paris that he is in the very midst of the wild gaiety of the opera-house ball.

No more darkness, no more loneliness, but a mad crowd, shouting and dancing, and a lovely Débardeuse hanging on his arm.

The boisterous gaiety he feels surely is his old light-heartedness come back. He hears the people round him talking of the outrageous conduct of some drunken student, and it is to him they point when they say this – to him, who has not moistened his lips since yesterday at noon, for even now he will not drink; though his lips are parched, and his throat burning, he cannot drink. His voice is thick and hoarse, and his utterance indistinct; but still this must be his old lightheartedness come back that makes him so wildly gay.

The little Débardeuse is wearied out – her arm rests on his shoulder heavier than lead – the other dancers one by one drop off.

The lights, in the chandeliers one by one die out.

The decorations look pale and shadowy in that dim light which is neither night nor day.

A faint glimmer from the dying lamps, a pale streak of cold grey light from the new-born day, creeping in through half-opened shutters.

And by this light the bright-eyed Débardeuse fades sadly. He looks her in the face. How the brightness of her eyes dies out! Again he looks her in the face. How white that face has grown! Again – and now it is the shadow of a face alone that looks in his.

Again – and they are gone – the bright eyes, the face, the shadow of the face. He is alone; alone in that vast saloon.

Alone, and, in the terrible silence, he hears the echoes of his own footsteps in that dismal dance which has no music.

No music but the beating of his heart against his breast. For the cold arms are round his neck – they whirl him round, they will not be flung off, or cast away; he can no more escape from their icy grasp than he can escape from death. He looks behind him – there is nothing but himself in the great empty salle; but he can feel – cold, deathlike, but oh, how palpable! – the long slender fingers, and the ring which was his mother’s.

He tries to shout, but he has no power in his burning throat. The silence of the place is only broken by the echoes of his own footsteps in the dance from which he cannot extricate himself. Who says he has no partner? The cold hands are clasped on his breast, and now he does not shun their caress. No! One more polka, if he drops down dead.

The lights are all out, and half an hour after, the gendarmes come in with a lantern to see that the house is empty; they are followed by a great dog that they have found seated howling on the steps of the theatre. Near the principal entrance they stumble over –

The body of a student, who has died from want of food, exhaustion, and the breaking of a blood-vessel.

A LIFE-WATCH

Georgina C. Clark

1867

We do many foolish things in early life. I did what the world esteems a very foolish thing – married for love. Harry and I were equally poor, and the affronted world turned its back upon us. The wealthy heads of both houses, determining to give us leisure to repent after having married in haste, left us to ourselves. Harry obtained, through an old friend of the family, a situation as clerk in a mercantile house in the City. The salary was a small one, and many a shift and contrivance was endured by us in those days. And yet we were very happy. Like an obstinate fond young couple, we refused to learn the lesson our offended elders set us, and we would not repent, but struggled on through the battle of life in the ranks with the rest. Yes, I am proud to say that we fought and conquered. Now that our mansion is built in the favoured locality of the West; now that I rumble along streets in my carriage that I have trodden once burdened with galoshes and umbrella when the weather would not smile, however much we smiled at Fate; now that, amongst not a few good and true and tried friends, many throng to our gay parties who would not then have condescended to cross our threshold – now I can look back and call to mind many an incident of our early life with pleasure. There is one story, however, mixed up with those days that is fraught with inexplicable horror. And that is the story I have promised to relate. I must promise that we considered it – in those early and struggling days – a rise in life when we took a small cottage at Hampstead, with woodbine growing over the door, and resolved to eke out the very moderate rent by the assistance of a lodger. It was a rise because we had previously occupied apartments, and one who has not experienced similar feelings can hardly fancy with what joy we hailed the idea of dwelling at last under a roof of our own.

We entered into possession of our cottage, and then came our lodger, through the ready intervention of the Times, in the shape of a lady, and a singular one. We took her to be about fifty years of age. She was a tall fine woman, but distinguished unpleasantly by remarkable rigidity in her movements. Her step was slow, measured, and dull, and as she trod her foot never seemed to leave the floor. There was no rebound, no pliancy in her gait, which seemed rather that of a statue on wheels than of a creature throbbing with the pulses of life., Her hair was thick, but entirely grey; she arranged it simply and neatly, without ornament and without a cap, but also with a total absence of style. Her face was ashen pale and deeply lined. She came late at night in a cab, and my one servant remarked to me how curious it was that she, being evidently a lady, rode outside next the driver. I thought it very extraordinary, but the fact soon glided out of my memory as too trivial to retain a place in it. When I say “glided out of my memory” I am using an incorrect expression. It rather slid into some remote, unused corner, to be furbished out again at any distant time, like the present, when it might be wanted as one of the small coloured bits that fit into the puzzle of my eccentric lodger’s horrible story.

She came outside the cab, dressed in an old barathea gown, a black cloak and bonnet, and an imperviously close gauze veil of the same sombre hue, which she held about her face as if that were a secret enemy everyone was curious to detect, and she terribly interested to conceal. There was a large box upon the top of the cab. It was of very old-fashioned make, and evidently originally designed as an addendum to a travelling carriage. The exterior was covered with leather, bound with iron, studded with nails, and secured with a big foreign lock, supplemented by a clumsy hasp. It was not unlike its owner – old, worn, and of a rusty black. The great handles clanked as the man lifted it with difficulty and due assistance to the ground. It was not easy to get it upstairs. Did it contain books, that it was so weighty? It evidently held something very precious to the owner, for she watched its ascent with strained eyes; and judging from the nervous interest she appeared to take in it, I did not doubt she had ridden outside to be near her treasure, and selected the time of night on purpose to do so. When the box was fairly upstairs, she sat down upon it and remained there. Within the cab we found only a small portmanteau.

She had given no name when answering our advertisement, but simply forwarded a stamped envelope addressed to “Alpha, Post Office, Dover”. Kitty, the servant girl, asked if she would like some tea, and also by what name she should address her.

“I will take tea, thank you,” was the reply, in a half absent, slow, inward tone peculiar to her. “My name is of no consequence. What am I to call you?”

“Kitty, if you please.”

“Very well then, Kitty, you will have occasion to address me in no other manner than as ‘madam’ or, as you will pronounce it, ‘ma’am!’” And with that she gave Kitty a month’s rent and asked for a receipt. “Money is better than a name,” she added, in her listless, slow way, muttering to herself. “What is my name to them? What is my name?”

As it appeared to vex her, and really did not matter to us, we asked the question no more, but spoke of her as “the lady upstairs”. She was evidently eccentric. Sometimes she would walk round the garden in the twilight, covered with her gauze veil, and holding it in a tight, nervous grasp with a gloved hand, as she did the night when she came, her eyes apparently seeking the window of her room with a suspicious restlessness, which seemed to be a part of her eccentricity.

It appeared that the lady’s portmanteau contained only a change of linen, originally fine and trimmed with costly lace, but now most elaborately yet neatly mended. But for this, a thimble, scissors, needle and thread, and the dress she came in, our lodger might have been destitute. Yet the large heavy box must contain something. Still, though the object of so much solicitude, we could never discover that she opened it. It was placed in such a position as to be visible from both rooms. During the day she always sat upon it. In the morning, when Kitty took in her can of hot water, the lady was ever awake, lying on her side, with her eyes fixed upon her precious box.

When first this quiet but eccentric inmate entered our house she had with her a roll of banknotes and a case of valuable jewels. Although she barely allowed herself the necessaries of life, the former were changed away one by one, until at last, at her request, Harry procured a purchaser for her trinkets, at a fair price, through the intervention of a friend.

The budding months blossomed into years and fructified into the seed that is sown in the eternity of the past, and we knew that the means thus procured were exhausted. We felt deeply interested in our tenant, in spite – perhaps because – of her strange habits, and fell into a custom of conversing together about her as if she had been a friend. If these jewels were her last possessions, what was to become of her? What was a woman of her age to do?

Her age? That was a question. We felt some doubts about her age. Kitty, who saw most of her, thought she had not passed so many years in the world as we at first supposed. She appeared to have no friends or acquaintances. No letters came, no visitors called, no postbag was troubled on her account.

Well! There was that mysterious chest. Our conjectures and anxieties on her behalf always found a refuge and a consolation in that. It must contain something. It was the hope, the Ultima Thule of our fancies – the sword with which we cut the Gordian knot of our perplexities.

“Depend upon it,” Harry remarked, “the box holds plate – you remember how heavy it was. Or perhaps it contains diamonds of greater value and more in number than those I sold some time ago.”

Our speculations regarding the age of the lady were set at rest by the arrival of the census. Armed with the formidable paper, I rapped gently at the drawing-room door.

“Come in,” responded the low, dull, measured voice.

I entered and explained my errand. “Shall I leave the paper with you?” I suggested.

“My writing might be—” She commenced as if thinking aloud, and stopping suddenly upon remembering that she was no longer alone. Turning on me her eyes – peculiar grey eyes, that looked as if she never slept or wept – she added, “Will you have the goodness to add the particulars for me?”

“The name?” I inquired, dipping a pen in the ink.

“What is yours?” was the counter question.

“Mary Herbert.”

“Write Martha Herbert, then; that will do.”

I looked inquiringly. “You know there is a penalty?”

“Yes; but the name is of little consequence – the name of a lone woman. I have given you a name; will you not write it?”

I said no more, but inscribed the paper as directed. But the appellation was evidently feigned.

“Your age?”

“Twenty-eight”

The pen actually dropped from my hand as she said twenty-eight; and I looked up very quickly.

“Nay,” she replied, meeting my gaze, and without altering her monotonous tone, “that is the simple truth. Are you very surprised? I suppose with my grey hair I look an old woman.”

“I can hardly believe, my dear madam, that you are not mistaken,” I ventured to remonstrate.

“I have given you reasons to doubt me, perhaps; but I have answered your query with regard to age truly. I am but eight-and-twenty – barely eight-and-twenty.”

Good heaven! thought I, what can have been the circumstances of your life that your hair is grey, your face thus lined, yourself all but turned from a being of flesh and blood to a thing of stone? – that you are thus self-immured and solitary, that you shun our society and have refused all our efforts at kindness? We had gathered even from her scanty denials of our offers of amusement that she was a linguist, a musician, an artist; and yet there she sat all day, on that chest, nursing her hands, or at most adding a darn to her worn linen.

The census further told me that she was born in the parish of St George, Hanover-square, and was a widow. Harry and I talked about ( her more than ever. We knew that she had spent all the money obtained for the jewels, even on her frugal wants. For two weeks she had paid no rent, ordered no food. We knew not what to do; whether or not to speak to her, or, if we spoke, what to propose.

It was Monday morning, and we were seated at breakfast when Kitty hurried in and told us that the lady upstairs was in a fit. I ran up, begging Harry himself to hasten for a doctor. The girl had spoken truly. The fit was not fatal; but the poor woman lay unconscious for days. When her reason returned, it was evident that she was rapidly sinking. The doctor informed us she had only a few hours to live. There were no friends to summon; and vain were my persuasions to induce her to see a clergyman, to confess any faith, or acknowledge connection with any church or sect. I sat by the bedside I had not quitted day or night since her illness. After lying quiet some time with her hand in mine, she at last said feebly, “Open my portmanteau and take out the book.” I took the key she offered, and obeyed by bringing to her bedside a common clasped account-book, the only one I saw.

“You have shown me kindness. You have appeared interested in me. I have yearned to make you my friend. But my secrets are such as during life could be confided to none. I have written them there for you. Promise me not to open that book till I am dead.”

I gave my word, and, in obedience to her request, put the book into my pocket.

“My grey hair, my wrinkled face, my twenty-eight years – you will understand them; but will you feel pity?”

She was sinking rapidly, like the sun at eventide; and I pressed upon her again my request to read from my Bible the words of One whose mercy and forgiveness were more needed than mine.

She consented. I read for some time, and thought the words were comforting, when she started up, her manner wild, her eyes startling, “Look! look! look!” she cried, pointing with her forefinger and white-draped arm to the iron-bound chest, “look! look! look!” and with a low cry the poor lady sank back on her couch dying. The struggle was soon over, and all was quiet.

“Look! look! look!” What had she seen? What vision had fancy, or conscience, or sudden delirium roused before her? I know not. I saw only the large dark chest in the place where it had ever rested – dull, shabby, and cumbrous.

We were worn out and tired, and glad to retire early to bed. I do not know how long Harry and I had been asleep when we were startled by a heavy noise in the room underneath. Harry sprang up and seized the night-light. Surely it is the lid of the heavy chest suddenly slammed, and there are thieves in the house, thought I, as I ran after my spouse, lest there might be danger for him alone, and just as if a feeble woman in her night array, like myself, could be any protection. In moments of sudden fear we do not stay to reason, but act upon impulse. In another moment we stood in the double chamber below. It was untenanted, save by the dead. The great box stood as I had last seen it. I tried the lock; it was quite secure. We called up Kitty, and searched the house; bolts, bars, and locks were all intact. Then we began to reason how absurd we had been to suppose that thieves would slam a box-lid, or make a noise loud enough to wake the inmates of the house, had they entered. We could not sleep any more that night, but dressed ourselves and sat up watching; and Kitty lighted a fire, prepared some tea, and shared our folly. The truth is, we had all been fagged and distressed, and our nerves were unstrung. As for the noise, it was one of those mysterious sounds never accounted for, but cast amongst “things not generally known” even to the inquiring mind of a Timbs.

In the morning the doctor called in to see us, as he had promised to do, and with him and Kitty as witnesses we determined to open the chest or box, and relieve our minds of doubts as to what it contained. There might be property – in fact we had no doubt but what there was – and possibly traces of family connections, or friends with whom we ought to communicate.

The key was turned; the lid raised. The ticking of a bed, old, yellow, and discoloured, was folded over the contents. As we essayed to remove it, it fell to fragments in our hands, disclosing – good heavens! – such a sight .as eyes have rarely rested upon. Kitty shrieked; I almost fainted, and Harry involuntarily caught me in his arms. Even the doctor blanched, and fell back a step or two. For there lay, under the fragments of the old ticking, the remains of a man. Little more than a skeleton, little more than a heap of rags, and more or less mouldy dust, hidden amongst which was a costly watch and chain, a set of studs, and a diamond ring of very great price – trinkets whose value would have kept the lady who lay dead in comfort for two or three years.

Who was this man? and what was the motive that led to this strange enclosure of his body? Were the remains those of a husband from whom, like Queen Jane, she could not part? or was it the body of a murdered man – a guilty lover – a jealous spouse, thrust from sight and concealed at the expense of a life-watch? This was the secret of the eccentricity of the woman who had kept ghastly companionship under our roof so long.

I remembered her book, and putting my hand into my pocket pulled it forth; for in the solemn hour of death, during the grief and fatigue that followed, and the subsequent foolish alarm of the night, I had forgotten it. Closing the lid over the ghastly spectacle, turning the key in the lock, and securing also the chamber-door, was the work of a short time; and afterwards we gathered in our little parlour together, to learn the terrible facts which Harry read us, and which I here copy from.

THE CONTENTS
OF THE CLASPED VOLUME

I know not whether I am mad or sane. I know not whether I was mad when I did it. There is madness in our family. My mother died raving mad. The old earl, my grandfather, was methodically mad, and was kept under disguised restraint in his ancestral mansion, that the world might not know it. But it oozed out, as things concealed usually do, with exaggerations. If I am mad, I was not accountable for it, and cannot be judged for it. And if I am sane, I have expiated by a long life-watch of cruel and horrible self-torture. To live all my days in a house converted into a mausoleum; to be condemned to sit upon an unburied coffin; to be encumbered everywhere with a tenant who should be in the tomb; to live alone with death; to eat side by side with a skeleton; to taste food out of a blood-red hand, and have a blood-red sky ever before me – are parts of my punishment. I never see a blue sky or a grey distance. Everything has a sanguinary haze over it, as if I looked through spectacles of flame-colour. And yet I did not shed blood, – ah no, I did not do that.

I have formed a friendship for this woman, and I should like to talk to her; yet I cannot divulge my secret. She seems to love her husband; yet not as I loved mine. As I loved him? As I do love him – passionately, wildly, fearfully, madly, so that I can never take my gaze off his coffin; so that I rise in the darkness and silence of the night to kiss and embrace the cold wood; and I feel my passion and my remorse eating out my heart. I cannot weep. I never shed a tear now, as I never shed a tear then. My grief is cold and tearless, as my rage was cold and tearless and my happiness cold and tearless when he lived. Outwardly, only outwardly. Within I was and am a human volcano, and the fire is consuming my heart and brain, sense and being, slowly, slowly – heaven, how slowly! It is retribution.

In my girlhood I was beautiful, and gifted with extraordinary talents. Whatever I undertook I mastered. I studied astrology, and cast my nativity. I saw the doom then, but did not comprehend it. Could we literally know the future, of what use would it be? Should we be warned, advised, or guided? No! Doom is doom, and we should rush on blindly towards it.

In every accomplishment I excelled. And yet I was but fifteen years of age, living in retirement at a country seat with my governess, when I met my future husband. I was sketching the stump of a tree in a grove, he out with dog and gun. Our eyes met with a flash of light, and we loved each other. He was so handsome, a heathen might have thought him a deity descended from the clouds. His hair was fair, rich, and waving, over eyes blue as heaven, his complexion more delicate, if possible, than my own. His voice was soft, rich, and manly. He had travelled, and was as well read as myself, I did not discover all this at first. But we loved as our eyes met. Then we were impelled to speak. We walked home and saw my chaperone – an interview which resulted in his seeking my father, whose parliamentary duties yet held him in London. No parent could object to such an unexceptionable suitor as Lionel; but an obstacle existed on his side, whose father, Lord – (I will betray no names, not even to her I fancy my friend; but for the credit of those so unwillingly related, suppress all nomenclature, and carry shame and crime alone to the grave) – Lord – refused to sanction his son’s union with the daughter of a lunatic, the grandchild of an idiot.

But Lionel and I were mad for love. We met; we eloped; we married, and fled to the Continent to avoid the reproaches and interference of angry parents.

After I had consented to elope, I looked round our place for a receptacle wherein I might pack a few clothes I intended to take with me. In the coach-house I saw the old box or chest destined to play so awful a part in my wretched story. I contrived to deposit what I needed unobserved; and in the silence of the night, when all slept, I aroused the young groom, who slept over the stable, and offered him a handsome gift of gold, yellow and shining in the light of the lamp I held, if he would harness the horses and take me and that dingy box to where Lionel awaited us.

The coachman, an old family servant, might have refused to drive so young a mistress on so doubtful a journey. But Sam was of an age when such deeds raise sympathy in the breast; so he took his reward, and I, with my box, was hurried from my home.

Weary of travelling, we returned to England, and rented a small house – a mere cottage – not far from Broadstairs, where, as we thought, we ran little risk of being seen by anyone who knew us. My husband, being fond of bathing, sought the shore every morning, and I sat in the garden until he returned.

We had not been at Broadstairs very long when I fancied there was a change in his manner. I was certain some secret rested upon his mind, and I became aware also, that though he went to the shore, he ceased to bathe. Sitting alone with busy thoughts I grew jealous, and determined to watch him; so instead of remaining at home, one day I hurried along a byroad to a part of the esplanade that overlooked the sands. I cast my eyes downwards, and saw him walking with a young lady about my own age. After a time they left the sands and walked towards our home. They were too preoccupied to detect that they were followed, but sat down to talk by a quiet bank near a cornfield, where I hid myself amongst the wheat. I was not near enough to hear his words, to which she listened so earnestly, or hers, on which he seemed to hang with tender interest. I noticed him holding her hands fondly, twining her curls in his fingers; and I saw him kiss her before they parted. I watched this day after day, and yet I said nothing. She only passed a few minutes each time in his company, as if fearful of being missed by her friends. But was not that enough? was it not too much for a young loving wife to witness?

One morning I noticed a bouquet of flowers, just gathered, lying on the escritoire where he had been writing. Full of suspicion I diverted his glance to another part of the room, and with a hasty glance read the words scribbled upon a slip of paper: “I will meet you at sunset on the sands, and, if your plans are ripe enough, we will leave Broadstairs tomorrow.” He returned to his desk, folded the note, and went out with it and the flowers. Could I not guess how the one would be concealed in the other, and for whom? Did I not know the golden-haired siren with the sweet baby-face that had bewitched him?

That morning I spent at home, a wretched prey to love, jealousy, and wrath. At all hazards the sunset meeting must be prevented. Should I charge him with perfidy, upbraid, entreat? Should I prevail? Should I risk failure? No; a thousand times no. As our dinner-hour drew near, a foolish, an evil, a vile idea entered my miserable mind.. I was mad then; I know now that I was mad. I laughed when I remembered the laudanum in a tiny bottle on the mantelshelf of my dressing-room. I emptied it into the wine decanter. Lionel drank wine, but I did not. After dinner he slept. Coffee was brought, but still his slumber lasted. It was as I wished. I sat and watched him. The hours went on slowly. I sent the servants to bed, and the house was very quiet. It grew late, the wax lights – there was no gas – burned down low; he still slept very heavily. One, two, sounded – then three. It was broad daylight; and I drew up the blinds; for I was getting restless and alarmed. Daylight was let in, and it fell upon the armchair and upon the face of a dead man. I dropped at his feet; I tried to pray, but knelt there wordless and thoughtless. Then surely I was mad – carefully cunningly, strangely mad. As Heaven is my witness, I had only meant to cause a sleep to stop that meeting and to put off an explanation so bitterly humiliating, so stormy in the aspect of its gathering clouds.

I knelt before my dead husband and laughed. I had no part in the laughter; it was as if the voice of some strange spirit issued from my lips, and sounded curiously in my ear. I was aroused suddenly by hearing the servants come downstairs. I was alone with him; and they would say I had murdered him, and the fair girl with the golden hair and the baby’s face would stand by and see me strangled out of life on a scaffold. How I found strength for the terrible task I cannot tell, but I took Lionel in my arms and carried him into our sleeping- chamber, which adjoined, threw open the windows that led from the dining-room into the garden, and then locked myself and my crime away together. I laid him on the floor by the great box, and knelt down.

Suddenly an idea came into my head. I opened the box, and taking out my clothing made it into a bundle. There was a closet in the room which I had once opened, and had seen amongst other domestic curiosities the old ticking of a bed. I took it out and covered it over Lionel, and with the same strange strength lifted him into the box. He was barely dead then, for his limbs were not stiff, and I folded them into the space. Then I locked up the box and dressed, and went in to breakfast. A note lay on the table. It was contained in a little pink envelope, directed in a girlish hand. As my eyes rested upon it my jealousy and anger rushed to life again. I felt glad Lionel was dead. I took up the note which she with the yellow hair and pink face must have sent, and tearing it open read, “Dear Lionel” – dear Lionel! How the letters ran before my eyes! Did she dare to call him her dear Lionel! Ay, it was there, written upon the pink paper with perfumed ink.

Dear Lionel,

I have pleaded your cause with papa and mamma, but cannot move them; and because they think I must have seen you here, our governess is ordered to bring us all home by the first train tomorrow.. But I do not despair; for if I can do nothing at present, I will yet reconcile them to you someday. I fear I shall not be allowed to write, but in silence and absence do not doubt that I am, and ever shall remain,

Your affectionate sister,

Edith.

His sister! Ah! was ever climax so terrible? This, then, must be his favourite sister Edith, of whom he had so often talked, but who was unknown to me. Alas! why had he kept their meeting secret? That, too, was obvious: could he expose me to the mortification of knowing that she was pleading for my recognition by his family, or that he was forced to meet a dearly-loved sister by stealth because he had chosen me to be his wife?

And Lionel was dead. I hardly comprehended that fact. Fear was upon me. I must fly, and I must conceal the deed. Twenty miles from my own home a lonely house stood in the midst of a wood. Report called it haunted, and no one of the simple country folk dared approach, far less inhabit it. In a feigned name, I wrote to the landlord, and requested he would let it to me, with permission to enter immediately, saying that I was anxious to secure a good house at the low rent I did not doubt he would be happy to accept. I would have given any price for the house, but I wished to give a likely reason, not the true one. My offer was accepted by return of post.

Meanwhile I had told my two servants that their master had left early in the morning for town, whither he wished me to follow him, as we found it necessary to take a long and unexpected journey. I had paid all debts when the landlord’s letter came. Hurrying to London I there disposed of our valuable plate, and whatever I possessed, except a little linen, a few jewels, and the horrible sarcophagus, hereafter my life-watch. I was anxious to gain my new abode, as I knew the delays of a day or two would cause detection. But my route was purposely circuitous and broken to baffle any efforts that might be made to trace me, though under the family ban it was hardly likely.

The chest was placed in a large room – a sort of loft – at the top of the house; and after a few preparations had been made by three women who were induced to come to the haunted place whilst it was day, I was left alone. The fact of my having a large box put in the loft excited no suspicion. The conjecture was that it contained books.

There, without servants, without the companionship of a living soul, I dwelt alone for many years, until upon the death of the old landlord a new master of the soil desired to pull the house down. Then with my chest I travelled from place to place, a haunted, restless woman, asking of myself eternally, “Am I sane or mad?”

•   •   •   •   •

I had written so much of my history, in this poor cottage at Hampstead, to give it someday to one who has been kind to me; but going over the details of my life has raised in my mind a horrible suspicion, more exquisitely agonising than all that has gone before – a suspicion the bare form of which, as it suddenly came before me, cast me into that frenzied fit which has closed the weary life of one who neither wants nor wishes to die – one who only desires to live her vague life on and on, gazing eternally at the sarcophagus. The idea, the certainty so terrible in its nature, is, that Lionel was not dead when I placed him in the chest. Lionel was under the influence of the narcotic, but living – Lionel my love, may, husband, was put living into the tomb and stifled by his beautiful wife’s mad hands; and his young wife of sixteen summers locked up his life and the secret of her crime and sat down heartlessly, beside it to perform her cruel life-watch. Let her die.

THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW

Rudyard Kipling

1885

“May no ill dreams disturb my rest,

Nor Powers of Darkness me molest.

—Evening Hymn

One of the few advantages that India has over England is a certain great Knowability. After five years’ service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted with the two or three hundred Civilians in his Province, all the Messes of ten or twelve Regiments and Batteries, and some fifteen hundred other people of the non-official castes. In ten years his knowledge should be doubled, and at the end of twenty he knows, or knows something about, almost every Englishman in the Empire, and may travel anywhere and everywhere without paying hotel-bills.

Globe-trotters who expect entertainment as a right, have, even within my memory, blunted this open-heartedness, but, none the less, today if you belong to the Inner Circle and are neither a bear nor a black sheep all houses are open to you and our small world is very kind and helpful.

Rickett of Kamartha stayed with Polder of Kumaon, some fifteen years ago. He meant to stay two nights only, but was knocked down by rheumatic fever, and for six weeks disorganized Polder’s establishment, stopped Polder’s work, and nearly died in Polder’s bedroom. Polder behaves as though he had been placed under eternal obligation by Rickett, and yearly sends the little Ricketts a box of presents and toys. It is the same everywhere. The men who do not take the trouble to conceal from you their opinion that you are an incompetent ass, and the women who blacken your character and misunderstand your wife’s amusements, will work themselves to the bone in your behalf if you fall sick or into serious trouble.

Heatherlegh, the Doctor, kept, in addition to his regular practice, a hospital on his private account – an arrangement of loose-boxes for Incurables, his friends called it – but it was really a sort of fitting-up shed for craft that had been damaged by stress of weather. The weather in India is often sultry, and since the tale of bricks is a fixed quantity, and the only liberty allowed is permission to work overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally break down and become as mixed as the metaphors in this sentence.

Heatherlegh is the nicest doctor that ever was, and his invariable prescription to all his patients is “lie low, go slow, and keep cool.” He says that more men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world justifies. He maintains that overwork slew Pansay who died under his hands about three years ago. He has, of course, the right to speak authoritatively, and he laughs at my theory that there was a crack in Pansay’s head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death. “Pansay went off the handle,” says Heatherlegh, “after the stimulus of long leave at Home. He may or he may not have behaved like a blackguard to Mrs. Keith-Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P. & O. flirtation. He certainly was engaged to Miss Mannering, and she certainly broke off the engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense about ghosts developed itself. Overwork started his illness, kept it alight, and killed him, poor devil. Write him off to the System – one man to do the work of two-and-a-half men.”

I do not believe this. I used to sit up with Pansay sometimes when Heatherlegh was called out to visit patients and I happened to be within claim. The man would make me most unhappy by describing in a low, even voice the procession of men, women, children, and devils that was always passing at the bottom of his bed. He had a sick man’s command of language. When he recovered I suggested that he should write out the whole affair from beginning to end, knowing that ink might assist him to ease his mind. When little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy till they have chalked it up on a door. And this also is Literature.

He was in a high fever while he was writing, and the blood-and-thunder Magazine style he adopted did not calm him. Two months afterwards he was reported fit for duty, but, in spite of the fact that he was urgently needed to help an undermanned Commission stagger through a deficit, he preferred to die; vowing at the last that he was hag-ridden. I secured his manuscript before he died, and this is his version of the affair, dated 1885:—

•   •   •   •   •

My doctor tells me that I need rest and change of air. It is not improbable that I shall get both ere long – rest that neither the red-coated orderly nor the midday gun can break, and change of air far beyond that which any homeward-bound steamer can give me. In the meantime I am resolved to stay where I am; and, in flat defiance of my doctor’s orders, to take all the world into my confidence. You shall learn for yourselves the precise nature of my malady; and shall, too, judge for yourselves whether any man born of woman on this weary earth was ever so tormented as I.

Speaking now as a condemned criminal might speak ere the drop-bolts are drawn, my story, wild and hideously improbable as it may appear, demands at least attention. That it will ever receive credence I utterly disbelieve. Two months ago I should have scouted as mad or drunk the man who had dared tell me the like. Two months ago I was the happiest man in India. Today, from Peshawar to the sea, there is no one more wretched. My doctor and I are the only two who know this. His explanation is that my brain, digestion and eyesight are all slightly affected; giving rise to my frequent and persistent “delusions.” Delusions, indeed! I call him a fool; but he attends me still with the same unwearied smile, the same bland professional manner, the same neatly-trimmed red whiskers, till I begin to suspect that I am an ungrateful, evil-tempered invalid. But you shall judge for yourselves.

Three years ago it was my fortune – my great misfortune – to sail from Gravesend to Bombay, on return from long leave, with one Agnes Keith-Wessington, wife of an officer on the Bombay side. It does not in the least concern you to know what manner of woman she was. Be content with the knowledge that, ere the voyage had ended, both she and I were desperately and unreasoningly in love with one another. Heaven knows that I can make the admission now without one particle of vanity. In matters of this sort there is always one who gives and another who accepts. From the first day of our ill-omened attachment, I was conscious that Agnes’s passion was a stronger, a more dominant, and – if I may use the expression – a purer sentiment than mine. Whether she recognized the fact then, I do not know. Afterwards it was bitterly plain to both of us.

Arrived at Bombay in the spring of the year, we went our respective ways, to meet no more for the next three or four months, when my leave and her love took us both to Simla. There we spent the season together; and there my fire of straw burnt itself out to a pitiful end with the closing year. I attempt no excuse. I make no apology. Mrs. Wessington had given up much for my sake, and was prepared to give up all. From my own lips, in August, 1882, she learnt that I was sick of her presence, tired of her company, and weary of the sound of her voice. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have wearied of me as I wearied of them; seventy-five of that number would have promptly avenged themselves by active and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs. Wessington was the hundredth. On her neither my openly-expressed aversion, nor the cutting brutalities with which I garnished our interviews had the least effect.

“Jack, darling!” was her one eternal cuckoo-cry, “I’m sure it’s all a mistake – a hideous mistake; and we’ll be good friends again someday. Please forgive me, Jack, dear.”

I was the offender, and I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into passive endurance, and, eventually, into blind hate – the same instinct, I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half killed. And with this hate in my bosom the season of 1882 came to an end.

Next year we met again at Simla – she with her monotonous face and timid attempts at reconciliation, and I with loathing of her in every fiber of my frame. Several times I could not avoid meeting her alone; and on each occasion her words were identically the same. Still the unreasoning wail that it was all a “mistake”; and still the hope of eventually “making friends.” I might have seen, had I cared to look, that that hope only was keeping her alive. She grew more wan and thin month by month. You will agree with me, at least, that such conduct would have driven any one to despair. It was uncalled for, childish, unwomanly. I maintain that she was much to blame. And again, sometimes, in the black, fever-stricken night watches, I have begun to think that I might have been a little kinder to her. But that really is a “delusion.” I could not have continued pretending to love her when I didn’t; could I? It would have been unfair to us both.

Last year we met again – on the same terms as before. The same weary appeals, and the same curt answers from my lips. At least I would make her see how wholly wrong and hopeless were her attempts at resuming the old relationship. As the season wore on, we fell apart – that is to say, she found it difficult to meet me, for I had other and more absorbing interests to attend to. When I think it over quietly in my sick-room, the season of 1884 seems a confused nightmare wherein light and shade were fantastically intermingled – my courtship of little Kitty Mannering; my hopes, doubts and fears; our long rides together; my trembling avowal of attachment; her reply; and now and again a vision of a white face flitting by in the ’rickshaw with the black and white liveries I once watched for so earnestly; the wave of Mrs. Wessington’s gloved hand; and, when she met me alone, which was but seldom, the irksome monotony of her appeal. I loved Kitty Mannering, honestly, heartily loved her, and with my love for her grew my hatred for Agnes. In August Kitty and I were engaged. The next day I met those accursed “magpie” jhampanies at the back of Jakko, and, moved by some passing sentiment of pity, stopped to tell Mrs. Wessington everything. She knew it already.

“So I hear you’re engaged, Jack dear.” Then, without a moment’s pause: “I’m sure it’s all a mistake – a hideous mistake. We shall be as good friends someday, Jack, as we ever were.”

My answer might have made even a man wince. It cut the dying woman before me like the blow of a whip. “Please forgive me, Jack; I didn’t mean to make you angry; but it’s true, it’s true!”

And Mrs. Wessington broke down completely. I turned away and left her to finish her journey in peace, feeling, but only for a moment or two, that I had been an unutterably mean hound. I looked back, and saw that she had turned her ’rickshaw with the idea, I suppose, of overtaking me.

The scene and its surroundings were photographed on my memory. The rain-swept sky (we were at the end of the wet weather), the sodden, dingy pines, the muddy road, and the black powder-riven cliffs formed a gloomy background against which the black and white liveries of the jhampanies, the yellow-paneled ’rickshaw and Mrs. Wessington’s down-bowed golden head stood out clearly. She was holding her handkerchief in her left hand and was leaning back exhausted against the ’rickshaw cushions. I turned my horse up a bypath near the Sanjowlie Reservoir and literally ran away. Once I fancied I heard a faint call of “Jack!” This may have been imagination. I never stopped to verify it. Ten minutes later I came across Kitty on horseback; and, in the delight of a long ride with her, forgot all about the interview.

A week later Mrs. Wessington died, and the inexpressible burden of her existence was removed from my life. I went Plainsward perfectly happy. Before three months were over I had forgotten all about her, except that at times the discovery of some of her old letters reminded me unpleasantly of our bygone relationship. By January I had disinterred what was left of our correspondence from among my scattered belongings and had burnt it. At the beginning of April of this year, 1885, I was at Simla – semi-deserted Simla – once more, and was deep in lover’s talks and walks with Kitty. It was decided that we should be married at the end of June. You will understand, therefore, that, loving Kitty as I did, I am not saying too much when I pronounce myself to have been, at the time, the happiest man in India.

Fourteen delightful days passed almost before I noticed their flight. Then, aroused to the sense of what was proper among mortals circumstanced as we were, I pointed out to Kitty that an engagement-ring was the outward and visible sign of her dignity as an engaged girl; and that she must forthwith come to Hamilton’s to be measured for one. Up to that moment, I give you my word, we had completely forgotten so trivial a matter. To Hamilton’s we accordingly went on the 15th of April, 1885. Remember that – whatever my doctor may say to the contrary – I was then in perfect health, enjoying a well-balanced mind and an absolutely tranquil spirit. Kitty and I entered Hamilton’s shop together, and there, regardless of the order of affairs, I measured Kitty’s finger for the ring in the presence of the amused assistant. The ring was a sapphire with two diamonds. We then rode out down the slope that leads to the Combermere Bridge and Peliti’s shop.

While my Waler was cautiously feeling his way over the loose shale, and Kitty was laughing and chattering at my side – while all Simla, that is to say as much of it as had then come from the Plains, was grouped round the Reading-room and Peliti’s veranda – I was aware that someone, apparently at a vast distance, was calling me by my Christian name. It struck me that I had heard the voice before, but when and where I could not at once determine. In the short space it took to cover the road between the path from Hamilton’s shop and the first plank of the Combermere Bridge I had thought over half-a-dozen people who might have committed such a solecism, and had eventually decided that it must have been some singing in my ears. Immediately opposite Peliti’s shop my eye was arrested by the sight of four jhampanies in black and white livery, pulling a yellow-paneled, cheap, bazar ’rickshaw. In a moment my mind flew back to the previous season and Mrs. Wessington with a sense of irritation and disgust. Was it not enough that the woman was dead and done with, without her black and white servitors re-appearing to spoil the day’s happiness? Whoever employed them now I thought I would call upon, and ask as a personal favour to change her jhampanies’ livery. I would hire the men myself, and, if necessary, buy their coats from off their backs. It is impossible to say here what a flood of undesirable memories their presence evoked.

“Kitty,” I cried, “there are poor Mrs. Wessington’s jhampanies turned up again! I wonder who has them now?”

Kitty had known Mrs. Wessington slightly last season, and had always been interested in the sickly woman.

“What? Where?” she asked. “I can’t see them anywhere.”

Even as she spoke, her horse, swerving from a laden mule, threw himself directly in front of the advancing ’rickshaw. I had scarcely time to utter a word of warning when, to my unutterable horror, horse and rider passed through men and carriage as if they had been thin air.

“What’s the matter?” cried Kitty; “what made you call out so foolishly, Jack? If I am engaged I don’t want all creation to know about it. There was lots of space between the mule and the veranda; and, if you think I can’t ride – There!”

Whereupon willful Kitty set off, her dainty little head in the air, at a hand-gallop in the direction of the Bandstand; fully expecting, as she herself afterwards told me, that I should follow her. What was the matter? Nothing, indeed. Either that I was mad or drunk, or that Simla was haunted with devils. I reined in my impatient cob, and turned round. The ’rickshaw had turned too, and now stood immediately facing me, near the left railing of the Combermere Bridge.

“Jack! Jack, darling.” (There was no mistake about the words this time: they rang through my brain as if they had been shouted in my ear.) “It’s some hideous mistake, I’m sure. Please forgive me, Jack, and let’s be friends again.”

The ’rickshaw-hood had fallen back, and inside, as I hope and daily pray for the death I dread by night, sat Mrs. Keith-Wessington, handkerchief in hand, and golden head bowed on her breast.

How long I stared motionless I do not know. Finally, I was aroused by my groom taking the Waler’s bridle and asking whether I was ill. I tumbled off my horse and dashed, half fainting, into Peliti’s for a glass of cherry-brandy. There two or three couples were gathered round the coffee-tables discussing the gossip of the day. Their trivialities were more comforting to me just then than the consolations of religion could have been. I plunged into the midst of the conversation at once; chatted, laughed and jested with a face (when I caught a glimpse of it in a mirror) as white and drawn as that of a corpse. Three or four men noticed my condition; and, evidently setting it down to the results of over many pegs, charitably endeavoured to draw me apart from the rest of the loungers. But I refused to be led away. I wanted the company of my kind – as a child rushes into the midst of the dinner-party after a fright in the dark. I must have talked for about ten minutes or so, though it seemed an eternity to me, when I heard Kitty’s dear voice outside inquiring for me. In another minute she had entered the shop, prepared to roundly upbraid me for failing so signally in my duties. Something in my face stopped her.

“Why, Jack,” she cried, “what have you been doing? What has happened? Are you ill?” Thus driven into a direct lie, I said that the sun had been a little too much for me. It was close upon five o’clock of a cloudy April afternoon, and the sun had been hidden all day. I saw my mistake as soon as the words were out of my mouth: attempted to recover it; blundered hopelessly and followed Kitty, in a regal rage, out of doors, amid the smiles of my acquaintances. I made some excuse (I have forgotten what) on the score of my feeling faint; and cantered away to my hotel, leaving Kitty to finish the ride by herself.

In my room I sat down and tried calmly to reason out the matter. Here was I, Theobald Jack Pansay, a well-educated Bengal Civilian in the year of grace 1885, presumably sane, certainly healthy, driven in terror from my sweetheart’s side by the apparition of a woman who had been dead and buried eight months ago. These were facts that I could not blink. Nothing was further from my thought than any memory of Mrs. Wessington when Kitty and I left Hamilton’s shop. Nothing was more utterly commonplace than the stretch of wall opposite Peliti’s. It was broad daylight. The road was full of people; and yet here, look you, in defiance of every law of probability, in direct outrage of Nature’s ordinance, there had appeared to me a face from the grave.

Kitty’s Arab had gone through the ’rickshaw: so that my first hope that some woman marvellously like Mrs. Wessington had hired the carriage and the coolies with their old livery was lost. Again and again I went round this treadmill of thought; and again and again gave up baffled and in despair. The voice was as inexplicable as the apparition. I had originally some wild notion of confiding it all to Kitty; of begging her to marry me at once; and in her arms defying the ghostly occupant of the ’rickshaw. “After all,” I argued, “the presence of the ’rickshaw is in itself enough to prove the existence of a spectral illusion. One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never of coolies and carriages. The whole thing is absurd. Fancy the ghost of a hill-man!”

Next morning I sent a penitent note to Kitty, imploring her to overlook my strange conduct of the previous afternoon. My Divinity was still very wroth, and a personal apology was necessary. I explained, with a fluency born of night-long pondering over a falsehood, that I had been attacked with a sudden palpitation of the heart – the result of indigestion. This eminently practical solution had its effect; and Kitty and I rode out that afternoon with the shadow of my first lie dividing us.

Nothing would please her save a canter round Jakko. With my nerves still unstrung from the previous night I feebly protested against the notion, suggesting Observatory Hill, Jutogh, the Boileaugunge road – anything rather than the Jakko round. Kitty was angry and a little hurt, so I yielded from fear of provoking further misunderstanding, and we set out together towards Chota Simla. We walked a greater part of the way, and, according to our custom, cantered from a mile or so below the Convent to the stretch of level road by the Sanjowlie Reservoir. The wretched horses appeared to fly, and my heart beat quicker and quicker as we neared the crest of the ascent. My mind had been full of Mrs. Wessington all the afternoon; and every inch of the Jakko road bore witness to our old-time walks and talks. The boulders were full of it; the pines sang it aloud overhead; the rain-fed torrents giggled and chuckled unseen over the shameful story; and the wind in my ears chanted the iniquity aloud.

As a fitting climax, in the middle of the level men call the Ladies’ Mile, the Horror was awaiting me. No other ’rickshaw was in sight – only the four black and white jhampanies, the yellow-paneled carriage, and the golden head of the woman within – all apparently just as I had left them eight months and one fortnight ago! For an instant I fancied that Kitty must see what I saw – we were so marvellously sympathetic in all things. Her next words undeceived me – “Not a soul in sight! Come along, Jack, and I’ll race you to the Reservoir buildings!” Her wiry little Arab was off like a bird, my Waler following close behind, and in this order we dashed under the cliffs. Half a minute brought us within fifty yards of the ’rickshaw. I pulled my Waler and fell back a little. The ’rickshaw was directly in the middle of the road: and once more the Arab passed through it, my horse following. “Jack, Jack, dear! Please forgive me,” rang with a wail in my ears, and, after an interval: “It’s all a mistake, a hideous mistake!”

I spurred my horse like a man possessed. When I turned my head at the Reservoir works the black and white liveries were still waiting – patiently waiting – under the grey hillside, and the wind brought me a mocking echo of the words I had just heard. Kitty bantered me a good deal on my silence throughout the remainder of the ride. I had been talking up till then wildly and at random. To save my life I could not speak afterwards naturally, and from Sanjowlie to the Church wisely held my tongue.

I was to dine with the Mannerings that night and had barely time to canter home to dress. On the road to Elysium Hill I overheard two men talking together in the dusk – “It’s a curious thing,” said one, “how completely all trace of it disappeared. You know my wife was insanely fond of the woman (never could see anything in her myself) and wanted me to pick up her old ’rickshaw and coolies if they were to be got for love or money. Morbid sort of fancy I call it, but I’ve got to do what the Memsahib tells me. Would you believe that the man she hired it from tells me that all four of the men, they were brothers, died of cholera, on the way to Hardwár, poor devils; and the ’rickshaw has been broken up by the man himself. Told me he never used a dead Memsahib’s’rickshaw. Spoilt his luck. Queer notion, wasn’t it? Fancy poor little Mrs. Wessington spoiling any one’s luck except her own!” I laughed aloud at this point; and my laugh jarred on me as I uttered it. So there were ghosts of ’rickshaws after all, and ghostly employments in the other world! How much did Mrs. Wessington give her men? What were their hours? Where did they go?

And for visible answer to my last question I saw the infernal thing blocking my path in the twilight. The dead travel fast and by short-cuts unknown to ordinary coolies. I laughed aloud a second time and checked my laughter suddenly, for I was afraid I was going mad. Mad to a certain extent I must have been, for I recollect that I reined in my horse at the head of the ’rickshaw, and politely wished Mrs. Wessington “good evening.” Her answer was one I knew only too well. I listened to the end; and replied that I had heard it all before, but should be delighted if she had anything further to say. Some malignant devil stronger than I must have entered into me that evening, for I have a dim recollection of talking the commonplaces of the day for five minutes to the thing in front of me.

“Mad as a hatter, poor devil – or drunk. Max, try and get him to come home.”

Surely that was not Mrs. Wessington’s voice! The two men had overheard me speaking to the empty air, and had returned to look after me. They were very kind and considerate, and from their words evidently gathered that I was extremely drunk. I thanked them confusedly and cantered away to my hotel, there changed, and arrived at the Mannerings’ ten minutes late. I pleaded the darkness of the night as an excuse; was rebuked by Kitty for my unlover-like tardiness; and sat down.

The conversation had already become general; and, under cover of it, I was addressing some tender small talk to my sweetheart when I was aware that at the further end of the table a short red-whiskered man was describing with much broidery his encounter with a mad unknown that evening. A few sentences convinced me that he was repeating the incident of half an hour ago. In the middle of the story he looked round for applause, as professional storytellers do, caught my eye, and straightway collapsed. There was a moment’s awkward silence, and the red-whiskered man muttered something to the effect that he had “forgotten the rest”; thereby sacrificing a reputation as a good storyteller which he had built up for six seasons past. I blessed him from the bottom of my heart and – went on with my fish.

In the fullness of time that dinner came to an end; and with genuine regret I tore myself away from Kitty – as certain as I was of my own existence that It would be waiting for me outside the door. The red-whiskered man, who had been introduced to me as Dr. Heatherlegh of Simla, volunteered to bear me company as far as our roads lay together. I accepted his offer with gratitude.

My instinct had not deceived me. It lay in readiness in the Mall, and, in what seemed devilish mockery of our ways, with a lighted head-lamp. The red-whiskered man went to the point at once, in a manner that showed he had been thinking over it all dinner time.

“I say, Pansay, what the deuce was the matter with you this evening on the Elysium road?” The suddenness of the question wrenched an answer from me before I was aware.

“That!” said I, pointing to It.

“That may be either D.T. or eyes for aught I know. Now you don’t liquor. I saw as much at dinner, so it can’t be D.T. There’s nothing whatever where you’re pointing, though you’re sweating and trembling with fright like a scared pony. Therefore, I conclude that it’s eyes. And I ought to understand all about them. Come along home with me. I’m on the Blessington lower road.”

To my intense delight the ’rickshaw instead of waiting for us kept about twenty yards ahead – and this, too, whether we walked, trotted, or cantered. In the course of that long night ride I had told my companion almost as much as I have told you here.

“Well, you’ve spoilt one of the best tales I’ve ever laid tongue to,” said he, “but I’ll forgive you for the sake of what you’ve gone through. Now come home and do what I tell you; and when I’ve cured you, young man, let this be a lesson to you to steer clear of women and indigestible food till the day of your death.”

The ’rickshaw kept steadily in front; and my red-whiskered friend seemed to derive great pleasure from my account of its exact whereabouts.

“Eyes, Pansay – all eyes, brain and stomach; and the greatest of these three is stomach. You’ve too much conceited brain, too little stomach, and thoroughly unhealthy eyes. Get your stomach straight and the rest follows. And all that’s French for a liver pill. I’ll take sole medical charge of you from this hour; for you’re too interesting a phenomenon to be passed over.”

By this time we were deep in the shadow of the Blessington lower road and the ’rickshaw came to a dead stop under a pine-clad, overhanging shale cliff. Instinctively I halted too, giving my reason. Heatherlegh rapped out an oath.

“Now, if you think I’m going to spend a cold night on the hillside for the sake of a stomach-cum-brain-cum-eye illusion.… Lord ha’ mercy! What’s that?”

There was a muffled report, a blinding smother of dust just in front of us, a crack, the noise of rent boughs, and about ten yards of the cliffside – pines, undergrowth, and all – slid down into the road below, completely blocking it up. The uprooted trees swayed and tottered for a moment like drunken giants in the gloom, and then fell prone among their fellows with a thunderous crash. Our two horses stood motionless and sweating with fear. As soon as the rattle of falling earth and stone had subsided, my companion muttered: “Man, if we’d gone forward we should have been ten feet deep in our graves by now! ‘There are more things in heaven and earth’… Come home, Pansay, and thank God. I want a drink badly.”

We retraced our way over the Church Ridge, and I arrived at Dr. Heatherlegh’s house shortly after midnight.

His attempts towards my cure commenced almost immediately, and for a week I never left his sight. Many a time in the course of that week did I bless the good fortune which had thrown me in contact with Simla’s best and kindest doctor. Day by day my spirits grew lighter and more equable. Day by day, too, I became more and more inclined to fall in with Heatherlegh’s “spectral illusion” theory, implicating eyes, brain, and stomach. I wrote to Kitty, telling her that a slight sprain caused by a fall from my horse kept me indoors for a few days; and that I should be recovered before she had time to regret my absence.

Heatherlegh’s treatment was simple to a degree. It consisted of liver-pills, cold-water baths and strong exercise, taken in the dusk or at early dawn – for, as he sagely observed: “A man with a sprained ankle doesn’t walk a dozen miles a day, and your young woman might be wondering if she saw you.”

At the end of the week, after much examination of pupil and pulse and strict injunctions as to diet and pedestrianism, Heatherlegh dismissed me as brusquely as he had taken charge of me. Here is his parting benediction: “Man, I certify to your mental cure, and that’s as much as to say I’ve cured most of your bodily ailments. Now, get your traps out of this as soon as you can; and be off to make love to Miss Kitty.”

