A Book of Ghosts: 13
Author: Various authors
Date: 1840-12-31T15:00:00+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+70” or less, and in the USA

A BOOK OF GHOSTS
– 13 –

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 1841 ~ 1923. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- The Haunted House of Paddington  –1841
by Charles Ollier
(1788–1859)

- Walnut-Tree House  –1878
by Charlotte Riddell
(1832–1906)

- The Ghost of Charlotte Cray  –1883
by Florence Marryat
(1833–1899)

- The Devil’s Own  –1895
by Lilian Quiller-Couch
(1867–1941)

- The Devil’s Manuscript  –1899
by S. Levett-Yeats
(1858–1916)

- The Watcher by the Threshold  –1900
by John Buchan
(1875–1940)

- The Face in the Mirror  –1903
by Helen Mathers
(Ellen B. Mathews)
(1853–1920)

- The Screaming Skull  –1908
by F. Marion Crawford
(1854–1909)

- The Marble Child  –1910
by E(dith). Nesbit
(1858–1924)

- The Tarn  –1923
by Sir Hugh Walpole
(1884–1941)

THE HAUNTED HOUSE
OF PADDINGTON

Charles Ollier

1836

The old manor-house was now a gloomy ruin. It was surrounded by an old-fashioned, spacious garden, overgrown with weeds, but, in the drowsy and half-veiled light of an April dawn, looking almost as beautiful as if it had been kept in trim order. The gravel-walks were green with moss and grass, and the fruit-trees, trained against the wall, shot out a plenteous overgrowth of wild branches which hung unprofitably over the borders. A rank crop of thistles, bind-weed, and groundsel, choked the beds over which the slimy trace of slugs and snails shone in the horizontal gleam of the uprising sun. The noble elms, which stood about the lawn in groups, were the only objects that did not bear the melancholy evidence of neglect. All was silent, deserted, desolate.

Two men stood, in the silence of an April morning, contemplating the deserted scene. One of them appeared to know something of its history, and, yielding to the entreaty of his companion, related the following story:

Ten years ago, said he, there dwelt in this house a man of high repute for virtue and piety. He had no wife nor children, but he lived with much liberality, and kept many servants. He was constant in his attendance at church, and gladdened the heart of the neighbouring poor by the frequency of his alms-giving.

His fame among his neighbours was increased by his great hospitality. Scarcely a day passed without his entertaining some of them with feasts at his house, when his conversation was admired, his judgment appealed to as something more than ordinarily wise, his decisions considered final, and his jokes received with hearty laughter, according to the time-hallowed and dutiful practice of guests at the tables of rich men.

Nothing could exceed the costliness and rarity of this man’s wines, the lavish profusion of his plate, nor the splendour of his rooms – these very rooms! – which were decorated with the richest furniture, the most costly specimens of the Italian and Flemish schools of painting, and resounded nightly with the harmony of dainty madrigals. This text was lifted from another site--warning, copyrights may have been violated.

One summer evening, after a sumptuous dinner had been enjoyed by himself and a numerous party, the weather being very sultry, a proposal was made by the host that the wine and dessert should be taken to the lawn, and that the revelry should be prolonged under the shade of the leafy elms which stood about the garden in groups, as now you see them. The company accordingly adjourned thither, and great was the merriment beneath the green boughs which hung over the table in heavy masses, and loud the songs in the sweet air of evening.

Twilight came on; but still the happy revellers were loath to leave the spot, which seemed sacred to wine and music, and indolent enjoyment. The leaves which canopied them were motionless; even those which hung on the extreme point of the tenderest sprays, quivered not. One shining star, poised in the clear ether, seemed to look down with curious gaze on the jocund scene; and the soft west wind had breathed its last drowsy evening hymn. The calm, indeed, was so perfect that the master of the house ordered lights to be brought there where they sat, that the out-of-door carouse might be still enjoyed.

“Hang care!” exclaimed he. “This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant – let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance, and rouse the night-owl with a catch. I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices – a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon.”

Thus he spoke; but his merriment seemed forced and unnatural. A grievous change awaited him.

As one of the servants was proceeding from the house with a flambeau in his hand, to light the tapers already placed on the table, he saw, in the walk leading from the outer gate, a matron of lofty bearing, in widow’s weeds, whose skin, as the rays of the torch fell on it, looked white as a monumental effigy, and made a ghastly contrast with her black robe. Her face was like that of the grisly phantom, Death-in-Life; it was rigid and sunken; but her eyes glanced about from their hollow sockets with a restless motion, and her brow was knit as if in anger. A corpse-like infant was in her arms; and she paced with proud and stately tread towards the spot where the master of the house, apparently “Merry in heart, and filled with swelling wine,” was sitting amongst his jovial friends.

The servant shuddered as he beheld the strange intruder; but he, too, had partaken of the good cheer, and felt bolder than usual. Mustering up his courage, he faced the awful woman, and demanded her errand.

“I seek your master,” said she.

“He is engaged, and cannot be interrupted,” replied the man. “Ugh! turn your face from me – I like not your looks. You are enough to freeze one’s very blood.”

“Fool!” returned the woman. “Your master must see me.” And she pushed the servant aside.

The menial shivered at the touch of her hand, which was heavy and cold, like marble. He felt as if rooted to the spot; he could not move to follow her as she walked on to the scene of the banquet.

On arriving at the spot, she drew herself up beside the host, and stood there without uttering a word! He saw, and shook in every joint. The song ceased; the guests were speechless with amazement, and sat like petrifactions, bending their gaze one way towards the strange and solemn figure which confronted them.

“Why comest thou here?” at length demanded the rich man in low and gasping accents. “Vanish! Who opened the vault to let thee forth? Thou shouldst be a hundred miles away. Sink again into the earth! Hence, horrible thing! – delusion of hell! – dead creature! – ghost! – hence! What seekest thou? What can I do to keep thee in the grave? I will resign thy lands; to whom shall they be given? Thy child is dead. Who is now thy heir? Speak! and be invisible!”

The pale woman stooped with unseemly effort, as if an image of stone were to bend, and whispered something in the ear of her questioner, which made him tremble still more violently. Then beckoning him, she passed through the deepening twilight towards the house, while he, with bristling hair and faltering gait, followed her. The terror-stricken man, the gaunt woman, and white child, looked like three corpses moving in the heavy and uncertain shades of evening, against the order of nature.

After waiting an hour for their friend’s return, the guests, who had now recovered from their first panic, became impatient to solve the mystery, and determined to seek the owner of the house, and offer such comfort as his evident trepidation required. They accordingly directed their steps towards the room into which they were informed the woman and child, and their host had entered.

On approaching the door, piteous groans, and incoherent exclamations were heard; above which these words were plainly audible in a female voice: “Remember what I have said! Think of my slaughtered husband! A more terrible intruder will some night come to thy house! Thou shalt perish here and hereafter!”

Hearing these groans and these menaces, the party instantly burst into the room, followed by a servant with a light. The man, whose face was buried in his hands, was standing alone. But, as his friends gazed around in amazement, a shadow of the woman with the infant in her arms was seen to flicker on the wall, as if moved about uncouthly by a faint wind. By degrees it faded entirely away. No one knew how the stately widow herself had disappeared, nor by what means she had obtained admittance through the outer gate.

To the earnest inquiries of his friends the host would give no answer; and the party left the place perplexed with fearful thoughts. From that time no feasts were given in the manor house. The apartment where the secret interview took place, and which is to this day called “The Room of the Shadow,” was closed, and, it is said, has never since been opened. It is the chamber immediately above this, and is now the haunt of bats, and other night birds.

After having lived here several years in comparative solitude, a mortal sickness came upon the owner of the house. But, if his bodily sufferings were grievous to behold, the agony of his mind seemed tenfold greater, so that the friends who called to cheer him in his malady were amazed to see one of so pure a life (as they thought) given over to the torture of remorse. He felt that he must shortly appear before the Supreme Judge; and the anticipated terrors of the judgment were already upon his spirit. His countenance underwent many ghastly changes, and the sweat of dismal suffering poured in heavy beads from his face and breast.

The throes of his conscience were too strong to be any longer endured and hidden; and, summoning one or two of his neighbours to his bedside, he confessed many sins of which he had been guilty in another part of England; he had, he said, enriched himself by the ruin of widows and orphans; and, he added, that the accursed lust for gold had made him a murderer.

It was in vain that the pastor of the parish, who saw his bitter agony, strove to absolve him of his manifold crimes. He could not be comforted. His “works, and alms, and all the good endeavour” of the latter years of his life were of no avail. They were as chaff, and flew off from the weight of his transgressions. The vengeance of eternal fire haunted him while living, and he did not dare even to pray. “Alas! my friends,” said he, to those who besought him to lift up his voice in supplication to the Most High, “I have no heart to pray, for I am already condemned! Hell is even now in my soul, there to burn forever. Resign me, I pray you, to my lost condition, and to the fiends hovering around to seize me.”

The menace of the strange woman was now about to be fulfilled.

On the last night of this person’s miserable life, one of his neighbours, a benevolent and pious man, sat up with the expiring wretch by his bedside. He had for some time fallen into a state of stupor, being afraid to look any human being in time face, or even to open his eyes. He slept or seemed to sleep for a while; then suddenly arousing himself, he appeared to be in intolerable agitation of body and mind, and with an indescribable expression of countenance, shrieked out, “Oh the intolerable horrors of damnation!”

Midnight had now arrived. The servants were in bed, and no one was stirring in the house but the old nurse, and the friend who watched the last moments of the sufferer. All was in quiet profound as that of the sepulchre, when suddenly the sound of loud and impatient footsteps was heard in the room adjoining the forlorn man’s bed-chamber.

“What can that be?” said the nurse under her breath, and with an expression of ghastly alarm. “Hark! the noise continues!”

“Is anyone up in the house?” inquired the friend.

“No; besides, would a servant dare to tramp with such violence about the next room to that of his dying master?”

The gentleman snatched up a lamp, and went forth into the next chamber. It was empty! but still the footsteps sounded loudly as those of a person waiting in angry impatience.

Bewildered and aghast, the friend returned to the bedside of the wretch, and could not find utterance to tell the nurse what had been the result of his examination of the adjoining room.

“For the love of Heaven!” exclaimed the woman, “speak ! – tell me what you have seen in the next chamber. Who is there? Why do you look so pale? What has made you dumb? Hark! The noise of the footsteps grows louder and louder. Oh! how I wish I had never entered this accursed house – this house abhorred of God and man!”

Meanwhile the sound of the horrid footsteps grew not only louder, but quicker and more impatient.

The scene of their tramping was, after a time, changed. They approached the sick man’s room, and were heard – plainly heard – close by the bedside of the dying wretch, whose nurse and friend stared with speechless terror upon the floor, which sounded and shook as the invisible footfalls passed over it.

“Something is here – something terrible – in this very room, and close to us, though we cannot see it!” whispered the gentleman in panting accents to his companion. “Go upstairs – and call the servants – and let all in the house assemble here.”

“I dare not move,” exclaimed the trembling woman. “My brain – my brain! I am faint – I shall go mad! Let us fly from this place – the fiend is here. Help! help! In the name of the Almighty.”

“Be composed, I beseech you,” said the gentleman in a voice scarcely audible. “Recall your scattered senses. I too should be scared to death, did I not with a strong effort keep down the mad throbbings that torment me. Recollect our duty. We are Christians, and must not abandon the expiring man. God will protect us. Merciful Heaven!” he continued, with a frenzied glance into the shadowy recesses of the chamber – “listen! the noise is stronger than ever – those iron footsteps! – and still we cannot discern the cause! Go and bring some companions – some human faces – our own are transformed!”

The nurse, thus adjured, left the demon-haunted apartment with a visage white as snow; and the benevolent friend, whose spirits had been subdued by long watching in the chamber of death, and by witnessing the sick man’s agony and remorse, became, now that he was left alone, wild and frantic. Assuming a courage from the very intensity of fear, he shrieked out in a voice which scarcely sounded like his own, “What art thou, execrable thing! That comest at this dead hour? Speak, if thou canst; show thyself, if thou darest!”

These cries roused the dying man from the miserable slumber into which he had fallen, he opened his glassy eyes – gasped for utterance, and seemed as though he would now have prayed – prayed in mortal anguish; but the words died in his throat. His lips quivered and seemed parched, as if by fire; they stood apart, and his clenched teeth grinned horribly. It was evident that he heard the footsteps; for an agony, fearful to behold, came over him. He arose in his bed – held out his arms, as if to keep off the approach of some hateful thing; and, having sat thus for a few moments, fell back, and with a dismal groan expired!

From that very instant the sound of the footsteps was heard no more! Silence fell upon the room. When the nurse re-entered, followed by the servants, they found the sick man dead, with a face of horrible contortion, and his friend stretched on the floor in a swoon.

The mortal part of the wretch was soon buried; and after that time (the dismal story becoming generally known) no one would dare to inhabit the house, which gradually fell into decay, and got the fatal reputation of being haunted.

WALNUT-TREE HOUSE

Charlotte Riddell

1878

I
THE NEW OWNER

Many years ago there stood at the corner of a street leading out of Upper Kennington Lane a great red brick house, covering a goodly area of ground, and surrounded by gardens magnificent in their proportions when considered in relation to the populous neighbourhood mentioned.

Originally a place of considerable pretention; a gentleman’s seat in the country, probably when Lambeth Marsh had not a shop in the whole of it; when Vauxhall Gardens were still in nubilus; when no South-Western Railway was planned or thought of; when London was comparatively a very small place, and its present suburbs were mere country villages – hamlets lying quite remote from the heart of the city.

Once, the house in question had been surrounded by a small park, and at that time there were fish-ponds in the grounds, and quite a stretch of meadow-land within the walls. Bit by bit, however, the park had been cut up into building ground and let off on building leases; the meadows were covered with bricks and mortar, shops were run up where cows once chewed the cud, and the roar and rumble of London traffic sounded about the old house and the deserted garden, formerly quiet and silent as though situated in some remote part of the country.

Many a time in the course of the generations that had come and gone, been born and buried, since the old house was built, the freehold it covered changed hands. On most estates of this kind round London there generally is a residence, which passes like a horse from buyer to buyer. When it has served one man’s need it is put up for sale and bid for by another. When rows and rows of houses, and line after line of streets, have obliterated all the familiar marks, it is impossible to cultivate a sentiment as regards property; and it is unlikely that the descendants of the first possessors of Walnut-Tree House who had grown to be country folk and lived in great state, oblivious of business people, and entertaining a great contempt for trade, knew that in a very undesirable part of London there still stood the residence where the first successful man of their family went home each day from his counting-house over against St. Mildred’s Church, in The Poultry.

One very wet evening, in an autumn the leaves of which have been dead and gone this many a year, Walnut-Tree House, standing grim and lonely in the mournful twilight, looked more than ordinarily desolate and deserted.

There was not a sign of life about it; the shutters were closed – the rusty iron gates were fast locked – the approach was choked up with grass and weeds – through no chink did the light of a single candle flicker. For seven years it had been given over to rats and mice and blackbeetles; for seven years no one had been found to live in it; for seven years it had remained empty, while its owner wore out existence in fits of moody dejection or of wild frenzy in the madhouse close at hand; and now that owner was dead and buried and forgotten, and the new owner was returning to take possession. This new owner had written to his lawyers, or rather he had written to the lawyers of his late relative, begging them to request the person in charge of the house to have rooms prepared for his arrival; and, when the train drew into the station at Waterloo, he was met by one of the clerks in Messrs Timpson and Co.’s office, who, picking out Mr. Stainton, delivered to that gentleman a letter from the firm, and said he would wait and hear if there were any message in reply.

Mr. Stainton read the letter – looked at the blank flyleaf – and then, turning back to the first words, read what his solicitors had to say all through once again, this time aloud.

“The house has stood empty for more than seven years,” he said, half addressing the clerk and half speaking to himself. “Must be damp and uninhabitable; there is no one living on the premises. Under these circumstances we have been unable to comply with your directions, and can only recommend you to go to an hotel till we are able personally to discuss future arrangements.”

“Humph,” said the new owner, after he had finished. “I’ll go and take a look at the place, anyhow. Is it far from here, do you know?” he asked, turning to the young man from Timpsons’.

“No, sir; not very far.”

“Can you spare time to come over there with me?” continued Mr. Stainton. The young man believed that he could, adding, “If you want to go into the house we had better call for the key. It is at an estate agent’s in the Westminster Bridge Road.”

“I cannot say I have any great passion for hotels,” remarked the new owner, as he took his seat in the cab.

“Indeed, sir?”

“No; either they don’t suit me, or I don’t suit them. I have led a wild sort of life: not much civilisation in the bush, or at the goldfields, I can tell you. Rooms full of furniture, houses where a fellow must keep to the one little corner he has hired, seem to choke me. Then I have not been well, and I can’t stand noise and the trampling of feet. I had enough of that on board ship; and I used to lie awake at nights and think how pleasant it would be to have a big house all to myself, to do as I liked in.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed the clerk.

“You see, I have been used to roughing it, and I can get along very well for a night without servants.”

“No doubt, sir.”

“I suppose the house is in substantial repair – roof tight, and all that sort of thing?”

“I can’t say, I am sure, sir.”

“Well, if there is a dry corner where I can spread a rug, I shall sleep there tonight.”

The clerk coughed. He looked out of the window, and then he looked at Messrs. Timpsons’ client.

“I do not think—” he began, apologetically, and then stopped.

“You don’t think what?” asked the other.

“You’ll excuse me, sir, but I don’t think – I really do not think, if I were you, I’d go to that house tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it has not been slept in for nearly seven years, and it must be blue mouldy with damp; and if you have been ill, that is all the more reason you should not run such a risk. And, besides—”

“Besides?” suggested Mr. Stainton. “Out with it! Like a postscript, no doubt, that ‘besides’ holds the marrow of the argument.”

“The house has stood empty for years, sir, because – there is no use in making any secret of it – the place has a bad name.”

“What sort of a bad name – unhealthy?”

“Oh, no!”

“Haunted?”

The clerk inclined his head. “You have hit it, sir,” he said.

“And that is the reason no one has lived there?”

“We have been quite unable to let the house on that account.”

“The sooner it gets unhaunted, then, the better,” retorted Mr. Stainton. “I shall certainly stop there tonight. You are not disposed to stay and keep me company, I suppose?”

With a little gesture of dismay the clerk drew back. Certainly, this was one of the most unconventional of clients. The young man from Timpsons’ did not at all know what to make of him.

“A rough sort of fellow,” he said afterwards, when describing the new owner; “boorish; never mixed with good society, that sort of thing.”

He did not in the least understand this rich man, who treated him as an equal, who objected to hotels, who didn’t mind taking up his abode in a house where not even a drunken charwoman could be induced to stop, and who calmly asked a stranger on whom he had never set eyes before – a clerk in the respectable office of Timpson and Co., a young fellow anxious to rise in the world, careful as to his associates, particular about the whiteness of his shirts and the sit of his collar and the cut of his coats – to “rough” things with him in that dreadful old dungeon, where, perhaps, he might even be expected to light a fire.

Still, he did not wish to offend the new owner. Messrs. Timpson expected him to be a profitable client; and to that impartial firm, the money of a boor would, he knew, seem as good as the money of a count.

“I am very sorry,” he stammered; “should only have felt too much honoured; but the fact is – previous engagement—”

Mr. Stainton laughed.

“I understand,” he said. “Adventures are quite as much out of your line as ghosts. And now tell me about this apparition. Does the ‘old man’ walk?”

“Not that I ever heard of,” answered the other.

“Is it, then, the miserable beggar who tried to do for himself?”

“It is not the late Mr. Stainton, I believe,” said the young man, in tone which mildly suggested that reference to a client of Timpsons’ as a “miserable beggar” might be considered bad taste.

“Then who on earth is it?” persisted Mr. Stainton.

“If you must know, sir, it is a child – a child who has driven every tenant in succession out of the house.”

The new owner burst into a hearty laugh – a laugh which gave serious offence to Timpsons’ clerk.

“That is too good a joke,” said Mr. Stainton. “I do not know when I heard anything so delicious.”

“It is a fact, whether it be delicious or not,” retorted the young man, driven out of all his former propriety of voice and demeanour by the contemptuous ridicule this “digger” thought fit to cast on his story; “and I, for one, would not, after all I have heard about your house, pass a night in it – no, not if anybody offered me fifty pounds down.”

“Make your mind easy, my friend,” said the new owner, quietly. “I am not going to bid for your company. The child and I can manage, I’ll be bound, to get on very comfortably by ourselves.”

II
THE CHILD

It was later on in the same evening; Mr. Stainton had an hour previously taken possession of Walnut-Tree House, dismissed his cab, bidden Timpsons’ clerk good evening, and, having ordered in wood and coals from the nearest greengrocer, besides various other necessary articles from various other tradesmen, he now stood by the front gate waiting the coming of the goods purchased.

As he waited, he looked up at the house, which in the uncertain light of the street lamps appeared gloomier and darker than had been the case even in the gathering twilight.