I was endeavouring to express my thanks for his kindness. He cut me short:

“Don’t think I did this because I like you. I gather that you’ve behaved like a blackguard all through. But, all the same you’re a phenomenon, and as queer a phenomenon as you are a blackguard. Now, go out and see if you can find the eyes-brain-and-stomach business again. I’ll give you a lakh for each time you see it.”

Half an hour later I was in the Mannerings’ drawing-room with Kitty – drunk with the intoxication of present happiness and the foreknowledge that I should never more be troubled with It’s hideous presence. Strong in the sense of my new-found security, I proposed a ride at once; and, by preference, a canter round Jakko.

Never have I felt so well, so overladen with vitality and mere animal spirits as I did on the afternoon of the 30th of April. Kitty was delighted at the change in my appearance, and complimented me on it in her delightfully frank and outspoken manner. We left the Mannerings’ house together, laughing and talking, and cantered along the Chota Simla road as of old.

I was in haste to reach the Sanjowlie Reservoir and there make my assurance doubly sure. The horses did their best, but seemed all too slow to my impatient mind. Kitty was astonished at my boisterousness. “Why, Jack!” she cried at last, “you are behaving like a child! What are you doing?”

We were just below the Convent, and from sheer wantonness I was making my Waler plunge and curvet across the road as I tickled it with the loop of my riding-whip.

“Doing,” I answered, “nothing, dear. That’s just it. If you’d been doing nothing for a week except lie up, you’d be as riotous as I.

“‘Singing and murmuring in your feastful mirth,

Joying to feel yourself alive;

Lord over nature, Lord of the visible Earth,

Lord of the senses five.’”

My quotation was hardly out of my lips before we had rounded the corner above the Convent; and a few yards further on could see across to Sanjowlie. In the centre of the level road stood the black and white liveries, the yellow-paneled ’rickshaw and Mrs. Keith-Wessington. I pulled up, looked, rubbed my eyes, and, I believe, must have said something. The next thing I knew was that I was lying face downward on the road, with Kitty kneeling above me in tears.

“Has it gone, child?” I gasped. Kitty only wept more bitterly.

“Has what gone? Jack dear: what does it all mean? There must be a mistake somewhere, Jack. A hideous mistake.” Her last words brought me to my feet – mad – raving for the time being.

“Yes, thereis a mistake somewhere.” I repeated, “a hideous mistake. Come and look at It!”

I have an indistinct idea that I dragged Kitty by the wrist along the road up to where It stood, and implored her for pity’s sake to speak to it; to tell It that we were betrothed! that neither Death nor Hell could break the tie between us; and Kitty only knows how much more to the same effect. Now and again I appealed passionately to the Terror in the ’rickshaw to bear witness to all I had said, and to release me from a torture that was killing me. As I talked I suppose I must have told Kitty of my old relations with Mrs. Wessington, for I saw her listen intently with white face and blazing eyes.

“Thank you, Mr. Pansay,” she said, “that’s quite enough. Bring my horse.”

The grooms, impassive as Orientals always are, had come up with the recaptured horses; and as Kitty sprang into her saddle I caught hold of the bridle entreating her to hear me out and forgive. My answer was the cut of her riding-whip across my face from mouth to eye, and a word or two of farewell that even now I cannot write down. So I judged, and judged rightly, that Kitty knew all; and I staggered back to the side of the ’rickshaw. My face was cut and bleeding, and the blow of the riding-whip had raised a livid blue weal on it. I had no self-respect. Just then, Heatherlegh, who must have been following Kitty and me at a distance, cantered up.

“Doctor,” I said, pointing to my face, “here’s Miss Mannering’s signature to my order of dismissal and… I’ll thank you for that lakh as soon as convenient.”

Heatherlegh’s face, even in my abject misery, moved me to laugh.

“I’ll stake my professional reputation” – he began. “Don’t be a fool,” I whispered. “I’ve lost my life’s happiness and you’d better take me home.”

As I spoke the ’rickshaw was gone. Then I lost all knowledge of what was passing. The crest of Jakko seemed to heave and roll like the crest of a cloud and fall in upon me.

Seven days later (on the 7th of May, that is to say) I was aware that I was lying in Heatherlegh’s room as weak as a little child. Heatherlegh was watching me intently from behind the papers on his writing table. His first words were not very encouraging; but I was too far spent to be much moved by them.

“Here’s Miss Kitty has sent back your letters. You corresponded a good deal, you young people. Here’s a packet that looks like a ring, and a cheerful sort of a note from Mannering Papa, which I’ve taken the liberty of reading and burning. The old gentleman’s not pleased with you.”

“And Kitty?” I asked dully.

“Rather more drawn than her father from what she says. By the same token you must have been letting out any number of queer reminiscences just before I met you. Says that a man who would have behaved to a woman as you did to Mrs. Wessington ought to kill himself out of sheer pity for his kind. She’s a hot-headed little virago, your mash. Will have it too that you were suffering from D.T. when that row on the Jakko road turned up. Says she’ll die before she ever speaks to you again.”

I groaned and turned over on the other side.

“Now you’ve got your choice, my friend. This engagement has to be broken off; and the Mannerings don’t want to be too hard on you. Was it broken through D.T. or epileptic fits? Sorry I can’t offer you a better exchange unless you’d prefer hereditary insanity. Say the word and I’ll tell ’em it’s fits. All Simla knows about that scene on the Ladies’ Mile. Come! I’ll give you five minutes to think over it.”

During those five minutes I believe that I explored thoroughly the lowest circles of the Inferno which it is permitted man to tread on earth. And at the same time I myself was watching myself faltering through the dark labyrinths of doubt, misery, and utter despair. I wondered, as Heatherlegh in his chair might have wondered, which dreadful alternative I should adopt. Presently I heard myself answering in a voice that I hardly recognized:

“They’re confoundedly particular about morality in these parts. Give ’em fits, Heatherlegh, and my love. Now let me sleep a bit longer.”

Then my two selves joined, and it was only I (half crazed, devil-driven I) that tossed in my bed, tracing step by step the history of the past month.

“But I am in Simla,” I kept repeating to myself. “I, Jack Pansay, am in Simla, and there are no ghosts here. It’s unreasonable of that woman to pretend there are. Why couldn’t Agnes have left me alone? I never did her any harm. It might just as well have been me as Agnes. Only I’d never have come back on purpose to kill her. Why can’t I be left alone – left alone and happy?”

It was high noon when I first awoke: and the sun was low in the sky before I slept – slept as the tortured criminal sleeps on his rack, too worn to feel further pain.

Next day I could not leave my bed. Heatherlegh told me in the morning that he had received an answer from Mr. Mannering, and that, thanks to his (Heatherlegh’s) friendly offices, the story of my affliction had travelled through the length and breadth of Simla, where I was on all sides much pitied.

“And that’s rather more than you deserve,” he concluded pleasantly, “though the Lord knows you’ve been going through a pretty severe mill. Never mind; we’ll cure you yet, you perverse phenomenon.”

I declined firmly to be cured. “You’ve been much too good to me already, old man,” said I; “but I don’t think I need trouble you further.”

In my heart I knew that nothing Heatherlegh could do would lighten the burden that had been laid upon me.

With that knowledge came also a sense of hopeless, impotent rebellion against the unreasonableness of it all. There were scores of men no better than I whose punishments had at least been reserved for another world and I felt that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair that I alone should have been singled out for so hideous a fate. This mood would in time give place to another where it seemed that the ’rickshaw and I were the only realities in a world of shadows; that Kitty was a ghost; that Mannering, Heatherlegh, and all the other men and women I knew were all ghosts and the great, grey hills themselves but vain shadows devised to torture me. From mood to mood I tossed backwards and forwards for seven weary days, my body growing daily stronger and stronger, until the bedroom looking-glass told me that I had returned to everyday life, and was as other men once more. Curiously enough, my face showed no signs of the struggle I had gone through. It was pale indeed, but as expressionless and commonplace as ever. I had expected some permanent alteration – visible evidence of the disease that was eating me away. I found nothing.

On the 15th of May I left Heatherlegh’s house at eleven o’clock in the morning; and the instinct of the bachelor drove me to the Club. There I found that every man knew my story as told by Heatherlegh, and was, in clumsy fashion, abnormally kind and attentive. Nevertheless I recognized that for the rest of my natural life I should be among, but not of, my fellows; and I envied very bitterly indeed the laughing coolies on the Mall below. I lunched at the Club, and at four o’clock wandered aimlessly down the Mall in the vague hope of meeting Kitty. Close to the Band-stand the black and white liveries joined me; and I heard Mrs. Wessington’s old appeal at my side. I had been expecting this ever since I came out; and was only surprised at her delay. The phantom ’rickshaw and I went side by side along the Chota Simla road in silence. Close to the bazaar, Kitty and a man on horseback overtook and passed us. For any sign she gave I might have been a dog in the road. She did not even pay me the compliment of quickening her pace; though the rainy afternoon had served for an excuse.

So Kitty and her companion, and I and my ghostly Light-o’-Love, crept round Jakko in couples. The road was streaming with water; the pines dripped like roof-pipes on the rocks below, and the air was full of fine, driving rain. Two or three times I found myself saying to myself almost aloud: “I’m Jack Pansay on leave at Simla – at Simla! Everyday, ordinary Simla. I mustn’t forget that – I mustn’t forget that.” Then I would try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard at the Club; the prices of So-and-So’s horses – anything, in fact, that related to the work-a-day Anglo-Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated the multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to make quite sure that I was not taking leave of my senses. It gave me much comfort; and must have prevented my hearing Mrs. Wessington for a time.

Once more I wearily climbed the Convent slope and entered the level road. Here Kitty and the man started off at a canter, and I was left alone with Mrs. Wessington. “Agnes,” said I, “will you put back your hood and tell me what it all means?” The hood dropped noiselessly and I was face to face with my dead and buried mistress. She was wearing the dress in which I had last seen her alive: carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand; and the same card-case in her left. (A woman eight months dead with a card-case!) I had to pin myself down to the multiplication-table, and to set both hands on the stone parapet of the road to assure myself that that at least was real.

“Agnes,” I repeated, “for pity’s sake tell me what it all means.” Mrs. Wessington leant forward, with that odd, quick turn of the head I used to know so well, and spoke.

If my story had not already so madly overleaped the bounds of all human belief I should apologize to you now. As I know that no one – no, not even Kitty, for whom it is written as some sort of justification of my conduct – will believe me, I will go on. Mrs. Wessington spoke and I walked with her from the Sanjowlie road to the turning below the Commander-in-Chief’s house as I might walk by the side of any living woman’s ’rickshaw, deep in conversation. The second and most tormenting of my moods of sickness had suddenly laid hold upon me, and like the prince in Tennyson’s poem, “I seemed to move amid a world of ghosts.” There had been a garden-party at the Commander-in-Chief’s, and we two joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows – impalpable fantastic shadows – that divided for Mrs. Wessington’s ’rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot – indeed, I dare not – tell. Heatherlegh’s comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been “mashing a brain-eye-and-stomach chimera.” It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvellously dear experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect and cruelty?

I met Kitty on the homeward road – a shadow among shadows.

If I were to describe all the incidents of the next fortnight in their order, my story would never come to an end; and your patience would be exhausted. Morning after morning and evening after evening the ghostly ’rickshaw and I used to wander through Simla together. Wherever I went, there the four black and white liveries followed me and bore me company to and from my hotel. At the theatre I found them amid the crowd of yelling jhampanies; outside the club veranda, after a long evening of whist; at the birthday ball, waiting patiently for my reappearance; and in broad daylight when I went calling. Save that it cast no shadow, the ’rickshaw was in every respect as real to look upon as one of wood and iron. More than once, indeed, I have had to check myself from warning some hard-riding friend against cantering over it. More than once I have walked down the Mall deep in conversation with Mrs. Wessington to the unspeakable amazement of the passers-by.

Before I had been out and about a week I learnt that the “fit” theory had been discarded in favour of insanity. However, I made no change in my mode of life. I called, rode, and dined out as freely as ever. I had a passion for the society of my kind which I had never felt before; I hungered to be among the realities of life; and at the same time I felt vaguely unhappy when I had been separated too long from my ghostly companion. It would be almost impossible to describe my varying moods from the 15th of May up to today.

The presence of the ’rickshaw filled me by turns with horror, blind fear, a dim sort of pleasure, and utter despair. I dared not leave Simla; and I knew that my stay there was killing me. I knew, moreover, that it was my destiny to die slowly and a little every day. My only anxiety was to get the penance over as quietly as might be. Alternately I hungered for a sight of Kitty and watched her outrageous flirtations with my successor – to speak more accurately, my successors – with amused interest. She was as much out of my life as I was out of hers. By day I wandered with Mrs. Wessington almost content. By night I implored Heaven to let me return to the world as I used to know it. Above all these varying moods lay the sensation of dull, numbing wonder that the seen and the unseen should mingle so strangely on this earth to hound one poor soul to its grave.

•   •   •   •   •

August 27th.—Heatherlegh has been indefatigable in his attendance on me; and only yesterday told me that I ought to send in an application for sick-leave. An application to escape the company of a phantom! A request that the Government would graciously permit me to get rid of five ghosts and an airy ’rickshaw by going to England! Heatherlegh’s proposition moved me to almost hysterical laughter. I told him that I should await the end quietly at Simla; and I am sure that the end is not far off. Believe me that I dread its advent more than any word can say; and I torture myself nightly with a thousand speculations as to the manner of my death.

Shall I die in my bed decently and as an English gentlemen should die; or, in one last walk on the Mall, will my soul be wrenched from me to take its place for ever and ever by the side of that ghastly phantasm? Shall I return to my old lost allegiance in the next world, or shall I meet Agnes loathing her and bound to her side through all eternity? Shall we two hover over the scene of our lives till the end of time? As the day of my death draws nearer, the intense horror that all living flesh feels towards escaped spirits from beyond the grave grows more and more powerful. It is an awful thing to go down quick among the dead with scarcely one half of your life completed. It is a thousand times more awful to wait as I do in your midst, for I know not what unimaginable terror. Pity me, at least on the score of my “delusion,” for I know you will never believe what I have written here. Yet as surely as ever a man was done to death by the Powers of Darkness I am that man.

In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as ever woman was killed by man, I killed Mrs. Wessington. And the last portion of my punishment is even now upon me.

MYSTERIOUS MAISIE

Wirt Gerrare

1895

It is very good of you to interest yourself in my behalf in our quest for “Mysterious Maisie” – so we have named the kind creature – and I lose no time in giving you not only all the facts concerning her visits, but many details of my sister’s strange experiences. For the best of reasons I cannot add to the particulars now given; you have the whole story, and nothing extraneous to it, save such slight embellishments as my sister herself has written in her letters and journal, and some explanatory comments by myself to references which would be unintelligible to a stranger.

I will preface the story by stating that my sister Laura was seventeen when our father died; in our straitened circumstances, and with mother’s health failing, it was needful that she should at once earn her living. She was not fitted for teaching, and had she been so, I think my experiences as assistant mistress of a High School were well enough known to her to act as an efficient repellant from embarking upon a like career. She was accomplished, fond of literature, painted a little, played well, and was of such a kindly disposition that she seemed eminently fitted for the post of companion to an elderly or invalid lady, and we were glad to accept a situation of this kind for her. True it was obtained through an agency, but the references were quite satisfactory, and such enquiries as we could make brought replies which reassured us, and we were confident that Laura would quickly gain the affection of all with whom she came in contact. My sister at that time was very pretty; she had a really beautiful face, but she was petite, very slight, very fragile; a delicately nurtured child, but full of verve, and not wanting in courage. She was not unduly timorous, nor was she over imaginative, and so truthful in all she said, and honest in all she did, that I accept as actual fact every statement she has made, exaggerated though those accounts may appear, and extraordinary as they undoubtedly are. But to the story. My sister wrote in her journal, under the date of October 22nd, 1889, the following.

•   •   •   •   •

Arrived safely at Willesden Junction at 4.33; after waiting nearly half-an-hour, took the train to ———, reaching that station in less than twenty minutes; took a “four-wheeler” to Miss Mure’s. The streets had a very dingy appearance, is a dowdy suburb. Soon we turned down a winding lane, very badly fenced, not many houses in it, they were all old and were built on one side of the road; plenty of trees, nearly all of them bare of leaves. The car stopped in a wider road just out of the lane; the house looks old and badly kept from the outside; it stands back about twelve yards from the road. The garden in front is very badly kept – I have not yet seen that at the back – it is walled in, with iron palisades on the top of the wall, and ivy and other creepers grow over the fence as well as over the house. The front gate is in an iron arch, and was locked. The maid, whose name is Agnes, was a long time answering our appeal; then, when she saw who it was, she went back into the house for the key, so the cabman put my box on the footway, I paid him, and he drove away. I did not at all like the look of the house or the garden, and the cold flagstones with which the walk from the gate to the front door is paved are very ugly and cheerless. Agnes locked the gate again before we went into the house. In the little hall it was so dark I could not see anything, but when the door was shut, and we opened another leading to the stairs, I felt that the front door was lined with sheet iron. Every time I see such a door I think of the house in which Bill Sikes made his last stand, but I do not want to frighten myself. My room is large; it has a four-post bedstead with green rep hangings, a chest-upon-chest, an old closed press, and some old-fashioned chairs. The only lights are candles, the window is small, overgrown with a creeper from which the leaves are fast falling, and is barred with five iron bars and some ornamental scroll work. There are very curious prints on the wall, and some designs, which I cannot make out, on the ceiling. In the walls there are three doors, not counting the one in use; one of those has no bolts, but is locked. I have placed my box against it.

I have not seen Miss Mure. Agnes tells me she does not wish to see me until tomorrow. I have had tea in the front room downstairs. It is a long, narrow room, with three tall and very narrow windows looking into the front garden, and a smaller window at the side, by the fireplace, also looking out upon the garden. There is a door leading to the drawing-room, which is at the back of the house. The room seemed to be very dark, but perhaps that was due to the dismal light out of doors, and the thick growth of trees and shrubs in front. When the candles were lit – we have no gas nor lamps – I saw that the room had a papered ceiling, a dirty, cream-coloured ground, with an open floral design in blue. The walls are panelled half way, the upper half is covered with an ornamental net reaching up to the cornice; at the back of the netting the wall is plastered over with canvas, which some time was painted stone colour. There are no pictures in the room. It is not home-like or cosy, and I do not admire the style; but I have never seen anything at all like it before, perhaps it will be better when I am accustomed to it; at present there is an air of mystery about the house and its inmates.

Since I wrote the above I have had a talk with Agnes. I hope nothing she told me was true. She is a strange woman; but she says she has been here over fourteen years, so I cannot think things are so bad as she represents them to be. If her idea was to frighten me, she failed; I do not believe her silly tales. At first I was amused at her talk, for she speaks the true cockney dialect, and with a peculiar inflexion, very different to the accent habitual to people of the Midlands. I think Agnes is good-natured, but it was cruel to attempt to frighten me with silly superstitions; she is very ignorant if she does not know that all she said is false. I hope Miss Mure is more enlightened, otherwise my sojourn here will not be pleasant. I judge them to be funny people; they must be eccentric, or they would not keep a crocodile for a pet.

Agnes says that my room is called the dragon room, from the pattern upon the ceiling. I am to go later into “Caduceus,” but she persuaded Miss Mure to let me have the larger room at first, as being more homelike. I wonder what “Caduceus” is like! There are seven bedrooms – some of them must be very small – and one over the back kitchen; in that Agnes sleeps, and it is reached by different stairs.

After her silly tales about hauntings, I asked her why she did not keep a dog. She replied that she had tried several times to get one to stay, but they all ran away. “They sees ’em, and they won’t stop. Why there’s Draysen’s bull terrier, what’ll kill anythin’ livin’; when I come with the meat one day, I ’ticed him in through the side entrance, and put him in the back garden. He were right savage when I shut the door on him, but ’e no sooner turned round and looked the other way than his tail dropped, and he whined that awful I were glad to let ’im out there and then. But we must ha’ summut, so we’ve got Sivvy.”

“And what is Sivvy?” I asked.

For answer, Agnes commenced to explain that Miss Mure is a spiritualist, and constantly attended by a lot of spiritual companions, so that dogs and other animals dread her. At this I laughed heartily. Agnes was not offended, but she said I evidently knew very little of such matters. We were then silent for a few minutes, and I heard mumblings and scratchings. “Is that Sivvy?” I asked laughingly. “No,” she replied very seriously, “they’re at it agen,” by they meaning the spirits, I suppose; but after listening she said it was the “sooterkin,” at which I was, of course, as wise as before. I shall have to enlarge my vocabulary very considerably before understanding the inmates of this house. Sivvy frightened me much more than any ghost is likely to do. She is a huge crocodile, nearly four feet in length, and she ran, or rather waddled, straight towards me as soon as the door to the kitchen was opened; she hissed the whole time, and sent one of the chairs spinning by a blow from her tail. Agnes had ready a rough and much torn Turkish towel, which she threw over Sivvy’s head; the reptile snapped savagely at it, and got its teeth entangled in the threads, and being also blindfolded by the towel, was quiet until Agnes seized its snout with her left hand, and taking its right thigh in her other, lifted it from the floor. It then commenced to lash savagely with its tail, and if Agnes was not badly hurt by the blows, she must be destitute of feeling; but it was only for an instant, for she slipped the reptile into a tank underneath the side-table by the window. She looked hot and flurried when the business was over, but she gave me to understand that the vicious thing was always loose in the outer kitchen, and that I must not presume to pass that way unless she accompanied me. She said also that Sivvy was in and out of the tank in her kitchen all night; a significant hint that neither I nor Miss Mure must venture beyond our own quarters after Sivvy’s supper time.

I did not sleep very well last night. Someone was in and out of my room several times, but they did not reply to my challenge, and as they did not molest me, no harm is done. I expect it was Agnes, trying to convince me of the truth of her ghost stories. I saw Miss Mure just after twelve o’clock today. She is an ogress. I think she is harmless, for she is nearly blind, but she is dreadful to look upon; very big, very stout, with a great fat face and tremendous cheeks and neck. She speaks in a very snappy, peremptory manner, but what she has said so far has not been disagreeable. My chief duty it appears is to read to her in the afternoons. We commenced today; she has a large number of books, but they are very old and about many curious things. Some of them arc in black letter, which is very hard to read; some are in Latin, which I can read, but cannot understand. Miss Mure says, so much the better. When she tries to read she has to bring the volume quite close to her nose, and then runs along the line. It must be very trying work for her, but it is quite comical to see. We finished by reading in a book called Certaine Secret Wonders of Nature, and I had to copy out the following description of a monster, for Miss Mure said she knew where there was one just like it, only it was nearly six months old; she seemed very much interested in the description, which she has learned by heart.

“Begotten of honourable parents, yet was he most horrible, deformed and fearefull, having his eyes of the colour of fire, his mouth and his nose like to the snoute of an Oxe, wyth an Horne annexed thereunto like the Trumpe of an Elephant; all hys back shagge-hairde like a dogge, and in place where other men be accustomed to have brests, he had two heads of an Ape, hauing above his nauell marked the eies of a cat, and joyned to his knee and armes foure heades of a dog, with a grenning and fearefull countenance. The palmes of his feet and handes were like to those of an Ape; and among the rest he had a taile turning up so high, that the height thereof was half an elle; who after he had lived foure houres died.”

A fortnight has passed since I last wrote in my journal. I have had two letters from my sister Maggie, and one from mother; both complain that they have not heard from me, save by the note advising my arrival. I have given three letters to Agnes to post for me, today I found them on the dresser in her kitchen. I am not allowed to go out of the house at all; first one excuse and then another is made, but I shall soon see whether or not any attempt will be made to keep me prisoner here. Two people have been at different times to see Miss Mure, but the interviews have been private. There is very little variety in the life we lead, and our reading is confined to the same class of book.

I have become quite learned respecting goblin-land. I should know much more if I understood better the Latin books I have to read, but they are printed in such strange type and with so many abbreviations, that I have to concentrate my attention upon the words, not the sense. How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lemprire would have found ours a more marvellous world to catalogue than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised ‘A.L.O.E.’ or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find how to make even the crocodile useful, or how to kill it, which would be still better.

It is a month today since I left home. It seems a year. I am conscious of a great change in myself; this cooped-up life, the whole of my time passed in the company of people for whom I have no affection, and my thoughts engaged with things to which I have a natural aversion, have altered my character. That this change was desired by my employer I am certain. The atmosphere of mystery and unreality which pervades this house has broken my nerve. The trifling irregularities at which I used to laugh now oppress me; the dream faces, the scrapings, the waving of the bed-curtains, the footsteps and the scurrying, which disturb my rest, I cannot attribute to my imagination. Until a week or so ago I felt strong enough to dismiss them as absurdities, now I do not know what to think. I see strange forms disappearing from the rooms as I enter them; creatures, like to nothing in the heaven above or in the earth beneath, trip across the landing as I mount the stairs to my chamber; small headless beasts creep through the skirting-board on the corridor to hide themselves from my gaze, and these matters now affect me greatly. In the words of Job, “Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up: it stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof.”