The long rows of shuttered windows, the silent solemnity of the great trees, remnants of a once goodly avenue that had served to give its name to Walnut-Tree House; the appalling silence of everything within the place, when contrasted with the noise of passing cabs and whistling street boys, and men trudging home with unfurled umbrellas and women scudding along with draggled petticoats, might well have impressed even an unimpressionable man, and Edgar Stainton, spite of his hard life and rough exterior, was impressionable and imaginative.

“It has an ‘uncanny’ look, certainly,” he considered; “but is not so cheerless for a lonely man as the ‘bush’; and though I am not overtired, I fancy I shall sleep more soundly in my new home than I did many a night at the goldfields. When once I can get a good fire up I shall be all right. Now, I wonder when those coals are coming!”

As he turned once again towards the road, he beheld on its way the sack of fuel with which the nearest greengrocer said he thought he could – indeed, said he would – “oblige” him. A ton – half a ton – quarter of a ton, the greengrocer affirmed would be impossible until the next day; but a sack – yes – he would promise that. Bill should bring it round; and Bill was told to put his burden on the truck, and twelve bundles of wood, “and we’ll make up the rest tomorrow,” added Bill’s master, with the air of one who has conferred a favour.

In the distance Mr. Stainton descried a very grimy Bill, and a very small boy, coming along with the truck leisurely, as though the load had been Herculean.

Through the rain he watched the pair advancing and greeted Bill with a glad voice of welcome.

“So you’ve come at last; that’s right. Better late than never. Bring them this way. I’ll have this small lot shot in the kitchen for the night.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” answered Bill, “I don’t think you will – that is to say, not by me. As I told our governor, I’ll take ‘em to the house as you’ve sold ‘em to the house, but I won’t set a foot inside it.”

“Do you mean to say you are going to leave them out on the pavement?” asked Mr. Stainton.

“Well, sir, I don’t mind taking them to the front door if it’ll be a convenience.”

“That will do. You are a brave lot of people in these parts I must say.”

“As for that,” retorted Bill, with sack on back and head bent forward, “I dare say we’re as brave about here as where you come from.”

“It is not impossible,” retorted Mr. Stainton; “there are plenty of cowards over there too.”

With a feint of being very much afraid, Bill, after he had shot his coals on the margin of the steps, retreated from the door, which stood partly open, and when the boy who brought up the wood was again out with the truck, said, putting his knuckles to his eyebrows:

“Beg pardon, sir, but I suppose you couldn’t give us a drop of beer? Very wet night, sir.”

“No, I could not,” answered Mr. Stainton, very decidedly. “I shall have to shovel these coals into the house myself; and, as for the night, it is as wet for me as it is for you.”

Nevertheless, as Bill shuffled along the short drive – shuffling wearily – like a man who, having nearly finished one day’s hard work, was looking forward to beginning another hard day in the morning, the new owner relented.

“Here,” he said, picking out a sixpence to give him, “it isn’t your fault, I suppose, that you believe in old women’s tales.”

“Thank you kindly, sir,” Bill answered; “I am sure I am extremely obliged; but if I was in your shoes I wouldn’t stop in that house – you’ll excuse me, sir, meaning no offence – but I wouldn’t; indeed I wouldn’t.”

“It seems to have got a good name, at any rate,” thought Mr. Stainton, while retracing his steps to the banned tenement. “Let us see what effect a fire will have in routing the shadows.”

He entered the house, and, striking a match, lighted some candles he had brought in with him from a neighbouring oil-shop.

Years previously the gas company, weary of receiving no profit from the house, had taken away their meter and cut off their connections. The water supply was in the same case, as Mr. Stainton, going round the premises before it grew quite dark, had discovered.

Of almost all small articles of furniture easily broken by careless tenants, easily removed by charwomen, the place was perfectly bare; and as there were no portable candlesticks in which to place the lights the new tenant was forced to make his illumination by the help of some dingy mirrors provided with sconces, and to seek such articles as he needed by the help of a guttering mould candle stuck in the neck of a broken bottle. After an inspection of the ground-floor rooms he decided to take up his quarters for the night in one which had evidently served as a library.

In the centre of the apartment there was the table covered with leather. Around the walls were bookcases, still well filled with volumes, too uninviting to borrow, too valueless in the opinion of the ignorant to steal. In one corner stood a bureau, where the man, who for so many years had been dead even while living, kept his letters and papers.

The floor was bare. Once a Turkey carpet had been spread over the centre of the polished oak boards, but it lay in its wonted place no longer; between the windows hung a convex mirror, in which the face of any human being looked horrible and distorted; whilst over the mantle-shelf, indeed, forming a portion of it, was a long, narrow glass, bordered by a frame ornamented with a tracery of leaves and flowers. The ceiling was richly decorated, and, spite of the dust and dirt and neglect of years, all the appointments of the apartment he had selected gave Edgar Stainton the impression that it was a good thing to be the owner of such a mansion, even though it did chance to be situated as much out of the way of fashionable London as the diggings whence he had come.

“And there is not a creature but myself left to enjoy it all,” he mused, as he sat looking into the blazing coals. “My poor mother, how she would have rejoiced tonight, had she lived to be the mistress of so large a place! And my father, what a harbour this would have seemed after the storms that buffeted him! Well, they are better off, I know; and yet I cannot help thinking how strange it all is – that I, who went away a mere beggar, should come home rich, to be made richer, and yet stand so utterly alone that in the length and breadth of England I have not a relative to welcome me or to say I wish you joy of your inheritance.”

He had eaten his frugal supper, and now, pushing aside the table on which the remains of his repast were spread, he began walking slowly up and down the room, thinking over the past and forming plans for the future.

As he was buried in reflection, the fire began to die down without his noticing the fact; but a sudden feeling of chilliness at length causing him instinctively to look towards the hearth, he threw some wood into the grate, and, while the flames went blazing up the wide chimney, piled on coals as though he desired to set the house alight.

While he was so engaged there came a knock at the door of the room – a feeble, hesitating knock, which was repeated more than once before it attracted Mr. Stainton’s attention.

When it did, being still busy with the fire, and forgetting he was alone in the house, he called out, “Come in.”

Along the panels there stole a rustling sort of touch, as if someone were feeling uncertainly for the handle – a curious noise, as of a weak hand fumbling about the door in the dark; then, in a similar manner, the person seeking admittance tried to turn the lock.

“Come in, can’t you?” repeated Mr. Stainton; but even as he spoke he remembered he was, or ought to be, the sole occupant of the mansion.

He was not alarmed; he was too much accustomed to solitude and danger for that; but he rose from his stooping position and instinctively seized his revolver, which he had chanced, while unpacking some of his effects, to place on the top of the bureau.

“Come in, whoever you are,” he cried; but seeing the door remained closed, though the intruder was evidently making futile efforts to open it, he strode half-way across the room, and then stopped, amazed.

For suddenly the door opened, and there entered, shyly and timidly, a little child – a child with the saddest face mortal ever beheld; a child with wistful eyes and long, ill-kept hair; a child poorly dressed, wasted and worn, and with the mournfullest expression on its countenance that face of a child ever wore.

“What a hungry little beggar,” thought Mr. Stainton. “Well, young one, and what do you want here?” he added, aloud.

The boy never answered, never took the slightest notice of his questioner, but simply walked slowly round the room, peering into all the corners, as if looking for something. Searching the embrasures of the windows, examining the recesses beside the fireplace, pausing on the hearth to glance under the library table, and finally, when the doorway was reached once more, turning to survey the contents of the apartment with an eager and yet hopeless scrutiny.

“What is it you want, my boy?” asked Mr. Stainton, glancing as he spoke at the child’s poor thin legs, and short, shabby frock, and shoes well nigh worn out, and arms bare and lean and unbeautiful. “Is it anything I can get for you?”

Not a word – not a whisper; only for reply a glance of the wistful brown eyes.

“Where do you come from, and who do you belong to?” persisted Mr. Stainton.

The child turned slowly away.

“Come, you shall not get off so easily as you seem to imagine,” persisted the new owner, advancing towards his visitor. “You have no business to be here at all; and before you go you must tell me how you chance to be in this house, and what you expected to find in this room.”

He was close to the doorway by this time, and the child stood on the threshold, with its back towards him.

Mr. Stainton could see every detail of the boy’s attire – his little plaid frock, which he had outgrown, the hooks which fastened it; the pinafore, soiled and crumpled, tied behind with strings broken and knotted; in one place the skirt had given from the body, and a piece of thin, poor flannel showed that the child’s under habiliments matched in shabbiness his exterior garments.

“Poor little chap,” thought Mr. Stainton. “I wonder if he would like something to eat. Are you hungry, my lad?”

The child turned and looked at him earnestly, but answered never a word.

“I wonder if he is dumb,” marvelled Mr. Stainton; and, seeing he was moving away, put out a hand to detain him. But the child eluded his touch, and flitted out into the hall and up the wide staircase with swift, noiseless feet.

Only waiting to snatch a candle from one of the sconces, Mr. Stainton pursued as fast as he could follow.

Up the easy steps he ran at the top of his speed; but, fast as he went, the child went faster. Higher and higher he beheld the tiny creature mounting, then, still keeping the same distance between them, it turned when it reached the top storey and trotted along a narrow corridor with rooms opening off to right and left. At the extreme end of this passage a door stood ajar. Through this the child passed, Mr. Stainton still following.

“I have run you to earth at last,” he said, entering and closing the door. “Why, where has the boy gone?” he added, holding the candle above his head and gazing round the dingy garret in which he found himself.

The room was quite empty. He examined it closely, but could find no possible outlet save the door, and a skylight which had evidently not been opened for years.

There was no furniture in the apartment, except a truckle bedstead, a rush-bottomed chair, and a rickety washstand. No wardrobe, or box or press where even a kitten might have lain concealed.

“It is very strange,” muttered Mr. Stainton, as he turned away baffled. “Very strange!” he repeated, while he walked along the corridor. “I don’t understand it at all,” he decided, proceeding slowly down the topmost flight of stairs; but then all at once he stopped.

“It is the child!” he exclaimed aloud, and the sound of his own voice woke strange echoes through the silence of that desolate house. “It is the child!” And he descended the principal staircase very slowly, with bowed head, and his grave, thoughtful face graver and more thoughtful than ever.

III
SEEKING FOR INFORMATION

It was enough to make any man look grave; and as time went on the new owner of Walnut-Tree House found himself pondering continually as to what the mystery could be which attached to the child he had found in possession of his property, and who had already driven tenant after tenant out of the premises. Inclined at first to regard the clerk’s story as a joke, and his own experience on the night of his arrival a delusion, it was impossible for him to continue incredulous when he found, even in broad daylight, that terrible child stealing down the staircase and entering the rooms, looking – looking, for something it never found.

Never after the first horror was over did Mr. Stainton think of leaving the house in consequence of that haunting presence which had kept the house tenantless. It would have been worse than useless, he felt. With the ocean stretching between, his spirit would still be in the old mansion at Lambeth – his mental vision would always be watching the child engaged in the weary search to which there seemed no end – that never appeared to produce any result.

At bed and at board he had company, or the expectation of it. No apartment in the building was secure from intrusion. It did not matter where he lay; it did not matter where he ate; between sleeping and waking, between breakfast and dinner, whenever the notion seized it, the child came gliding in, looking, looking, looking, and never finding; not lingering longer than was necessary to be certain the object of its search was absent, but wandering hither and thither, from garret to kitchen, from parlour to bed-chamber, in that quest which still seemed fresh as when first begun.

Mr. Stainton went to his solicitors as the most likely persons from whom to obtain information on the subject, and plunged at once into the matter.

“Who is the child supposed to be, Mr. Timpson?” he asked, making no secret that he had seen it.

“Well, that is really very difficult to say,” answered Mr. Timpson.

“There was a child once, I suppose – a real child – flesh and blood?”

Mr. Timpson took off his spectacles and wiped them.

“There were two; yes, certainly, in the time of Mr. Felix Stainton – a boy and a girl.”

“In that house?”

“In that house. They survived him.”

“And what became of them?”

“The girl was adopted by a relation of her father’s, and the – boy – died.”

“Oh the boy died, did he? Do you happen to know what he died of?”

“No; I really do not. There was nothing wrong about the affair, however, if that is what you are thinking of. There never was a hint of that sort.”

Mr. Stainton sat silent for a minute; then he said:

“Mr. Timpson, I can’t shake off the idea that somehow there has been foul play with regard to those children. Who were they?”

“Felix Stainton’s grandchildren. His daughter made a low marriage, and he cast her adrift. After her death the two children were received at Walnut-Tree House on sufferance – fed and clothed, I believe, that was all; and when the old man died the heir-at-law permitted them to remain.”

“Alfred Stainton?”

“Yes; the unhappy man who became insane. His uncle died intestate, and he consequently succeeded to everything but the personalty, which was very small, and of which these children had a share.”

“There was never any suspicion you say, of foul play on the part of the late owner?”

“Dear, dear! No; quite the contrary.”

“Then can you throw the least light on the mystery?”

“Not the least; I wish I could.”

For all that, Mr. Stainton carried away an impression Mr. Timpson knew more of the matter than he cared to tell; and was confirmed in this opinion by a chance remark from Mr. Timpson’s partner, whom he met in the street almost immediately after.

“Why can’t you let the matter rest, Mr. Stainton?” asked the Co. with some irritation of manner when he heard the object of their client’s visit. “What is the use of troubling your head about a child who has been lying in Lambeth Churchyard these dozen years? Take my advice, have the house pulled down and let or sell the ground for building. You ought to get a pot of money for it in that neighbourhood. If there were a wrong done, it is too late to set it right now.”

“What wrong do you refer to?” asked Mr. Stainton eagerly, thinking he had caught Timpson’s partner napping. But that gentleman was too sharp for him.

“I remarked if there were a wrong done – not that there had been one,” he answered; and then, without a pause, added, “We shall hope to hear from you that you have decided to follow our advice.”

But Mr. Stainton shook his head.

“I will not pull down the old house just yet,” he said, and walked slowly away.

“There is a mystery behind it all,” he considered. “I must learn more about these children. Perhaps some of the local tradespeople may recollect them.”

But the local tradespeople for the most part were newcomers – or else had not supplied “the house.”

“So far as ever I could understand,” said one “family butcher,” irascibly sharpening his knife as he spoke, “there was not much to supply. That custom was not worth speaking of. I hadn’t it, so what I am saying is not said on my own account. A scrag end of neck of mutton – a bit of gravy beef – two pennyworth of sheep’s liver – that was the sort of thing. Misers, sir, misers; the old gentleman bad, and the nephew worse. A bad business, first and last. But what else could be expected? When people as can afford to live on the fat of the land never have a sirloin inside their doors, why, worse must come of it. No, sir, I never set eyes on the children to my knowledge; I only knew there were children by hearing one of them was dead, and that it was the poorest funeral ever crossed a decent threshold.”

“Poor little chap,” thought Mr. Stainton, looking straight out into the street for a moment; then added, “lest the family misfortunes should descend to me, you had better send round a joint to Walnut-Tree House.”

“Lor’, sir, are you the gentleman as is living there? I beg your pardon, I am sure, but I have been so bothered with questions in regard of that house and those children that I forget my manners when I talk about them. A joint, sir – what would you please to have?”

The new owner told him; and while he counted out the money to pay for it Mr. Parker remarked:

“There is only one person I can think of sir, likely to be able to give any information about the matter.”

“And that is?”

“Mr. Hennings, at the ‘Pedlar’s Dog.’ He had some acquaintance with the old lady as was housekeeper both to Mr. Felix Stainton and the gentleman that went out of his mind.”

Following the advice, the new owner repaired to the ‘Pedlar’s Dog,’ where (having on his first arrival at Walnut-Tree House ordered some creature comforts from that well-known public) he experienced a better reception than had been accorded to him by Mr. Parker.

“Do I know Walnut-Tree House, sir?” said Mr. Hennings, repeating his visitor’s question. “Well, yes, rather. Why, you might as well ask me, do I know the ‘Pedlar’s Dog.’ As boy and man I can remember the old house for close on five-and-fifty years. I remember Mr. George Stainton; he used to wear a skull-cap and knee-breeches. There was an orchard then where Stainton Street is now, and his whole time was taken up in keeping the boys out of it. Many a time I have run from him.”

“Did you ever see anything of the boy and girl who were there, after Mr. Alfred succeeded to the property – Felix Stainton’s grandchildren, I mean?” asked the new owner, when a pause in Mr. Henning’s reminiscences enabled him to take his part in the conversation.

“Well, sir, I may have seen the girl, but I can’t bring it to my recollection; the boy I do remember, however. He came over here two or three times with Mrs. Toplis, who kept house for both Mr. Staintons, and I took notice of him, both because he looked so peaky and old-fashioned, and also on account of the talk about him.”

“There was talk about him, then?”

“Bless you, yes, sir; as much talk while he was living as since he died. Everybody thought he ought to have been the heir.”

“Why?” enquired the new owner.

“Because there was a will made leaving the place to him.”

Here was information. Mr. Stainton’s heart seemed to stand still for a second and then leap on with excitement.

“Who made the will?”

“The grandfather, Felix Stainton, to be sure; who else should make it?”

“I did not mean that. Was it not drawn out by a solicitor?”

“Oh! Yes – now I understand you, sir. The will was drawn right enough by Mr. Quinance, in the Lambeth Road, a very clever lawyer.”

“Not by Timpson, then? How was that?”

“The old man took the notion of making it late one night, and so Mrs. Toplis sent to the nearest lawyer she knew of.”

“Yes; and then?”

“Well, the will was made and signed and witnessed, and everything regular; and from that day to this no one knows what has become of it.”

“How very strange.”

“Yes, sir, it is more than strange – unaccountable. At first Mr. Quinance was suspected of having given it up to Mr. Alfred; but Mrs. Toplis and Quinance’s clerk – he has succeeded to the business now – say that old Felix insisted upon keeping it himself. So, whether he destroyed it or the nephew got hold of it, Heaven only knows; for no man living does, I think.”

“And the child – the boy, I mean?”

“If you want to hear all about him, sir, Mrs. Toplis is the one to tell you. If you have a mind to give a shilling to a poor old lady who always did try to keep herself respectable, and who, I will say, paid her way honourable as long as she had a sixpence to pay it honourable with, you cannot do better than go and see Mrs. Toplis, who will talk to you for hours about the time she lived at Walnut-Tree House.”

And with this delicate hint that his minutes were more valuable than the hours of Mrs. Toplis, Mr. Hennings would have closed the interview, but that his visitor asked where he should be able to find the housekeeper.

“A thousand pardons!” he answered, with an air; “forgetting the very cream and marrow of it, wasn’t I? Mrs. Toplis, sir, is to be found in Lambeth Workhouse – and a pity, too.”

Edgar Stainton turned away, heart-sick. Was this all wealth had done for his people and those connected with them?

No man seemed to care to waste a moment in speaking about their affairs; no one had a good word for or kindly memory of them. The poorest creature he met in the streets might have been of more use in the world then they. The house they had lived in mentioned as if a curse rested on the place; themselves only recollected as leaving everything undone which it befitted their station to do. An old servant allowed to end her days in the workhouse!

“Heaven helping me,” he thought, “I will not so misuse the wealth which has been given me.”

The slight put upon his family tortured and made him wince, and the face of the dead boy who ought to have been the heir seemed, as he hurried along the streets, to pursue and look on him with a wistful reproach.

“If I cannot lay that child I shall go mad,” he said, almost audibly, “as mad, perhaps, as Alfred Stainton.” And then a terrible fear took possession of him. The horror of that which is worse than any death made for the moment this brave, bold man more timid than a woman.

“God preserve my senses,” he prayed, and then, determinedly putting that phantom behind him, he went on to the Workhouse.

IV
BROTHER AND SISTER

Mr. Stainton had expected to find Mrs. Toplis a decrepit crone, bowed with age and racked with rheumatism, and it was therefore like a gleam of sunshine streaming across his path to behold a woman, elderly, certainly, but carrying her years with ease, ruddy cheeked, clear eyed, upright as a dart, who welcomed him with respectful enthusiasm.

“And so you are Mr. Edgar, the son of the dear old Captain,” she said, after the first greetings and explanations were over, after she had wiped her eyes and uttered many ejaculations of astonishment and expressions of delight. “Eh! I remember him coming to the house just after he was married, and telling me about the sweet lady his wife. I never heard a gentleman so proud; he never seemed tired of saying the words, ‘My wife’.”

“She was a sweet lady,” answered the new owner.

“And so the house has come to you, sir? Well, I wish you joy. I hope you may have peace, and health, and happiness, and prosperity in it. And I don’t see why you should not – no, indeed, sir.”

Edgar Stainton sat silent for a minute, thinking how he should best approach his subject.

“Mrs. Toplis,” he began at last, plunging into the very middle of the difficulty, “I want you to tell me about it. I have come here on purpose to ask you what it all means.”

The old woman covered her face with her hands, and he could see that she trembled violently.

“You need not be afraid to speak openly to me,” he went on. “I am quite satisfied there was some great wrong done in the house, and I want to put it right, if it lies in my power to do so. I am a rich man. I was rich when the news of this inheritance reached me, and I would gladly give up the property tomorrow if I could only undo whatever may have been done amiss.”

Mrs. Toplis shook her head.

“Ah, sir; you can’t do that,” she said. “Money can’t bring back the dead to life; and, if it could, I doubt if even you could prove as good a friend to the poor child sleeping in the churchyard yonder as his Maker did when He took him out of this troublesome world. It was just soul rending to see the boy the last few months of his life. I can’t bear to think of it, sir! Often at night I wake in a fright, fancying I still hear the patter, patter of his poor little feet upon the stair.”

“Do you know, it is a curious thing, but he doesn’t frighten me,” said Mr. Stainton; “that is when I am in the house; although when I am away from it the recollection seems to dog every step I take.”

“What?” cried Mrs. Toplis. “Have you, then, seen him too? There, what am I talking about? I hope, sir, you will forgive my foolishness.”

“I see him constantly,” was the calm reply.

“I wonder what it means! – I wonder what it can mean!” exclaimed the housekeeper, wringing her hands in dire perplexity and dismay.

“I do not know,” answered the new owner, philosophically; “but I want you to help me to find out. I suppose you remember the children coming there at first?”

“Well, sir – well, they were poor Miss Mary’s son and daughter. She ran away, you know, with a Mr. Fenton – made a very poor match; but I believe he was kind to her. When they were brought to us, a shivering little pair, my master was for sending them here. Aye, and he would have done it, too, if somebody had not said he could be made to pay for their keep. You never saw brother and sister so fond of one another – never. They were twins. But, Lor’! the boy was more like a father to the little girl than aught else. He’d have kept an apple a month rather than eat it unless she had half; and the same with everything. I think it was seeing that – watching the love they had, he for her and she for him, coming upon them unsuspected, with their little arms round one another’s necks, made the old gentleman alter his mind about leaving the place to Mr. Alfred; for he said to me, one day, thoughtful like, pointing to them, ‘Wonderful fond, Toplis!’ and I answered, ‘Yes, sir; for all the world like the Babes in the Wood;’ not thinking of how lonely that meant—

“Shortly afterwards he took to his bed; and while he was lying there, no doubt, better thoughts came to him, for he used to talk about his wife and Miss Mary, and the Captain, your father, sir, and ask if the children were gone to bed, and such like – things he never used to mention before.

“So when he made the will Mr. Quinance drew out I was not surprised – no, not a bit. Though before that time he always spoke of Mr. Alfred as his heir, and treated him as such.”

“That will never was found,” suggested Mr. Stainton, anxious to get at another portion of the narrative.

“Never, sir; we hunted for it high and low. Perhaps I wronged him, but I always thought Mr. Alfred knew what became of it. After the old gentleman’s death the children were treated shameful – shameful. I don’t mean beaten, or that like; but half-starved and neglected. He would not buy them proper clothes, and he would not suffer them to wear decent things if anybody else bought them. It was just the same with their food. I durs’n’t give them even a bit of bread and butter unless it was on the sly; and, indeed, there was not much to give in that house. He turned regular miser. Hoarding came into the family with Mrs. Lancelot Stainton, Mr. Alfred’s great grandmother, and they went on from bad to worse, each one closer and nearer than the last, begging your pardon for saying so, sir; but it is the truth.”

“I fear so, Mrs. Toplis,” agreed the man, who certainly was neither close nor near.

“Well, sir, at last, when the little girl was about six years old, she fell sick, and we didn’t think she would get over the illness. While she was about at her worst, Mrs. May, her father’s sister, chanced to be stopping up in London, and, as Mr. Alfred refused to let a doctor inside his doors, she made no more ado but wrapped the child up in blankets, sent for a cab, and carried her off to her own lodgings. Mr. Alfred made no objection to that. All he said as she went through the hall was:

“‘If you take her now, remember, you must keep her.’

“‘Very well,’ she replied, ‘I will keep her.’”

“And the boy? the boy?” cried Mr. Stainton, in an agony of impatience.

“I am coming to him, sir, if you please. He just dwindled away after his sister and he were parted, and died in December, as she was taken away in the July.”

“What did he die of?”

“A broken heart, sir. It seems a queer thing to say about a child; but if ever a heart was broken his was. At first he was always wandering about the house looking for her, but towards the end he used to go up to his room and stay there all by himself. At last I wrote to Mrs. May, but she was ill when the letter got to her, and when she did come up he was dead. My word, she talked to Mr. Alfred! I never heard any one person say so much to another. She declared he had first cheated the boy of his inheritance, and then starved him to death; but that was not true, the child broke his heart fretting after his sister.”

“Yes; and when he was dead—”

“Sir, I don’t like to speak of it, but as true as I am sitting here, the night he was put in his coffin he came pattering down just as usual, looking, looking for his sister. I went straight upstairs, and if I had not seen the little wasted body lying there still and quiet, I must have thought he had come back to life. We were never without him afterwards, never; that, and nothing else, drove Mr. Alfred mad. He used to think he was fighting the child and killing it. When the worst fits were on him he tried to trample it under foot or crush it up in a corner, and then he would sob and cry, and pray for it to be taken away. I have heard he recovered a little before he died, and said his uncle told him there was a will leaving all to the boy, but he never saw such a paper. Perhaps it was all talk, though, or that he was still raving?”

“You are quite positive there was no foul play as regards the child?” asked Mr. Stainton, sticking to that question pertinaciously.

“Certain, sir; I don’t say but Mr. Alfred wished him dead. That is not murder, though.”

“I am not clear about that,” answered Mr. Stainton.

V
THE NEXT AFTERNOON

Mr. Stainton was trying to work off some portion of his perplexities by pruning the grimy evergreens in front of Walnut-Tree House, and chopping away at the undergrowth of weeds and couch grass which had in the course of years matted together beneath the shrubs, when his attention was attracted to two ladies who stood outside the great iron gate looking up at the house.

“It seems to be occupied now,” remarked the elder, turning to her companion. “I suppose the new owner is going to live here. It looks just as dingy as ever; but you do not remember it, Mary.”

“I think I do,” was the answer. “As I look the place grows familiar to me. I do recollect some of the rooms, I am sure just like a dream, as I remember Georgie. What I would give to have a peep inside.”

At this juncture the new owner emerged from amongst the bushes, and, opening the gate, asked if the ladies would like to look over the place.

The elder hesitated; whilst the younger whispered, “Oh, aunt, pray do!”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. May to the stranger, whom she believed to be a gardener; “but perhaps Mr. Stainton might object.”

“No; he wouldn’t, I know,” declared the new owner. “You can go through the house if you wish. There is no one in it. Nobody lives there except myself.”

“Taking charge, I suppose?” suggested Mrs. May blandly.

“Something of that sort,” he answered.

“I do not think he is a caretaker,” said the girl, as she and her relative passed into the old house together.

“What do you suppose he is, then?” asked her aunt.

“Mr. Stainton himself.”

“Nonsense, child !” exclaimed Mrs. May, turning, nevertheless, to one of the windows, and casting a curious glance towards the new owner, who was now, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, walking idly up and down the drive.

After they had been all over the place, from hall to garret, with a peep into this room and a glance into that, Mrs. May found the man who puzzled her leaning against one of the pillars of the porch, waiting, apparently, for their reappearance.

“I am sure we are very much obliged to you,” she began, with a hesitation in her manner.

“Pray do not mention it,” he said.

“This young lady has sad associations connected with the house,” May proceeded, still doubtfully feeling her way.

He turned his eyes towards the girl for a moment, and, though her veil was down, saw she had been weeping.

“I surmised as much,” he replied. “She is Miss Fenton, is she not?”

“Yes, certainly,” was the answer; “and you are—”

“Edgar Stainton,” said the new owner, holding out his hand.

“I am all alone here,” he went on, after the first explanations were over. “But I can manage to give you a cup of tea. Pray do come in, and let me feel I am not entirely alone in England.”

Only too well pleased, Mrs. May complied, and ten minutes later the three were sitting round a fire, the blaze of which leapt and flickered upon the walls and over the ceiling, casting bright lights on the dingy mirrors and the dark oak shelves.

“It is all coming back to me now,” said the girl softly, addressing her aunt. “Many an hour Georgie and I have sat on that hearth seeing pictures in the fire.”

But she did not see something which was even then standing close beside her, and which the new owner had witnessed approach with a feeling of terror that precluded speech.

It was the child! The child searching about no longer for something it failed to find, but standing at the girl’s side still and motionless, with its eyes fixed upon her face, and its poor, wasted figure nestling amongst the folds of her dress.

“Thank Heaven she does not see it!” he thought, and drew his breath, relieved.

No; she did not see it – though its wan cheek touched her shoulder, though its thin hand rested on her arm, though through the long conversation which followed it never moved from her side, nor turned its wistful eyes from her face.

When she went away – when she took her fresh young beauty out of the house, it seemed to gladden and light up – the child followed her to the threshold; and then in an instant it vanished, and Mr. Stainton watched for its flitting up the staircase all in vain.

But later on in the evening, when he was sitting alone beside the fire, with his eyes bent on the glowing coals, and perhaps seeing pictures there, as Mary said she and her brother had done in their lonely childhood, he felt conscious, even without looking round, that the boy was there once again.

And when he fell to thinking of the long, long years during which the dead child had kept faithful and weary watch for his sister, searching through the empty rooms for one who never came, and then bethought him of the sister to whom her dead brother had become but the vaguest of memories, of the summers and winters during the course of which she had probably forgotten him altogether, he sighed deeply; and heard his sigh echoed behind him in the merest faintest whisper.

More, when he, thinking deeply about his newly found relative and trying to recall each feature in her face, each tone of her voice, found it impossible to dissociate the girl grown to womanhood from the child he had pictured to himself as wandering about the old house in company with her twin brother, their arms twined together, their thoughts one, their sorrows one, their poor pleasures one – he felt a touch on his hand, and knew the boy was beside him, looking with wistful eyes into the firelight, too.

But when he turned he saw that sadness clouded those eyes no longer. She was found; the lost had come again to meet a living friend on the once desolate hearth, and up and down the wide, desolate staircase those weary little feet pattered no longer.

The quest was over, the search ended; into the darksome corners of that dreary house the child’s glance peered no longer.

She was come! Through years he had kept faithful watch for her, but the waiting was ended now.

That night Edgar Stainton slept soundly; and yet when morning dawned he knew that once in the darkness he wakened suddenly and was conscious of a small, childish hand smoothing his pillow and touching his brow.

Sweet were the dreams which visited his rest subsequently; sweet as ought to be the dreams of a man who had said to his own soul – and meant to hold fast by words he had spoken:

“As I deal by that orphan girl, so may God deal with me!”

VI
THE MISSING WILL

Ere long there were changes in the old house. Once again Mrs. Toplis reigned there, but this time with servants under her – with maids she could scold and lads she could harass.

The larder was well plenished, the cellars sufficiently stocked; windows formerly closely shuttered now stood open to admit the air; and on the drive grass grew no longer – too many footsteps passed that way for weeds to flourish.

It was Christmas-time. The joints in the butchers’ shops were gay with ribbons; the grocers’ windows were tricked out to delight the eyes of the children, young and old, who passed along. In Mr. May’s house up the Clapham Road all was excitement, for the whole of the family – father, mother, grown-up sons and daughters, girls still in short frocks and boys in round jackets – were going to spend Christmas Eve with their newly-found cousin, whom they had adopted as a relation with a unanimity as rare as charming.

Cousin Mary also was going – Cousin Mary had got a new dress for the occasion, and was having her hair done up in a specially effective manner by Cissie May, when the toilette proceedings were interrupted by half a dozen young voices announcing:

“A gentleman in the parlour wants to see you, Mary. Pa says you are to make haste and come down immediately.”

Obediently Mary made haste as bidden and descended to the parlour, to find there the clerk from Timpsons’ who met Mr. Stainton on his arrival in London.

His business was simple, but important. Once again he was the bearer of a letter from Timpson and Co., this time announcing to Miss Fenton that the will of Mr. Felix Stainton had been found, and that under it she was entitled to the interest of ten thousand pounds, secured upon the houses in Stainton Street.

“Oh! aunt, Oh! uncle, how rich we shall be,” cried the girl, running off to tell her cousins; but the uncle and aunt looked grave. They were wondering how this will might effect Edgar Stainton.

While they were still talking it over – after Timpsons’ young man had taken his departure, Mr. Edgar Stainton himself arrived.

“Oh, it’s all right!” he said, in answer to their questions. “I found the will in the room where Felix Stainton died. Walnut-Tree House and all the freeholds were left to the poor little chap who died, chargeable with Mary’s ten thousand pounds, five hundred to Mrs. Toplis, and a few other legacies. Failing George, the property was to come to me. I have been to Quinance’s successor, and found out the old man and Alfred had a grievous quarrel, and that in consequence he determined to cut him out altogether. Where is Mary? I want to wish her joy.”

Mary was in the little conservatory, searching for a rose to put in her pretty brown hair. He went straight up to her, and said:

“Mary, dear, you have had one Christmas gift tonight, and I want you to take another with it.”

“What is it, Cousin Edgar?” she asked; but when she looked in his face she must have guessed his meaning, for she drooped her head, and began pulling her sweet rose to pieces.

He took the flower, and with it her fingers.

“Will you have me, dear?” he asked. “I am but a rough fellow, I know; but I am true, and I love you dearly.”

Somehow, she answered him as he wished, and all spent a very happy evening in the old house.

Once, when he was standing close beside her in the familiar room, hand clasped in hand, Edgar Stainton saw the child looking at them.

There was no sorrow or yearning in his eyes as he gazed – only a great peace, a calm which seemed to fill and light them with an exquisite beauty.

THE GHOST
OF CHARLOTTE CRAY

Florence Marryat

1883

Mr Sigismund Braggett was sitting in the little room he called his study, wrapped in a profound – not to say a mournful – reverie. Now, there was nothing in the present life nor surroundings of Mr Braggett to account for such a demonstration. He was a publisher and bookseller; a man well to do, with a thriving business in the city, and the prettiest of all pretty villas at Streatham. And he was only just turned forty; had not a grey hair in his head nor a false tooth in his mouth; and had been married but three short months to one of the fairest and most affectionate specimens of English womanhood that ever transformed a bachelor’s quarters into Paradise.

What more could Mr Sigismund Braggett possibly want? Nothing! His trouble lay in the fact that he had got rather more than he wanted. Most of us have our little peccadilloes in this world – awkward reminiscences that we would like to bury five fathoms deep, and never hear mentioned again, but that have an uncomfortable habit of cropping up at the most inconvenient moments; and no mortal is more likely to be troubled with them than a middle-aged bachelor who has taken to matrimony.

Mr Sigismund Braggett had no idea what he was going in for when he led the blushing Emily Primrose up to the altar, and swore to be hers, and hers only, until death should them part. He had no conception a woman’s curiosity could be so keen, her tongue so long, and her inventive faculties so correct. He had spent whole days before the fatal moment of marriage in burning letters, erasing initials, destroying locks of hair, and making offerings of affection look as if he had purchased them with his own money. But it had been of little avail. Mrs Braggett had swooped down upon him like a beautiful bird of prey, and wheedled, coaxed, or kissed him out of half his secrets before he knew what he was about. But he had never told her about Charlotte Cray. And now he almost wished that he had done so, for Charlotte Cray was the cause of his present dejected mood.

Now, there are ladies and ladies in this world. Some are very shy, and will only permit themselves to be wooed by stealth. Others, again, are the pursuers rather than the pursued, and chase the wounded or the flying even to the very doors of their stronghold, or lie in wait for them like an octopus, stretching out their tentacles on every side in search of victims.

And to the latter class Miss Charlotte Cray decidedly belonged. Not a person worth mourning over, you will naturally say. But, then, Mr Sigismund Braggett had not behaved well to her. She was one of the “peccadilloes.” She was an authoress – not an author, mind you, which term smacks more of the profession than the sex – but an “authoress,” with lots of the “ladylike” about the plots of her stories and metre of her rhymes. They had come together in the sweet connection of publisher and writer – had met first in a dingy, dusty little office at the back of his house of business, and laid the foundation of their friendship with the average amount of chaffering and prevarication that usually attend such proceedings.

Mr Braggett ran a risk in publishing Miss Cray’s tales or verses, but he found her useful in so many other ways that he used occasionally to hold forth a sop to Cerberus in the shape of publicity for the sake of keeping her in his employ. For Miss Charlotte Cray – who was as old as himself, and had arrived at the period of life when women are said to pray “Any, good Lord, any!” – was really a clever woman, and could turn her hand to most things required of her, or upon which she had set her mind; and she had most decidedly set her mind upon marrying Mr Braggett, and he – to serve his own purposes – had permitted her to cherish the idea, and this was the Nemesis that was weighing him down in the study at the present moment. He had complimented Miss Cray, and given her presents, and taken her out a-pleasuring, all because she was useful to him, and did odd jobs that no one else would undertake, and for less than anyone else would have accepted; and he had known the while that she was in love with him, and that she believed he was in love with her.

He had not thought much of it at the time. He had not then made up his mind to marry Emily Primrose, and considered that what pleased Miss Cray, and harmed no one else, was fair play for all sides. But he had come to see things differently now. He had been married three months, and the first two weeks had been very bitter ones to him. Miss Cray had written him torrents of reproaches during that unhappy period, besides calling day after day at his office to deliver them in person. This and her threats had frightened him out of his life. He had lived in hourly terror lest the clerks should overhear what passed at their interviews, or that his wife should be made acquainted with them.

He had implored Miss Cray, both by word of mouth and letter, to cease her persecution of him; but all the reply he received was that he was a base and perjured man, and that she should continue to call at his office, and write to him through the penny post, until he had introduced her to his wife. For therein lay the height and depth of his offending. He had been afraid to bring Emily and Miss Cray together, and the latter resented the omission as an insult. It was bad enough to find that Sigismund Braggett, whose hair she wore next her heart, and whose photograph stood as in a shrine upon her bedroom mantelpiece, had married another woman, without giving her even the chance of a refusal, but it was worse still to come to the conclusion that he did not intend her to have a glimpse into the garden of Eden he had created for himself.

Miss Cray was a lady of vivid imagination and strong aspirations. All was not lost in her ideas, although Mr Braggett had proved false to the hopes he had raised. Wives did not live forever; and the chances and changes of this life were so numerous, that stranger things had happened than that Mr Braggett might think fit to make better use of the second opportunity afforded him than he had done of the first. But if she were not to continue even his friend, it was too hard. But the perjured publisher had continued resolute, notwithstanding all Miss Cray’s persecution, and now he had neither seen nor heard from her for a month; and, manlike, he was beginning to wonder what had become of her, and whether she had found anybody to console her for his untruth. Mr Braggett did not wish to comfort Miss Cray himself; but he did not quite like the notion of her being comforted.

After all – so he soliloquised – he had been very cruel to her; for the poor thing was devoted to him. How her eyes used to sparkle and her cheek to flush when she entered his office, and how eagerly she would undertake any work for him, however disagreeable to perform! He knew well that she had expected to be Mrs Braggett, and it must have been a terrible disappointment to her when he married Emily Primrose.

Why had he not asked her out to Violet Villa since? What harm could she do as a visitor there? particularly if he cautioned her first as to the peculiarity of Mrs Braggett’s disposition, and the quickness with which her jealousy was excited. It was close upon Christmas-time, the period when all old friends meet together and patch up, if they cannot entirely forget, everything that has annoyed them in the past. Mr Braggett pictured to himself the poor old maid sitting solitary in her small rooms at Hammersmith, no longer able to live in the expectation of seeing his manly form at the wicket-gate, about to enter and cheer her solitude. The thought smote him as a two-edged sword, and he sat down at once and penned Miss Charlotte a note, in which he inquired after her health, and hoped that they should soon see her at Violet Villa.

He felt much better after this note was written and despatched. He came out of the little study and entered the cheerful drawing-room, and sat with his pretty wife by the light of the fire, telling her of the lonely lady to whom he had just proposed to introduce her.

“An old friend of mine, Emily. A clever, agreeable woman, though rather eccentric. You will be polite to her, I know, for my sake.”

“An old woman, is she?” said Mrs Braggett, elevating her eyebrows. “And what do you call ‘old,’ Siggy, I should like to know?”

“Twice as old as yourself, my dear – five-and-forty at the very least, and not personable-looking, even for that age. Yet I think you will find her a pleasant companion, and I am sure she will be enchanted with you.”

“I don’t know that: clever women don’t like me, as a rule, though I don’t know why.”

“They are jealous of your beauty, my darling; but Miss Cray is above such meanness, and will value you for your own sake.”

“She’d better not let me catch her valuing me for yours,” responded Mrs Braggett, with a flash of the eye that made her husband ready to regret the dangerous experiment he was about to make of bringing together two women who had each, in her own way, a claim upon him, and each the will to maintain it.

So he dropped the subject of Miss Charlotte Cray, and took to admiring his wife’s complexion instead, so that the evening passed harmoniously, and both parties were satisfied.