I am quite in the power of Miss Mure; she takes my hand in hers, and I know not how the time passes, but I feel weak and listless; even the letters from Maggie and mother do not interest me; they are in answer to letters I do not remember to have written. There has been one gathering here for the performance of the rites of the higher mystery. I was present, but I remember very little of them; one great horror excluded all others. A thing they brought here, half human, half – I know not what. I was in the front room downstairs when it arrived. It stood on two splayed feet outside the front gate when I first saw it, and its hand was grasped by a sad-looking, demure little man, with white hair, and wearing large blue spectacles. Its face was hidden by a dark silk pocket-handkerchief tucked in under the edge of a heavy cloth cap, and it made uncouth noises, and tugged at the bars of the gate like a wild beast in its cage. At the séance we were in semi-darkness; at the table it was placed right opposite me, and the cap and handkerchief were removed – but it would be wicked to describe what was disclosed – neither God nor demon could have made that horror! Its keeper stood at the back of it, and he had taken from the black handbag he carried a short, stiff stick with a pear-shaped end, with which he energetically cudgelled the horror about the elbows when it tried to get across the table to me; apparently the only thing it sought to do. Strange shapes flitted about in the gloom, harsh noises were made, there was some weird chanting and hysterical sobbing; the sooterkin was brought from its warm-lined hatching-box, and twitched two tentacles sluggishly after the manner of a moribund jellyfish; but my attention was riveted on the horror before whom I crouched. Since the séance I have had more leisure, and have hardly seen Miss Mure, who is engaged in preparations for some other orgy; thus I have time, and now some inclination, to write once more.

Agnes tells me that I am soon to go into “Caduceus,” a small room at the back of the house. It looks out upon that corner of the garden which is a dense tangle of shrub and bramble. It is at the angle nearest to a low building which has been built on a piece of land cut off from the garden. The building, Agnes says, is the mortuary for this district, and it is only when there are bodies there that Miss Mure convenes a meeting. The girl who came to the last séance and sat at my side is, Agnes informs me, a successful sorceress. Only a short time ago she was robust, stout, and healthy; now she is like a walking corpse, and she draws her strength from those of her acquaintance who do not shun her. If Agnes is to be believed, this Miss Buimbert must be a sort of soul vampire, sucking the spirituality from every person who allows her to approach within range of her influence. I was doubtful whether she was in reality a person or only the phantom of one; it has become so hard to me now to distinguish the actual from the seemingly real. I know that the headless forms and curious creatures which are ever flitting before me, and disappearing at my approach, are but illusions or phantasms conjured by Miss Mure to make an impression upon me, and it is to her that I owe the visitations of intangible visionary monsters who disturb my rest with groans, and make my waking moments horrible by their hideous grimaces and threatening gestures. I know the horror was real, for it had to be admitted by the front gate, and the impress left by its clubbed feet was visible for days on the clayey side walk outside the entrance gate. The sooterkin is real, for I have touched the brown skin of its boneless body, and seen the impression of its short, flabby, rounded limbs in the soft cotton wool of its bed.

I know the phantoms cannot harm me, and I pray earnestly for preservation from all ill, and that I may be delivered from this place.

Why was I brought here? For what unholy purpose am I necessary to these people that they guard me so jealously? Perhaps Agnes may be induced to give me some indication of my fate.

Three days have passed since I wrote in my journal; an event has happened which has increased the mystery of this place. Yesternight, about ten o’clock, a car drew up at the front gate. I was in the front room and peeped through the blind. As Agnes passed the door to answer the knock she turned the key of the room and made me a prisoner. She admitted three men, and a fourth stood on the flags between the door and the gate. I had ample opportunity for examining him closely. A coarse, ruffianly-looking, burly man, a drover or butcher, or one following some brutalizing calling, I judged, from his appearance and his manner whilst standing and walking. Dark hair, a short beard, and a raucous voice. After admitting the men Agnes went hurriedly to her kitchen, and locked and barred the door, and soon I heard the hiss and the clattering of furniture which followed Sivvy’s entrance into the front kitchen.

The three men went upstairs, and in a few moments the stillness of the house was broken by the shrill shrieks of a female; the screams were accompanied by sounds as of a scuffle and overturned furniture, then the noise partly subsided, but the struggle had not ceased. I heard the heavy breathing of the men, and seemed to see the efforts made by the woman they were dragging to the stairs. There were gasps and short cries as they brought her downstairs, and a short but sharp struggle in the hall. Then the burly man stepped within, and soon the four re-appeared in front, half carrying half dragging a struggling woman. Her light hair flew in disorder, as she twisted and bent to free herself It was with difficulty they forced her into the car, and I saw her arms waving in helplessness as the captors endeavoured to enter the vehicle. I saw, too, that something had been tied over her mouth, and the last thing I noticed on her thin forearm, from which the dress had been torn, was a freshly-made scratch two or more inches in length, from which the blood was still trickling. Three of the men, including the burly drover, having entered the vehicle, the fourth rang our bell, then mounted the seat by the driver, and as they drove away I saw them pulling down the blinds to the windows of the car.

Agnes went out at once and locked the gate, then bolted and barred the door and came to me. She appeared to have been drinking heavily, and answered my earnestly-put questions in an incoherent manner. If I am to believe her there have been several girls engaged at different times as companions to Miss Mure, and none of them have escaped; some have died, others have been taken away after residing here a long time. What am I to do? I will see Miss Mure tomorrow and demand some explanation of what I have seen and heard; and I have told Agnes to tell Miss Mure when she first sees her tomorrow that I must have an interview.

I did not sleep at all last night, for I could not dismiss from my mind the scene I had witnessed, and what with speculating upon the fate of the unhappy creature forcibly taken away, and forebodings of ill to myself, I passed a most wretched time.

Somewhat to my surprise, Miss Mure expressed her willingness to see me at once. She was at breakfast when I entered her bedroom, feeling very nervous, and not quite knowing what to say. I told her that I did not like the place, and wished to go home; that she had no confidence in me, and did not even let me know who were the inmates of the house. To this she replied that she was sorry that I was not comfortable, that Agnes should have instructions to give me greater attention, and that any delicacy I might express a liking for should be obtained for me. As to not knowing who were the inmates of the house, she could not understand to whom I referred. No one was there, or had been there, but herself, myself, and Agnes. When I told her of what I had seen, she said it was all imagination; she knew nothing of anyone having been there, and surely she would have heard had there been any such struggle as I described. I told her that the footprints on the footpath outside the gate, and the marks of the carriage wheels, were still to be seen distinctly, so that I was sure I had not deceived myself. She said it was cruel of me to mention such evidence, as I knew she was so afflicted that she could not see the marks herself; and even were the marks there, as I said, she was not responsible, for they were not upon her premises, and what people did outside our gates was beyond our control. The neighbourhood had greatly deteriorated since she first resided there. Had they not forced her to give up the most delightful portion of the garden for the erection of a public mortuary? A thing which so incensed her that she had entirely neglected the “beautiful pleasure grounds” since, and allowed the gardens to run wild, for she never used them now, and she only hoped that the authorities would allow her to enjoy possession of her house unmolested for the few years that remained to her.

Then I complained of the crocodile. To this the answer was that I need not go near it. Siva – that is its correct name – was to be kept in the kitchen; it was a strange pet, but Agnes wished to keep it, and as long as she kept it in her own quarters she was to be allowed to do so. If it was once found in any other part of the house it was to go; Agnes knew that, and I need not fear that it would be allowed to pass the threshold of the kitchen. Then I said that I did not like the “horror” and I could not, and would not, stay if it ever came again. She replied that it was impertinent of me to attempt to dictate to her as to whom she should or should not invite as guests to her house, and that she would not submit to my dictation; no harm had been done to me, I had experienced no rudeness, and she was sure that none of her acquaintance would insult me.

I then told her that I had heard that none of the persons who had previously filled the post I occupied had received any wages; that I was too poor to stay there if not paid, and that my only object on leaving home was to earn something to help to support my mother, as my sister’s salary was insufficient, and that I should be pleased to be able to send them something at once. She listened in silence, but veritably stormed her reply. I had been listening to “idle kitchen tales,” for she always paid when the money was due, my first quarter’s salary was not payable until Christmas. I should have it then, unless she sent me about my business before, and she would like to know if there were any other preposterous claims I wished to make. To this I replied somewhat hotly that I had not made any preposterous claims, that I had simply asked for an advance of money as a favour and for the purpose I stated; that I certainly did wish for greater liberty; that I had never been outside the door since the day I came, that I wanted greater freedom for writing and posting my letters, and that I could not consent to remain in her service unless she showed greater confidence in me, and informed of the object she had in view when compelling my attendance at such meetings as the séance at which I had assisted. She said that she was pleased that I had spoken out boldly, for she now felt no diffidence in making our relative positions plain to me. She wished me to remember that she stood in loco parentis, and therefore could not allow me to wander about alone, for the neighbourhood was not one of the kind in which a young girl could do so with impunity. But I was not to imagine that it was by her wish that I was confined to the premises. On fitting occasions, and as opportunities offered, we should drive and walk out together. As to the writing of letters I was, and always had been, quite free to write when I liked and whatever I wished to either my mother or my sister, and so far from having tampered with my correspondence she was only too pleased to know that my letters had been delivered to me personally by the postman. I sadly mistrusted her, but she was sure it was because I did not know her sufficiently well, and as proof of the kindly interest she took in my welfare, and that of my mother and sister, she would be pleased to advance me, there and then, five pounds on account of my first quarter’s salary if I would undertake to send it at once, writing only a few lines to say why it had been sent, and in her presence putting the money in the envelope, sealing it and taking it directly to the gate, and giving it to any boy who might be playing in the locality to post in the letter box which we could see about a hundred yards distant.

She knew it must be tiresome to a young girl to have no companions but Agnes, so, if my mother was agreeable, I might at Christmas spend a few days with friends in London; or, if that could not be arranged, I might invite anyone to spend some time with me in her house; she would always be ready to grant me facilities to receive or visit any friend of whom my mother might approve. As to the object of her studies and work, she was gratified that I showed any interest in them. I was possessed of sufficient intelligence, she thought, to form some idea of her work from the book’s I had read to her. She was engaged in researches of a kind not understood by many, and she admitted that the methods it was necessary to adopt were not always pleasant; indeed they were viewed with such suspicion by the authorities that it was advisable “to work in secret, or at any rate in such a manner as would excite but little suspicion.” She concluded, “I liked you, dear, from the time I first saw your portrait, and I hope someday you will be an earnest worker in the cause to which I have devoted my life.”

I made haste to apologise fully, and gladly availed myself of her offer to make the remittance. I thought how pleased dear mother and Maggie would be to receive my first earnings, and I took the five sovereigns to Agnes to get changed into a note by one of the tradesmen. Then I wrote my letter, and submitted it to Miss Mure, who at once approved it, though it took her some time to read it. When Agnes brought up the note I took the number and date, at Miss Mure’s suggestion, and also the name of the last owner, “H. Fletcher,” scrawled on the back, and stated them upon the receipt I gave her; then in her presence and in that of Agnes I put the note and the letter in the envelope, sealed it with black wax, and at once went with Agnes to the front gate to find a boy to post it. At Miss Mure’s suggestion we stayed there, and watched him take it to and drop it in the box, then gave him another penny when he came back. I never was so pleased as when I saw the boy drop the letter in. I felt quite content to remain with Miss Mure, and I told Agnes so. She did not say anything. I added that though we had no friends in London, a friend of mine had, and no doubt I should have an invitation from them, and leave for a few days at Christmas. “Oh no, you won’t!” said Agnes. “I’ve been here fourteen year last Febry, and it ain’t the fust time I’ve seen this trick played. Don’t I remember poor Miss Jo? Why, ’er stood here just as you, and talked about goin’ ’ome in a fortnight; but ’er was took bad and died; and ’er went ’ome from the mortrey, ’er did. The missis ain’t never so dangerous as when her’s nice, that’s it, miss. It ain’t her fault, but I’m sorry for yer, I am.”

No sooner were we back in the house than Miss Mure called me. I hastened to her, and she held out to me the note I had sent in the letter, and laughingly asked me why I had forgotten to enclose it. There it was, the number and the name both corresponded with those I had taken of the one I was sure I had enclosed to mother. “Have you sent the real note or only the phantom?” she asked. I was too confused to reply. “Well, we will wait until we hear from your home,” she said with a smile, and motioned me to leave the room.

I have had a long talk with Agnes; she refused to say anything about the event of the other evening, but says I shall “see what I shall see.” I cannot make out at all what became of the other girls; but as to my fate, Agnes makes no secret of what she believes is in store for me. “If I was you, miss, I should pra’. I should; it can’t do no harm to you, and it’ll make yer ’appy. Why don’t I pray? It ain’t much use prayin’ when the copper ’ave ’is ’and on yer shoulder, is it? I hadn’t oughter come ’ere, I ’adn’t. If I’d gone to quod it’d only been for life at the wust. But Agnes Coley’d had one taste, and her d’ain’t want two, so ’er chivvied the beak, and ’as ’er liberty – livin’ alone in a cellar with a bloomin’ crocerdile, that’s what ’er’s doin’.”

“But I have not ‘chivvied the beak,’ and I am here,” I argued.

“’Course yer ’aven’t. It’s yer fate, that’s all. You won’t be here for a couple o’ bloomin’ stretches fightin’ for yer livin’ with a stinkin’ crocerdile. You’ll be a hangel long afore that.”

“But, Agnes, tell me why must I be an angel? If what you tell me is true, I do not think poor Miss Mure and her friends want angels, they seem to choose such very opposite characters for their acquaintance.”

“Look ’ere, miss, ’t ain’t that missis wants yer to become a hangel; yer’ll become a hangel ’cause it’s yer nature.”

“I do not understand you.”

“Well, see ’ere. S’pose – only s’pose a’ course – s’pose that there thing yer call the ’orror were to come here, and be put in ‘Salymandy,’ and you in ‘Caduceus,’ with only a bit a’ tishy paper a dividin’ yer room from his’n. Don’t yer think yer’d soon be a hangel thin?”

I shuddered.

“Yer’d better pray, miss; though it ain’t for the likes o’ me to tell you to pray – if I’d a pray’d for fourteen year instead o’ carryin’ on as I’ve been doin’ – but there, it ain’t no use cryin’ over spilt milk.”

“But why should the horror be brought here at all?”

“You ask that? Well, I should have thought you’d a knowed. There was poor Miss Jo, a nice girl she was, and she used to tell me that what the hinner cercle was after was the makin’ o’ summat different to ’omunclusses, and as how, when all things was properishus, they’d try agen and agen until they did get somethin’ fresh. We was great in mandrakes in them days, miss, and some hawful things I’ve seen in this house. Poor Miss Jo, ’er was a dear good girl, just like yerself; but I found her ’alf dead in Caduceus, and the dwerger what used to be here ain’t been nigh since that. You do put me in mind o’ Miss Jo, miss, you do.”

I did not quite understand Agnes at first, but soon the import of much I had read to Miss Mure seemed clear to me.

“You pretend to like me, Agnes,” I said. “Why did you not help Miss Jo, if you liked her as you say you did?”

“That’s it, miss, I ain’t no good. When the times is properishus I could no more stir a finger to help yer than Sivvy could if yer tumbled in a vat o’ bilin’ oil.”

“Then if you believe that, and wish to help me, let me escape from here at once.” I clung to her arm, for I felt a fear I had never before experienced.

“No, miss, that wouldn’t save yer, and it’d be worse than death to me. I ’an’t live ’ere fourteen year for nothin’. I’ve ’eard all that before. Yer a brave girl, you are, braver than Miss Jo, but I s’pose it’ll be the same with you as with the rest.”

We were silent for some time.

“Agnes, will you tell me – will you let me know – if that thing ever comes here again?”

“I can’t promise, miss.”

“If only I could get a few days I could escape,” I said in despair.

“No, yer couldn’t. There was that Miss Vanover who got out of a Russian prison, trying for months to escape from ’ere, and ’er never could. Besides, ’ow do you know ’e ain’t here now? What would you do if you met ’im on the stairs tonight.”

I screamed.

“Be quiet, or I’ll let Sivvy in. You’d better go to bed now.”

“Oh, do help me, Agnes!” I pleaded.

“And ’aven’t I helped yer? Aven’t I warned yer of yer fate? Ain’t it because I like you I’ve told yer what I ’ave? You do what I told you.”

I came upstairs, and have written, and now feel more trustful. Surely mother’s prayers will avail with the good God, and His angels will guard me.

I slept soundly that night, but the last two days my terror has increased. I notice just those indications of a forthcoming meeting which immediately preceded the last séance, and the passages we have read in the books of magic have prepared me for the attempt which I feel certain will be made. Agnes has taken me, for the first time, into “Caduceus,” and shown me the window bars which were bent by Miss Jo in her frantic endeavours to escape, and I have peeped into the adjoining cupboard, “Salamander,” which is arranged more like a stall for a beast than a bedroom for a human creature. It is divided by the flimsiest of partitions from “Caduceus,” and there is a door communicating which I could easily break down. I have a letter from mother acknowledging the receipt of my remittance, (“No money was received and no acknowledgment sent. – Maggie Gleig”) and containing some words of encouragement which I shall lay to heart. I showed the letter to Miss Mure, and read it to her. She smiled and said she hoped I was now satisfied. Unfortunately I am not.

Last night I sustained another shock. I was again in that downstairs room where I spend so much of my time, fearing to see that horror once more, yet always on the lookout for it; it would be still worse if it came into the house unknown to me. A two-wheeled cart of funny shape, like that used for delivering pianofortes, stopped at the gate. Four men were on it. I recognised the tread of one at once, he was the burly, butcher-like man who had waited on the flags when the woman was dragged away. I was again locked in the room by Agnes, who however did not retreat to her kitchen, but fetched lights, and the men brought from the vehicle a large coffin. Their burden seemed heavy. They spoke in low whispers, and once inside the house the door was shut. Then they conveyed the coffin upstairs, and I heard their irregular tramp across the landing. From the manner in which the coffin was handled I knew that it was not empty.

Did it contain the corpse of the woman whom less than a week ago I had seen forcibly dragged from the house? Or was it intended for me? Did it contain the living horror, smuggled thus into the house so that I should not know of its coming?

The men were not long upstairs, and soon descended and drove away. Agnes went straight to her kitchen without unfastening the door of the room in which I was. I called and knocked, but obtained no reply.

It was nearly midnight when the door communicating with the drawing-room opened, and Miss Mure beckoned to me to follow her. We went upstairs, and she told me that my room had been changed. I was to sleep henceforth in “Caduceus,” whither my things had already been conveyed,

She showed me into the room, and left me there with less than a half inch of candle, locking the door upon me. I at once attempted to barricade the flimsy door which divided my room from the “pen,” but the result was unsatisfactory. Then I looked for my Bible, but none of my books appeared to have been brought into the room. It did not take long to search the small apartment, and my things were so few that the books must have been left behind purposely. There was no bedstead in the room, but in its place was a long settle like a boxed-in bath or water cistern, and on the top of this a straw mattress was laid and the bed made; a long curtain, hanging over a pole swung above the middle of the bed in the French fashion, hid the want of a bedstead. Suddenly it occurred to me that the coffin had been placed in the locker under my bed. For some minutes I was too frightened at the thought to do more than stare blankly at the bed. When I commenced to lift up the palliasse the candle gave a warning flicker, and I was in utter darkness before I could make even a cursory examination of the locker. Left without light and with the apartment in disorder, I sat in a half dazed condition on the first chair into which I could drop; straining my eyes to see further into the darkness and my ears to catch a sound from the next room. In a short time I succeeded in frightening myself completely. I heard, or thought I heard, the peculiar grunting of the horror, and I flung myself against the door from my room, hoping to break it down, but the effort was useless, and I again sank helplessly into the chair. It was whilst listening breathlessly for the sounds I so well remembered, that my attention was distracted by a sigh, as the soughing of the wind, from the box bed before me. I looked in that direction, and in the pitchy blackness saw a bright white figure, first its head projecting through the lid of the box, or the bottom of the bed, then slowly it arose – a corpse fully dressed out in its grave clothes, with livid face, fallen jaw, and wide-open glassy eyes staring vacantly before it. Very many strange things I had seen since staying at Miss Mure’s, but no spectre so struck me with terror as did this one. I felt that I could not stay there with it.

I sprang up, and whilst my gaze was riveted upon it fell back towards the door of “Salamander” and groped for the fastenings. The door yielded to my pressure, and scrambling over my box I entered the little pen or cupboard, which was associated in my mind with the thing I most dreaded. In the delirium of terror I felt that I must reach Agnes, but I had sufficient sense to clutch at the bed coverlet as I escaped from my room. The door from “Salamander” was unlocked, and without stopping to think I sped along the corridor and hurried downstairs, groping my way more slowly in the less known hall and passages leading to the kitchen. The door had no lock – in this very old part of the house a drop latch was the only fastening – and by working away perseveringly the stop peg Agnes stuck in above the latch would drop out. I knew Siva would be near, and had the coverlet ready to throw over her, but when I gently opened the door and peered in I saw Siva was perched half on a chair and half on the kitchen table still and dumb, whilst before the fire there stood the figure of a man from whom the skin had been removed. It was like an anatomical figure designed to show the muscles; its grinning face, prominent teeth, and colourless scalp were doubly horrible in the glow of the dying fire. As it turned its head to look at me the last spark of hope died in my heart, and with a loud scream I fell forward on the floor and fainted.

When I recovered consciousness I was again on the bed in “Caduceus.” The light of a foggy morning showed that the room was empty, and some untouched breakfast was on a tray by my bedside. Was the adventure of last night a dream or a reality?

I arose and went at once downstairs and wrote up my journal. When I went there again, in the dusk of the early evening, a young woman was sitting in an obscure corner; I bowed to her, and took up my accustomed position at the front window. She crossed over to me, and sat by my side. I felt pleased that she did so, and soon we commenced a conversation. I learned that her name was Maisie, and she told me that she understood my fears, and that in time I should be free of them. Her face seemed familiar, her voice was sweet, and manner gentle and subdued. I could learn nothing concerning Miss Mure, and Maisie told me that she could never see me in her presence, but she would be in that room frequently, and possibly she could come to me occasionally in my new room.

I told her of my dread of that room, and of the great fear I entertained that the cupboard next to it would be tenanted by the creature who was sometimes brought there. She told me it was wrong to anticipate trouble, the danger was less real than I imagined. I spoke of what I had seen from that window, and she shuddered when I described the struggles of the woman who had been dragged away. I commenced to tell her of what I had seen brought back the night before, but she prevented me with an impatient gesture. I dropped the Subject, but soon the thoughts which were uppermost in my mind were again the topic of my tale, and I told her of the spectre I had seen arise from beneath my bed. She arose abruptly, and, with a sad wave of the hand, left the room by the door leading to the passage. I remained there musing, and hoping that she would soon return. The darkness and loneliness became oppressive. I sought Agnes, but I dared not speak to her of Maisie, and as we had little to say to each other, she went to bed early.

That night I barely slept at all, the remembrance of my adventures the night before, or the too vivid nature of my dream, prevented slumber. I may have dozed several times, but I had no sleep until daylight broke, when I fell into a troubled slumber. When in the afternoon I again entered the downstairs room Maisie was there. Her presence cheered me; she said but little, and all too soon she went. I am pleased with the companionship of Maisie; sometimes I find her in my bedroom, but there she is always more sad than when downstairs, and I barely notice her coming and going. She glides in and out as a ghost might. My manner, likely enough, is the same. Today, when I looked in the mirror, I was horrified at my appearance. My face is pallid as death, and set in its frame of hay-coloured hair, and with two violet eyes shining like burning coals, I doubt whether it would not frighten a visitor as much as any real spectre could do.

Something tells me I am not long for this world; I think of mother and Maggie, and burst into tears. They will miss me. If it were not for them I think I should like to be at rest; but when I think about it “a strange perplexity creeps coldly on me, like a fear to die.” I have talked about this to Maisie, and she answered peremptorily that I must not die here. “You know not what it means to die in this place.” I looked at her earnestly. Was she real? The words of Dryden came imperatively into my mind—

“Oh, it is a fearful thing to be no more.

Or if it be, to wander after death;

To walk, as spirits do, in brakes all day;

And when the darkness comes, to glide in paths

That lead to graves; and in the silent vault,

Where lies your own pale shroud, to hover o’er it.

Striving to enter your forbidden corpse.”

I looked tearfully at Maisie; she did not reply, but her face was ineffably sad. As I cried piteously, “Oh, Maisie! Maisie!” she left the room hastily.

I saw her again when I went to my room; her face was still troubled, but she drew me towards her affectionately, and we talked together for a long time of love, and trust, and of beauty. The pale moonlight shone into the room, and by its faint glimmer Maisie’s face seemed truly beautiful; but for the first time I noticed that her hands were coarse, and that upon the wrist of one there was the scratch I had seen on the arm of the woman who had been dragged from the house on that terrible evening a fortnight ago. She smiled when she saw that I noticed the scar, but offered no explanation. It seemed to alter the thread of our discourse, for she talked to me of my position in the house, of the heavy work she had to do on the morrow. It would be best for me to go, if I really wished. I told her how I dreaded the next meeting, and how anxious I was to» escape. For some minutes she was silent; she then said it would be hard to part from me, but tomorrow, if I would trust her, she would show me how to escape. I was to follow her in silence, soon after midnight, and must promise not to speak to her. I expressed my readiness to do all that she wished, and commenced at once to think out my plans for getting my things together in readiness. She said that she was tired, and with my permission would rest for a time on my bed. She lay down, and after looking at her for a time I turned away and watched the moon and the slowly-floating clouds. I must have dozed, for when I again looked for her I found that she had disappeared.

When I awoke in the morning it was already late, but I should have slept on had not the noise of strange footsteps on the landing disturbed me, I dressed hastily, and upon leaving my room was in time to see two men dragging the coffin from under my bed through a door in the wooden partition which divided the room from the landing. I waited and saw that it was taken to the séance room.

Agnes has been in a very bad temper all day. Siva has been thrust out into the garden, and lurks about in the bushes. The house has been reeking with strange odours, and the preparations for the meeting tonight are now completed. I do so hope Maisie will not fail me, and that I shall leave this house tonight for ever. I have not seen Miss Mure, nor did I expect to. Maisie has not been here, and I am waiting patiently at the window, looking out for the arrival of that most fearful of all things which attends the meeting of the black magicians. I feel that if I see it again I shall never more write in this, my journal. It is at the gate, gripped tightly by the old man with blue spectacles. Adieu!