For two days Mr Braggett received no answer from Miss Cray, which rather surprised him. He had quite expected that on the reception of his invitation she would rush down to his office and into his arms, behind the shelter of the ground-glass door that enclosed his chair of authority. For Miss Charlotte had been used on occasions to indulge in rapturous demonstrations of the sort, and the remembrance of Mrs Braggett located in Violet Villa would have been no obstacle whatever to her. She believed she had a prior claim to Mr Braggett. However, nothing of the kind happened, and the perjured publisher was becoming strongly imbued with the idea that he must go out to Hammersmith and see if he could not make his peace with her in person, particularly as he had several odd jobs for Christmastide, which no one could undertake so well as herself, when a letter with a black-edged border was put into his hand. He opened it mechanically, not knowing the writing; but its contents shocked him beyond measure.

Honoured Sir— I am sorry to tell you that Miss Cray died at my house a week ago, and was buried yesterday. She spoke of you several times during her last illness, and if you would like to hear any further particulars, and will call on me at the old address, I shall be most happy to furnish you with them.

Yours respectfully,

Mary Thompson.

When Mr Braggett read this news, you might have knocked him over with a feather. It is not always true that a living dog is better than a dead lion. Some people gain considerably in the estimation of their friends by leaving this world, and Miss Charlotte Cray was one of them. Her persecution had ceased forever, and her amiable weaknesses were alone held in remembrance. Mr Braggett felt a positive relief in the knowledge that his dead friend and his wife would never now be brought in contact with each other; but at the same time he blamed himself more than was needful, perhaps, for not having seen nor communicated with Miss Cray for so long before her death. He came down to breakfast with a portentously grave face that morning, and imparted the sad intelligence to Mrs Braggett with the air of an undertaker. Emily wondered, pitied, and sympathised, but the dead lady was no more to her than any other stranger; and she was surprised her husband looked so solemn over it all. Mr Braggett, however, could not dismiss the subject easily from his mind. It haunted him during the business hours of the morning, and as soon as he could conveniently leave his office, he posted away to Hammersmith. The little house in which Miss Cray used to live looked just the same, both inside and outside: how strange it seemed that she should have flown away from it forever! And here was her landlady, Mrs Thompson, bobbing and curtseying to him in the same old black net cap with artificial flowers in it, and the same stuff gown she had worn since he first saw her, with her apron in her hand, it is true, ready to go to her eyes as soon as a reasonable opportunity occurred, but otherwise the same Mrs Thompson as before. And yet she would never wait upon her again:

“It was all so sudden, sir,” she said, in answer to Mr Braggett’s inquiries, “that there was no time to send for nobody.”

“But Miss Cray had my address.”

“Ah! perhaps so; but she was off her head, poor dear, and couldn’t think of nothing. But she remembered you, sir, to the last; for the very morning she died, she sprung up in bed and called out, ‘Sigismund! Sigismund!’ as loud as ever she could, and she never spoke to anybody afterwards, not one word.”

“She left no message for me?”

“None, sir. I asked her the day before she went if I was to say nothing to you for her (knowing you was such friends), and all her answer was, ‘I wrote to him. He’s got my letter.’ So I thought, perhaps, you had heard, sir.”

“Not for some time past. It seems terribly sudden to me, not having heard even of her illness. Where is she buried?”

“Close by in the churchyard, sir. My little girl will go with you and show you the place, if you’d like to see it.”

Mr Braggett accepted her offer and left.

When he was standing by a heap of clods they called a grave, and had dismissed the child, he drew out Miss Cray’s last letter, which he carried in his pocket, and read it over.

“You tell me that I am not to call at your office again, except on business” (so it ran), “nor to send letters to your private address, lest it should come to the knowledge of your wife, and create unpleasantness between you; but I shall call, and I shall write, until I have seen Mrs Braggett, and, if you don’t take care, I will introduce myself to her and tell her the reason you have been afraid to do so.”

This letter had made Mr Braggett terribly angry at the time of reception. He had puffed and fumed, and cursed Miss Charlotte by all his gods for daring to threaten him. But he read it with different feelings now Miss Charlotte was down there, six feet beneath the ground he stood on, and he could feel only compassion for her frenzy, and resentment against himself for having excited it. As he travelled home from Hammersmith to Streatham, he was a very dejected publisher indeed.

He did not tell Mrs Braggett the reason of his melancholy, but it affected him to that degree that he could not go to office on the following day, but stayed at home instead, to be petted and waited upon by his pretty wife, which treatment resulted in a complete cure. The next morning, therefore, he started for London as briskly as ever, and arrived at office before his usual time. A clerk, deputed to receive all messages for his master, followed him behind the ground-glass doors, with a packet of letters.

“Mr Van Ower was here yesterday, sir. He will let you have the copy before the end of the week, and Messrs. Hanley’s foreman called on particular business, and will look in today at eleven. And Mr Ellis came to ask if there was any answer to his letter yet; and Miss Cray called, sir; and that’s all.”

“Who did you say?” cried Braggett.

“Miss Cray, sir. She waited for you above an hour, but I told her I thought you couldn’t mean to come into town at all, so she went.”

“Do you know what you’re talking about, Hewetson? You said Miss Cray!”

“And I meant it, sir – Miss Charlotte Cray. Burns spoke to her as well as I.”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Mr Braggett, turning as white as a sheet. “Go at once and send Burns to me.” Burns came.

“Burns, who was the lady that called to see me yesterday?”

“Miss Cray, sir. She had a very thick veil on, and she looked so pale that I asked her if she had been ill, and she said ‘Yes.’ She sat in the office for over an hour, hoping you’d come in, but as you didn’t, she went away again.”

“Did she lift her veil?”

“Not whilst I spoke to her, sir.”

“How do you know it was Miss Cray, then?”

The clerk stared. “Well, sir, we all know her pretty well by this time.”

“Did you ask her name?”

“No, sir; there was no need to do it.”

“You’re mistaken, that’s all, both you and Hewetson. It couldn’t have been Miss Cray! I know for certain that she is – is – is – not in London at present. It must have been a stranger.”

“It was not, indeed, sir, begging your pardon. I could tell Miss Cray anywhere, by her figure and her voice, without seeing her face. But I did see her face, and remarked how awfully pale she was – just like death, sir!”

“There! there! that will do! It’s of no consequence, and you can go back to your work.”

But anyone who had seen Mr Braggett, when left alone in his office, would not have said he thought the matter of no consequence. The perspiration broke out upon his forehead, although it was December, and he rocked himself backward and forward in his chair with agitation.

At last he rose hurriedly, upset his throne, and dashed through the outer premises in the face of twenty people waiting to speak to him. As soon as he could find his voice, he hailed a hansom, and drove to Hammersmith. Good Mrs Thompson opening the door to him, thought he looked as if he had just come out of a fever.

“Lor’ bless me, sir! whatever’s the matter?”

“Mrs Thompson, have you told me the truth about Miss Cray? Is she really dead?”

“Really dead, sir! Why, I closed her eyes, and put her in the coffin with my own hands! If she ain’t dead, I don’t know who is! But if you doubt my word, you’d better ask the doctor that gave the certificate for her.”

“What is the doctor’s name?”

“Dodson; he lives opposite.”

“You must forgive my strange questions, Mrs Thompson, but I have had a terrible dream about my poor friend, and I think I should like to talk to the doctor about her.”

“Oh, very good, sir,” cried the landlady, much offended. “I’m not afraid of what the doctor will tell you. She had excellent nursing and everything as she could desire, and there’s nothing on my conscience on that score, so I’ll wish you good morning.” And with that Mrs Thompson slammed the door in Mr Braggett’s face.

He found Dr Dodson at home.

“If I understand you rightly,” said the practitioner, looking rather steadfastly in the scared face of his visitor, “you wish, as a friend of the late Miss Cray’s, to see a copy of the certificate of her death? Very good, sir; here it is. She died, as you will perceive, on the twenty-fifth of November, of peritonitis. She had, I can assure you, every attention and care, but nothing could have saved her.”

“You are quite sure, then, she is dead?” demanded Mr Braggett, in a vague manner.

The doctor looked at him as if he were not quite sure if he were sane.

“If seeing a patient die, and her corpse coffined and buried, is being sure she is dead, I am in no doubt whatever about Miss Cray.”

“It is very strange – most strange and unaccountable,” murmured poor Mr Braggett, in reply, as he shuffled out of the doctor’s passage, and took his way back to the office.

Here, however, after an interval of rest and a strong brandy and soda, he managed to pull himself together, and to come to the conclusion that the doctor and Mrs Thompson could not be mistaken, and that, consequently, the clerks must. He did not mention the subject again to them, however; and as the days went on, and nothing more was heard of the mysterious stranger’s visit, Mr Braggett put it altogether out of his mind.

At the end of a fortnight, however, when he was thinking of something totally different, young Hewetson remarked to him, carelessly—

“Miss Cray was here again yesterday, sir. She walked in just as your cab had left the door.”

All the horror of his first suspicions returned with double force upon the unhappy man’s mind.

“Don’t talk nonsense!” he gasped, angrily, as soon as he could speak. “Don’t attempt to play any of your tricks on me, young man, or it will be the worse for you, I can tell you.”

“Tricks, sir!” stammered the clerk. “I don’t know what you are alluding to. I am only telling you the truth. You have always desired me to be most particular in letting you know the names of the people who call in your absence, and I thought I was only doing my duty in making a point of ascertaining them – ”

“Yes, yes! Hewetson, of course,” replied Mr Braggett, passing his handkerchief over his brow, “and you are quite right in following my directions as closely as possible; only – in this case you are completely mistaken, and it is the second time you have committed the error.”

“Mistaken!”

“Yes! – as mistaken as it is possible for a man to be! Miss Cray could not have called at this office yesterday.”

“But she did, sir.”

“Am I labouring under some horrible nightmare?” exclaimed the publisher, “or are we playing at cross purposes? Can you mean the Miss Cray I mean?”

“I am speaking of Miss Charlotte Cray, sir, the author of ‘Sweet Gwendoline,’ – the lady who has undertaken so much of our compilation the last two years, and who has a long nose, and wears her hair in curls. I never knew there was another Miss Cray; but if there are two, that is the one I mean.”

“Still I cannot believe it, Hewetson, for the Miss Cray who has been associated with our firm died on the twenty-fifth of last month.”

“Died, sir! Is Miss Cray dead? Oh, it can’t be! It’s some humbugging trick that’s been played upon you, for I’d swear she was in this room yesterday afternoon, as full of life as she’s ever been since I knew her. She didn’t talk much, it’s true, for she seemed in a hurry to be off again, but she had got on the same dress and bonnet she was in here last, and she made herself as much at home in the office as she ever did. Besides,” continued Hewetson, as though suddenly remembering something, “she left a note for you, sir.”

“A note! Why did you not say so before?”

“It slipped my memory when you began to doubt my word in that way, sir. But you’ll find it in the bronze vase. She told me to tell you she had placed it there.”

Mr Braggett made a dash at the vase, and found the three-cornered note as he had been told. Yes! it was Charlotte’s handwriting, or the facsimile of it, there was no doubt of that; and his hands shook so he could hardly open the paper. It contained these words:

“You tell me that I am not to call at your office again, except on business, nor to send letters to your private address, lest it should come to the knowledge of your wife, and create unpleasantness between you; but I shall call, and I shall write until I have seen Mrs Braggett, and if you don’t take care I will introduce myself to her, and tell her the reason you have been afraid to do so.”

Precisely the same words, in the same writing of the letter he still carried in his breast pocket, and which no mortal eyes but his and hers had ever seen. As the unhappy man sat gazing at the opened note, his whole body shook as if he were attacked by ague.

“It is Miss Cray’s handwriting, isn’t it, sir?”

“It looks like it, Hewetson, but it cannot be. I tell you it is an impossibility! Miss Cray died last month, and I have seen not only her grave, but the doctor and nurse who attended her in her last illness. It is folly, then, to suppose either that she called here or wrote that letter.”

“Then who could it have been, sir?” said Hewetson, attacked with a sudden terror in his turn.

“That is impossible for me to say; but should the lady call again, you had better ask her boldly for her name and address.”

“I’d rather you’d depute the office to anybody but me, sir,” replied the clerk, as he hastily backed out of the room.

Mr Braggett, dying with suspense and conjecture, went through his business as best he could, and hurried home to Violet Villa.

There he found that his wife had been spending the day with a friend, and only entered the house a few minutes before himself.

“Siggy, dear!” she commenced, as soon as he joined her in the drawing-room after dinner; “I really think we should have the fastenings and bolts of this house looked to. Such a funny thing happened whilst I was out this afternoon. Ellen has just been telling me about it.”

“What sort of a thing, dear?”

“Well, I left home as early as twelve, you know, and told the servants I shouldn’t be back until dinner-time; so they were all enjoying themselves in the kitchen, I suppose, when cook told Ellen she heard a footstep in the drawing-room. Ellen thought at first it must be cook’s fancy, because she was sure the front door was fastened; but when they listened, they all heard the noise together, so she ran upstairs, and what on earth do you think she saw?”

“How can I guess, my dear?”

“Why, a lady, seated in this very room, as if she was waiting for somebody. She was oldish, Ellen says, and had a very white face, with long curls hanging down each side of it; and she wore a blue bonnet with white feathers, and a long black cloak, and – ”

“Emily, Emily! Stop! You don’t know what you’re talking about. That girl is a fool: you must send her away. That is, how could the lady have got in if the door was closed? Good heavens! you’ll all drive me mad between you with your folly!” exclaimed Mr Braggett, as he threw himself back in his chair, with an exclamation that sounded very like a groan.

Pretty Mrs Braggett was offended. What had she said or done that her husband should doubt her word? She tossed her head in indignation, and remained silent. If Mr Braggett wanted any further information, he would have to apologise.

“Forgive me, darling,” he said, after a long pause. “I don’t think I’m very well this evening, but your story seemed to upset me.”

“I don’t see why it should upset you,” returned Mrs Braggett. “If strangers are allowed to come prowling about the house in this way, we shall be robbed someday, and then you’ll say I should have told you of it.”

“Wouldn’t she – this person – give her name?”

“Oh! I’d rather say no more about it. You had better ask Ellen.”

“No, Emily! I’d rather hear it from you.”

“Well, don’t interrupt me again, then. When Ellen saw the woman seated here, she asked her her name and business at once, but she gave no answer, and only sat and stared at her. And so Ellen, feeling very uncomfortable, had just turned round to call up cook, when the woman got up, and dashed past her like a flash of lightning, and they saw nothing more of her!”

“Which way did she leave the house?”

“Nobody knows any more than how she came in. The servants declare the hall door was neither opened nor shut – but, of course, it must have been. She was a tall gaunt woman, Ellen says, about fifty, and she’s sure her hair was dyed. She must have come to steal something, and that’s why I say we ought to have the house made more secure. Why, Siggy! Siggy! what’s the matter? Here, Ellen! Jane! come, quick, some of you! Your master’s fainted!”

And, sure enough, the repeated shocks and horrors of the day had had such an effect upon poor Mr Braggett, that for a moment he did lose all consciousness of what surrounded him. He was thankful to take advantage of the Christmas holidays, to run over to Paris with his wife, and try to forget, in the many marvels of that city, the awful fear that fastened upon him at the mention of anything connected with home. He might be enjoying himself to the top of his bent; but directly the remembrance of Charlotte Cray crossed his mind, all sense of enjoyment vanished, and he trembled at the mere thought of returning to his business, as a child does when sent to bed in the dark.

He tried to hide the state of his feelings from Mrs Braggett, but she was too sharp for him. The simple, blushing Emily Primrose had developed, under the influence of the matrimonial forcing-frame, into a good watchdog, and nothing escaped her notice.

Left to her own conjecture, she attributed his frequent moods of dejection to the existence of some other woman, and became jealous accordingly. If Siggy did not love her, why had he married her? She felt certain there was some other horrid creature who had engaged his affections and would not leave him alone, even now that he was her own lawful property. And to find out who the “horrid creature” was became Mrs Emily’s constant idea. When she had found out, she meant to give her a piece of her mind, never fear! Meanwhile Mr Braggett’s evident distaste to returning to business only served to increase his wife’s suspicions. A clear conscience, she argued, would know no fear. So they were not a happy couple, as they set their faces once more towards England. Mr Braggett’s dread of re-entering his office amounted almost to terror, and Mrs Braggett, putting this and that together, resolved that she would fathom the mystery, if it lay in feminine finesse to do so. She did not whisper a word of her intentions to dear Siggy, you may be sure of that! She worked after the manner of her amiable sex, like a cat in the dark, or a worm boring through the earth, and appearing on the surface when least expected.

So poor Mr Braggett brought her home again, heavy at heart indeed, but quite ignorant that any designs were being made against him. I think he would have given a thousand pounds to be spared the duty of attending office the day after his arrival. But it was necessary, and he went, like a publisher and a Briton. But Mrs Emily had noted his trepidation and his fears, and laid her plans accordingly. She had never been asked to enter those mysterious precincts, the house of business. Mr Braggett had not thought it necessary that her blooming loveliness should be made acquainted with its dingy, dusty accessories, but she meant to see them for herself today. So she waited till he had left Violet Villa ten minutes, and then she dressed and followed him by the next train to London.

Mr Sigismund Braggett meanwhile had gone on his way, as people go to a dentist, determined to do what was right, but with an indefinite sort of idea that he might never come out of it alive. He dreaded to hear what might have happened in his absence, and he delayed his arrival at the office for half-an-hour, by walking there instead of taking a cab as usual, in order to put off the evil moment. As he entered the place, however, he saw at a glance that his efforts were vain, and that something had occurred. The customary formality and precision of the office were upset, and the clerks, instead of bending over their ledgers, or attending to the demands of business, were all huddled together at one end whispering and gesticulating to each other. But as soon as the publisher appeared, a dead silence fell upon the group, and they only stared at him with an air of horrid mystery.

“What is the matter now?” he demanded, angrily, for like most men when in a fright which they are ashamed to exhibit, Mr Sigismund Braggett tried to cover his want of courage by bounce.

The young man called Hewetson advanced towards him, with a face the colour of ashes, and pointed towards the ground-glass doors dumbly.

“What do you mean? Can’t you speak? What’s come to the lot of you, that you are neglecting my business in this fashion to make fools of yourselves?”

“If you please, sir, she’s in there.”

Mr Braggett started back as if he’d been shot. But still he tried to have it out.

“She! Who’sshe?”

“Miss Cray, sir.”

“Haven’t I told you already that’s a lie.”

“Will you judge for yourself, Mr Braggett?” said a grey-haired man, stepping forward. “I was on the stairs myself just now when Miss Cray passed me, and I have no doubt whatever but that you will find her in your private room, however much the reports that have lately reached you may seem against the probability of such a thing.”

Mr Braggett’s teeth chattered in his head as he advanced to the ground-glass doors, through the panes of one of which there was a little peephole to ascertain if the room were occupied or not. He stooped and looked in. At the table, with her back towards him, was seated the well-known figure of Charlotte Cray. He recognised at once the long black mantle in which she was wont to drape her gaunt figure – the blue bonnet, with its dejected-looking, uncurled feather – the lank curls which rested on her shoulders – and the black-leather bag, with a steel clasp, which she always carried in her hand. It was the embodiment of Charlotte Cray, he had no doubt of that; but how could he reconcile the fact of her being there with the damp clods he had seen piled upon her grave, with the certificate of death, and the doctor’s and landlady’s assertion that they had watched her last moments?

At last he prepared, with desperate energy, to turn the handle of the door. At that moment the attention of the more frivolous of the clerks was directed from his actions by the entrance of an uncommonly pretty woman at the other end of the outer office. Such a lovely creature as this seldom brightened the gloom of their dusty abiding-place. Lilies, roses, and carnations vied with each other in her complexion, whilst the sunniest of locks, and the brightest of blue eyes, lent her face a girlish charm not easily described. What could this fashionably-attired Venus want in their house of business?

“Is Mr Braggett here? I am Mrs Braggett. Please show me in to him immediately.”

They glanced at the ground-glass doors of the inner office. They had already closed behind the manly form of their employer.

“This way, madam,” one said, deferentially, as he escorted her to the presence of Mr Braggett.

Meanwhile, Sigismund had opened the portals of the Temple of Mystery, and with trembling knees entered it. The figure in the chair did not stir at his approach. He stood at the door irresolute. What should he do or say?

“Charlotte,” he whispered.

Still she did not move.

At that moment his wife entered.

“Oh, Sigismund!” cried Mrs Emily, reproachfully, “I knew you were keeping something from me, and now I’ve caught you in the very act. Who is this lady, and what is her name? I shall refuse to leave the room until I know it.”

At the sound of her rival’s voice, the woman in the chair rose quickly to her feet and confronted them. Yes! there was Charlotte Cray, precisely similar to what she had appeared in life, only with an uncertainty and vagueness about the lines of the familiar features that made them ghastly.

She stood there, looking Mrs Emily full in the face, but only for a moment, for, even as she gazed, the lineaments grew less and less distinct, with the shape of the figure that supported them, until, with a crash, the apparition seemed to fall in and disappear, and the place that had known her was filled with empty air.

“Where is she gone?” exclaimed Mrs Braggett, in a tone of utter amazement.

“Where is who gone?” repeated Mr Braggett, hardly able to articulate from fear.

“The lady in the chair!”

“There was no one there except in your own imagination. It was my greatcoat that you mistook for a figure,” returned her husband hastily, as he threw the article in question over the back of the armchair.

“But how could that have been?” said his pretty wife, rubbing her eyes. “How could I think a coat had eyes, and hair, and features? I am sure I saw a woman seated there, and that she rose and stared at me. Siggy! tell me it was true. It seems so incomprehensible that I should have been mistaken.”

“You must question your own sense. You see that the room is empty now, except for ourselves, and you know that no one has left it. If you like to search under the table, you can.”

“Ah! now, Siggy, you are laughing at me, because you know that would be folly. But there was certainly someone here – only, where can she have disappeared to?”

“Suppose we discuss the matter at a more convenient season,” replied Mr Braggett, as he drew his wife’s arm through his arm. “Hewetson! you will be able to tell Mr Hume that he was mistaken. Say, also, that I shall not be back in the office today. I am not so strong as I thought I was, and feel quite unequal to business. Tell him to come out to Streatham this evening with my letters, and I will talk with him there.”

What passed at that interview was never disclosed; but pretty Mrs Braggett was much rejoiced, a short time afterwards, by her husband telling her that he had resolved to resign his active share of the business, and devote the rest of his life to her and Violet Villa. He would have no more occasion, therefore, to visit the office, and be exposed to the temptation of spending four or five hours out of every twelve away from her side. For, though Mrs Emily had arrived at the conclusion that the momentary glimpse she caught of a lady in Siggy’s office must have been a delusion, she was not quite satisfied by his assertions that she would never have found a more tangible cause for her jealousy.

But Sigismund Braggett knew more than he chose to tell Mrs Emily. He knew that what she had witnessed was no delusion, but a reality; and that Charlotte Cray had carried out her dying determination to call at his office and his private residence, until she had seen his wife!

THE DEVIL’S OWN

Lilian Quiller-Couch

1895

We all wondered why Octavius Nottage married at seventeen. Octavius Nottage is the youth who drives his father’s wagon to fetch and carry linen from our town to the laundry in his own village. An ordinary boy was Octavius until a year or so ago; just ruddy, and grubby, and scented with the boyish scent of brimstone marbles. His name had been bestowed on him by his parents out of compliment to a young gentleman of that family in which Mrs. Nottage had been a nursemaid – the eighth young gentleman in a family of eleven. True it so happened that Octavius Nottage was a first and only child, but there be still some persons living who stride over trifles, and level all difficulties with the besom of disregard; and John and Jane Nottage were of this class.

When first we knew Octavius he was sturdy and mischievous, travelling to and from town and village in the wagon as a sort of unpleasant consequence of John Nottage’s rheumatism, fidgetting among the bundles and baskets throughout the journeys for the sole purpose of loading and unloading at the terminus. Then came a time when John Nottage devoted his entire attention to his pain and sat home to give the fiend no cause for jealousy; then were the horse and wagon entrusted to Octavius, who rejoiced thereat, for Octavius was now sixteen, and much preferred the handling of the reins and the breaking of his own record to that forced repose on the uneven surface of somebody’s week’s washing, to which he had hitherto been doomed. He enjoyed himself, the grinning young ruffian, and we could not find it in our hearts to reproach him for his heartlessness.

But there came a year, a whole twelve months, in which Octavius changed utterly; he grew tall – that, to be sure, was only what one might expect, or at least hope – but in addition to this his face grew white to ghastliness; his eyes stared with a hunted, haunted expression from out his pallor, and he became gloomy as the veriest pessimist. We all noted the change; we all deplored it. Then at the end of twelve months Octavius married, and our regrets turned to prudent disapproval of the imprudence of his act.

“Love” and “ghosts” are superstitions which gain but little credence in these days of science and health exhibitions; but in the story of Octavius Nottage we have to face a strong similitude to both these superstitions; and as yet there is no explanation ready.

On the first morning of that enervating year Octavius drove into town with his baskets as usual, delivered them with a grin and a joke of equal breadth at their respective area doors, remounted his seat on the knify edge of the wagon, and started for home, whistling “Primo” of a duet with the rattle of wheels as he went.

This was pleasant and commonplace enough in its way: but when Octavius reached the margin of the town a strange thing happened. With the wagon still rumbling on, with the rattle of the wheels still in his ears, with the whistle still on his lips, his eyes chanced to glance down at the shafts, and there he saw, clambering up the step even as the wagon went at its full speed, a grimy little child of hideous features, with blazing yellow eyes, and a few tawny rags wrapped round about it.

“Hullo, there,” shouted Octavius cheerfully, above the clatter of his own advancing, “get down, you young brat.”

But the child neither looked at him nor answered him; it just climbed on persistently, regardless of the wagoner’s rights as of its own danger.

“Little beggar, you!” shouted Octavius again, “d’ye hear what I say; get down.”

Still the child gave no answering sign.

“Oh, all right; we’ll soon see about that,” quoth Octavius; and slackening speed a trifle he leaned forward to take the young trespasser by the shoulder that he might drop him over the side of the wagon, with care as with determination; but – there was no shoulder! his hand went grasping air!

Octavius drew back in horror, and the blood ebbed out of his face, while the clutching hand went shaking as with palsy. But even as he looked, there sat the child, grimy and hideous on the foot-board beside his very feet, gazing with those blazing yellow eyes from out its evil countenance at the horse as it ambled on its way.

Then did the heart of Octavius turn to water behind his ribs; then did his tune trail off inelegantly in mid-bar as his mouth drew lax with horror; then did the taut reins slacken in his hands, as his face stiffened coldly. For here in broad daylight, before this ruddy, healthy youth, clothed in corduroy, on a commonplace wagon lacking paint, and hung about with gaudy signs of modern soaps and matchless cleansers, sat a ghost; a grimy, pallid, evil-featured ghost, who asked no permission and heeded no remonstrance.

For a mile or more the horse jogged on unguided, while Octavius stood wide-eyed and horror-struck on the foot-board beside that – thing! and took no count of time or place. It was awful! As the moments went by it seemed to Octavius as if things must always have been in this wise – just he, and it, and the rattling wagon, with no part for him to play but to endure.

Then as the wagon neared the village, from the thing beside him came a short, hellish shriek; and then there was empty space where the thing had sat, and nothing remained but the echo of that shriek in his ears. The sound roused him into some sort of action; he leaned forward, he shouted “Whoa!” to the horse, from his dry throat, though he had no strength to pull the reins, and he staggered down from the shaft to the ground that he might witness the departure of the creature. He looked before him and behind him, but it was not to be seen; then did he stare at the common stretching away on either side of him, at the sky, at the pools; but there was no trace of the hideous thing who had claimed conveyance from him; no echo of footfall, no footprint in the dust.

When Octavius reached his home that afternoon the shock of his journey had already left its mark upon him. His heart cowered within him in childish shame and fear of ridicule, and he said nothing of the horror he had gone through; he, whose communicativeness had driven his father not infrequently to quote copiously from proverbs bearing upon “the speech of fools,” and his mother to suggest kindly but daily that it was always as well to eat a dinner while it was hot, and talk afterwards; he, I say, spoke no word of what he had seen, and even unconsciously rubbed his cheeks with his fists to soften that grey rigidity which had fallen upon them. But the terror which Octavius suffered that night when he went to his lonely little bedroom was such as no rubbing of cheeks could destroy the effect of next morning, and it brought upon him Jane Nottage’s traditional cure for pallor, a decoction which smelt of many powerful herbs, but was calculated to prove more efficacious in cases of gormandising than of ghosts.

But that terror was as nothing to the terror which followed; for day after day, week after week, did that child-sprite haunt Octavius Nottage; as surely as the wagon reached that spot at the margin of the town on its homeward way, so surely did that hideous ghost child climb to its place on the foot-board, and sit there, ghastly and untouchable, until on nearing the village it vanished with its hellish shriek of woe.

Octavius, erst so impudently satisfied with his fate, grew daily more white and miserable, more nervous and short-tempered; his cheeks fell long and thin, his eyes gazed wide and scared at all things; and by-and-by old wives of the village shook their heads as he passed by and murmured that “Nottage’s boy had been touched by death.”

For weeks did Octavius despairingly cast about in his mind for some other road by which he could escape that dreadful spot, or some time at which the spectre would not appear; but there was no other road to lead him to his home, and all times were the same. He might have told of his trouble, one would argue; but there was some fiendish spell, some strange power which sent the trembling words choking back in his throat as he strove to utter them. For eleven months he fought against that power, and then he seemed to conquer; he conquered inasmuch as he forced himself to go to his companions one by one, and bid them meet him by the churchyard wall on a certain evening, for that he had something of importance to tell them. When it so happened that they obeyed him, with curiosity raised and tempers untrammelled by respect of mood or mania, their force did the rest. They questioned him jovially – brutally it seemed – of his “matter of importance”; they twitted him cheerfully on his lady-like complexion, and inquired of his cosmetics; and at last he told them what he had bidden them there to hear. By that churchyard wall in the dim light of a fading summer’s evening, with a voice low-pitched and tremulous with the import of his words, he told them his ghastly tale. There was a minute of complete silence as the words ceased, and the heart of Octavius thumped riotously inside him with the fresh pangs of suffering which he endured as his terror sounded on his ears in spoken syllables. Then came the voice of Sam Underdown, the village wag, in tone somewhat muffled, but perfectly solemn and sympathetic in inflection.

“Ocky Nottage,” he declared, slowly, “I ’ave ’eard of that there sort of thing before; ’tis commonly called the ‘Jumps.’”

Then followed a full-voiced chorus of laughter, and a general scramble from the hedge, and Octavius stood alone in the greyness, with his cheeks throbbing hot at the insult.

From that hour the trouble of Octavius Nottage was bruited about the village with much gusto and little mercy. In the sand-strewn bar parlour of the Seven Stars, at the gossips’ corner by the three crossroads, at the forge, at the bakehouse, at the post-office; in all of these spots was the tale of “Ocky’s ghost” jeered at, while great whole-lunged guffaws went forth at his expense. Even at the laundry, in whose service the poor youth fetched and carried so regularly, Sam Underdown lounged over the windowsill as he passed, and told his humorous tale. There, indeed, it was received with an interest tempered with awe, for the maidens felt more reverence for the unknown than did the men; and they craved more details from the flippant Sam as they bent over their tubs and wrung the snowy linen with their strong red arms. And Sam gave them a sufficiency, elaborated by his own lively imagination, and the maidens shuddered and giggled, turn in, turn out, as they listened, and exclaimed, “Law, now! Sam Underdown, go along with you, talking such stuff,” even as they yearned to delay him in their midst.

But down at the end of the row of maidens in the wash-house stood one before her tub who listened to Sam Underdown’s repetitions and inventions with straining ears, and spoke no word in return. A large, slow-moving girl she was, with a wealth of shining red hair and a serious face; a girl who joined but seldom in the ordinary frivolous gossip of the laundry, and who had acquired the character of being “a bit pious.” Admonition Ellery was her name, and deep down in her heart lay a great simmering love for this youth, at whom they all scoffed in their wicked, careless way.

Up to that day Octavius Nottage and Admonition Ellery had exchanged little more than a few words; for the girl’s tub stood at the far end of the wash-house, and her eyes were wont to be sealed upon her work when Octavius or any other village youth lounged near to gossip; for her nature was charged with an overwhelming bashfulness and a shamed consciousness of her fiery hair. But there had been one day, one showery morning, nearly a year ago, when she had broken through her silence somewhat; she had been standing at the doorway with a bucket in her hand, hesitating to run through the heavy drops to the well; and Octavius, chancing to pass by at the moment, and taking in the situation, held out his hand for the bucket.

“Here, hand it over to me, I’ll fetch the water,” he said in his cheery, offhanded way. So he fetched it, and brought it, and stood for a moment telling of a cow belonging to Farmer Laskey which had fallen over a hurdle; then he jerked a smiling “Good morning” to her, and went on his way, to give many a thought to Farmer Laskey’s cow, but never one to Admonition Ellery; while she went back to her tub again and thought of him all day. That had been the birthday of her love, and for almost a year had it grown and chafed in her heart, this mighty young power, this turbulent offspring of a phlegmatic nature.

“The brutes,” raged Admonition, inwardly, as she listened now to Sam Underdown’s romancing and the comments it provoked, “the lyin’, ignorant brutes,” and her heart grew fiery as her hair; but still she spoke no word, for habits are not lightly broken; but she bided her time, and she bit her lips as she wrung out her tubful of steaming clothes and rinsed them in the cold blueing water; and then Sam Underdown went on his way, and she grew calmer, and thought and thought again of Octavius and his trouble.

So it happened that same afternoon that soon after Octavius had reached the dreadful spot at which his ghastly passenger climbed to its usual seat, and as he stood there beside it on the foot-board with a wild hopelessness filling his heart, he heard a voice calling his name, and turning his head quickly, always expectant of some new horror, saw a girl standing on the pathway waving her hand to him to stop. It was Admonition Ellery in her holiday clothes.

“I thought maybe you’d give me a lift back,” she said, smiling up at him with bashful, deprecating eyes and the blushes flaming in her cheeks. “I’m feelin’ dretful tired somehow.”

Octavius strove to bend his rigid features into an answering smile as he looked down at her. “Course I will,” he answered slowly, his horror still stamped upon his face, “get up here if you don’t mind a poor seat; wagons ain’t built altogether for comfort, be ’em?”

“The seat’s plenty good enough,” she answered, “if you’ve no objection to the company—”

“Ah!” he exclaimed sharply, as she began to climb the shaft and brushed the very shoulders of the terrible child which sat there still gazing intently, with its blazing eyes, into space; then he stopped suddenly, but her yearning heart seemed to divine his pain, for when she reached the narrow seat beside him, she said, falteringly, but with a great sympathy in her voice, “you’m in trouble, I’ve heard tell; terrible trouble – I’m – I’m mortal sorry for ’ee.”

He looked into her face suddenly and longingly, for his own heart ached to give confidence and accept comfort, and his brain grew wilder and less controllable as each day passed; and as he looked he saw great tears welling up in Admonition’s eyes.

“How came you to know of my trouble?” he asked breathlessly.

“I’m from the laundry,” she said, “and I heard tell of it there today.”

“And what do they say of me there? Say I’m a mazed-headed fool, I s’pose; and what story do they tell?”

“They say,” faltered Admonition, “they say as how – as how – you think you see—”

“‘Think I see,’” he interrupted, “‘think,’ do they say, when I see the thing before my eyes this very minute, a horrible, devil-faced brat, sitting there at your very feet – taking all the blood from my body day after day; there I see it—” his voice rose to a cry as he pointed to the foot-board, and his eyes blazed with wild fear.

Then did Admonition rise from the narrow seat, and clutching the side of the wagon with one hand, raised the other almost tragically to the sky.

“So do I,” she declared, “so do I. All that you see I see too.”

For moments there was silence, as the boy and girl faced each other, each flushed, each wild-eyed, each trembling with a great earnestness. Then Octavius spoke, pointing to the fearful thing at their feet.

“You see that thing there?” he questioned.

“I see it,” she answered; looking at the spot to which he pointed.

“You see its ghastly face and yellow eyes?”

“A face hideous as a devil, an’ eyes yellow as burning jealousy.”

“You see its dirty rags an’ its white body?”

“Rags fit to breed a plague, and body bloodless as a dead thing.”

“You see how it sits an’ stares, an’ now – how my foot goes through it an’ never touches it?”

“Starin’ like the very congers, an’ no solider than a puff of smoke.”

“Oh, my God!” he cried, pressing his hands, reins and all, over his eyes, “then I b’aint mazed! I b’aint mazed after all.”

“You b’aint mazed no more’n I’m mazed,” she cried, with all her shyness wiped out by her great love, and this her great wickedness.

And then he turned to her and caught her hands. “Tell it all again,” he cried, “tell of what you see.”

And Admonition, the sober, the pious, the bashful, leaned against the ledge of the wagon there as the horse ambled on and the sun went down, and lied to the lad beside her without scruple; and the terrible thing which was in truth invisible to her eyes as the mountains of the moon, sat on in Octavius Nottage’s sight as if it listened to her words.

“But what can I do?” he cried, when the torrent of her falsehoods which had flowed so unfalteringly ceased at last. “I can’t live on like this always. I’d rather be dead than live like this.”

Admonition mused awhile. “Perhaps I can help ’ee,” she remarked, slowly. “My grandmother – well, I know my grandmother knows a whole lot of charms – she’s done wonderful things sometimes – an’ somehow I’ve felt sometimes as if – as if I could do ’em too.”

“I’d give the world, if ’twas mine, to be rid of the devilish thing,” he raved.

Admonition looked at him straightly. “There’s some as don’t want all the world,” she answered, quietly. Then as his eyes questioned her meaning, her blushes came back to her. “I’d like to get down here, please,” she added hastily, and in another moment she was walking quickly on her way.

For almost a month Octavius Nottage had no word with Admonition Ellery. Day after day he haunted the laundry, or strove to waylay her as she went to and from her home, but she always hurried past him with some shy, murmured word of greeting, and that was all. Then as she grew more distant he became more ardent. She was the one human soul in the village who appreciated his tragedy, and he felt that he could not live without her sympathy; and this was what she longed for, for dearly did she love this lad who heretofore had given her no thought. So all through those days she held herself from him, and went gravely and slowly on her way, to all outward eyes, while his heart swelled within him as the belief was forced upon him that she had fooled with him, and yet – and yet when he remembered her face as it had been that afternoon on the wagon he found it hard to doubt her – he longed so earnestly to believe her, and his eyes grew wilder and his face more white with the suspense, and John Nottage and Jane, his wife, bowed their heads in grief, and sighed with the heaviness of premonition, for, to all appearances their boy, their only child, had truly been picked out by the hand of Death. He was dying before their eyes.

The one evening as Octavius strolled languidly along the lanes he met Admonition, and she stopped before him. She gave him no greeting in answer to his words, and he saw that her face was very white.

“There’s a charm—” she began at once without more prelude, “I’ve learnt it all by myself and nobody knows I’ve found it out – but you’d never do it.” Her voice sank to a tone of helpless conviction.

Octavius clenched his hands. “I swear I’ll do anything,” he cried. “There’s nothing in my power as I wouldn’t do to be rid of that ugly child-devil. Tell me the charm,” he commanded.

Admonition shook from head to foot as she looked into his face, but she did not blush even now. “An’ I must tell of it?” she asked, slowly.

“Yes, yes, be quick, whatever it is.”

“This is what ’tis, then, and don’t blame me for it when ’tis told.”

“Go on, go on.”

Then she began with hard, even tones, “You must get your horse an’ wagon ready on the night of the full moon, an’ you must go the same way where you always see the spirit, an’ – an’—”

“Go on,” urged Octavius again.

Admonition caught her breath as if in pain, but she continued in the same even tones. “An’ your promised wife must be beside you – an’—”

“My promised wife!” exclaimed Octavius.

“— an’—” went on Admonition, heedless of his interruption, “you must hold hands with her when you come to the spot where the spirit appears, an’ you must say—

“‘Spirit, I defy thee.

Spirit, I deny thee,

In the name of all that’s holy.’

“—an’ the spirit goes forever.”

Admonition ceased speaking and clutched her throat as if the words had scorched her. Neither spoke, and Octavius looked at Admonition, and Admonition looked steadily upon the ground.

“But I haven’t got a promised wife,” he protested, slowly.

Then Admonition raised her eyes to his, and a great hot blush spread over her face and neck till for very shame she raised her hands to hide it and turned to lean forward against a gate for support.

“Admonition! Admonition” he cried, the whole world seeming to open and lighten before him. Then he made a stride to her again and pulled the shaking hands from her blazing face in the wildness of his mood, “what do ’ee mean? Oh, Admonition, will ’ee, will ’ee for my sake!”

And Admonition consented.

On the night that the moon was at its full, Octavius Nottage took his horse and his wagon, and his promised wife, and drove towards the town. Not a word did they two utter, not a sound did they hear, for the wild throbbing of their own hearts deafened them. Then when they had reached the outlying streets of the town Octavius Nottage turned his horse’s head towards the village again. In his heart there surged a wild hope of release from his terrible burden; but in the heart of the girl beside him there was nothing but a sickening terror; she knew that she was but juggling with the superstitions which lay so strong within them both, for the sake of her selfish love, she knew that this solemn charm was but of her own manufacture, that by this night’s work she must either stand or fall; and for the first time the full sense of her lying crept coldly over her; she realised the sin of it all, but she could only stand there numb and passive, unable to do aught but go through with that which she had undertaken.

As they neared the direful spot the face of Octavius became as a model of ghastly death, and his eyes held in them a feverishness akin to madness; while the great full-faced moon, placid as ever, looked coldly down to witness his defeat or victory, and Admonition still leaned against the side of the wagon, her hands limp with a chilled faintness which had fallen upon her, realising that those daily, routine prayers of hers had been but so much mockery, and waiting for her fate.