•   •   •   •   •

East Sheen,
December 14th.

Dearest Mother, – Mr. Frank’s telegram has informed you that I have left Miss Mure’s. That the why and wherefore of my conduct may be understood without inconvenient explanations by word of mouth when I see you, I send you the journal I have kept since I went there, and when I tell you that I have promised one to whom I owe my life that I will never speak of my experiences while with those dreadful people, I know that both Maggie and yourself will accept this account as final, and so far complete as I am able to make it…

At the séance I was pleased to see Maisie sitting opposite me in the seat which the horror had occupied on the last occasion. On the table between us was the coffin, open, and containing Maisie herself. The other Maisie, the living one, smiled at me as she saw my wondering face. The monster still had its face covered, and was tolerably still. I kept my gaze fixed upon Maisie during the performance of the preliminary rites. Later, when the face of the horror was uncovered, it whined piteously, and moved about the room as a ferret which has escaped from a rat-hole, sniffing and creeping, but avoiding the seat on which Maisie sat, and towards which it was evident its keeper wished to direct it. Then it clambered on to the table, and threw itself upon the body in the coffin. Maisie at once arose, and crossing to where I was gazing in the stupefaction of fascination upon the horror, she touched me lightly on the shoulder, and I turned and followed her from the room. We went downstairs and through the kitchens, then along an old, little-used passage leading to a stable-yard. In this there was a door locked from the inside, the key still in the lock. Maisie indicated that I was to open the door, and we passed out into a passage leading to the pathway by the mortuary. We were free. She then made me promise never to speak of what had happened to me, and told me to hasten towards town. I looked behind me, and saw her pale, wistful face still watching me. How I reached here I can tell you fully. It was all so strange. In the thick London fog the men and creatures all loomed upon me suddenly, and took seemingly strange shapes. I became frightened, but struggled on to the address I had determined to reach. More I will never tell until Maisie shall have released me from the promise I made.

•   •   •   •   •

Nothing has shaken my sister’s resolution. Miss Mure has now left the house, and resides with a relative. Agnes, we learned, has joined her friends in Australia. Whether the mystery is fact or fiction I may never know, but my sister is often strangely affected since her return to us.

She starts in her sleep, is often found weeping, is timorous, and will not be alone after dusk. Even when she is with us, and we are as merry as we know how to be, her face will suddenly become clouded, and she will shrink as though some great horror were before her, and ofttimes she will raise her hands as though to screen from view something which terrifies her, and sends her sobbing to mother or myself.

CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAPBOOK

M. R. JAMES

1895

St. Bertrand De Comminges is a decayed town on the spurs of the Pyrenees, not very far from Toulouse, and still nearer to Bagnères-deLuchon. It was the site of a bishopric until the Revolution, and has a cathedral which is visited by a certain number of tourists. In the spring of 1883 an Englishman arrived at this old-world place – I can hardly dignify it with the name of city, for there are not a thousand inhabitants. He was a Cambridge man, who had come specially from Toulouse to see St. Bertrand’s Church, and had left two friends, who were less keen archaeologists than himself, in their hotel at Toulouse, under promise to join him on the following morning. Half an hour at the church would satisfy them, and all three could then pursue their journey in the direction of Auch. But our Englishman had come early on the day in question, and proposed to himself to fill a notebook and to use several dozens of plates in the process of describing and photographing every corner of the wonderful church that dominates the little hill of Comminges. In order to carry out this design satisfactorily, it was necessary to monopolise the verger of the church for the day. The verger or sacristan (I prefer the latter appellation, inaccurate as it may be) was accordingly sent for by the somewhat brusque lady who keeps the inn of the Chapeau Rouge; and when he came, the Englishman found him an unexpectedly interesting object of study. It was not in the personal appearance of the little, dry, wizened old man that the interest lay, for he was precisely like dozens of other church-guardians in France, but in a curious furtive or rather hunted and oppressed air which he had. He was perpetually half glancing behind him; the muscles of his back and shoulders seemed to be hunched in a continual nervous contraction, as if he were expecting every moment to find himself in the clutch of an enemy. The Englishman hardly knew whether to put him down as a man haunted by a fixed delusion, or as one oppressed by a guilty conscience, or as an unbearably henpecked husband. The probabilities, when reckoned up, certainly pointed to the last idea; but, still, the impression conveyed was that of a more formidable persecutor even than a termagant wife.

However, the Englishman (let us call him Dennistoun) was soon too deep in his notebook and too busy with his camera to give more than an occasional glance to the sacristan. Whenever he did look at him, he found him at no great distance, either huddling himself back against the wall or crouching in one of the gorgeous stalls. Dennistoun became rather fidgety after a time. Mingled suspicions that he was keeping the old man from his déjeuner, that he was regarded as likely to make away with St. Bertrand’s ivory crozier, or with the dusty stuffed crocodile that hangs over the font, began to torment him.

“Won’t you go home?” he said at last; “I’m quite well able to finish my notes alone; you can lock me in if you like. I shall want at least two hours more here, and it must be cold for you, isn’t it?”

“Good heavens!” said the little man, whom the suggestion seemed to throw into a state of unaccountable terror, “such a thing cannot be thought of for a moment. Leave monsieur alone in the church? No, no; two hours, three hours, all will be the same to me. I have breakfasted, I am not at all cold, with many thanks to monsieur.”

“Very well, my little man,” quoth Dennistoun to himself: “you have been warned, and you must take the consequences.”

Before the expiration of the two hours, the stalls, the enormous dilapidated organ, the choir-screen of Bishop John de Mauléon, the remnants of glass and tapestry, and the objects in the treasure-chamber had been well and truly examined; the sacristan still keeping at Dennistoun’s heels, and every now and then whipping round as if he had been stung, when one or other of the strange noises that trouble a large empty building fell on his ear. Curious noises they were, sometimes.

“Once,” Dennistoun said to me, “I could have sworn I heard a thin metallic voice laughing high up in the tower. I darted an inquiring glance at my sacristan. He was white to the lips. ‘It is he – that is – it is no one; the door is locked,’ was all he said, and we looked at each other for a full minute.”

Another little incident puzzled Dennistoun a good deal. He was examining a large dark picture that hangs behind the altar, one of a series illustrating the miracles of St. Bertrand. The composition of the picture is well-nigh indecipherable, but there is a Latin legend below, which runs thus:

Qualiter S. Bertrandus liberavit hominem quem diabolus diu volebat strangulare.
(How St. Bertrand delivered a man whom the Devil long sought to strangle.)

Dennistoun was turning to the sacristan with a smile and a jocular remark of some sort on his lips, but he was confounded to see the old man on his knees, gazing at the picture with the eye of a suppliant in agony, his hands tightly clasped, and a rain of tears on his cheeks. Dennistoun naturally pretended to have noticed nothing, but the question would not go away from him, “Why should a daub of this kind affect anyone so strongly?” He seemed to himself to be getting some sort of clue to the reason of the strange look that had been puzzling him all the day: the man must be a monomaniac; but what was his monomania?

It was nearly five o’clock; the short day was drawing in, and the church began to fill with shadows, while the curious noises – the muffled footfalls and distant talking voices that had been perceptible all day – seemed, no doubt because of the fading light and the consequently quickened sense of hearing, to become more frequent and insistent.

The sacristan began for the first time to show signs of hurry and impatience. He heaved a sigh of relief when camera and notebook were finally packed up and stowed away, and hurriedly beckoned Dennistoun to the western door of the church, under the tower. It was time to ring the Angelus. A few pulls at the reluctant rope, and the great bell Bertrande, high in the tower, began to speak, and swung her voice up among the pines and down to the valleys, loud with mountain-streams, calling the dwellers on those lonely hills to remember and repeat the salutation of the angel to her whom he called Blessed among women. With that a profound quiet seemed to fall for the first time that day upon the little town, and Dennistoun and the sacristan went out of the church.

On the doorstep they fell into conversation.

“Monsieur seemed to interest himself in the old choir-books in the sacristy.”

“Undoubtedly. I was going to ask you if there were a library in the town.”

“No, monsieur; perhaps there used to be one belonging to the Chapter, but it is now such a small place—” Here came a strange pause of irresolution, as it seemed; then, with a sort of plunge, he went on: “But if monsieur is amateur des vieux livres [lover of old books], I have at home something that might interest him. It is not a hundred yards.”

At once all Dennistoun’s cherished dreams of finding priceless manuscripts in untrodden corners of France flashed up, to die down again the next moment. It was probably a stupid missal of Plantin’s printing, about 1580. Where was the likelihood that a place so near Toulouse would not have been ransacked long ago by collectors? However, it would be foolish not to go; he would reproach himself for ever after if he refused. So they set off. On the way the curious irresolution and sudden determination of the sacristan recurred to Dennistoun, and he wondered in a shamefaced way whether he was being decoyed into some purlieu to be made away with as a supposed rich Englishman. He contrived, therefore, to begin talking with his guide, and to drag in, in a rather clumsy fashion, the fact that he expected two friends to join him early the next morning. To his surprise, the announcement seemed to relieve the sacristan at once of some of the anxiety that oppressed him.

“That is well,” he said quite brightly – “that is very well. Monsieur will travel in company with his friends: they will be always near him. It is a good thing to travel thus in company – sometimes.”

The last word appeared to be added as an afterthought and to bring with it a relapse into gloom for the poor little man.

They were soon at the house, which was one rather larger than its neighbours, stone-built, with a shield carved over the door, the shield of Alberic de Mauléon, a collateral descendant, Dennistoun tells me, of Bishop John de Mauléon. This Alberic was a Canon of Comminges from 1680 to 1701. The upper windows of the mansion were boarded up, and the whole place bore, as does the rest of Comminges, the aspect of decaying age.

Arrived on his doorstep, the sacristan paused a moment.

“Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps, after all, monsieur has not the time?”

“Not at all – lots of time – nothing to do till tomorrow. Let us see what it is you have got.”

The door was opened at this point, and a face looked out, a face far younger than the sacristan’s, but bearing something of the same distressing look: only here it seemed to be the mark, not so much of fear for personal safety as of acute anxiety on behalf of another. Plainly the owner of the face was the sacristan’s daughter; and, but for the expression I have described, she was a handsome girl enough. She brightened up considerably on seeing her father accompanied by an able-bodied stranger. A few remarks passed between father and daughter of which Dennistoun only caught these words, said by the sacristan: “He was laughing in the church,” words which were answered only by a look of terror from the girl.

But in another minute they were in the sitting-room of the house, a small, high chamber with a stone floor, full of moving shadows cast by a wood-fire that flickered on a great hearth. Something of the character of an oratory was imparted to it by a tall crucifix, which reached almost to the ceiling on one side; the figure was painted of the natural colours, the cross was black. Under this stood a chest of some age and solidity, and when a lamp had been brought, and chairs set, the sacristan went to this chest, and produced therefrom, with growing excitement and nervousness, as Dennistoun thought, a large book, wrapped in a white cloth, on which cloth a cross was rudely embroidered in red thread. Even before the wrapping had been removed, Dennistoun began to be interested by the size and shape of the volume. “Too large for a missal,” he thought, “and not the shape of an antiphoner; perhaps it may be something good, after all.” The next moment the book was open, and Dennistoun felt that he had at last lit upon something better than good. Before him lay a large folio, bound, perhaps, late in the seventeenth century, with the arms of Canon Alberic de Mauléon stamped in gold on the sides. There may have been a hundred and fifty leaves of paper in the book, and on almost every one of them was fastened a leaf from an illuminated manuscript. Such a collection Dennistoun had hardly dreamed of in his wildest moments. Here were ten leaves from a copy of Genesis, illustrated with pictures, which could not be later than A.D. 700. Further on was a complete set of pictures from a Psalter, of English execution, of the very finest kind that the thirteenth century could produce; and, perhaps best of all, there were twenty leaves of uncial writing in Latin, which, as a few words seen here and there told him at once, must belong to some very early unknown patristic treatise. Could it possibly be a fragment of the copy of Papias “On the Words of Our Lord”, which was known to have existed as late as the twelfth century at Nimes? (We now know that these leaves did contain a considerable fragment of that work, if not of that actual copy of it.) In any case, his mind was made up; that book must return to Cambridge with him, even if he had to draw the whole of his balance from the bank and stay at St. Bertrand till the money came. He glanced up at the sacristan to see if his face yielded any hint that the book was for sale. The sacristan was pale, and his lips were working.

“If monsieur will turn on to the end,” he said.

So monsieur turned on, meeting new treasures at every rise of a leaf; and at the end of the book he came upon two sheets of paper, of much more recent date than anything he had seen yet, which puzzled him considerably. They must be contemporary, he decided, with the unprincipled Canon Alberic, who had doubtless plundered the Chapter library of St. Bertrand to form this priceless scrapbook. On the first of the paper sheets was a plan, carefully drawn and instantly recognizable by a person who knew the ground, of the south aisle and cloisters of St. Bertrand’s. There were curious signs looking like planetary symbols, and a few Hebrew words in the corners; and in the north-west angle of the cloister was a cross drawn in gold paint. Below the plan were some lines of writing in Latin, which ran thus:

Responsa 12mi Dec. 1694. Interrogatum est: Inveniamne? Responsum est: Invenies. Fiamne dives? Fies. Vivamne invidendus? Vives. Moriarne in lecto meo? Ita.

(Answers of the 12th of December, 1694. It was asked: Shall I find it? Answer: Thou shalt. Shall I become rich? Thou wilt. Shall I live an object of envy? Thou wilt. Shall I die in my bed? Thou wilt.)

“A good specimen of the treasure-hunter’s record – quite reminds one of Mr. Minor-Canon Quatremain in Old St. Paul’s,” was Dennistoun’s comment, and he turned the leaf.

What he then saw impressed him, as he has often told me, more than he could have conceived any drawing or picture capable of impressing him. And, though the drawing he saw is no longer in existence, there is a photograph of it (which I possess) which fully bears out that statement. The picture in question was a sepia drawing at the end of the seventeenth century, representing, one would say at first sight, a Biblical scene; for the architecture (the picture represented an interior) and the figures had that semi-classical flavour about them which the artists of two hundred years ago thought appropriate to illustrations of the Bible. On the right was a king on his throne, the throne elevated on twelve steps, a canopy overhead, soldiers on either side – evidently King Solomon. He was bending forward with outstretched sceptre, in attitude of command; his face expressed horror and disgust, yet there was in it also the mark of imperious command and confident power. The left half of the picture was the strangest, however. The interest plainly centred there.

On the pavement before the throne were grouped four soldiers, surrounding a crouching figure which must be described in a moment. A fifth soldier lay dead on the pavement, his neck distorted, and his eyeballs starting from his head. The four surrounding guards were looking at the King. In their faces, the sentiment of horror was intensified; they seemed, in fact, only restrained from flight by their implicit trust in their master. All this terror was plainly excited by the being that crouched in their midst.

I entirely despair of conveying by any words the impression which this figure makes upon anyone who looks at it. I recollect once showing the photograph of the drawing to a lecturer on morphology – a person of, I was going to say, abnormally sane and unimaginative habits of mind. He absolutely refused to be alone for the rest of that evening, and he told me afterwards that for many nights he had not dared to put out his light before going to sleep. However, the main traits of the figure I can at least indicate.

At first you saw only a mass of coarse, matted black hair; presently it was seen that this covered a body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the muscles standing out like wires. The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body, with long, coarse hairs, and hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils, and were fixed upon the throned King with a look of beast-like hate. Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less than human, and you will have some faint conception of the terror inspired by the appalling effigy. One remark is universally made by those to whom I have shown the picture: “It was drawn from the life.”

As soon as the first shock of his irresistible fright had subsided, Dennistoun stole a look at his hosts. The sacristan’s hands were pressed upon his eyes; his daughter, looking up at the cross on the wall, was telling her beads feverishly.

At last the question was asked: “Is this book for sale?”

There was the same hesitation, the same plunge of determination that he had noticed before, and then came the welcome answer: “If monsieur pleases.”

“How much do you ask for it?”

“I will take two hundred and fifty francs.”

This was confounding. Even a collector’s conscience is sometimes stirred, and Dennistoun’s conscience was tenderer than a collector’s.

“My good man!” he said again and again, “your book is worth far more than two hundred and fifty francs. I assure you – far more.”

But the answer did not vary: “I will take two hundred and fifty francs – not more.”

There was really no possibility of refusing such a chance. The money was paid, the receipt signed, a glass of wine drunk over the transaction, and then the sacristan seemed to become a new man. He stood upright, he ceased to throw those suspicious glances behind him, he actually laughed or tried to laugh. Dennistoun rose to go.

“I shall have the honour of accompanying monsieur to his hotel?” said the sacristan.

“Oh, no, thanks! it isn’t a hundred yards. I know the way perfectly, and there is a moon.”

The offer was pressed three or four times and refused as often.

“Then, monsieur will summon me if – if he finds occasion; he will keep the middle of the road, the sides are so rough.”

“Certainly, certainly,” said Dennistoun, who was impatient to examine his prize by himself; and he stepped out into the passage with his book under his arm.

Here he was met by the daughter; she, it appeared, was anxious to do a little business on her own account; perhaps, like Gehazi, to “take somewhat” from the foreigner whom her father had spared.

“A silver crucifix and chain for the neck; monsieur would perhaps be good enough to accept it?”

Well, really, Dennistoun hadn’t much use for these things. What did mademoiselle want for it?

“Nothing – nothing in the world. Monsieur is more than welcome to it.”

The tone in which this and much more was said was unmistakably genuine, so that Dennistoun was reduced to profuse thanks, and submitted to have the chain put round his neck. It really seemed as if he had rendered the father and daughter some service which they hardly knew how to repay. As he set off with his book they stood at the door looking after him, and they were still looking when he waved them a last good night from the steps of the Chapeau Rouge.

•   •   •   •   •

Dinner was over, and Dennistoun was in his bedroom, shut up alone with his acquisition. The landlady had manifested a particular interest in him since he had told her that he had paid a visit to the sacristan and bought an old book from him. He thought, too, that he had heard a hurried dialogue between her and the said sacristan in the passage outside the salle à manger; some words to the effect that “Pierre and Bertrand would be sleeping in the house” had closed the conversation.

All this time a growing feeling of discomfort had been creeping over him – nervous reaction, perhaps, after the delight of his discovery. Whatever it was, it resulted in a conviction that there was someone behind him, and that he was far more comfortable with his back to the wall. All this, of course, weighed light in the balance as against the obvious value of the collection he had acquired. And now, as I said, he was alone in his bedroom, taking stock of Canon Alberic’s treasures, in which every moment revealed something more charming.

“Bless Canon Alberic!” said Dennistoun, who had an inveterate habit of talking to himself. “I wonder where he is now? Dear me! I wish that landlady would learn to laugh in a more cheering manner; it makes one feel as if there was someone dead in the house. Half a pipe more, did you say? I think perhaps you are right. I wonder what that crucifix is that the young woman insisted on giving me? Last century, I suppose. Yes, probably. It is rather a nuisance of a thing to have round one’s neck – just too heavy. Most likely her father has been wearing it for years. I think I might give it a clean up before I put it away.”

He had taken the crucifix off, and laid it on the table, when his attention was caught by an object lying on the red cloth just by his left elbow. Two or three ideas of what it might be flitted through his brain with their own incalculable quickness.

“A penwiper? No, no such thing in the house. A rat? No, too black. A large spider? I trust to goodness not – no. Good God! a hand like the hand in that picture!”

In another infinitesimal flash he had taken it in. Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny, and wrinkled.

He flew out of his chair with deadly, inconceivable terror clutching at his heart. The shape, whose left hand rested on the table, was rising to a standing posture behind his seat, its right hand crooked above his scalp. There was black and tattered drapery about it; the coarse hair covered it as in the drawing. The lower jaw was thin – what can I call it? – shallow, like a beast’s; teeth showed behind the black lips; there was no nose; the eyes, of a fiery yellow, against which the pupils showed black and intense, and the exulting hate and thirst to destroy life which shone there, were the most horrifying features in the whole vision. There was intelligence of a kind in them – intelligence beyond that of a beast, below that of a man.

The feelings which this horror stirred in Dennistoun were the intensest physical fear and the most profound mental loathing. What did he do? What could he do? He has never been quite certain what words he said, but he knows that he spoke, that he grasped blindly at the silver crucifix, that he was conscious of a movement towards him on the part of the demon, and that he screamed with the voice of an animal in hideous pain.

Pierre and Bertrand, the two sturdy little serving-men, who rushed in, saw nothing, but felt themselves thrust aside by something that passed out between them, and found Dennistoun in a swoon. They sat up with him that night, and his two friends were at St. Bertrand by nine o’clock next morning. He himself, though still shaken and nervous, was almost himself by that time, and his story found credence with them, though not until they had seen the drawing and talked with the sacristan.

Almost at dawn the little man had come to the inn on some pretence, and had listened with the deepest interest to the story retailed by the landlady. He showed no surprise.

“It is he – it is he! I have seen him myself,” was his only comment; and to all questionings but one reply was vouchsafed: “Deux fois je l’ai vu; mille fois je l’ai senti.” [“Two times I have seen it; a thousand times I have felt it.”] He would tell them nothing of the provenance of the book, nor any details of his experiences. “I shall soon sleep, and my rest will be sweet. Why should you trouble me?” he said.

(He died that summer; his daughter married, and settled at St. Papoul. She never understood the circumstances of her father’s “obsession”.)

We shall never know what he or Canon Alberic de Mauléon suffered. At the back of that fateful drawing were some lines of writing which may be supposed to throw light on the situation:

Contradictio Salomonis cum demonio nocturno.
Albericus de Mauléone delineavit.
V. Deus in adiutorium. Ps. Qui habitat.

Sancte Bertrande, demoniorum effugator, intercede pro me miserrimo. Primum uidi nocte 12mi Dec. 1694: uidebo mox ultimum. Peccaui et passus sum, plura adhuc passurus.
Dec. 29, 1701.

I.e., The Dispute of Solomon with a demon of the night. Drawn by Alberic de Mauléon. Versicle. O Lord, make haste to help me. Psalm. Whoso dwelleth (xci.).

Saint Bertrand, who puttest devils to flight, pray for me most unhappy. I saw it first on the night of Dec. 12, 1694: soon I shall see it for the last time. I have sinned and suffered, and have more to suffer yet.
Dec. 29, 1701.

The “Gallia Christiana” gives the date of the Canon’s death as December 31, 1701, “in bed, of a sudden seizure”. Details of this kind are not common in the great work of the Sammarthani.

I have never quite understood what was Dennistoun’s view of the events I have narrated. He quoted to me once a text from Ecclesiasticus: “Some spirits there be that are created for vengeance, and in their fury lay on sore strokes.” On another occasion he said: “Isaiah was a very sensible man; doesn’t he say something about night monsters living in the ruins of Babylon? These things are rather beyond us at present.”

Another confidence of his impressed me rather, and I sympathized with it. We had been, last year, to Comminges, to see Canon Alberic’s tomb. It is a great marble erection with an effigy of the Canon in a large wig and soutane, and an elaborate eulogy of his learning below. I saw Dennistoun talking for some time with the Vicar of St. Bertrand’s, and as we drove away he said to me: “I hope it isn’t wrong: you know I am a Presbyterian – but I – I believe there will be ‘saying of Mass and singing of dirges’ for Alberic de Mauléon’s rest.” Then he added, with a touch of the Northern British in his tone, “I had no notion they came so dear.”

•   •   •   •   •

The book is in the Wentworth Collection at Cambridge. The drawing was photographed and then burnt by Dennistoun on the day when he left Comminges on the occasion of his first visit.

THE DOLL’S GHOST

Francis Marion Crawford

1896

It was a terrible accident, and for one moment the splendid machinery of Cranston House got out of gear and stood still. The butler emerged from the retirement in which he spent his elegant leisure, two grooms of the chambers appeared simultaneously from opposite directions, there were actually housemaids on the grand staircase, and those who remember the facts most exactly assert that Mrs. Pringle herself positively stood upon the landing. Mrs. Pringle was the housekeeper. As for the head nurse, the under nurse, and the nursery maid, their feelings cannot be described. The head nurse laid one hand upon the polished marble balustrade and stared stupidly before her, the under nurse stood rigid and pale, leaning against the polished marble wall, and the nursery-maid collapsed and sat down upon the polished marble step, just beyond the limits of the velvet carpet, and frankly burst into tears.

The Lady Gwendolen Lancaster-Douglas-Scroop, youngest daughter of the ninth Duke of Cranston, and aged six years and three months, picked herself up quite alone, and sat down on the third step from the foot of the grand staircase in Cranston House.

“Oh!” ejaculated the butler, and he disappeared again.

“Ah!” responded the grooms of the chambers, as they also went away.

“It’s only that doll,” Mrs. Pringle was distinctly heard to say, in a tone of contempt.

The under nurse heard her say it. Then the three nurses gathered round Lady Gwendolen and patted her, and gave her unhealthy things out of their pockets, and hurried her out of Cranston House as fast as they could, lest it should be found out upstairs that they had allowed the Lady Gwendolen Lancaster-Douglas-Scroop to tumble down the grand staircase with her doll in her arms. And as the doll was badly broken, the nursery-maid carried it, with the pieces, wrapped up in Lady Gwendolen’s little cloak. It was not far to Hyde Park, and when they had reached a quiet place they took means to find out that Lady Gwendolen had no bruises. For the carpet was very thick and soft, and there was thick stuff under it to make it softer.