“Quick, quick; your hands!” whispered Octavius hoarsely; but she had no power to stretch them to him. The wagon had almost reached the spot, but she made no move to fulfil her share of the rite. So he clutched her damp, chilly fingers, unconscious of their lifelessness, and gasped with a voice almost soundless by reason of the extremity of his excitement.

“‘Spirit, I defy thee.

Spirit, I deny thee,

In the name of all that’s holy.’”

There was a shock, a crash, a confusion of dancing lights, and the boy and girl were hurled from their insecure foothold, the white road leaped to meet the moonlit sky, a roar as of raging oceans filled the air, and for some moments it seemed as if these two defiers had sailed from the petty waters of Life over the great bar to Eternity.

“Is anyone injured?” asked a kindly voice.

There came a faint groan from Admonition in answer.

“There’s a girl here,” panted Octavius, as he raised himself slowly and painfully from the ground, “come round to this side.”

So the stranger went to him, and together they raised Admonition from the ground, and then she lay awhile in Octavius’s arms.

“Something frightened the horses; some child or something,” said the stranger, “it ran across the road suddenly, and sent my animal swerving into yours. If you will hold the girl I will go now and see what damage is done.”

After a few moments Admonition opened her eyes. “I’m all right,” she murmured unsteadily. “I’m quite well. I can stand and walk if you’ll let me go,” and she raised herself and stood trembling upon her feet.

“Come here!” shouted the stranger, and Octavius went to him.

“Ah!” he cried aloud as he bent over the man, and saw what lay in his arms. “Can you hold it? Can you touch it? Oh, my God!” There in the white dust lay the semblance of the spirit which he had defied, the child who had been such a hideous burden in his life, who had changed him from a ruddy, sturdy boy to a picture of living death, who had haunted him night and day, in sight and out of sight, who had drained the courage from his heart and bade fair to steal the reason from his brain; there it lay with its head on the stranger’s arm, its grimy rags displaced, its bloodless limbs limp and lifeless, its hideous features distorted, its yellow eyes half-closed – dead.

“Hold it?” cried the stranger, looking up in wonder, “there is no difficulty in holding the poor little fellow now, he is dead. It was quite an accident, I must say; the child seemed to spring from nowhere, and my horse was upon it in an instant.”

Octavius made no answer; he stood stunned by the force of circumstances, while Admonition crept slowly to the spot, and stood beside him. Octavius stretched his hand towards her, and she held it fast in hers; and still he gazed down upon the stranger’s burden and marvelled, for if he might believe his eyes, the spirit-child was but a creature of flesh and blood, and moreover it was killed. But Admonition did not give so much as a single glance to the dead child at her feet; her eyes were fixed with feverish intensity upon the stranger who held it.

“Well,” said the stranger, looking up at them with some appearance of surprise at their strange silence, “there is nothing more to be done for the poor little fellow now. My cart is rather damaged, but I think it will hold together until I reach the town, and I think it will be better for me to take the child’s body with me and explain matters when I get there. There is but small harm done to your wagon. Just tell me your name that I may be able to communicate with you.”

And Octavius told his name as in a dream, and as they stood, he and Admonition, and watched with wide, hunted eyes as the stranger laid the little corpse in his cart, examining the damage done to that vehicle, bade them “Good-night,” and then drove swiftly from them along the moonlit road.

The “Good-night” echoed in their ears unanswered, and still these two lovers stood there watching. At last Octavius turned to Admonition, and there was an awful look stamped upon his face.

“What does it all mean?” he asked hoarsely.

“’Tis the devil carrying off his own,” she answered solemnly.

Then the horror of it all came rushing over her, she turned and clung to Octavius, and there came such a storm of tears as her calm eyes had never known before.

“Let us go home,” she sobbed, “let us go home.”

So he kissed her and comforted her, and the doing of it steadied his own reason as nothing else could have done; and with the moon still flooding the world, and shining on their white and horrified faces, they journeyed home.

From that night no sight nor sound of the stranger, nor of the spirit-child, ever reached Octavius or Admonition.

The marriage took place a few weeks later; and since hearing the story of their wooing, the imprudence of the alliance appears less inexcusable.

THE DEVIL’S MANUSCRIPT

S. Levett-Yeats

1899

I. THE BLACK PACKET

“M. De Bac? De Bac? I do not know the name.”

“Gentleman says he knows you, sir, and has called on urgent business.”

There was no answer, and John Brown, the ruined publisher, looked about him in a dazed manner. He knew he was ruined; tomorrow the world would know it also, and then – beggary stared him in the face, and infamy too. For this the world would not care. Brown was not a great man in “the trade,” and his name in the Gazette would not attract notice; but his name, as he stood in the felon’s dock, and the ugly history a cross-examination might disclose would probably arouse a fleeting interest, and then the world would go on with a pitiless shrug of its shoulders. What does it matter to the moving wave of humanity if one little drop of spray from its crest is blown into nothing by the wind? Not a jot. But it was a terrible business for the drop of spray, otherwise John Brown, publisher. He was at his best not a good-looking man, rather mean-looking than otherwise, with a thin, angular face, eyes as shifty as a jackal’s and shoulders shaped like a champagne-bottle. As the shadow of coming ruin darkened over him, he seemed to shrink and look meaner than ever. He had almost forgotten the presence of his clerk. He could think of nothing but the morrow, when Simmonds’ voice again broke the stillness.

“Shall I say you will see him, sir?”

The question cut sharply into the silence, and brought Brown to himself. He had half a mind to say “No.” In the face of the coming tomorrow, business, urgent or otherwise, was nothing to him. Yet, after all, there could be no harm done in receiving the man. It would, at any rate, be a distraction, and, lifting his head, Brown answered:

“Yes, I will see him, Simmonds.”

Simmonds went out, closing the green baize door behind him. There was a delay of a moment, and M. De Bac entered – a tall, thin figure, bearing an oblong parcel, packed in shiny, black paper, and sealed with flame-coloured wax.

“Good-day, Mr. Brown”; and M. De Bac, who, for all his foreign name, spoke perfect English, extended his hand.

Brown rose, put his own cold fingers into the warm grasp of his visitor, and offered him a seat.

“With your permission, Mr. Brown, I will take this other chair. It is nearer the fire. I am accustomed to warm climates, as you doubtless perceive”; and De Bac, suiting his action to his words, placed his packet on the table, and began to slowly rub his long, lean fingers together. The publisher glanced at him with some curiosity. M. De Bac was as dark as an Italian, with clear, resolute features, and a moustache, curled at the ends, thick enough to hide the sarcastic curve of his thin lips. He was strongly if sparely built, and his fiery black eyes met Brown’s gaze with a look that ran through him like a needle.

“You do not appear to recognize me, Mr. Brown?” – De Bac’s voice was very quiet and deep-toned.

“I have not the honour—” began the publisher; but his visitor interrupted him.

“You mistake. We are quite old friends; and in time will always be very near each other. I have a minute or two to spare” – he glanced at a repeater – “and will prove to you that I know you. You are John Brown, that very religious young man of Battersea, who, twelve years ago, behaved like a blackguard to a girl at Homerton, and sent her to – but no matter. You attracted my attention then; but, unfortunately, I had no time to devote to you. Subsequently, you effected a pretty little swindle – don’t be angry, Mr. Brown – it was very clever. Then you started in business on your own account, and married. Things went well with you; you know the art of getting at a low price, and selling at a high one. You are a born ‘sweater.’ Pardon the word. You know how to keep men down like beasts, and go up yourself. In doing this, you did me yeoman’s service, although you are even now not aware of this. You had one fault, you have it still, and had you not been a gambler you might have been a rich man. Speculation is a bad thing, Brown – I mean gambling speculation.”

Brown was an Englishman, and it goes without saying that he had courage. But there was something in De Bac’s manner, some strange power in the steady stare of those black eyes, that held him to his seat as if pinned there.

As De Bac stopped, however, Brown’s anger gave him strength. Every word that was said was true, and stung like the lash of a whip. He rose white with anger.

“Sir!” he began with quivering lips, and made a step forward. Then he stopped. It was as if the sombre fire in De Bac’s gaze withered his strength. An invisible hand seemed to drag him back into his seat and hold him there.

“You are hasty, Mr. Brown”; and De Bac’s even voice continued: “you are really very rash. I was about to tell you a little more of your history, to tell you you are ruined, and tomorrow everyone in London – it is the world for you, Brown – will know you are a beggar, and many will know you are a cheat.”

The publisher swore bitterly under his breath.

“You see, Mr. Brown,” continued his strange visitor, “I know all about you, and you will be surprised, perhaps, to hear that you deserve help from me. You are too useful to let drift. I have therefore come to save you.”

“Save me?”

“Yes. By means of this manuscript here,” he pointed to the packet, “which you are going to publish.”

Brown now realized that he was dealing with a lunatic. He tried to stretch out his arm to touch the bell on the table; but found that he had no power to do so. He made an attempt to shout to Simmonds; but his tongue moved inaudibly in his mouth. He seemed only to have the faculty of following De Bac’s words, and of answering them. He gasped out:

“It is impossible!”

“My friend” – and De Bac smiled mirthlessly – “you will publish that manuscript. I will pay. The profits will be yours. It will make your name, and you will be rich. You will even be able to build a church.”

“Rich!” Brown’s voice was very bitter. “M. De Bac, you said rightly. I am a ruined man. Even if you were to pay for the publication of that manuscript I could not do it now. It is too late. There are other houses. Go to them.”

“But not other John Browns. You are peculiarly adapted for my purpose. Enough of this! I know what business is, and I have many things to attend to. You are a small man, Mr. Brown, and it will take little to remove your difficulties. See! Here are a thousand pounds. They will free you from your present troubles,” and De Bac tossed a pocketbook on the table before Brown. “I do not want a receipt,” he went on. “I will call tomorrow for your final answer, and to settle details. If you need it I will give you more money. This hour – twelve – will suit me. Adieu!” He was gone like a flash, and Brown looked around in blank amazement. He was as if suddenly aroused from a dream. He could hardly believe the evidence of his senses, although he could see the black packet, and the neat leather pocketbook with the initials “L. De B.” let in in silver on the outside. He rang his bell violently, and Simmonds appeared.

“Has M. De Bac gone?”

“I don’t know, sir. He didn’t pass out through the door.”

“There is no other way. You must have been asleep.”

“Indeed I was not, sir.”

Brown felt a chill as of cold fingers running down his backbone, but pulled himself together with an effort. “It does not matter, Simmonds. You may go.”

Simmonds went out scratching his head. “How the demon did he get out?” he asked himself. “Must have been sleeping after all. The guv’nor seems a bit dotty today. It’s the smash coming – sure.”

He wrote a letter or two, and then taking his hat, sallied forth to an aërated bread-shop for his cheap and wholesome lunch, for Simmonds was a saving young man, engaged to a young lady living out Camden Town way. Simmonds perfectly understood the state of affairs, and was not a little anxious about matters, for the mother of his fiancée, a widow who let lodgings, had only agreed to his engagement after much persuasion; and if he had to announce the fact that, instead of “thirty bob a week,” as he put it, his income was nothing at all, there would be an end of everything.

“M’ria’s all right,” he said to his friend Wilkes, in trustful confidence as they sat over their lunch; “but that old torpedo” – by which name he designated his mother-in-law-elect – “she’ll raise Cain if there’s a smash-up.”

In the meantime, John Brown tore open the pocketbook with shaking hands, and, with a crisp rustling, a number of new bank-notes fell out, and lay in a heap before him. He counted them one by one. They totalled to a thousand pounds exactly. He was a small man. M. De Bac had said so truly, if a little rudely, and the money was more than enough to stave off ruin. De Bac had said, too, if needed he would give him more, and then Brown fell to trembling all over. He was like a man snatched from the very jaws of death. At Battersea he wore a blue ribbon; but now he went to a cabinet, filled a glass with raw brandy, and drained it at a gulp. In a minute or so the generous cordial warmed his chilled blood, and picking up the notes, he counted them again, and thrust them into his breast-pocket. After this he paced the room up and down in a feverish manner, longing for the morrow when he could settle up the most urgent demands against him. Then, on a sudden, a thought struck him. It was almost as if it had been whispered in his ear. Why trouble at all about matters? He had a clear thousand with him, and in an hour he could be out of the country! He hesitated, but prudence prevailed. Extradition laws stretched everywhere; and there was another thing – that extraordinary madman, De Bac, had promised more money on the morrow. After all, it was better to stay.

As he made this resolve his eyes fell on the black packet on the table. The peculiar colour of the seals attracted his attention. He bent over them, and saw that the wax bore an impress of a V-shaped shield, within which was set a trident. He noticed also that the packet was tied with a silver thread. His curiosity was excited. He sat down, snipped the threads with a penknife, tore off the black paper covering, flung it into the fire, and saw before him a bulky manuscript exquisitely written on very fine paper. A closer examination showed that they were a number of short stories. Now Brown was in no mood to read; but the title of the first tale caught his eye, and the writing was so legible that he had glanced over half a dozen lines before he was aware of the fact. Those first half-dozen lines were sufficient to make him read the page, and when he had read the page the publisher felt he was before the work of a genius.

He was unable to stop now; and, with his head resting between his hands, he read on tirelessly. Simmonds came in once or twice and left papers on the table, but his master took no notice of him. Brown forgot all about his lunch, and turning over page after page read as if spellbound. He was a businessman, and was certain the book would sell in thousands. He read as one inspired to look into the author’s thoughts and see his design. Short as the stories were, they were Titanic fragments, and everyone of them taught a hideous lesson of corruption. Some of them cloaked in a religious garb, breathed a spirit of pitiless ferocity; others were rich with the sensuous odours of an Eastern garden; others, again, were as the tender green of moss hiding the treacherous deeps of a quicksand; and all of them bore the hall-mark of genius. They moved the man sitting there to tears, they shook him with laughter, they seemed to rock his very soul asleep; but through it all he saw, as the mariner views the beacon fire on a rocky coast, the deadly plan of the writer. There was money in them – thousands – and all was to be his. Brown’s sluggish blood was running to flame, a strange strength glowed in his face, and an uncontrollable admiration for De Bac’s evil power filled him. The book, when published, might corrupt generations yet unborn; but that was nothing to Brown. It meant thousands for him, and an eternal fame to De Bac. He did not grudge the writer the fame as long as he kept the thousands.

“By Heaven!” and he brought his fist down on the table with a crash, “the man may be a lunatic; but he is the greatest genius the world ever saw – or he is the devil incarnate.”

And somebody laughed softly in the room.

The publisher looked up with a start, and saw Simmonds standing before him:

“Did you laugh, Simmonds?”

“No, sir!” replied the clerk with a surprised look.

“Who laughed then?”

“There is no one here but ourselves, sir – and I didn’t laugh.”

“Did you hear nothing?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Strange!” and Brown began to feel chill again.

“What time is it?” he asked with an effort.

“It is half-past six, sir.”

“So late as that? You may go, Simmonds. Leave me the keys. I will be here for some time. Good evening.”

“Mad as a coot,” muttered Simmonds to himself; “must break the news to M’ria tonight. Oh, Lor’!” and his eyes were very wet as he went out into the Strand, and got into a blue omnibus.

When he was gone, Brown turned to the fire, poker in hand. To his surprise he saw that the black paper was still there, burning red hot, and the wax of the seals was still intact – the seals themselves shining like orange glow-lights. He beat at the paper with the poker; but instead of crumbling to ashes it yielded passively to the stroke, and came back to its original shape. Then a fury came on Brown. He raked at the fire, threw more coals over the paper, and blew at the flames with his bellows until they roared up the chimney; but still the coppery glare of the packet-cover never turned to the grey of ashes. Finally, he could endure it no longer, and, putting the manuscript into the safe, turned off the electric light, and stole out of his office like a thief.

II. THE RED TRIDENT

When Beggarman, Bowles & Co., of Providence Passage, Lombard Street, called at eleven o’clock on the morning following De Bac’s visit, their representative was not a little surprised to find the firm’s bills met in hard cash, and Simmonds paid him with a radiant face. When the affair was settled, the clerk leaned back in his chair, saying half-aloud to himself, “By George! I am glad after all M’ria did not keep our appointment in the Camden Road last night.” Then his face began to darken, “Wonder where she could have been, though?” his thoughts ran on; “half sorry I introduced her to Wilkes last Sunday at Victoria Park. Wilkes ain’t half the man I am though,” and he tried to look at himself in the window-pane, “but he has two pound ten a week – Lord! There’s the guv’nor ringing.” He hurried into Brown’s room, received a brief order, and was about to go back when the publisher spoke again.

“Simmonds!”

“Sir.”

“If M. De Bac calls, show him in at once.”

“Sir,” and the clerk went out.

Left to himself, Brown tried to go on with the manuscript; but was not able to do so. He was impatient for the coming of De Bac, and kept watching the hands of the clock as they slowly travelled towards twelve. When he came to the office in the morning Brown had looked with a nervous fear in the fireplace, half expecting to find the black paper still there; and it was a considerable relief to his mind to find it was not. He could do nothing, not even open the envelopes of the letters that lay on his table. He made an effort to find occupation in the morning’s paper. It was full of some absurd correspondence on a trivial subject, and he wondered at the thousands of fools who could waste time in writing and in reading yards of print on the theme of “Whether women should wear neckties.” The ticking of the clock irritated him. He flung the paper aside, just as the door opened and Simmonds came in. For a moment Brown thought he had come to announce De Bac’s arrival; but no – Simmonds simply placed a square envelope on the table before Brown.

“Passbook from Bransom’s, sir, just come in”; and he went out.

Brown took it up mechanically, and opened the envelope. A typewritten letter fell out with the passbook. He ran his eyes over it with astonishment. It was briefly to inform him that M. De Bac had paid into Brown’s account yesterday afternoon the sum of five thousand pounds, and that, adjusting overdrafts, the balance at his credit was four thousand seven hundred and twenty pounds thirteen shillings and three pence. Brown rubbed his eyes. Then he hurriedly glanced at the pass-book. The figures tallied – there was no error, no mistake. He pricked himself with his penknife to see if he was awake, and finally shouted to Simmonds:

“Read this letter aloud to me, Simmonds,” he said.

Simmonds’ eyes opened, but he did as he was bidden, and there was no mistake about the account.

“Anything else, sir?” asked Simmonds when he had finished.

“No – nothing,” and Brown was once more alone. He sat staring at the figures before him in silence, almost mesmerizing himself with the intentness of his gaze.

“My God!” he burst out at last, in absolute wonder.

“Who is your God, Brown?” answered a deep voice.

“I – I – M. De Bac! How did you come?”

“I did not drop down the chimney,” said De Bac with a grin; “your clerk announced me in the ordinary way, but you were so absorbed you did not hear. So I took the liberty of sitting in this chair, and awaiting your return to earthly matters. You were dreaming, Brown – by the way, who is your God?” he repeated with a low laugh.

“I – I do not understand, sir.”

“Possibly not, possibly not. I wouldn’t bother about the matter. Ah! I see Bransom’s have sent you your pass-book! Sit down, Brown. I hate to see a man fidgeting about – I paid in that amount yesterday on a second thought. It is enough – eh?”

Brown’s jackal eyes contracted. Perhaps he could get more out of De Bac? But a look at the strong impassive face before him frightened him.

“More than enough, sir,” he stammered; and then, with a rush, “I am grateful – anything I can do for you?”

“Oh! I know, I know, Brown – by the way, you do not object to smoke?”

“Certainly not. I do not smoke myself.”

“In Battersea, eh?” And De Bac, pulling out a silver cheroot case, held it out to Brown. But the publisher declined.

“Money wouldn’t buy a smoke like that in England,” remarked De Bac, “but as you will. I wouldn’t smoke if I were you. Such abstinence looks respectable and means nothing.” He put a cigar between his lips, and pointed his forefinger at the end. To Brown’s amazement an orange-flame licked out from under the fingernail, and vanished like a flash of lightning; but the cigar was alight, and its fragrant odour filled the room. It reached even Simmonds, who sniffed at it like a buck scenting the morning air. “By George!” he exclaimed in wonder, “what baccy!”

M. De Bac settled himself comfortably in his chair, and spoke with the cigar between his teeth. “Now you have recovered a little from your surprise, Brown, I may as well tell you that I never carry matches. This little scientific discovery I have made is very convenient, is it not?”

“I have never seen anything like it.”

“There are a good many things you have not seen, Brown – but to work. Take a pencil and paper and note down what I say. You can tell me when I have done if you agree or not.”

Brown did as he was told, and De Bac spoke slowly and carefully.

“The money I have given you is absolutely your own on the following terms. You will publish the manuscript I left you, enlarge your business, and work as you have hitherto worked – as a ‘sweater.’ You may speculate as much as you like. You will not lose. You need not avoid the publication of religious books, but you must never give in charity secretly. I do not object to a big cheque for a public object, and your name in all the papers. It will be well for you to hound down the vicious. Never give them a chance to recover themselves. You will be a legislator. Strongly uphold all those measures which, under a moral cloak, will do harm to mankind. I do not mention them. I do not seek to hamper you with detailed instructions. Work on these general lines, and you will do what I want. A word more. It will be advisable whenever you have a chance to call public attention to a great evil which is also a vice. Thousands who have never heard of it before will hear of it then – and human nature is very frail. You have noted all this down?”

“I have. You are a strange man, M. De Bac.”

M. De Bac frowned, and Brown began to tremble.

“I do not permit you to make observations about me, Mr. Brown.”

“I beg your pardon, sir.”

“Do not do so again. Will you agree to all this? I promise you unexampled prosperity for ten years. At the end of that time I shall want you elsewhere. And you must agree to take a journey with me.”

“A long one, sir?” Brown’s voice was just a shade satirical.

M. De Bac smiled oddly. “No – in your case I promise a quick passage. These are all the conditions I attach to my gift of six thousand pounds to you.”

Brown’s amazement did not blind him to the fact of the advantage he had, as he thought, over his visitor. The six thousand pounds were already his, and he had given no promise. With a sudden boldness he spoke out.

“And if I decline?”

“You will return me my money, and my book, and I will go elsewhere.”

“The manuscript, yes – but if I refuse to give back the money?”

“Ha! ha! ha!” M. De Bac’s mirthless laugh chilled Brown to the bone. “Very good, Brown – but you won’t refuse. Sign that like a good fellow,” and he flung a piece of paper towards Brown, who saw that it was a promissory note, drawn up in his name, agreeing to pay M. De Bac the sum of six thousand pounds on demand.

“I shall do no such thing,” said Brown stoutly.

M. De Bac made no answer, but calmly touched the bell. In a half-minute Simmonds appeared.

“Be good enough to witness Mr. Brown’s signature to that document,” said De Bac to him, and then fixed his gaze on Brown. There was a moment of hesitation and then – the publisher signed his name, and Simmonds did likewise as a witness. When the latter had gone, De Bac carefully put the paper by in a letter-case he drew from his vest pocket.

“Your scientific people would call this an exhibition of odic force, Brown – eh?”

Brown made no answer. He was shaking in every limb, and great pearls of sweat rolled down his forehead.

“You see, Brown,” continued De Bac, “after all you are a free agent. Either agree to my terms and keep the money, or say you will not, pay me back, receive your note-of-hand, and I go elsewhere with my book. Come – time is precious.”

And from Brown’s lips there hissed a low “I agree.”

“Then that is settled,” and De Bac rose from his chair. “There is a little thing more – stretch out your arm like a good fellow – the right arm.”

Brown did so; and De Bac placed his forefinger on his wrist, just between what palmists call “the lines of life.” The touch was as that of a red-hot iron, and with a quick cry Brown drew back his hand and looked at it. On his wrist was a small red trident, as cleanly marked as if it had been tattooed into the skin. The pain was but momentary; and, as he looked at the mark, he heard De Bac say, “Adieu once more, Brown. I will find my way out – don’t trouble to rise.” Brown heard him wish Simmonds an affable “Good-day,” and he was gone.

III. THE MARK OF THE BEAST

It was early in the spring that Brown published The Yellow Dragon – as the collection of tales left with him by De Bac was called – and the success of the book surpassed his wildest expectations. It became the rage. There were the strangest rumours afloat as to its authorship, for no one knew De Bac, and the name of the writer was supposed to be an assumed one. It was written by a clergyman; it was penned by a schoolgirl; it had employed the leisure of a distinguished statesman during his retirement; it was the work of an ex-crowned head. These, and such-like statements, were poured forth one day to be contradicted the next. Wherever the book was noticed it was either with the most extravagant praise or the bitterest rancour. But friend and foe were alike united on one thing – that of ascribing to its unknown author a princely genius. The greatest of the reviews, after pouring on The Yellow Dragon the vials of its wrath, concluded with these words of unwilling praise: “There is not a sentence of this book which should ever have been written, still less published; but we do not hesitate to say that, having been written and given to the world, there is hardly a line of this terrible work which will not become immortal – to the misery of mankind.”

Be this as it may, the book sold in tens of thousands, and Brown’s fortune was assured. In ten years a man may do many things; but during the ten years that followed the publication of The Yellow Dragon, Brown did so many things that he astonished “the City,” and it takes not a little to do that. It was not alone the marvellous growth of his business – although that advanced by leaps and bounds until it overshadowed all others – it was his wonderful luck on the Stock Exchange. Whatever he touched turned to gold. He was looked upon as the Napoleon of finance. His connection with The Yellow Dragon was forgotten when his connection with the yellow sovereign was remembered. He had a palace in Berkshire; another huge pile owned by him overlooked Hyde Park. He was a county member and a cabinet-minister. He had refused a peerage and built a church. Could ambition want more? He had clean forgotten De Bac. From him he had heard no word, received no sign, and he looked upon him as dead. At first, when his eyes fell on the red trident on his wrist, he was wont to shudder all over; but as years went on he became accustomed to the mark, and thought no more of it than if it had been a mole. In personal appearance he was but little changed, except that his hair was thin and grey, and there was a bald patch on the top of his head. His wife had died four years ago, and he was now contemplating another marriage – a marriage that would ally him with a family dating from the Confessor.

Such was John Brown, when we meet him again ten years after De Bac’s visit, seated at a large writing-table in his luxurious office. A clerk standing beside him was cutting open the envelopes of the morning’s post, and placing the letters one by one before his master. It is our friend Simmonds – still a young man, but bent and old beyond his years, and still on “thirty bob” a week. And the history of Simmonds will show how Brown carried out De Bac’s instructions.

When The Yellow Dragon came out and business began to expand, Simmonds, having increased work, was ambitious enough to expect a rise in his salary, and addressed his chief on the subject. He was put off with a promise, and on the strength of that promise Simmonds, being no wiser than many of his fellows, married M’ria; and husband and wife managed to exist somehow with the help of the mother-in-law. Then the mother-in-law died, and there was only the bare thirty shillings a week on which to live, to dress, to pay Simmonds’ way daily to the City and back, and to feed more than two mouths – for Simmonds was amongst the blessed who have their quivers full. Still the expected increase of pay did not come. Other men came into the business and passed over Simmonds. Brown said they had special qualifications. They had; and John Brown knew Simmonds better than he knew himself. The other men were paid for doing things Simmonds could not have done to save his life; but he was more than useful in his way. A hundred times it was in the mind of the wretched clerk to resign his post and seek to better himself elsewhere. But he had given hostages to fortune. There was M’ria and her children, and M’ria set her face resolutely against risk. They had no reserve upon which to fall back, and it was an option between partial and total starvation. So “Sim,” as M’ria called him, held on and battled with the wolf at the door, the wolf gaining inch by inch. Then illness came, and debt, and then – temptation. “Sim” fell, as many a better man than he has fallen.

Brown found it out, and saw his opportunity to behave generously, and make his generosity pay. He got a written confession of his guilt from Simmonds, and retained him in his service forever on thirty shillings a week. And Simmonds’ life became such as made him envy the lot of a Russian serf, of a Siberian exile, of a negro in the old days of the sugar plantations. He became a slave, a living machine who ground out his daily hours of work; he became mean and sordid in soul, as one does become when hope is extinct. Such was Simmonds as he cut open the envelopes of Brown’s letters, and the great man, reading them quickly, endorsed them with terse remarks in blue pencil, for subsequent disposal by his secretary. A sudden exclamation from the clerk, and Brown looked up.

“What is it?” he asked sharply.

“Only this, sir,” and Simmonds held before Brown’s eyes a jet black envelope; and as he gazed at it, his mind travelled back ten years, to that day when he stood on the brink of public infamy and ruin, and De Bac saved him. For a moment everything faded before Brown’s eyes, and he saw himself in a dingy room, with the gaunt figure of the author of The Yellow Dragon, and the maker of his fortune, before him.

“Shall I open it, sir?” Simmonds’ voice reached him as from a far distance, and Brown roused himself with an effort.

“No,” he said, “give it to me, and go for the present.”

When the bent figure of the clerk had passed out of the room, Brown looked at the envelope carefully. It bore a penny stamp and the impress of the postmark was not legible. The superscription was in white ink and it was addressed to Mr. John Brown. The “Mr.” on the letter irritated Brown, for he was now The Right Hon’ble John Brown, and was punctilious on that score. He was so annoyed that at first he thought of casting the letter unopened into the waste-paper basket beside him, but changed his mind, and tore open the cover. A note-card discovered itself. The contents were brief and to the point:

“Get ready to start. I will call for you at the close of the day.

L. De B.”

For a moment Brown was puzzled, then the remembrance of his old compact with De Bac came to him. He fairly laughed. To think that he, The Right Hon’ble John Brown, the richest man in England, and one of the most powerful, should be written to like that! Ordered to go somewhere he did not even know! Addressed like a servant! The cool insolence of the note amused Brown first, and then he became enraged. He tore the note into fragments and cast it from him. “Curse the madman,” he said aloud, “I’ll give him in charge if he annoys me.” A sudden twinge in his right wrist made him hurriedly look at the spot. There was a broad pink circle, as large as a florin, around the mark of the trident, and it smarted and burned as the sting of a wasp. He ran to a basin of water and dipped his arm in to the elbow; but the pain became intolerable, and, finally, ordering his carriage, he drove home. That evening there was a great civic banquet in the city, and amongst the guests was The Right Hon’ble John Brown.

All through the afternoon he had been in agony with his wrist, but towards evening the pain ceased as suddenly as it had come on, and Brown attended the banquet, a little pale and shaken, but still himself. On Brown’s right hand sat the Bishop of Browboro’, on his left a most distinguished scientist, and amongst the crowd of waiters was Simmonds, who had hired himself out for the evening to earn an extra shilling or so to eke out his miserable subsistence. The man of science had just returned from Mount Atlas, whither he had gone to observe the transit of Mercury, and had come back full of stories of witchcraft. He led the conversation in that direction, and very soon the Bishop, Brown, and himself were engaged in the discussion of diablerie. The Bishop was a learned and a saintly man, and was a “believer”; the scientist was puzzled by what he had seen, and Brown openly scoffed.

“Look here!” and pulling back his cuff, he showed the red mark on his wrist to his companions, “if I were to tell you how that came here, you would say the devil himself marked me.”

“I confess I am curious,” said the scientist; and the Bishop fixed an inquiring gaze upon Brown. Simmonds was standing behind, and unconsciously drew near. Then the man, omitting many things, told the history of the mark on his wrist. He left out much, but he told enough to make the scientist edge his chair a little further from him, and a look of grave compassion, not untinged with scorn, to come into the eyes of the Bishop. As Brown came to the end of his story he became unnaturally excited, he raised his voice, and, with a sudden gesture, held his wrist close to the Bishop’s face, “There!” he said, “I suppose you would say the devil did that?”

And as the Bishop looked, a voice seemed to breathe in his ear: “And he caused all ... to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads.” It was as if his soul was speaking to him and urging him to say the words aloud. He did not; but with a pale face gently put aside Brown’s hand. “I do not know, Mr. Brown – but I think you are called upon for a speech.”

It was so; and, after a moment’s hesitation, Brown rose. He was a fluent speaker, and the occasion was one with which he was peculiarly qualified to deal. He began well; but as he went on those who looked upon him saw that he was ghastly pale, and that the veins stood out on his high forehead in blue cords. As he spoke he made some allusion to those men who have risen to eminence from an obscure position. He spoke of himself as one of these, and then began to tell the story of “The Devil’s Manuscript,” as he called it, with a mocking look at the Bishop. As he went on he completely lost command over himself, and the story of the manuscript became the story of his life. He concealed nothing, he passed over nothing. He laid all his sordid past before his hearers with a vivid force. His listeners were astonished into silence; perhaps curiosity kept them still. But, as the long tale of infamy went on, some, in pity for the man, and believing him struck mad, tried to stop him, but in vain. He came at last to the incident of the letter, and told how De Bac was to call for him tonight. “The Bishop of Brownboro’,” he said with a jarring laugh, “thought De Bac was the fiend himself,” but he (Brown) knew better; he – he stopped, and, with a half-inarticulate cry, began to back slowly from the table, his eyes fixed on the entrance to the room. And now a strange thing happened. There was not a man in the room who had the power to move or to speak; they were as if frozen to their seats; as if struck into stone. Some were able to follow Brown’s glance, but could see nothing. All were able to see that in Brown’s face was an awful fear, and that he was trying to escape from a horrible presence which was moving slowly towards him, and which was visible to himself alone. Inch by inch Brown gave way, until he at last reached the wall, and stood with his back to it, with his arms spread out, in the position of one crucified. His face was marble white, and a dreadful terror and a pitiful appeal shone in his eyes. His blue lips were parted as of one in the dolors of death.

The silence was profound.

There were strong men there; men who had faced and overcome dangers, who had held their lives in their hands, who had struggled against desperate odds and won; but there was not a man who did not now feel weak, powerless, helpless as a child before that invisible, advancing terror that Brown alone could see. They could move no hand to aid, lift no voice to pray. All they could do was to wait in that dreadful silence and to watch. Time itself seemed to stop. It was as if the stillness had lasted for hours.

Suddenly Brown’s face, so white before, flushed a crimson purple, and with a terrible cry he fell forwards on the polished woodwork of the floor.

As he fell it seemed as if the weight which held all still was on the moment removed, and they were free. With scared faces they gathered around the fallen man and raised him. He was quite dead; but on his forehead, where there was no mark before, was the impress of a red trident.

A man, evidently one of the waiters, who had forced his way into the group, laid his finger on the mark and looked up at the Bishop. There was an unholy exultation in his face as he met the priest’s eyes, and said:

“He’s marked twice – curse him!”

THE WATCHER
BY THE THRESHOLD

John Buchan

1900

A chill evening in the early October of the year 189– found me driving in a dogcart through the belts of antique woodland which form the lowland limits of the hilly parish of More. The Highland express, which brought me from the north, took me no farther than Perth. Thence it had been a slow journey in a disjointed local train, till I emerged on the platform at Morefoot, with a bleak prospect of pot stalks, coal heaps, certain sour corn lands, and far to the west a line of moor where the sun was setting. A neat groom and a respectable trap took the edge off my discomfort, and soon I had forgotten my sacrifice and found eyes for the darkening landscape. We were driving through a land of thick woods, cut at rare intervals by old long-frequented highways. The More, which at Morefoot is an open sewer, became a sullen woodland stream, where the brown leaves of the season drifted. At times we would pass an ancient lodge, and through a gap in the trees would come a glimpse of chipped crowstep gable. The names of such houses, as told me by my companion, were all famous. This one had been the home of a drunken Jacobite laird, and a king of north country Medmenham. Unholy revels had waked the old halls, and the devil had been toasted at many a hell-fire dinner. The next was the property of a great Scots law family, and there the old Lord of Session, who built the place, in his frowzy wig and carpet slippers, had laid down the canons of Taste for his day and society. The whole country had the air of faded and bygone gentility. The mossy roadside walls had stood for two hundred years; the few wayside houses were toll bars or defunct hostelries. The names, too, were great: Scots baronial with a smack of France – Chatelray and Riverslaw, Black Holm and Fountainblue. The place had a cunning charm, mystery dwelt in every cranny, and yet it did not please me. The earth smelt heavy and raw; the roads were red underfoot; all was old, sorrowful, and uncanny. Compared with the fresh Highland glen I had left, where wind and sun and flying showers were never absent, all was chilly and dull and dead. Even when the sun sent a shiver of crimson over the crests of certain firs, I felt no delight in the prospect. I admitted shamefacedly to myself that I was in a very bad temper.

I had been staying at Glenaicill with the Clanroydens, and for a week had found the proper pleasure in life. You know the house with its old rooms and gardens, and the miles of heather which defend it from the world. The shooting had been extraordinary for a wild place late in the season; for there are few partridges, and the woodcock are notoriously late. I had done respectably in my stalking, more than respectably on the river, and creditably on the moors. Moreover, there were pleasant people in the house – and there were the Clanroydens. I had had a hard year’s work, sustained to the last moment of term, and a fortnight in Norway had been disastrous. It was therefore with real comfort that I had settled myself down for another ten days in Glenaicill, when all my plans were shattered by Sibyl’s letter. Sibyl is my cousin and my very good friend, and in old days when I was briefless I had fallen in love with her many times. But she very sensibly chose otherwise, and married a man Ladlaw – Robert John Ladlaw, who had been at school with me. He was a cheery, good-humoured fellow, a great sportsman, a justice of the peace, and deputy lieutenant for his county, and something of an antiquary in a mild way. He had a box in Leicestershire to which he went in the hunting season, but from February till October he lived in his moorland home. The place was called the House of More, and I had shot at it once or twice in recent years. I remembered its loneliness and its comfort, the charming diffident Sibyl, and Ladlaw’s genial welcome. And my recollections set me puzzling again over the letter which that morning had broken into my comfort. “You promised us a visit this autumn,” Sibyl had written, “and I wish you would come as soon as you can.” So far common politeness. But she had gone on to reveal the fact that Ladlaw was ill; she did not know how, exactly, but something, she thought, about his heart. Then she had signed herself my affectionate cousin, and then had come a short, violent postscript, in which, as it were, the fences of convention had been laid low. “For Heaven’s sake, come and see us,” she scrawled below. “Bob is terribly ill, and I am crazy. Come at once.” To cap it she finished with an afterthought: “Don’t bother about bringing doctors. It is not their business.”

She had assumed that I would come, and dutifully I set out. I could not regret my decision, but I took leave to upbraid my luck. The thought of Glenaicill, with the woodcock beginning to arrive and the Clanroydens imploring me to stay, saddened my journey in the morning, and the murky, coaly, midland country of the afternoon completed my depression. The drive through the woodlands of More failed to raise my spirits. I was anxious about Sibyl and Ladlaw, and this accursed country had always given me a certain eeriness on my first approaching it. You may call it silly, but I have no nerves and am little susceptible to vague sentiment. It was sheer physical dislike of the rich deep soil, the woody and antique smells, the melancholy roads and trees, and the flavor of old mystery. I am aggressively healthy and wholly Philistine. I love clear outlines and strong colours, and More with its half tints and hazy distances depressed me miserably. Even when the road crept uphill and the trees ended, I found nothing to hearten me in the moorland which succeeded. It was genuine moorland, close on eight hundred feet above the sea, and through it ran this old grass-grown coach road. Low hills rose to the left, and to the right, after some miles of peat, flared the chimneys of pits and oil works. Straight in front the moor ran out into the horizon, and there in the centre was the last dying spark of the sun. The place was as still as the grave save for the crunch of our wheels on the grassy road, but the flaring lights to the north seemed to endow it with life. I have rarely had so keenly the feeling of movement in the inanimate world. It was an unquiet place, and I shivered nervously. Little gleams of loch came from the hollows, the burns were brown with peat, and every now and then there rose in the moor jags of sickening red stone. I remembered that Ladlaw had talked about the place as the old Manann, the holy land of the ancient races. I had paid little attention at the time, but now it struck me that the old peoples had been wise in their choice. There was something uncanny in this soil and air. Framed in dank mysterious woods and a country of coal and ironstone, at no great distance from the capital city, it was a sullen relic of a lost barbarism. Over the low hills lay a green pastoral country with bright streams and valleys, but here, in this peaty desert, there were few sheep and little cultivation. The House of More was the only dwelling, and, save for the ragged village, the wilderness was given over to the wild things of the hills. The shooting was good, but the best shooting on earth would not persuade me to make my abode in such a place. Ladlaw was ill; well, I did not wonder. You can have uplands without air, moors that are not health-giving, and a country life which is more arduous than a townsman’s. I shivered again, for I seemed to have passed in a few hours from the open noon to a kind of dank twilight.

We passed the village and entered the lodge gates. Here there were trees again – little innocent new-planted firs, which flourished ill. Some large plane trees grew near the house, and there were thickets upon thickets of the ugly elderberry. Even in the half darkness I could see that the lawns were trim and the flower beds respectable for the season; doubtless Sibyl looked after the gardeners. The oblong whitewashed house, more like a barrack than ever, opened suddenly on my sight, and I experienced my first sense of comfort since I left Glenaicill. Here I should find warmth and company; and sure enough, the hall door was wide open, and in the great flood of light which poured from it Sibyl stood to welcome me.

She ran down the steps as I dismounted, and, with a word to the groom, caught my arm and drew me into the shadow. “Oh, Henry, it was so good of you to come. You mustn’t let Bob think that you know he is ill. We don’t talk about it. I’ll tell you afterwards. I want you to cheer him up. Now we must go in, for he is in the hall expecting you.”

While I stood blinking in the light, Ladlaw came forward with outstretched hand and his usual cheery greeting. I looked at him and saw nothing unusual in his appearance; a little drawn at the lips, perhaps, and heavy below the eyes, but still fresh-coloured and healthy. It was Sibyl who showed change. She was very pale, her pretty eyes were deplorably mournful, and in place of her delightful shyness there were the self-confidence and composure of pain. I was honestly shocked, and as I dressed my heart was full of hard thoughts about Ladlaw. What could his illness mean? He seemed well and cheerful, while Sibyl was pale; and yet it was Sibyl who had written the postscript. As I warmed myself by the fire, I resolved that this particular family difficulty was my proper business.