Lady Gwendolen Douglas-Scroop sometimes yelled, but she never cried. It was because she had yelled that the nurse had allowed her to go downstairs alone with Nina, the doll, under one arm, while she steadied herself with her other hand on the balustrade, and trod upon the polished marble steps beyond the edge of the carpet. So she had fallen, and Nina had come to grief.

When the nurses were quite sure that she was not hurt, they unwrapped the doll and looked at her in her turn. She had been a very beautiful doll, very large, and fair, and healthy, with real yellow hair, and eyelids that would open and shut over very grown-up dark eyes. Moreover, when you moved her right arm up and down she said “Pa-pa,” and when you moved the left she said “Ma-ma,” very distinctly.

“I heard her say ‘Pa’ when she fell,” said the under nurse, who heard everything. “But she ought to have said ‘Pa-pa.’”

“That’s because her arm went up when she hit the step,” said the head nurse. “She’ll say the other ‘Pa’ when I put it down again.”

“Pa,” said Nina, as her right arm was pushed down, and speaking through her broken face. It was cracked right across, from the upper corner of the forehead, with a hideous gash, through the nose and down to the little frilled collar of the pale green silk Mother Hubbard frock, and two little three-cornered pieces of porcelain had fallen out.

“I’m sure it’s a wonder she can speak at all, being all smashed,” said the under nurse.

“You’ll have to take her to Mr. Puckler,” said her superior. “It’s not far, and you’d better go at once.”

Lady Gwendolen was occupied in digging a hole in the ground with a little spade, and paid no attention to the nurses.

“What are you doing?” enquired the nursery-maid, looking on.

“Nina’s dead, and I’m diggin’ her a grave,” replied her ladyship thoughtfully.

“Oh, she’ll come to life again all right,” said the nursery-maid.

The under nurse wrapped Nina up again and departed. Fortunately a kind soldier, with very long legs and a very small cap, happened to be there; and as he had nothing to do, he offered to see the under nurse safely to Mr. Puckler’s and back.

•   •   •   •   •

Mr. Bernard Puckler and his little daughter lived in a little house in a little alley, which led out off a quiet little street not very far from Belgrave Square. He was the great doll doctor, and his extensive practice lay in the most aristocratic quarter. He mended dolls of all sizes and ages, boy dolls and girl dolls, baby dolls in long clothes, and grown-up dolls in fashionable gowns, talking dolls and dumb dolls, those that shut their eyes when they lay down, and those whose eyes had to be shut for them by means of a mysterious wire. His daughter Else was only just over twelve years old, but she was already very clever at mending dolls’ clothes, and at doing their hair, which is harder than you might think, though the dolls sit quite still while it is being done.

Mr. Puckler had originally been a German, but he had dissolved his nationality in the ocean of London many years ago, like a great many foreigners. He still had one or two German friends, however, who came on Saturday evenings, and smoked with him and played picquet or “skat” with him for farthing points, and called him “Herr Doctor,” which seemed to please Mr. Puckler very much.

He looked older than he was, for his beard was rather long and ragged, his hair was grizzled and thin, and he wore horn-rimmed spectacles. As for Else, she was a thin, pale child, very quiet and neat, with dark eyes and brown hair that was plaited down her back and tied with a bit of black ribbon. She mended the dolls’ clothes and took the dolls back to their homes when they were quite strong again.

The house was a little one, but too big for the two people who lived in it. There was a small sitting-room on the street, and the workshop was at the back, and there were three rooms upstairs. But the father and daughter lived most of their time in the workshop, because they were generally at work, even in the evenings.

Mr. Puckler laid Nina on the table and looked at her a long time, till the tears began to fill his eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles. He was a very susceptible man, and he often fell in love with the dolls he mended, and found it hard to part with them when they had smiled at him for a few days. They were real little people to him, with characters and thoughts and feelings of their own, and he was very tender with them all. But some attracted him especially from the first, and when they were brought to him maimed and injured, their state seemed so pitiful to him that the tears came easily. You must remember that he had lived among dolls during a great part of his life, and understood them.

“How do you know that they feel nothing?” he went on to say to Else. “You must be gentle with them. It costs nothing to be kind to the little beings, and perhaps it makes a difference to them.”

And Else understood him, because she was a child, and she knew that she was more to him than all the dolls.

He fell in love with Nina at first sight, perhaps because her beautiful brown glass eyes were something like Else’s own, and he loved Else first and best, with all his heart. And, besides, it was a very sorrowful case. Nina had evidently not been long in the world, for her complexion was perfect, her hair was smooth where it should be smooth, and curly where it should be curly, and her silk clothes were perfectly new. But across her face was that frightful gash, like a sabre-cut, deep and shadowy within, but clean and sharp at the edges. When he tenderly pressed her head to close the gaping wound, the edges made a fine grating sound, that was painful to hear, and the lids of the dark eyes quivered and trembled as though Nina were suffering dreadfully.

“Poor Nina!” he exclaimed sorrowfully. “But I shall not hurt you much, though you will take a long time to get strong.”

He always asked the names of the broken dolls when they were brought to him, and sometimes the people knew what the children called them, and told him. He liked “Nina” for a name. Altogether and in every way she pleased him more than any doll he had seen for many years, and he felt drawn to her, and made up his mind to make her perfectly strong and sound, no matter how much labour it might cost him.

Mr. Puckler worked patiently a little at a time, and Else watched him. She could do nothing for poor Nina, whose clothes needed no mending. The longer the doll doctor worked, the more fond he became of the yellow hair and the beautiful brown glass eyes. He sometimes forgot all the other dolls that were waiting to be mended, lying side by side on a shelf, and sat for an hour gazing at Nina’s face, while he racked his ingenuity for some new invention by which to hide even the smallest trace of the terrible accident.

She was wonderfully mended. Even he was obliged to admit that; but the scar was still visible to his keen eyes, a very fine line right across the face, downwards from right to left. Yet all the conditions had been most favourable for a cure, since the cement had set quite hard at the first attempt and the weather had been fine and dry, which makes a great difference in a dolls’ hospital.

At last he knew that he could do no more, and the under nurse had already come twice to see whether the job was finished, as she coarsely expressed it.

“Nina is not quite strong yet,” Mr. Puckler had answered each time, for he could not make up his mind to face the parting.

And now he sat before the square deal table at which he worked, and Nina lay before him for the last time with a big brown paper box beside her. It stood there like her coffin, waiting for her, he thought. He must put her into it, and lay tissue paper over her dear face, and then put on the lid, and at the thought of tying the string his sight was dim with tears again. He was never to look into the glassy depths of the beautiful brown eyes any more, nor to hear the little wooden voice say “Pa-pa” and “Ma-ma.” It was a very painful moment.

In the vain hope of gaining time before the separation, he took up the little sticky bottles of cement and glue and gum and colour, looking at each one in turn, and then at Nina’s face. And all his small tools lay there, neatly arranged in a row, but he knew that he could not use them again for Nina. She was quite strong at last, and in a country where there should be no cruel children to hurt her she might live a hundred years, with only that almost imperceptible line across her face to tell of the fearful thing that had befallen her on the marble steps of Cranston House.

Suddenly Mr. Puckler’s heart was quite full, and he rose abruptly from his seat and turned away.

“Else,” he said unsteadily, “you must do it for me. I cannot bear to see her go into the box.”

So he went and stood at the window with his back turned, while Else did what he had not the heart to do.

“Is it done?” he asked, not turning round. “Then take her away, my dear. Put on your hat, and take her to Cranston House quickly, and when you are gone I will turn round.”

Else was used to her father’s queer ways with the dolls, and though she had never seen him so much moved by a parting, she was not much surprised.

“Come back quickly,” he said, when he heard her hand on the latch. “It is growing late, and I should not send you at this hour. But I cannot bear to look forward to it any more.”

When Else was gone, he left the window and sat down in his place before the table again, to wait for the child to come back. He touched the place where Nina had lain, very gently, and he recalled the softly tinted pink face, and the glass eyes, and the ringlets of yellow hair, till he could almost see them.

The evenings were long, for it was late in the spring. But it began to grow dark soon, and Mr. Puckler wondered why Else did not come back. She had been gone an hour and a half, and that was much longer than he had expected, for it was barely half a mile from Belgrave Square to Cranston House. He reflected that the child might have been kept waiting, but as the twilight deepened he grew anxious, and walked up and down in the dim workshop, no longer thinking of Nina, but of Else, his own living child, whom he loved.

An undefinable, disquieting sensation came upon him by fine degrees, a chilliness and a faint stirring of his thin hair, joined with a wish to be in any company rather than to be alone much longer. It was the beginning of fear.

He told himself in strong German-English that he was a foolish old man, and he began to feel about for the matches in the dusk. He knew just where they should be, for he always kept them in the same place, close to the little tin box that held bits of sealing-wax of various colours, for some kinds of mending. But somehow he could not find the matches in the gloom.

Something had happened to Else, he was sure, and as his fear increased, he felt as though it might be allayed if he could get a light and see what time it was. Then he called himself a foolish old man again, and the sound of his own voice startled him in the dark. He could not find the matches.

The window was grey still; he might see what time it was if he went close to it, and he could go and get matches out of the cupboard afterwards. He stood back from the table, to get out of the way of the chair, and began to cross the board floor.

Something was following him in the dark. There was a small pattering, as of tiny feet upon the boards. He stopped and listened, and the roots of his hair tingled. It was nothing, and he was a foolish old man. He made two steps more, and he was sure that he heard the little pattering again. He turned his back to the window, leaning against the sash so that the panes began to crack, and he faced the dark. Everything was quite still, and it smelt of paste and cement and wood-filings as usual.

“Is that you, Else?” he asked, and he was surprised by the fear in his voice.

There was no answer in the room, and he held up his watch and tried to make out what time it was by the grey dusk that was just not darkness. So far as he could see, it was within two or three minutes of ten o’clock. He had been a long time alone. He was shocked, and frightened for Else, out in London, so late, and he almost ran across the room to the door. As he fumbled for the latch, he distinctly heard the running of the little feet after him.

“Mice!” he exclaimed feebly, just as he got the door open.

He shut it quickly behind him, and felt as though some cold thing had settled on his back and were writhing upon him. The passage was quite dark, but he found his hat and was out in the alley in a moment, breathing more freely, and surprised to find how much light there still was in the open air. He could see the pavement clearly under his feet, and far off in the street to which the alley led he could hear the laughter and calls of children, playing some game out of doors. He wondered how he could have been so nervous, and for an instant he thought of going back into the house to wait quietly for Else. But instantly he felt that nervous fright of something stealing over him again. In any case it was better to walk up to Cranston House and ask the servants about the child. One of the women had perhaps taken a fancy to her, and was even now giving her tea and cake.

He walked quickly to Belgrave Square, and then up the broad streets, listening as he went, whenever there was no other sound, for the tiny footsteps. But he heard nothing, and was laughing at himself when he rang the servants’ bell at the big house. Of course, the child must be there.

The person who opened the door was quite an inferior person, for it was a back door, but affected the manners of the front, and stared at Mr. Puckler superciliously under the strong light.

No little girl had been seen, and he knew “nothing about no dolls.”

“She is my little girl,” said Mr. Puckler tremulously, for all his anxiety was returning tenfold, “and I am afraid something has happened.”

The inferior person said rudely that “nothing could have happened to her in that house, because she had not been there, which was a jolly good reason why;” and Mr. Puckler was obliged to admit that the man ought to know, as it was his business to keep the door and let people in. He wished to be allowed to speak to the under nurse, who knew him; but the man was ruder than ever, and finally shut the door in his face.

When the doll doctor was alone in the street, he steadied himself by the railing, for he felt as though he were breaking in two, just as some dolls break, in the middle of the backbone.

Presently he knew that he must be doing something to find Else, and that gave him strength. He began to walk as quickly as he could through the streets, following every highway and byway which his little girl might have taken on her errand. He also asked several policemen in vain if they had seen her, and most of them answered him kindly, for they saw that he was a sober man and in his right senses, and some of them had little girls of their own.

It was one o’clock in the morning when he went up to his own door again, worn out and hopeless and broken-hearted. As he turned the key in the lock, his heart stood still, for he knew that he was awake and not dreaming, and that he really heard those tiny footsteps pattering to meet him inside the house along the passage.

But he was too unhappy to be much frightened any more, and his heart went on again with a dull regular pain, that found its way all through him with every pulse. So he went in, and hung up his hat in the dark, and found the matches in the cupboard and the candlestick in its place in the corner.

Mr. Puckler was so much overcome and so completely worn out that he sat down in his chair before the work-table and almost fainted, as his face dropped forward upon his folded hands. Beside him the solitary candle burned steadily with a low flame in the still warm air.

“Else! Else!” he moaned against his yellow knuckles. And that was all he could say, and it was no relief to him. On the contrary, the very sound of the name was a new and sharp pain that pierced his ears and his head and his very soul. For every time he repeated the name it meant that little Else was dead, somewhere out in the streets of London in the dark.

He was so terribly hurt that he did not even feel something pulling gently at the skirt of his old coat, so gently that it was like the nibbling of a tiny mouse. He might have thought that it was really a mouse if he had noticed it.

“Else! Else!” he groaned right against his hands.

Then a cool breath stirred his thin hair, and the low flame of the one candle dropped down almost to a mere spark, not flickering as though a draught were going to blow it out, but just dropping down as if it were tired out. Mr. Puckler felt his hands stiffening with fright under his face; and there was a faint rustling sound, like some small silk thing blown in a gentle breeze. He sat up straight, stark and scared, and a small wooden voice spoke in the stillness.

“Pa-pa,” it said, with a break between the syllables.

Mr. Puckler stood up in a single jump, and his chair fell over backwards with a smashing noise upon the wooden floor. The candle had almost gone out.

It was Nina’s doll voice that had spoken, and he should have known it among the voices of a hundred other dolls. And yet there was something more in it, a little human ring, with a pitiful cry and a call for help, and the wail of a hurt child. Mr. Puckler stood up, stark and stiff, and tried to look round, but at first he could not, for he seemed to be frozen from head to foot.

Then he made a great effort, and he raised one hand to each of his temples, and pressed his own head round as he would have turned a doll’s. The candle was burning so low that it might as well have been out altogether, for any light it gave, and the room seemed quite dark at first. Then he saw something. He would not have believed that he could be more frightened than he had been just before that. But he was, and his knees shook, for he saw the doll standing in the middle of the floor, shining with a faint and ghostly radiance, her beautiful glassy brown eyes fixed on his. And across her face the very thin line of the break he had mended shone as though it were drawn in light with a fine point of white flame.

Yet there was something more in the eyes, too; there was something human, like Else’s own, but as if only the doll saw him through them, and not Else. And there was enough of Else to bring back all his pain and to make him forget his fear.

“Else! my little Else!” he cried aloud.

The small ghost moved, and its doll-arm slowly rose and fell with a stiff, mechanical motion.

“Pa-pa,” it said.

It seemed this time that there was even more of Else’s tone echoing somewhere between the wooden notes that reached his ears so distinctly, and yet so far away. Else was calling him, he was sure.

His face was perfectly white in the gloom, but his knees did not shake any more, and he felt that he was less frightened.

“Yes, child! But where? Where?” he asked. “Where are you, Else?”

“Pa-pa!”

The syllables died away in the quiet room. There was a low rustling of silk, the glassy brown eyes turned slowly away, and Mr. Puckler heard the pitter-patter of the small feet in the bronze kid slippers as the figure ran straight to the door. Then the candle burned high again, the room was full of light, and he was alone.

Mr. Puckler passed his hand over his eyes and looked about him. He could see everything quite clearly, and he felt that he must have been dreaming, though he was standing instead of sitting down, as he should have been if he had just waked up. The candle burned brightly now. There were the dolls to be mended, lying in a row with their toes up. The third one had lost her right shoe, and Else was making one. He knew that, and he was certainly not dreaming now. He had not been dreaming when he had come in from his fruitless search and had heard the doll’s footsteps running to the door. He had not fallen asleep in his chair. How could he possibly have fallen asleep when his heart was breaking? He had been awake all the time.

He steadied himself, set the fallen chair upon its legs, and said to himself again very emphatically that he was a foolish old man. He ought to be out in the streets looking for his child, asking questions, and enquiring at the police stations, where all accidents were reported as soon as they were known, or at the hospitals.

“Pa-pa!”

The longing, wailing, pitiful little wooden cry rang from the passage, outside the door, and Mr. Puckler stood for an instant with white face, transfixed and rooted to the spot. A moment later his hand was on the latch. Then he was in the passage, with the light streaming from the open door behind him.

Quite at the other end he saw the little phantom shining clearly in the shadow, and the right hand seemed to beckon to him as the arm rose and fell once more. He knew all at once that it had not come to frighten him but to lead him, and when it disappeared, and he walked boldly towards the door, he knew that it was in the street outside, waiting for him. He forgot that he was tired and had eaten no supper, and had walked many miles, for a sudden hope ran through and through him, like a golden stream of life.

And sure enough, at the corner of the alley, and at the corner of the street, and out in Belgrave Square, he saw the small ghost flitting before him. Sometimes it was only a shadow, where there was other light, but then the glare of the lamps made a pale green sheen on its little Mother Hubbard frock of silk; and sometimes, where the streets were dark and silent, the whole figure shone out brightly, with its yellow curls and rosy neck. It seemed to trot along like a tiny child, and Mr. Puckler could almost hear the pattering of the bronze kid slippers on the pavement as it ran. But it went very fast, and he could only just keep up with it, tearing along with his hat on the back of his head and his thin hair blown by the night breeze, and his horn-rimmed spectacles firmly set upon his broad nose.

On and on he went, and he had no idea where he was. He did not even care, for he knew certainly that he was going the right way.

Then at last, in a wide, quiet street, he was standing before a big, sober-looking door that had two lamps on each side of it, and a polished brass bell-handle, which he pulled.

And just inside, when the door was opened, in the bright light, there was the little shadow, and the pale green sheen of the little silk dress, and once more the small cry came to his ears, less pitiful, more longing.

“Pa-pa!”

The shadow turned suddenly bright, and out of the brightness the beautiful brown glass eyes were turned up happily to his, while the rosy mouth smiled so divinely that the phantom doll looked almost like a little angel just then.

“A little girl was brought in soon after ten o’clock,” said the quiet voice of the hospital doorkeeper. “I think they thought she was only stunned. She was holding a big brown-paper box against her, and they could not get it out of her arms. She had a long plait of brown hair that hung down as they carried her.”

“She is my little girl,” said Mr. Puckler, but he hardly heard his own voice.

He leaned over Else’s face in the gentle light of the children’s ward, and when he had stood there a minute the beautiful brown eyes opened and looked up to his.

“Pa-pa!” cried Else, softly, “I knew you would come!”

Then Mr. Puckler did not know what he did or said for a moment, and what he felt was worth all the fear and terror and despair that had almost killed him that night. But by and by Else was telling her story, and the nurse let her speak, for there were only two other children in the room, who were getting well and were sound asleep.

“They were big boys with bad faces,” said Else, “and they tried to get Nina away from me, but I held on and fought as well as I could till one of them hit me with something, and I don’t remember any more, for I tumbled down, and I suppose the boys ran away, and somebody found me there. But I’m afraid Nina is all smashed.”

“Here is the box,” said the nurse. “We could not take it out of her arms till she came to herself. Should you like to see if the doll is broken?”

And she undid the string cleverly, but Nina was all smashed to pieces. Only the gentle light of the children’s ward made a pale green sheen in the folds of the little Mother Hubbard frock.

THE CORPSE LIGHT

Dick Donovan

1899

What I am about to relate is so marvellous, so weird and startling, that even now, as I dwell upon it all, I wonder why I of all men should have been subjected to the unnatural and unearthly influence. I no longer scoff when somebody reminds me that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.

It was about twenty years ago that I took up a medical practice in the old-fashioned and picturesque little town of Brinton-on-sea. At that time there was no railway into Brinton, the nearest station being some seven or eight miles away. The result was the town still retained a delightful old-time air, while the people were as primitive and old-fashioned as their town. The nearest village was High Lea, about three miles away. Between the two places was a wide sweep of magnificent rolling down, delightful at all times, but especially so in the summer. Many an ancient farmhouse was dotted about, with here and there a windmill. The down on the seaside terminated in a high headland, from which a splendid lighthouse sent forth its warning beams over the fierce North Sea. Second only in conspicuousness to this lighthouse was an old and half ruined windmill, known all over the countryside as “The Haunted Mill”.

When I first went to live in Brinton this mill soon attracted my attention, for it was one of the most picturesque old places of its kind I had ever seen; and as I had some artistic instincts, and could sketch, the haunted mill appealed to me. It stood on rising ground, close to the high-road that ran between Brinton and High Lea. I gathered that there had been some dispute about the ownership and for over a quarter of a century that disputed claim had remained unsettled; and during that long period the old mill had been gradually falling into ruin. The foundations had from some cause sunk, throwing the main building out of the perpendicular. Part of the roof had fallen in, and the fierce gales of a quarter of a century had battered the sails pretty well to match-wood. A long flight of wooden steps led up to the principal door, but these steps had rotted away in places, and the door itself had partly fallen inwards. Needless to say, this mill had become the home of bats and owls, and, according to the yokels, of something more fearsome than either. It was a forlorn and mournful-looking place, any way, even in the full blaze of sunshine; but seen in moonlight its appearance was singularly weird, and well calculated to beget in the rustic mind a feeling of horror, and to produce a creepy and uncanny sensation in anyone susceptible to the influence of outre appearances.

To me it did not appeal in any of these aspects. I saw in it only subject matter for an exceedingly effective picture, and yet I am bound to confess that even when transferred to board or canvas there was a certain grim suggestiveness of things uncanny, and I easily understood how the superstitious and unreasoning rustic mind was awed into a belief that this mouldering old mill was haunted by something more creepy and harrowing than bats and owls. Anyway, I heard wonderful tales, at which I laughed, and when I learned that the country people generally gave the mill a wide berth at night, I blamed them for their stupidity. But it was a fact that worthy, and in other respects intelligent, farmers and market folk coming or going between Brinton and High Lea after dark preferred the much longer and dangerous route by the sea cliffs, even in the wildest weather.

I have dwelt thus long on the “Haunted Mill” because it bulks largely in my story, as will presently be seen, and I came in time to regard it with scarcely less awe than the rustics did.

It was during the second year of my residence in Brinton that a young man named Charles Royce came home after having been absent at sea for three years. Royce’s people occupied Gorse Hill Farm, about two miles to the south of Brinton. Young Charley, a fine, handsome, but rather wild youngster, had, it appears, fallen desperately in love with Hannah Trowzell, who was a domestic in the employ of the Rector of the parish. But Charley’s people did not approve of his choice, and, thinking to cure him, packed him off to sea, and after an absence of three years and a month the young fellow, bronzed, hearty, more rollicking and handsome than ever, returned to his native village. I had known nothing of Charles Royce or his history up to the day of his return; but it chanced on that very day I had to pay a professional visit to the Rectory, and the Rector pressed me to lunch with him. Greatly interested in all his parishioners, and knowing something of the private history of most of the families in his district, the rev. gentleman very naturally fell to talking about young Royce, and he told me the story, adding, “Hannah is a good girl, and I think it’s rather a pity Charley’s people objected to his courting her. I believe she would have made him a capital wife.”

“Has she given him up entirely?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, and is engaged to Silas Hartrop, whose father owns the fishing smack the North Sea Beauty. I’ve never had a very high opinion of Silas. I’m afraid he is a little too fond of skittles and beer. However, Hannah seems determined to have him in spite of anything I can say, so she must take her course. But I hope she will be able to reform him, and that the marriage will be a happy one. I really shouldn’t be a bit surprised, however, if the girl took up with her old lover again, for I have reason to know she was much attached to him, and I fancy Charley, if he were so minded, could easily influence her to throw Silas overboard.”

This little story of love and disappointment naturally interested me, for in a country town the affairs of one’s neighbours are matters of greater moment than is the case in a big city.

So it came to pass that a few weeks after Charley’s return it was generally known that, even as the Rector had suggested it might be, young Royce and pretty Hannah Trowzell were spooning again, and Silas had virtually been told to go about his business. It was further known that Silas had taken his dismissal so much to heart that he had been seeking consolation in the beer-pot. Of course, folk talked a good deal, and most of them sympathised with Silas, and blamed Hannah. Very soon it began to be bruited about that Royce’s people no longer opposed any objections to the wooing, and that in consequence Hannah and Charley were to become husband and wife at Christmas, that was in about seven weeks’ time.

A month of the time had passed, and the “askings” were up in the parish church, when one day there went forth a rumour that Charles Royce was missing. Rumour took a more definite shape a few hours later when it was positively stated that two nights previously Charles had left his father’s house in high spirits and the best of health to visit Hannah, and walk with her, as she was going into the town to make some purchases. On his way he called at the Two Waggoners, a wayside inn, where he had a pint of beer and purchased an ounce of tobacco. From the time he left the inn, all trace of him was lost, and he was seen no more. Hannah waited his coming until long past the appointed hour, and when he failed to put in an appearance, she became angry and went off to the town by herself.

Next day her anger gave place to anxiety when she learnt that he had left his home to visit her, and had not since returned; and anxiety became alarm when two and three days slipped by without bringing any tidings of the truant. On the night that he left his home, the weather was very tempestuous, and it had been wild and stormy since. It was therefore suggested that on leaving the Two Waggoners he might have got confused when he reached the common, which he had to cross to get to the Rectory; and as there were several pools and treacherous hollows on the common, it was thought he had come to grief; but the most diligent search failed to justify the surmise.

Such an event as this was well calculated to cause a sensation, not only in Brinton and its neighbourhood, but throughout the county. Indeed, for many days it was a common topic of conversation, and at the Brinton weekly market the farmers and the rustics dwelt upon it to the exclusion of other things; and, of course, everybody had some wonderful theory of their own to account for the missing man’s disappearance. Despite wide publicity and every effort on the part of the rural and county police, to say nothing of a hundred and one amateur detectives, the mystery remained unsolved. Charles Royce had apparently disappeared from off the face of the earth, leaving not a trace behind.

In the process of time the nine days’ wonder gave place to something else, and excepting by those directly interested in him, Charles Royce was forgotten. Hannah took the matter very seriously to heart, and for a while lay dangerously ill. Silas Hartrop, who was much affected by his disappointment with regard to Hannah, went to the dogs, as the saying is, and drank so heavily that it ended in an attack of delirium tremens. I was called in to attend him, and had hard work to pull him through. On his recovery his father sent him to an uncle at Yarmouth, who was in the fishing trade, and soon afterwards news came that young Hartrop had been drowned at sea. He was out in the North Sea in his uncle’s fishing smack, and, though nobody saw him go, it was supposed that he fell overboard in the night. This set the local tongues wagging again for a time, but even the affairs of Brinton could not stand still because the ne’er-do-weel Silas Hartrop was drowned. So sympathy was expressed with his people, and then the affair was dismissed.

About two years later I received an urgent message late one afternoon to hasten with all speed to High Lea, to attend to the Squire, who had been taken suddenly and seriously ill. I had had rather a heavy day of it, as there had been a good deal of sickness about for some time past, and it had taken me several hours to get through my list of patients. I had just refreshed myself with a cup of tea and was about to enjoy a cigar when the messenger came. Telling him to ride back as quickly as possible and say that I was coming, I busied myself with a few important matters which had to be attended to, as I might be absent for some hours, and then I ordered my favourite mare, Princess, to be saddled.

I set off from Brinton soon after seven. It was a November night, bitterly cold, dark as Erebus, while every now and then violent squalls swept the land from seaward. Princess knew the road well, so I gave the mare her head, and she went splendidly until we reached the ruined mill, when suddenly she wheeled round with such abruptness that, though I was a good horseman, I was nearly pitched from the saddle. At the same moment I was struck in the face by something that seemed cold and clammy. I thought at first it was a bat, but remembered that bats do not fly in November; an owl, but an owl would not have felt cold and clammy. However, I had little time for thought, as my attention had to be given to the mare. She seemed disposed to bolt, and was trembling with fear. Then, to my intense astonishment, I noticed what seemed to be a large luminous body lying on the roadway. It had the appearance of a corpse illuminated in some wonderful and mysterious manner. Had it not been for the fright of my mare I should have thought I was the victim of some optical delusion; but Princess evidently saw the weird object, and refused to pass it. So impressed was I with the idea that a real and substantial body was lying on the road, notwithstanding the strange unearthly light, that I slipped from the saddle, intending to investigate the matter, when suddenly it disappeared, and the cold and clammy something again struck me in the face.

I confess that for the first time in my life I felt a strange, nervous, unaccountable fear. Whatever the phenomenon was, there was the hard, stern fact to face that my horse had seen what I had seen, and was terrified. There was something strangely uncanny about the whole business, and when a terrific squall, bringing with it sleet and rain, came howling from the sea, it seemed to emphasise the uncanniness, and the ruined mill, looming gaunt and grim in the darkness, gave me an involuntary shudder. The next moment I was trying to laugh myself out of my nervousness. “Princess and I”, I mentally argued, “have been the victims of some atmospheric delusion.” That was all very well, but the something cold and clammy that struck me in the face, and which may have struck the mare in the face also, was no atmospheric delusion. With an alacrity I did not often display, I sprang into the saddle, spoke some encouraging words to the mare, for she was still trembling, and when she bounded forward, and the haunted mill was behind me, I experienced a positive sense of relief.

I found my patient at High Lea in a very bad way. He was suffering from an attack of apoplexy, and though I used all my skill on his behalf he passed away towards midnight. His wife very kindly offered me a bed for the night, but as I had important matters to attend to early in the morning I declined the hospitality. It was half-past twelve when I left the house on my return journey. The incident by the haunted mill had been put out of my head by the case I had been called upon to attend, but as I mounted my mare the groom, who had brought her round from the stable, said, “It be a bad night, doctor, for riding; the kind o’ night when dead things come out o’ their graves.”

I laughed, and replied:

“Tom, lad, I am surprised to hear you talk such rubbish. I thought you had more sense than that.”

“Well, I tell’ee what, doctor; if I had to ride to Brinton tonight I’d go by the cliffs and chance being drowned, rather than pass yon old mill.”

These words for the moment unnerved me, and I honestly confess that I resolved to go by the cliffs, dangerous as the road was in the dark. Nevertheless, I laughed at Tom’s fears, and ridiculed him, though when I left the squire’s grounds I turned the mare’s head towards the cliffs, In a few minutes I was ridiculing myself.

“John Patmore Lindsay,” I mentally exclaimed, “you are a fool. All your life you have been ridiculing stories of the supernatural, and now, at your time of life, are you going to allow yourself to be frightened by a bogey? Shame on you.”

I bucked up, grew bold, and thereupon altered my course, and got into the high road again.

There had been a slight improvement in the weather. It had ceased to rain, but the wind had settled down into a steady gale, and screeched and screamed over the moorland with a demoniacal fury. The darkness, however, was not so intense as it was, and a star here and there was visible through the torn clouds. But it was an eerie sort of night, and I was strangely impressed with a sense of my loneliness. It was absolutely unusual for me to feel like this, and I suggested to myself that my nerves were a little unstrung by overwork and the anxiety the squire’s illness had caused me. And so I rode on, bowing my head to the storm, while the mare stepped out well, and I anticipated that in little more than half an hour I should be snug in bed. As we got abreast of the haunted mill the mare once more gibbed, and all but threw me, and again I was struck in the face by the cold clammy something.

It almost think my hair rose on end as I observed that the illuminated corpse was lying in the roadway again; but now it appeared to be surrounded by a lake of blood. It was the most horrible sight that ever human eyes looked upon. I tried to urge Princess forward, but she was stricken with terror, and, wheeling right round, was setting off towards High Lea again. But once more I was struck in the face by the invisible something, and its coldness and clamminess made me shudder, while there in front of us lay the corpse in the pool of blood. The mare reared and plunged, but I got her head round, determining to make a wild gallop for Brinton and leave the horrors of the haunted mill behind. But the corpse was again in front of us, and I shrank back almost appalled as the something once more touched my face.

I cannot hope to describe what my feelings were at this supreme moment. I don’t believe anything human could have daunted me; but I was confronted by a supernatural mystery that not only terrified me but the mare I was riding. Whichever way I turned, that awful, ghastly object confronted me, and the blow in the face was repeated again and again.

How long I endured the horrors of the situation I really don’t know. Possibly the time was measured by brief minutes. It seemed to me hours. At last my presence of mind returned. I dismounted, and reasoned with myself that, whatever the apparition was, it had some import. I soothed the mare by patting her neck and talking to her, and I determined then to try and find a solution of the mystery. But now a more wonderful thing happened. The corpse, which was still made visible by the unearthly light, rose straight up, and as it did so the blood seemed to flow away from it. The figure glided past me, and a sense of extraordinary coldness made me shiver. Slowly and gracefully the shining corpse glided up the rotting steps of the old mill, and disappeared through the doorway. No sooner had it gone than the mill itself seemed to glow with phosphorescent light, and to become transparent, and I beheld a sight that took my breath away. I am disposed to think that for some moments my brain became so numbed that insensibility ensued, for I am conscious of a blank. When the power of thought returned, I was still holding the bridle of the mare, and she was cropping the grass at her feet. The mill loomed blackly against the night sky. It had resumed its normal appearance again. The wind shrieked about it. The ragged scud raced through the heavens, and the air was filled with the sounds of the raging wind. At first I was inclined to doubt the evidence of my own senses. I tried to reason myself into a belief that my imagination had played me a trick; but I didn’t succeed, although the mystery was too profound for my fathoming. So I mounted the mare, urged her to her fastest pace, galloped into Brinton, and entered my house with a feeling of intense relief.

Thoroughly exhausted by the prolonged physical and mental strain I had endured, I speedily sank into a deep though troubled slumber as soon as I got into bed. I was unusually late in rising the next day. I found that I had no appetite for breakfast. Indeed, I felt ill and out of sorts; and, though I busied myself with my professional duties, I was haunted by the strange incidents of the preceding night. Never before in the whole course of my career had I been so impressed, so unnerved, and so dispirited. I wanted to believe that I was still as sceptical as ever, but it was no use. What I had seen might have been unearthly; but I had seen it, and it was no use trying to argue myself out of the fact. The result was, in the course of the afternoon I called on my old friend, Mr Goodyear, who was chief of the county constabulary. He was a strong-minded man, and, like myself, a hardened sceptic about all things that smacked of the supernatural.

“Goodyear,” I said, “I’m out of sorts, and I want you to humour a strange fancy I have. Bring one of your best men, and come with me to the haunted mill. But first let me exact from you a pledge of honour that, if our journey should result in nothing, you will keep the matter secret, as I am very sensitive to ridicule.”

He looked at me in amazement, and then, as he burst into a hearty laugh, exclaimed:

“I say, my friend, you are overworking yourself. It’s time you got a locum tenens, and took a holiday.”

I told him that I agreed with him; nevertheless, I begged him to humour me, and accompany me to the mill. At last he reluctantly consented to do so, and an hour later we drove out of the town in my dog-cart. There were four of us, as I took Peter, my groom, with me. We had provided ourselves with lanterns, but Goodyear’s man and Peter knew nothing of the object of our journey.

When we got abreast of the mill I drew up, and giving the reins to Peter, I alighted, and Goodyear did the same. Taking him on one side, I said, “I have had a vision, and unless I am the victim of incipient madness we shall find a dead body in the mill.”

The light of the dog-cart was shining full on his face, and I saw the expression of alarm that my words brought.

“Look here, old chap,” he said in a cheery, kindly way, as he put his arm through mine, “you are not going into that mill, but straight home again. Come, now, get into the cart, and don’t let’s have any more of this nonsense.”

I felt disposed to yield to him, and had actually placed my foot on the step to mount, when I staggered back and exclaimed:

“My God! am I going mad, or is this a reality?”

Once again I had been struck in the face by the cold clammy something; and I saw Goodyear suddenly clap his hand to his face as he cried out – “Hullo, what the deuce is that?”

“Aha,” I exclaimed exultantly, for I no longer thought my brain was giving way, “you have felt it too?”

“Well, something cold and nasty-like struck me in the face. A bat, I expect. Confound ’em.”

“Bats don’t fly at this time of the year,” I replied.

“By Jove, no more they do.”

I approached him, and said in a low tone:

“Goodyear, this is a mystery beyond our solving. I am resolved to go into that mill.”

He was a brave man, though for a moment or two he hesitated; but on my insisting he consented to humour me, and so we lit the lantern, and leaving the groom in charge of the horse and trap, I, Goodyear, and his man made our way with difficulty up the rotting steps, which were slimy and sodden with wet. As we entered the mill an extraordinary scene of desolation and ruin met our gaze as we flashed the light of the lantern about. In places the floor had broken away, leaving yawning chasms of blackness. From the mouldering rafters hung huge festoons of cobwebs. The accumulated dust and dampness of years had given them the appearance of cords. And oh, how the wind moaned eerily through the rifts and crannies and broken windows! We advanced gingerly, for the floor was so rotten we were afraid it would crumble beneath our feet.

My companions were a little bewildered, I think, and were evidently at a loss to know what we had come there for. But some strange feeling impelled me to seek for something; though if I had been asked to define that something, for the life of me I could not have done it. Forward I went, however, taking the lead, and holding the lantern above my head so that its rays might fall afar. But they revealed nothing save the rotting floor and slimy walls. A ladder led to the upper storey, and I expressed my intention of mounting it. Goodyear tried to dissuade me, but I was resolute, and led the way. The ladder was so creaky and fragile that it was not safe for more than one to be on it at a time. When I reached the second floor and drew myself up through the trap, I am absolutely certain I heard a sigh. As I turned the lantern round so that its light might sweep every hole and corner of the place, I noticed what seemed to be a sack lying in a corner. I approached and touched it with my foot, and drew back in alarm, for touch and sound told me it contained neither corn nor chaff. I waited until my companions had joined me. Then I said to Goodyear, “Unless I am mistaken there is something dreadful in that sack.”

He stooped and, whipping out his knife, cut the string which fastened up the mouth of the sack, and revealed a human skull with the hair and shrivelled mummified flesh still adhering to it.

“Great heavens!” he exclaimed, “here is a human body.”

We held a hurried conversation, and decided to leave the ghastly thing undisturbed until the morrow. So we scuttled down as fast as we could, and went home. I did not return to the mill again myself. My part had been played. Investigation made it absolutely certain that the mouldering remains were those of poor Charley Royce, and it was no less absolutely certain that he had been foully murdered. For not only was there a bullet-hole in the skull but his throat had been cut. It was murder, horrible and damnable. The verdict of the coroner’s jury pronounced it murder, but there was no evidence to prove who had done the deed. Circumstances, however, pointed to Charley’s rival, Silas Hartrop. Was it a guilty conscience that drove him to drink? And did the Furies who avenge such deeds impel him on that dark and stormy night in the North Sea to end the torture of his accursed earthly life? Who can tell?

LUELLA MILLER

Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman

1902

Close to the village street stood the one-storey house in which Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt. She had been dead for years, yet there were those in the village who, in spite of the clearer light which comes on a vantage-point from a long-past danger, half believed in the tale which they had heard from their childhood. In their hearts, although they scarcely would have owned it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied fear of their ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella Miller. Young people even would stare with a shudder at the old house as they passed, and children never played around it as was their wont around an untenanted building. Not a window in the old Miller house was broken: the panes reflected the morning sunlight in patches of emerald and blue, and the latch of the sagging front door was never lifted, although no bolt secured it.

Since Luella Miller had been carried out of it, the house had had no tenant except one friendless old soul who had no choice between that and the far-off shelter of the open sky. This old woman, who had survived her kindred and friends, lived in the house one week, then one morning no smoke came out of the chimney, and a body of neighbours, a score strong, entered and found her dead in her bed. There were dark whispers as to the cause of her death, and there were those who testified to an expression of fear so exalted that it showed forth the state of the departing soul upon the dead face. The old woman had been hale and hearty when she entered the house, and in seven days she was dead; it seemed that she had fallen a victim to some uncanny power. The minister talked in the pulpit with covert severity against the sin of superstition; still the belief prevailed. Not a soul in the village but would have chosen the almshouse rather than that dwelling. No vagrant, if he heard the tale, would seek shelter beneath that old roof, unhallowed by nearly half a century of superstitious fear.

There was only one person in the village who had actually known Luella Miller. That person was a woman well over eighty, but a marvel of vitality and unextinct youth. Straight as an arrow, with the spring of one recently let loose from the bow of life, she moved about the streets, and she always went to church, rain or shine. She had never married, and had lived alone for years in a house across the road from Luella Miller’s.

This woman had none of the garrulousness of age, but never in all her life had she ever held her tongue for any will save her own, and she never spared the truth when she essayed to present it. She it was who bore testimony to the life, evil, though possibly wittingly or designedly so, of Luella Miller, and to her personal appearance. When this old woman spoke – and she had the gift of description, although her thoughts were clothed in the rude vernacular of her native village – one could seem to see Luella Miller as she had really looked. According to this woman, Lydia Anderson by name, Luella Miller had been a beauty of a type rather unusual in New England. She had been a slight, pliant sort of creature, as ready with a strong yielding to fate and as unbreakable as a willow. She had glimmering lengths of straight, fair hair, which she wore softly looped round a long, lovely face. She had blue eyes full of soft pleading, little slender, clinging hands, and a wonderful grace of motion and attitude.

—  —  —  —

Luella Miller used to sit in a way nobody else could if they sat up and studied a week of Sundays, said Lydia Anderson, and it was a sight to see her walk. If one of them willows over there on the edge of the brook could start up and get its roots free of the ground, and move off, it would go just the way Luella Miller used to. She had a green shot silk she used to wear, too, and a hat with green ribbon streamers, and a lace veil blowing across her face and out sideways, and a green ribbon flyin’ from her waist. That was what she came out bride in when she married Erastus Miller. Her name before she was married was Hill. There was always a sight of “l’s” in her name, married or single. Erastus Miller was good lookin’, too, better lookin’ than Luella. Sometimes I used to think that Luella wa’n’t so handsome after all. Erastus just about worshipped her. I used to know him pretty well. He lived next door to me, and we went to school together. Folks used to say he was waitin’ on me, but he wa’n’t. I never thought he was except once or twice when he said things that some girls might have suspected meant somethin’. That was before Luella came here to teach the district school. It was funny how she came to get it, for folks said she hadn’t any education, and that one of the big girls, Lottie Henderson, used to do all the teachin’ for her, while she sat back and did embroidery work on a cambric pocket-handkerchief. Lottie Henderson was a real smart girl, a splendid scholar, and she just set her eyes by Luella, as all the girls did. Lottie would have made a real smart woman, but she died when Luella had been here about a year – just faded away and died: nobody knew what ailed her. She dragged herself to that schoolhouse and helped Luella teach till the very last minute. The committee all knew how Luella didn’t do much of the work herself, but they winked at it. It wa’n’t long after Lottie died that Erastus married her. I always thought he hurried it up because she wa’n’t fit to teach. One of the big boys used to help her after Lottie died, but he hadn’t much government, and the school didn’t do very well, and Luella might have had to give it up, for the committee couldn’t have shut their eyes to things much longer. The boy that helped her was a real honest, innocent sort of fellow, and he was a good scholar, too. Folks said he overstudied, and that was the reason he was took crazy the year after Luella married, but I don’t know. And I don’t know what made Erastus Miller go into consumption of the blood the year after he was married: consumption wa’n’t in his family. He just grew weaker and weaker, and went almost bent double when he tried to wait on Luella, and he spoke feeble, like an old man. He worked terrible hard till the last trying to save up a little to leave Luella. I’ve seen him out in the worst storms on a wood-sled – he used to cut and sell wood – and he was hunched up on top lookin’ more dead than alive. Once I couldn’t stand it: I went over and helped him pitch some wood on the cart – I was always strong in my arms. I wouldn’t stop for all he told me to, and I guess he was glad enough for the help. That was only a week before he died. He fell on the kitchen floor while he was gettin’ breakfast. He always got the breakfast and let Luella lay abed. He did all the sweepin’ and the washin’ and the ironin’ and most of the cookin’. He couldn’t bear to have Luella lift her finger, and she let him do for her. She lived like a queen for all the work she did. She didn’t even do her sewin’. She said it made her shoulder ache to sew, and poor Erastus’s sister Lily used to do all her sewin’. She said it made her shoulder ache to sew, and poor Erastus’s sister Lily used to do all her sewin’. She wa’n’t able to, either; she was never strong in her back, but she did it beautifully. She had to, to suit Luella, she was so dreadful particular. I never saw anythin’ like the fagottin’ and hemstitchin’ that Lily Miller did for Luella. She made all Luella’s weddin’ outfit, and that green silk dress, after Maria Babbit cut it. Maria she cut it for nothin’, and she did a lot more cuttin’ and fittin’ for nothin’ for Luella, too. Lily Miller went to live with Luella after Erastus died. She gave up her home, though she was real attached to it and wa’n’t a mite afraid to stay alone. She rented it and she went to live with Luella right away after the funeral.

—  —  —  —

Then this old woman, Lydia Anderson, who remembered Luella Miller, would go on to relate the story of Lily Miller. It seemed that on the removal of Lily Miller to the house of her dead brother, to live with his widow, the village people first began to talk. This Lily Miller had been hardly past her first youth, and a most robust and blooming woman, rosy-cheeked, with curls of strong, black hair overshadowing round, candid temples and bright dark eyes. It was not six months after she had taken up her residence with her sister-in-law that her rosy colour faded and her pretty curves became wan hollows. White shadows began to show in the black rings of her hair, and the light died out of her eyes, her features sharpened, and there were pathetic lines at her mouth, which yet wore always an expression of utter sweetness and even happiness. She was devoted to her sister; there was no doubt that she loved her with her whole heart, and was perfectly content in her service. It was her sole anxiety lest she should die and leave her alone.

—  —  —  —

The way Lily Miller used to talk about Luella was enough to make you mad and enough to make you cry, said Lydia Anderson. I’ve been in there sometimes toward the last when she was too feeble to cook and carried her some blanc-mange or custard – somethin’ I thought she might relish, and she’d thank me, and when I asked her how she was, say she felt better than she did yesterday, and asked me if I didn’t think she looked better, dreadful pitiful, and say poor Luella had an awful time takin’ care of her and doin’ the work – she wa’n’t strong enough to do anythin’ – when all the time Luella wa’n’t liftin’ her finger and poor Lily didn’t get any care except what the neighbours gave her, and Luella eat up everythin’ that was carried in for Lily. I had it real straight that she did. Luella used to just sit and cry and do nothin’. She did act real fond of Lily, and she pined away considerable, too. There was those that thought she’d go into a decline herself. But after Lily died, her Aunt Abby Mixter came, and then Luella picked up and grew as fat and rosy as ever. But poor Aunt Abby begun to droop just the way Lily had, and I guess somebody wrote to her married daughter, Mrs. Sam Abbot, who lived in Barre, for she wrote her mother that she must leave right away and come and make her a visit, but Aunt Abby wouldn’t go. I can see her now. She was a real good-lookin’ woman, tall and large, with a big, square face and a high forehead that looked of itself kind of benevolent and good. She just tended out on Luella as if she had been a baby, and when her married daughter sent for her she wouldn’t stir one inch. She’d always thought a lot of her daughter, too, but she said Luella needed her and her married daughter didn’t. Her daughter kept writin’ and writin’, but it didn’t do any good. Finally she came, and when she saw how bad her mother looked, she broke down and cried and all but went on her knees to have her come away. She spoke her mind out to Luella, too. She told her that she’d killed her husband and everybody that had anythin’ to do with her, and she’d thank her to leave her mother alone. Luella went into hysterics, and Aunt Abby was so frightened that she called me after her daughter went. Mrs. Sam Abbot she went away fairly cryin’ out loud in the buggy, the neighbours heard her, and well she might, for she never saw her mother again alive. I went in that night when Aunt Abby called for me, standin’ in the door with her little green-checked shawl over her head. I can see her now. “Do come over here, Miss Anderson,” she sang out, kind of gasping for breath. I didn’t stop for anythin’. I put over as fast as I could, and when I got there, there was Luella laughin’ and cryin’ all together, and Aunt Abby trying to hush her, and all the time she herself was white as a sheet and shakin’ so she could hardly stand. “For the land sakes, Mrs. Mixter,” says I, “you look worse than she does. You ain’t fit to be up out of your bed.”

“Oh, there ain’t anythin’ the matter with me,” says she. Then she went on talkin’ to Luella. “There, there, don’t, don’t, poor little lamb,” says she. “Aunt Abby is here. She ain’t goin’ away and leave you. Don’t, poor little lamb.”

“Do leave her with me, Mrs. Mixter, and you get back to bed,” says I, for Aunt Abby had been layin’ down considerable lately, though somehow she contrived to do the work.

“I’m well enough,” says she. “Don’t you think she had better have the doctor, Miss Anderson?”

“The doctor,” says I, “I think you had better have the doctor. I think you need him much worse than some folks I could mention.” And I looked right straight at Luella Miller laughin’ and cryin’ and goin’ on as if she was the centre of all creation. All the time she was actin’ so – seemed as if she was too sick to sense anythin’ – she was keepin’ a sharp lookout as to how we took it out of the corner of one eye. I see her. You could never cheat me about Luella Miller. Finally I got real mad and I run home and I got a bottle of valerian I had, and I poured some boilin’ hot water on a handful of catnip, and I mixed up that catnip tea with most half a wineglass of valerian, and I went with it over to Luella’s. I marched right up to Luella, a-holdin’ out of that cup, all smokin’. “Now,” says I, “Luella Miller, you swaller this!”

“What is – what is it, oh, what is it?” she sort of screeches out. Then she goes off a-laughin’ enough to kill.

“Poor lamb, poor little lamb,” says Aunt Abby, standin’ over her, all kind of tottery, and tryin’ to bathe her head with camphor.

“You swaller this right down,” says I. And I didn’t waste any ceremony. I just took hold of Luella Miller’s chin and I tipped her head back, and I caught her mouth open with laughin’, and I clapped that cup to her lips, and I fairly hollered at her: “Swaller, swaller, swaller!” and she gulped it right down. She had to, and I guess it did her good. Anyhow, she stopped cryin’ and laughin’ and let me put her to bed, and she went to sleep like a baby inside of half an hour. That was more than poor Aunt Abby did. She lay awake all that night and I stayed with her, though she tried not to have me; said she wa’n’t sick enough for watchers. But I stayed, and I made some good cornmeal gruel and I fed her a teaspoon every little while all night long. It seemed to me as if she was jest dyin’ from bein’ all wore out. In the mornin’ as soon as it was light I run over to the Bisbees and sent Johnny Bisbee for the doctor. I told him to tell the doctor to hurry, and he come pretty quick. Poor Aunt Abby didn’t seem to know much of anythin’ when he got there. You couldn’t hardly tell she breathed, she was so used up. When the doctor had gone, Luella came into the room lookin’ like a baby in her ruffled nightgown. I can see her now. Her eyes were as blue and her face all pink and white like a blossom, and she looked at Aunt Abby in the bed sort of innocent and surprised. “Why,” says she, “Aunt Abby ain’t got up yet?”

“No, she ain’t,” says I, pretty short.

“I thought I didn’t smell the coffee,” says Luella.

“Coffee,” says I. “I guess if you have coffee this mornin’ you’ll make it yourself.”

“I never made the coffee in all my life,” says she, dreadful astonished. “Erastus always made the coffee as long as he lived, and then Lily she made it, and then Aunt Abby made it. I don’t believe I can make the coffee, Miss Anderson.”

“You can make it or go without, jest as you please,” says I.

“Ain’t Aunt Abby goin’ to get up?” says she.

“I guess she won’t get up,” says I, “sick as she is.” I was gettin’ madder and madder. There was somethin’ about that little pink-and-white thing standin’ there and talkin’ about coffee, when she had killed so many better folks than she was, and had jest killed another, that made me feel ’most as if I wished somebody would up and kill her before she had a chance to do any more harm.

“Is Aunt Abby sick?” says Luella, as if she was sort of aggrieved and injured.

“Yes,” says I, “she’s sick, and she’s goin’ to die, and then you’ll be left alone, and you’ll have to do for yourself and wait on yourself, or do without things.” I don’t know but I was sort of hard, but it was the truth, and if I was any harder than Luella Miller had been I’ll give up. I ain’t never been sorry that I said it. Well, Luella, she up and had hysterics again at that, and I jest let her have ’em. All I did was to bundle her into the room on the other side of the entry where Aunt Abby couldn’t hear her, if she wa’n’t past it – I don’t know but she was – and set her down hard in a chair and told her not to come back into the other room, and she minded. She had her hysterics in there till she got tired. When she found out that nobody was comin’ to coddle her and do for her she stopped. At least I suppose she did. I had all I could do with poor Aunt Abby tryin’ to keep the breath of life in her. The doctor had told me that she was dreadul low, and give me some very strong medicine to give to her in drops real often, and told me real particular about the nourishment. Well, I did as he told me real faithful till she wa’n’t able to swaller any longer. Then I had her daughter sent for. I had begun to realize that she wouldn’t last any time at all. I hadn’t realized it before, though I spoke to Luella the way I did. The doctor he came, and Mrs. Sam Abbot, but when she got there it was too late; her mother was dead. Aunt Abby’s daughter just give one look at her mother layin’ there, then she turned sort of sharp and sudden and looked at me.

“Where is she?” says she, and I knew she meant Luella.

“She’s out in the kitchen,” says I. “She’s too nervous to see folks die. She’s afraid it will make her sick.”

The Doctor he speaks up then. He was a young man. Old Doctor Park had died the year before, and this was a young fellow just out of college. “Mrs. Miller is not strong,” says he, kind of severe, “and she is quite right in not agitating herself.”

“You are another, young man; she’s got her pretty claw on you,” thinks I, but I didn’t say anythin’ to him. I just said over to Mrs. Sam Abbot that Luella was in the kitchen, and Mrs Sam Abbot she went out there, and I went, too, and I never heard anythin’ like the way she talked to Luella Miller. I felt pretty hard to Luella myself, but this was more than I ever would have dared to say. Luella she was too scared to go into hysterics. She jest flopped. She seemed to jest shrink away to nothin’ in that kitchen chair, with Mrs. Sam Abbot standin’ over her and talkin’ and tellin’ her the truth. I guess the truth was most too much for her and no mistake, because Luella presently actually did faint away, and there wa’n’t any sham about it, the way I always suspected there was about them hysterics. She fainted dead away and we had to lay her flat on the floor, and the Doctor he came runnin’ out and he said somethin’ about a weak heart dreadful fierce to Mrs. Sam Abbot, but she wa’n’t a mite scared. She faced him jest as white as even Luella was layin’ there lookin’ like death and the Doctor feelin’ of her pulse.

“Weak heart,” says she, “weak heart; weak fiddlesticks! There ain’t nothin’ weak about that woman. She’s got strength enough to hang onto other folks till she kills ’em. Weak? It was my poor mother that was weak: this woman killed her as sure as if she had taken a knife to her.”

But the Doctor he didn’t pay much attention. He was bendin’ over Luella layin’ there with her yellow hair all streamin’ and her pretty pink-and-white face all pale, and her blue eyes like stars gone out, and he was holdin’ onto her hand and smoothin’ her forehead, and tellin’ me to get the brandy in Aunt Abby’s room, and I was sure as I wanted to be that Luella had got somebody else to hang onto, now Aunt Abby was gone, and I thought of poor Erastus Miller, and I sort of pitied the poor young Doctor, led away by a pretty face, and I made up my mind I’d see what I could do.

I waited till Aunt Abby had been dead and buried about a month, and the Doctor was goin’ to see Luella steady and folks were beginnin’ to talk; then one evenin’, when I knew the Doctor had been called out of town and wouldn’t be round, I went over to Luella’s. I found her all dressed up in a blue muslin with white polka dots on it, and her hair curled jest as pretty, and there wa’n’t a young girl in the place could compare with her. There was somethin’ about Luella Miller seemed to draw the heart right out of you, but she didn’t draw it out of me. She was settin’ rocking in the chair by her sittin’-room window, and Maria Brown had gone home. Maria Brown had been in to help her, or rather to do the work, for Luella wa’n’t helped when she didn’t do anythin’. Maria Brown was real capable and she didn’t have any ties; she wa’n’t married, and lived alone, so she’d offered. I couldn’t see why she should do the work any more than Luella; she wa’n’t any too strong; but she seemed to think she could and Luella seemed to think so, too, so she went over and did all the work – washed, and ironed, and baked, while Luella sat and rocked. Maria didn’t live long afterward. She began to fade away just the same fashion the others had. Well, she was warned, but she acted real mad when folks said anythin’: said Luella was a poor, abused woman, too delicate to help herself, and they’d ought to be ashamed, and if she died helpin’ them that couldn’t help themselves she would – and she did.

“I s’pose Maria has gone home,” says I to Luella, when I had gone in and sat down opposite her.

“Yes, Maria went half an hour ago, after she had got supper and washed the dishes,” says Luella, in her pretty way.

“I suppose she has got a lot of work to do in her own house tonight,” says I, kind of bitter, but that was all thrown away on Luella Miller. It seemed to her right that other folks that wa’n’t any better able than she was herself should wait on her, and she couldn’t get it through her head that anybody should think it wa’n’t right.

“Yes,” says Luella, real sweet and pretty, “yes, she said she had to do her washin’ tonight. She has let it go for a fortnight along of comin’ over here.”

“Why don’t she stay home and do her washin’ instead of comin’ over here and doin’ your work, when you are just as well able, and enough sight more so, than she is to do it?” says I.

Then Luella she looked at me like a baby who has a rattle shook at it. She sort of laughed as innocent as you please. “Oh, I can’t do the work myself, Miss Anderson,” says she. “I never did. Maria has to do it.”

Then I spoke out: “Has to do it!” says I. “Has to do it! She don’t have to do it, either. Maria Brown has her own home and enough to live on. She ain’t beholden to you to come over here and slave for you and kill herself.”

Luella she jest set and stared at me for all the world like a doll-baby that was so abused that it was comin’ to life.

“Yes,” says I, “she’s killin’ herself. She’s goin’ to die just the way Erastus did, and Lily, and your Aunt Abby. You’re killin’ her jest as you did them. I don’t know what there is about you, but you seem to bring a curse,” says I. “You kill everybody that is fool enough to care anythin’ about you and do for you.”

She stared at me and she was pretty pale.

“And Maria ain’t the only one you’re goin’ to kill,” says I. “You’re goin’ to kill Doctor Malcom before you’re done with him.”

Then a red colour came flamin’ all over her face. “I ain’t goin’ to kill him, either,” says she, and she begun to cry.

“Yes, you be!” says I. The I spoke as I had never spoke before. You see, I felt it on account of Erastus. I told her that she hadn’t any business to think of another man after she’d been married to one that had died for her: that she was a dreadful woman; and she was, that’s true enough, but sometimes I have wondered lately if she knew it – if she wa’n’t like a baby with scissors in its hand cuttin’ everybody without knowin’ what it was doing.

Luella she kept gettin’ paler and paler, and she never took her eyes off my face. There was somethin’ awful about the way she looked at me and never spoke one word. After awhile I quit talkin’ and I went home. I watched that night, but her lamp went out before nine o’clock, and when Doctor Malcom came drivin’ past and sort of slowed up he see there wa’n’t any light and he drove along. I saw her sort of shy out of meetin’ the next Sunday, too, so he shouldn’t go home with her, and I begun to think mebbe she did have some conscience after all. It was only a week after that that Maria Brown died – sort of sudden at the last, though everybody had seen it was comin’. Well, then there was a good deal of feelin’ and pretty dark whispers. Folks said the days of witchcraft had come again, and they were pretty shy of Luella. She acted sort of offish to the Doctor and he didn’t go there, and there wa’n’t anybody to do anythin’ for her. I don’t know how she did get along. I wouldn’t go in there and offer to help her – not because I was afraid of dyin’ like the rest, but I thought she was just as well able to do her own work as I was to do it for her, and I thought it was about time that she did it and stopped killin’ other folks. But it wa’n’t very long before folks began to say that Luella herself was goin’ into a decline jest the way her husband, and Lily, and Aunt Abby and the others had, and I saw myself that she looked pretty bad. I used to see her goin’ past from the store with a bundle as if she could hardly crawl, but I remembered how Erastus used to wait and ’tend when he couldn’t hardly put one foot before the other, and I didn’t go out to help her.

But at last one afternoon I saw the Doctor come drivin’ up like mad with his medicine chest, and Mrs. Babbit came in after supper and said that Luella was real sick.

“I’d offer to go in and nurse her,” says she, “but I’ve got my children to consider, and mebbe it ain’t true what they say, but it’s queer how many folks that have done for her have died.”

I didn’t say anythin’, but I considered how she had been Erastus’s wife and how he had set his eyes by her, and I made up my mind to go in the next mornin’, unless she was better, and see what I could do; but the next mornin’ I see her at the window, and pretty soon she came steppin’ out as spry as you please, and a little while afterward Mrs. Babbit came in and told me that the Doctor had got a girl from out of town, a Sarah Jones, to come there, and she said she was pretty sure that the Doctor was goin’ to marry Luella.

I saw him kiss her in the door that night myself, and I knew it was true. The woman came that afternoon, and the way she flew around was a caution. I don’t believe Luella had swept since Maria died. She swept and dusted, and washed and ironed; wet clothes and dusters and carpets were flyin’ over there all day, and every time Luella set her foot out when the Doctor wa’n’t there there was that Sarah Jones helpin’ of her up and down the steps, as if she hadn’t learned to walk.

Well, everybody knew that Luella and the Doctor were goin’ to be married, but it wa’n’t long before they began to talk about his lookin’ so poorly, jest as they had about the others; and they talked about Sarah Jones, too.

Well, the Doctor did die, and he wanted to be married first, so as to leave what little he had to Luella, but he died before the minister could get there, and Sarah Jones died a week afterward.

Well, that wound up everything for Luella Miller. Not another soul in the whole town would lift a finger for her. There got to be a sort of panic. Then she began to droop in good earnest. She used to have to go to the store herself, for Mrs. Babbit was afraid to let Tommy go for her, and I’ve seen her goin’ past and stoppin’ every two or three steps to rest. Well, I stood it as long as I could, but one day I see her comin’ with her arms full and stoppin’ to lean against the Babbit fence, and I run out and took her bundles and carried them to her house. Then I went home and never spoke one word to her though she called after me dreadful kind of pitiful. Well, that night I was taken sick with a chill, and I was sick as I wanted to be for two weeks. Mrs. Babbit had seen me run out to help Luella and she came in and told me I was goin’ to die on account of it. I didn’t know whether I was or not, but I considered I had done right by Erastus’s wife.

That last two weeks Luella she had a dreadful hard time, I guess. She was pretty sick, and as near as I could make out nobody dared go near her. I don’t know as she was really needin’ anythin’ very much, for there was enough to eat in her house and it was warm weather, and she made out to cook a little flour gruel every day, I know, but I guess she had a hard time, she that had been so petted and done for all her life.

When I got so I could go out, I went over there one morning. Mrs. Babbit had just come in to say she hadn’t seen any smoke and she didn’t know but it was somebody’s duty to go in, but she couldn’t help thinkin’ of her children, and I got right up, though I hadn’t been out of the house for two weeks, and I went in there, and Luella she was layin’ on the bed, and she was dyin’.

She lasted all that day and into the night. But I sat there after the new doctor had gone away. Nobody else dared to go there. It was about midnight that I left her for a minute to run home and get some medicine I had been takin’, for I begun to feel rather bad.

It was a full moon that night, and just as I started out of my door to cross the street back to Luella’s, I stopped short, for I saw something.

Lydia Anderson at this juncture always said with a certain defiance that she did not expect to be believed, and then proceeded in a hushed voice:

I saw what I saw, and I know I saw it, and I will swear on my death bed that I saw it. I saw Luella Miller and Erastus Miller, and Lily, and Aunt Abby, and Maria, and the Doctor, and Sarah, all goin’ out of her door, and all but Luella shone white in the moonlight, and they were all helpin’ her along till she seemed to fairly fly in the midst of them. Then it all disappeared. I stood a minute with my heart poundin’, then I went over there. I thought of goin’ for Mrs. Babbit, but I thought she’d be afraid. So I went alone, though I knew what had happened. Luella was layin’ real peaceful, dead on her bed.

—  —  —  —

This was the story that the old woman, Lydia Anderson, told, but the sequel was told by the people who survived her, and this is the tale which has become folklore in the village.

Lydia Anderson died when she was eighty-seven. She had continued wonderfully hale and hearty for one of her years until about two weeks before her death.

One bright moonlight evening she was sitting beside a window in her parlour when she made a sudden exclamation, and was out of the house and across the street before the neighbour who was taking care of her could stop her. She followed as fast as possible and found Lydia Anderson stretched on the ground before the door of Luella Miller’s deserted house, and she was quite dead.

The next night there was a red gleam of fire athwart the moonlight and the old house of Luella Miller was burned to the ground. Nothing is now left of it except a few old cellar stones and a lilac bush, and in summer a helpless trail of morning glories among the weeds, which might be considered emblematic of Luella herself.

A STRANGE GOLDFIELD

Guy Boothby

1904

Of course nine out of every ten intelligent persons will refuse to believe that there could be a grain of truth in the story I am now going to tell you. The tenth may have some small faith in my veracity, but what I think of his intelligence I am going to keep to myself.

In a certain portion of a certain Australian Colony two miners, when out prospecting in what was then, as now, one of the dreariest parts of the Island Continent, chanced upon a rich find. They applied to Government for the usual reward, and in less than a month three thousand people were settled on the Field. What privations they had to go through to get there, and the miseries they had to endure when the did reach their journey’s end, have only a remote bearing on this story, but they would make a big book.

I should explain that between Railhead and the Field was a stretch of country some three hundred miles in extent. It was badly watered, vilely grassed, and execrably timbered. What was even worse, a considerable portion of it was made up of red sand, and everybody who has been compelled to travel over that knows what it means. Yet these enthusiastic seekers after wealth pushed on, some on horse-back, some in bullock wagons, but the majority travelled on foot; the graves, and the skeletons of cattle belonging to those who had preceded them punctuating the route, and telling them what they might expect as they advanced.

That the Field did not prove a success is now a matter of history, but that same history, if you read between the lines, gives one some notion of what the life must have been like while it lasted. The water supply was entirely insufficient, provisions were bad and ruinously expensive; the men themselves were, as a rule, the roughest of the rough, while the less said about the majority of the women the better. Then typhoid stepped in and stalked like the Destroying Angel through the camp. Its inhabitants went down like sheep in a drought, and for the most part rose no more. Where there had been a lust of gold there was now panic, terror – every man feared that he might be the next to be attacked, and it was only the knowledge of those terrible three hundred miles that separated them from civilisation that kept many of them on the Field. The most thickly populated part was now the cemetery. Drink was the only solace, and under its influence such scenes were enacted as I dare not describe. As they heard of fresh deaths, men shook their fists at Heaven, and cursed the day when they first saw pick or shovel. Some, bolder than the rest, cleared out just as they stood; a few eventually reached civilisation, others perished in the desert. At last the Field was declared abandoned, and the dead were left to take their last long sleep, undisturbed by the clank of windlass or the blow of pick.

It would take too long to tell all the different reasons that combined to draw me out into that “most distressful country”. Let it suffice that our party consisted of a young Englishman named Spicer, a wily old Australian bushman named Matthews, and myself. We were better off than the unfortunate miners, inasmuch as we were travelling with camels, and our outfits were as perfect as money and experience could make them. The man who travels in any other fashion in that country is neither more nor less than a madman. For a month past we had been having a fairly rough time of it, and were then on our way south, where we had reason to believe rain had fallen, and, in consequence, grass was plentiful. It was towards evening when we came out of a gully in the ranges and had our first view of the deserted camp. We had no idea of its existence, and for this reason we pulled up our animals and stared at it in complete surprise. Then we pushed on again, wondering what on earth place we had chanced upon.

“This is all right,” said Spicer, with a chuckle. “We’re in luck. Grog shanties and stores, a bath, and perhaps girls.”

I shook my head.

“I can’t make it out,” I said. “What’s it doing out here?”

Matthews was looking at it under his hand, and, as I knew that he had been out in this direction on a previous occasion, I asked his opinion.

“It beats me,” he replied; “but if you ask me what I think I should say it’s Gurunya, the Field that was deserted some four or five years back.”

“Look here,” cried Spicer, who was riding a bit on our left, “what are all these things – graves, as I’m a living man. Here, let’s get out of this. There are hundreds of them and before I know where I am old Polyphemus here will be on his nose.”

What he said was correct – the ground over which we were riding was literally bestrewn with graves, some of which had rough, tumbledown head boards, others being destitute of all adornment. We turned away and moved on over safer ground in the direction of the Field itself. Such a pitiful sight I never want to see again. The tents and huts, in numerous cases, were still standing, while the claims gaped at us on every side like new-made graves. A bullock dray, weather-worn but still in excellent condition, stood in the main street outside a grog shanty whose sign-board, strange incongruity, bore the name of “The Killarney Hotel”. Nothing would suit Spicer but that he must dismount and go in to explore. He was not long away, and when he returned it was with a face as white as a sheet of paper.

“You never saw such a place,” he almost whispered. “All I want to do is to get out of it. There’s a skeleton on the floor in the back room with an empty rum bottle alongside it.”

He mounted, and, when his beast was on its feet once more, we went on our way. Not one of us was sorry when we had left the last claim behind us.

Half a mile or so from the Field the country begins to rise again. There is also a curious cliff away to the left, and, as it looked like being a likely place to find water, we resolved to camp there. We were within a hundred yards or so of this cliff when an exclamation from Spicer attracted my attention.

“Look!” he cried. “What’s that?”

I followed the direction in which he was pointing, and, to my surprise, saw the figure of a man running as if for his life among the rocks. I have said the figure of a man, but, as a matter of fact, had there been baboons in the Australian bush, I should have been inclined to have taken him for one.

) “This is a day of surprises,” I said. “Who can the fellow be? And what makes him act like that?”

We still continued to watch him as he proceeded on his erratic course along the base of the cliff – then he suddenly disappeared.

“Let’s get on to camp,” I said, “and then we’ll go after him and endeavour to settle matters a bit.”

Having selected a place we offsaddled and prepared our camp. By this time it was nearly dark, and it was very evident that, if we wanted to discover the man we had seen, it would be wise not to postpone the search too long. We accordingly strolled off in the direction he had taken, keeping a sharp look-out for any sign of him. Our search, however, was not successful. The fellow had disappeared without leaving a trace of his whereabouts behind him, and yet we were all certain that we had seen him. At length we returned to our camp for supper, completely mystified. As we ate our meal we discussed the problem and vowed that, on the morrow, we would renew the search. Then the full moon rose over the cliff, and the plain immediately became well–nigh as bright as day. I had lit my pipe and was stretching myself out upon my blankets when something induced me to look across at a big rock, some half-dozen paces from the fire. Peering round it, and evidently taking an absorbing interest in our doings, was the most extraordinary figure I have ever beheld. Shouting something to my companions, I sprang to my feet and dashed across at him. He saw me and fled. Old as he apparently was, he could run like a jack-rabbit, and, though I have the reputation of being fairly quick on my feet, I found that I had all my work cut out to catch him. Indeed, I am rather doubtful as to whether I should have done so at all had he not tripped and measured his length on the ground. Before he could get up I was on him.

“I’ve got you at last, my friend,” I said. “Now you just come along back to the camp, and let us have a look at you.”

In reply he snarled like a dog and I believe would have bitten me had I not held him off. My word, he was a creature, more animal than man, and the reek of him was worse than that of our camels. From what I could tell he must have been about sixty years of age – was below the middle height, had white eyebrows, white hair and a white beard. He was dressed partly in rags and partly in skins, and went barefooted like a black fellow. While I was overhauling him the others came up – whereupon we escorted him back to the camp.

“What wouldn’t Barnum give for him?” said Spicer. “You’re a beauty, my friend, and no mistake. What’s your name?”

The fellow only grunted in reply – then, seeing the pipes in our mouths, a curious change came over him, and he muttered something that resembled “Give me.”

“Wants a smoke,” interrupted Matthews. “Poor beggar’s been without for a long time, I reckon. Well, I’ve got an old pipe, so he can have a draw.”

He procured one from his pack saddle, filled it and handed it to the man, who snatched it greedily and began to puff away at it.

“How long have you been out here?” I asked, when he had squatted himself down alongside the fire.

“Don’t know,” he answered, this time plainly enough.

“Can’t you get back?” continued Matthews, who knew the nature of the country on the other side.

“Don’t want to,” was the other’s laconic reply. “Stay here.”

. I heard Spicer mutter, “Mad – mad as a March hare.”

We then tried to get out of him where he hailed from, but he had either forgotten or did not understand. Next we inquired how he managed to live. To this he answered readily enough, “Carnies.”

Now the carny is a lizard of the iguana type, and eaten raw would be by no means an appetizing dish. Then came the question that gives me my reason for telling this story. It was Spicer who put it.

“You must have a lonely time of it out here,” said the latter. “How do you manage for company?”

“There is the Field,” he said, “as sociable a Field as you’d find.”

“But the Field’s deserted, man,” I put in. “And has been for years.”

The old fellow shook his head.

“As sociable a Field as ever you saw,” he repeated. “There’s Sailor Dick and ’Frisco, Dick Johnson, Cockney Jim, and half a hundred of them. They’re taking it out powerful rich on the Golden South, so I heard when I was down at The Killarney, a while back.”

It was plain to us all that the old man was, as Spicer had said, as mad as a hatter. For some minutes he rambled on about the Field, talking rationally enough, I must confess – that is to say, it would have seemed rational enough if we hadn’t known the true facts of the case. At last he got on to his feet, saying, “Well, I must be going – they’ll be expecting me. It’s my shift on with Cockney Jim.”

“But you don’t work at night,” growled Matthews, from the other side of the fire.

“We work always,” the other replied. “If you don’t believe me, come and see for yourselves.”

“I wouldn’t go back to that place for anything,” said Spicer.

But I must confess that my curiosity had been aroused, and I determined to go, if only to see what this strange creature did when he got there. Matthews decided to accompany me, and, not wishing to be left alone, Spicer at length agreed to do the same. Without looking round, the old fellow led the way across the plain towards the Field. Of all the nocturnal excursions I have made in my life, that was certainly the most uncanny. Not once did our guide turn his head, but pushed on at a pace that gave us some trouble to keep up with him. It was only when we came to the first claim that he paused.

“Listen,” he said, “and you can hear the camp at work. Then you’ll believe me.”

We did listen, and as I live we could distinctly hear the rattling of sluice-boxes and cradles, the groaning of windlasses – in fact, the noise you hear on a goldfield at the busiest hour of the day. We moved a little closer, and, believe me or not, I swear to you I could see, or thought I could see, the shadowy forms of men moving about in that ghostly moonlight. Meanwhile the wind sighed across the plain, flapping what remained of the old tents and giving an additional touch of horror to the general desolation. I could hear Spicer’s teeth chattering behind me, and, for my own part, I felt as if my blood were turning to ice.

“That’s the claim, the Golden South, away to the right there,” said the old man, “and if you will come along with me, I’ll introduce you to my mates.”

But this was an honour we declined, and without hesitation. I wouldn’t have gone any further among those tents for the wealth of all the Indies.

“I’ve had enough of this,” said Spicer, and I can tell you I hardly recognised his voice. “Let’s get back to camp.”

By this time our guide had left us, and was making his way in the direction he had indicated. We could plainly hear him addressing imaginary people as he marched along. As for ourselves, we turned about and hurried back to our camp as fast as we could go.

Once there, the grog bottle was produced, and never did three men stand more in need of stimulants. Then we set to work to find some explanation of what we had seen, or had fancied we saw. But it was impossible. The wind might have rattled the old windlasses, but it could not be held accountable for those shadowy grey forms that had moved about among the claims.

“I give it up,” said Spicer, at last. “I know that I never want to see it again. What’s more, I vote that we clear out of here tomorrow morning.”

We all agreed, and then retired to our blankets, but for my part I do not mind confessing I scarcely slept a wink all night. The thought that that hideous old man might be hanging about the camp would alone be sufficient for that.

Next morning, as soon as it was light, we breakfasted, but, before we broke camp, Matthews and I set off along the cliff in an attempt to discover our acquaintance of the previous evening. Though, however, we searched high and low for upwards of an hour, no success rewarded us. By mutual consent we resolved not to look for him on the Field. When we returned to Spicer we placed such tobacco and stores as we could spare under the shadow of the big rock, where the Mystery would be likely to see them, then mounted our camels and resumed our journey, heartily glad to be on our way once more.

Gurunya Goldfield is a place I never desire to visit again. I don’t like its population.