•   •   •   •   •

The Ladlaws were waiting for me in the drawing-room. I noticed something new and strange in Sibyl’s demeanor. She looked to her husband with a motherly, protective air, while Ladlaw, who had been the extreme of masculine independence, seemed to cling to his wife with a curious appealing fidelity. In conversation he did little more than echo her words. Till dinner was announced he spoke of the weather, the shooting, and Mabel Clanroyden. Then he did a queer thing; for when I was about to offer my arm to Sibyl he forestalled me, and clutching her right arm with his left hand led the way to the dining room, leaving me to follow in some bewilderment.

I have rarely taken part in a more dismal meal. The House of More has a pretty Georgian paneling through most of the rooms, but in the dining room the walls are level and painted a dull stone colour. Abraham offered up Isaac in a ghastly picture in front of me. Some photographs of the Quorn hung over the mantelpiece, and five or six drab ancestors filled up the remaining space. But one thing was new and startling. A great marble bust, a genuine antique, frowned on me from a pedestal. The head was in the late Roman style, clearly of some emperor, and in its commonplace environment the great brows, the massive neck, and the mysterious solemn lips had a surprising effect. I nodded toward the thing, and asked what it represented.

Ladlaw grunted something which I took for “Justinian,” but he never raised his eyes from his plate. By accident I caught Sibyl’s glance. She looked toward the bust, and laid a finger on her lips.

The meal grew more doleful as it advanced. Sibyl scarcely touched a dish, but her husband ate ravenously of everything. He was a strong, thickset man, with a square kindly face burned brown by the sun. Now he seemed to have suddenly coarsened. He gobbled with undignified haste, and his eye was extraordinarily vacant. A question made him start, and he would turn on me a face so strange and inert that I repented the interruption.

I asked him about the autumn’s sport. He collected his wits with difficulty. He thought it had been good, on the whole, but he had shot badly. He had not been quite so fit as usual. No, he had had nobody staying with him. Sibyl had wanted to be alone. He was afraid the moor might have been undershot, but he would make a big day with keepers and farmers before the winter.

“Bob has done pretty well,” Sibyl said. “He hasn’t been out often, for the weather has been very bad here. You can have no idea, Henry, how horrible this moorland place of ours can be when it tries. It is one great sponge sometimes, with ugly red burns and mud to the ankles.”

“I don’t think it’s healthy,” said I.

Ladlaw lifted his face. “Nor do I. I think it’s intolerable, but I am so busy I can’t get away.”

Once again I caught Sibyl’s warning eye as I was about to question him on his business.

Clearly the man’s brain had received a shock, and he was beginning to suffer from hallucinations. This could be the only explanation, for he had always led a temperate life. The distrait, wandering manner was the only sign of his malady, for otherwise he seemed normal and mediocre as ever. My heart grieved for Sibyl, alone with him in this wilderness.

Then he broke the silence. He lifted his head and looked nervously around till his eye fell on the Roman bust.

“Do you know that this countryside is the old Manann?” he said.

It was an odd turn to the conversation, but I was glad of a sign of intelligence. I answered that I had heard so.

“It’s a queer name,” he said oracularly, “but the thing it stood for was queerer, Manann, Manaw,” he repeated, rolling the words on his tongue. As he spoke, he glanced sharply, and, as it seemed to me, fearfully, at his left side.

The movement of his body made his napkin slip from his left knee and fall on the floor. It leaned against his leg, and he started from its touch as if he had been bitten by a snake. I have never seen a more sheer and transparent terror on a man’s face. He got to his feet, his strong frame shaking like a rush. Sibyl ran round to his side, picked up the napkin and flung it on a sideboard. Then she stroked his hair as one would stroke a frightened horse. She called him by his old boy’s name of Robin, and at her touch and voice he became quiet. But the particular course then in progress was removed, untasted.

In a few minutes he seemed to have forgotten his behaviour, for he took up the former conversation. For a time he spoke well and briskly. “You lawyers,” he said, “understand only the dry framework of the past. You cannot conceive the rapture, which only the antiquary can feel, of constructing in every detail an old culture. Take this Manann. If I could explore the secret of these moors, I would write the world’s greatest book. I would write of that prehistoric life when man was knit close to nature. I would describe the people who were brothers of the red earth and the red rock and the red streams of the hills. Oh, it would be horrible, but superb, tremendous! It would be more than a piece of history; it would be a new gospel, a new theory of life. It would kill materialism once and for all. Why, man, all the poets who have deified and personified nature would not do an eighth part of my work. I would show you the unknown, the hideous, shrieking mystery at the back of this simple nature. Men would see the profundity of the old crude faiths which they affect to despise. I would make a picture of our shaggy, sombre-eyed forefather, who heard strange things in the hill silences. I would show him brutal and terror-stricken, but wise, wise, God alone knows how wise! The Romans knew it, and they learned what they could from him, though he did not tell them much. But we have some of his blood in us, and we may go deeper. Manann! A queer land nowadays! I sometimes love it and sometimes hate it, but I always fear it. It is like that statue, inscrutable.”

I would have told him that he was talking mystical nonsense, but I had looked toward the bust, and my rudeness was checked on my lips. The moor might be a common piece of ugly waste land, but the statue was inscrutable – of that there was no doubt. I hate your cruel heavy-mouthed Roman busts; to me they have none of the beauty of life, and little of the interest of art. But my eyes were fastened on this as they had never before looked on marble. The oppression of the heavy woodlands, the mystery of the silent moor, seemed to be caught and held in this face. It was the intangible mystery of culture on the verge of savagery – a cruel, lustful wisdom, and yet a kind of bitter austerity which laughed at the game of life and stood aloof. There was no weakness in the heavy-veined brow and slumbrous eyelids. It was the face of one who had conquered the world, and found it dust and ashes; one who had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and scorned human wisdom. And at the same time, it was the face of one who knew uncanny things, a man who was the intimate of the half-world and the dim background of life. Why on earth I should connect the Roman grandee  [*] with the moorland parish of More I cannot say, but the fact remains that there was that in the face which I knew had haunted me through the woodlands and bogs of the place – a sleepless, dismal, incoherent melancholy.

“I bought that at Colenzo’s,” Ladlaw said, “because it took my fancy. It matches well with this place?”

I thought it matched very ill with his drab walls and Quorn photographs, but I held my peace.

“Do you know who it is?” he asked. “It is the head of the greatest man the world has ever seen. You are a lawyer and know your Justinian.”

The Pandects are scarcely part of the daily work of a common-law barrister. I had not looked into them since I left college.

“I know that he married an actress,” I said, “and was a sort of all-round genius. He made law, and fought battles, and had rows with the Church. A curious man! And wasn’t there some story about his selling his soul to the devil, and getting law in exchange? Rather a poor bargain!”

I chattered away, sillily enough, to dispel the gloom of that dinner table. The result of my words was unhappy. Ladlaw gasped and caught at his left side, as if in pain. Sibyl, with tragic eyes, had been making signs to me to hold my peace. Now she ran round to her husband’s side and comforted him like a child. As she passed me, she managed to whisper in my ear to talk to her only, and let her husband alone.

For the rest of dinner I obeyed my orders to the letter. Ladlaw ate his food in gloomy silence, while I spoke to Sibyl of our relatives and friends, of London, Glenaicill, and any random subject. The poor girl was dismally forgetful, and her eye would wander to her husband with wifely anxiety. I remember being suddenly overcome by the comic aspect of it all. Here were we three fools alone in the dank upland: one of us sick and nervous, talking out-of-the-way nonsense about Manann and Justinian, gobbling his food and getting scared at his napkin; another gravely anxious; and myself at my wits’ end for a solution. It was a Mad Tea-Party with a vengeance: Sibyl the melancholy little Dormouse, and Ladlaw the incomprehensible Hatter. I laughed aloud, but checked myself when I caught my cousin’s eye. It was really no case for finding humour. Ladlaw was very ill, and Sibyl’s face was getting deplorably thin.

I welcomed the end of that meal with unmannerly joy, for I wanted to speak seriously with my host. Sibyl told the butler to have the lamps lighted in the library. Then she leaned over toward me and spoke low and rapidly: “I want you to talk with Bob. I’m sure you can do him good. You’ll have to be very patient with him, and very gentle. Oh, please try to find out what is wrong with him. He won’t tell me, and I can only guess.”

The butler returned with word that the library was ready to receive us, and Sibyl rose to go. Ladlaw half rose, protesting, making the most curious feeble clutches to his side. His wife quieted him. “Henry will look after you, dear,” she said. “You are going into the library to smoke.” Then she slipped from the room, and we were left alone.

He caught my arm fiercely with his left hand, and his grip nearly made me cry out. As we walked down the hall, I could feel his arm twitching from the elbow to the shoulder. Clearly he was in pain, and I set it down to some form of cardiac affection, which might possibly issue in paralysis.

I settled him in the biggest armchair, and took one of his cigars. The library is the pleasantest room in the house, and at night, when a peat fire burned on the old hearth and the great red curtains were drawn, it used to be the place for comfort and good talk. Now I noticed changes. Ladlaw’s bookshelves had been filled with the Proceedings of antiquarian societies and many light-hearted works on sport. But now the Badminton library had been cleared out of a shelf where it stood most convenient to the hand, and its place taken by an old Leyden reprint of Justinian. There were books on Byzantine subjects of which I never dreamed he had heard the names; there were volumes of history and speculation, all of a slightly bizarre kind; and to crown everything, there were several bulky medical works with gaudily coloured plates. The old atmosphere of sport and travel had gone from the room with the medley of rods, whips, and gun cases which used to cumber the tables. Now the place was moderately tidy and somewhat learned, and I did not like it.

Ladlaw refused to smoke, and sat for a little while in silence. Then of his own accord he broke the tension.

“It was devilish good of you to come, Harry. This is a lonely place for a man who is a bit seedy.”

“I thought you might be alone,” I said, “so I looked you up on my way down from Glenaicill. I’m sorry to find you feeling ill.”

“Do you notice it?” he asked sharply.

“It’s tolerably patent,” I said. “Have you seen a doctor?”

He said something uncomplimentary about doctors, and kept looking at me with his curious dull eyes.

I remarked the strange posture in which he sat, his head screwed round to his right shoulder, and his whole body a protest against something at his left hand.

“It looks like a heart,” I said. “You seem to have pains in your left side.”

Again a spasm of fear. I went over to him and stood at the back of his chair.

“Now for goodness’ sake, my dear fellow, tell me what is wrong. You’re scaring Sibyl to death. It’s lonely work for the poor girl, and I wish you would let me help you.”

He was lying back in his chair now, with his eyes half shut, and shivering like a frightened colt. The extraordinary change in one who had been the strongest of the strong kept me from realizing his gravity. I put a hand on his shoulder, but he flung it off.

“For God’s sake, sit down!” he said hoarsely. “I’m going to tell you, but I’ll never make you understand.”

I sat down promptly opposite him.

“It’s the devil,” he said very solemnly.

I am afraid that I was rude enough to laugh. He took no notice, but sat, with the same tense, miserable air, staring over my head.

“Right,” said I. “Then it is the devil. It’s a new complaint, so it’s as well I did not bring a doctor. How does it affect you?”

He made the old impotent clutch at the air with his left hand. I had the sense to become grave at once. Clearly this was some serious mental affection, some hallucination born of physical pain.

Then he began to talk in a low voice, very rapidly, with his head bent forward like a hunted animal’s. I am not going to set down what he told me in his own words, for they were incoherent often, and there was much repetition. But I am going to write the gist of the odd story which took my sleep away on that autumn night, with such explanations and additions I think needful. The fire died down, the wind arose, the hour grew late, and still he went on in his mumbling recitative. I forgot to smoke, forgot my comfort – everything but the odd figure of my friend and his inconceivable romance. And the night before I had been in cheerful Glenaicill!

—  —  —  —

He had returned to the House of More, he said, in the latter part of May, and shortly after he fell ill. It was a trifling sickness – influenza or something – but he had never quite recovered. The rainy weather of June depressed him, and the extreme heat of July made him listless and weary. A kind of insistent sleepiness hung over him, and he suffered much from nightmare. Toward the end of July his former health returned, but he was haunted with a curious oppression. He seemed to himself to have lost the art of being alone. There was a perpetual sound in his left ear, a kind of moving and rustling at his left side, which never left him by night or day. In addition, he had become the prey of nerves and an insensate dread of the unknown.

Ladlaw, as I have explained, was a commonplace man, with fair talents, a mediocre culture, honest instincts, and the beliefs and incredulities of his class. On abstract grounds, I should have declared him an unlikely man to be the victim of an hallucination. He had a kind of dull bourgeois rationalism, which used to find reasons for all things in heaven and earth. At first he controlled his dread with proverbs. He told himself it was the sequel of his illness or the light-headedness of summer heat on the moors. But it soon outgrew his comfort. It became a living second presence, an alter ego which dogged his footsteps. He grew acutely afraid of it. He dared not be alone for a moment, and clung to Sibyl’s company despairingly. She went off for a week’s visit in the beginning of August, and he endured for seven days the tortures of the lost. The malady advanced upon him with swift steps. The presence became more real daily. In the early dawning, in the twilight, and in the first hour of the morning it seemed at times to take a visible bodily form. A kind of amorphous featureless shadow would run from his side into the darkness, and he would sit palsied with terror. Sometimes, in lonely places, his footsteps sounded double, and something would brush elbows with him. Human society alone exorcised it. With Sibyl at his side he was happy; but as soon as she left him, the thing came slinking back from the unknown to watch by him. Company might have saved him, but joined to his affliction was a crazy dread of his fellows. He would not leave his moorland home, but must bear his burden alone among the wild streams and mosses of that dismal place.

The 12th came, and he shot wretchedly, for his nerve had gone to pieces. He stood exhaustion badly, and became a dweller about the doors. But with this bodily inertness came an extraordinary intellectual revival. He read widely in a blundering way, and he speculated unceasingly. It was characteristic of the man that as soon as he left the paths of the prosaic he should seek his supernatural in a very concrete form. He assumed that he was haunted by the devil – the visible personal devil in whom our fathers believed. He waited hourly for the shape at his side to speak, but no words came. The Accuser of the Brethren in all but tangible form was his ever present companion. He felt, he declared, the spirit of old evil entering subtly into his blood. He sold his soul many times over, and yet there was no possibility of resistance. It was a Visitation more undeserved than Job’s, and a thousandfold more awful.

For a week or more he was tortured with a kind of religious mania. When a man of a healthy secular mind finds himself adrift on the terrible ocean of religious troubles he is peculiarly helpless, for he has not the most rudimentary knowledge of the winds and tides. It was useless to call up his old carelessness; he had suddenly dropped into a new world where old proverbs did not apply. And all the while, mind you, there was the shrinking terror of it – an intellect all alive to the torture and the most unceasing physical fear. For a little he was on the far edge of idiocy.

Then by accident it took a new form. While sitting with Sibyl one day in the library, he began listlessly to turn over the leaves of an old book. He read a few pages, and found the hint to a story like his own. It was some French Life of Justinian, one of the unscholarly productions of last century, made up of stories from Procopius and tags of Roman law. Here was his own case written down in black and white; and the man had been a king of kings. This was a new comfort, and for a little – strange though it may seem – he took a sort of pride in his affliction. He worshipped the great Emperor, and read every scrap he could find on him, not excepting the Pandects and the Digest. He sent for the bust in the dining room, paying a fabulous price. Then he settled himself to study his imperial prototype, and the study became an idolatry. As I have said, Ladlaw was a man of ordinary talents, and certainly of meagre imaginative power. And yet from the lies of the Secret History and the crudities of German legalists he had constructed a marvellous portrait of a man. Sitting there in the half-lighted room, he drew the picture: the quiet cold man with his inheritance of Dacian mysticism, holding the great world in fee, giving it law and religion, fighting its wars, building its churches, and yet all the while intent upon his own private work of making his peace with his soul – the churchman and warrior whom all the world worshipped, and yet one going through life with his lip quivering. He Watched by the Threshold ever at the left side. Sometimes at night, in the great Brazen Palace, warders heard the Emperor walking in the dark corridors, alone, and yet not alone; for once, when a servant entered with a lamp, he saw his master with a face as of another world, and something beside him which had no face or shape, but which he knew to be that hoary Evil which is older than the stars.

Crazy nonsense! I had to rub my eyes to assure myself that I was not sleeping. No! There was my friend with his suffering face, and it was the library of More.

And then he spoke of Theodora – actress, harlot, dévote, empress. For him the lady was but another part of the uttermost horror, a form of the shapeless thing at his side. I felt myself falling under the fascination. I have no nerves and little imagination, but in a flash I seemed to realize something of that awful featureless face, crouching ever at a man’s hand, till darkness and loneliness come, and it rises to its mastery. I shivered as I looked at the man in the chair before me. These dull eyes of his were looking upon things I could not see, and I saw their terror. I realized that it was grim earnest for him. Nonsense or no, some devilish fancy had usurped the place of his sanity, and he was being slowly broken upon the wheel. And then, when his left hand twitched, I almost cried out. I had thought it comic before; now it seemed the last proof of tragedy.

—  —  —  —

He stopped, and I got up with loose knees and went to the window. Better the black night than the intangible horror within. I flung up the sash and looked out across the moor. There was no light; nothing but an inky darkness and the uncanny rustle of elder bushes. The sound chilled me, and I closed the window.

“The land is the old Manann,” Ladlaw was saying. “We are beyond the pale here. Do you hear the wind?”

I forced myself back into sanity and looked at my watch. It was nearly one o’clock.

“What ghastly idiots we are!” I said. “I am off to bed.”

Ladlaw looked at me helplessly. “For God’s sake, don’t leave me alone!” he moaned. “Get Sibyl.”

We went together back to the hall, while he kept the same feverish grasp on my arm. Someone was sleeping in a chair by the hall fire, and to my distress I recognized my hostess. The poor child must have been sadly wearied. She came forward with her anxious face.

“I’m afraid Bob has kept you very late, Henry,” she said. “I hope you will sleep well. Breakfast at nine, you know.” And then I left them.

•   •   •   •   •

Over my bed there was a little picture, a reproduction of some Italian work, of Christ and the Demoniac. Some impulse made me hold my candle up to it. The madman’s face was torn with passion and suffering, and his eye had the pained furtive expression which I had come to know. And by his left side there was a dim shape crouching.

I got into bed hastily, but not to sleep. I felt that my reason must be going. I had been pitchforked from our clear and cheerful modern life into the mists of old superstition. Old tragic stories of my Calvinist upbringing returned to haunt me. The man dwelt in by a devil was no new fancy, but I believed that science had docketed and analyzed and explained the devil out of the world. I remembered my dabblings in the occult before I settled down to law – the story of Donisarius, the monk of Padua, the unholy legend of the Face of Proserpine, the tales of succubi and incubi, the Leannain Sith and the Hidden Presence. But here was something stranger still. I had stumbled upon that very possession which fifteen hundred years ago had made the monks of New Rome tremble and cross themselves. Some devilish occult force, lingering through the ages, had come to life after a long sleep. God knows what earthly connection there was between the splendid Emperor of the World and my prosaic friend, or between the glittering shores of the Bosporus and this moorland parish! But the land was the old Manann! The spirit may have lingered in the earth and air, a deadly legacy from Piet and Roman. I had felt the uncanniness of the place; I had augured ill of it from the first. And then in sheer disgust I rose and splashed my face with cold water.

I lay down again, laughing miserably at my credulity. That I, the sober and rational, should believe in this crazy fable was too palpably absurd. I would steel my mind resolutely against such harebrained theories. It was a mere bodily ailment – liver out of order, weak heart, bad circulation, or something of that sort. At the worst it might be some affection of the brain, to be treated by a specialist. I vowed to myself that next morning the best doctor in Edinburgh should be brought to More.

The worst of it was that my duty compelled me to stand my ground. I foresaw the few remaining weeks of my holiday blighted. I should be tied to this moorland prison, a sort of keeper and nurse in one, tormented by silly fancies. It was a charming prospect, and the thought of Glenaicill and the woodcock made me bitter against Ladlaw. But there was no way out of it. I might do Ladlaw good, and I could not have Sibyl worn to death by his vagaries.

My ill nature comforted me, and I forgot the horror of the thing in its vexation. After that I think I fell asleep and dozed uneasily till morning. When I woke I was in a better frame of mind. The early sun had worked wonders with the moorland. The low hills stood out fresh-coloured and clear against a pale October sky; the elders sparkled with frost; the raw film of morn was rising from the little loch in tiny clouds. It was a cold, rousing day, and I dressed in good spirits and went down to breakfast.

I found Ladlaw looking ruddy and well; very different from the broken man I remembered of the night before. We were alone, for Sibyl was breakfasting in bed. I remarked on his ravenous appetite, and he smiled cheerily. He made two jokes during the meal; he laughed often, and I began to forget the events of the previous day. It seemed to me that I might still flee from More with a clear conscience. He had forgotten about his illness. When I touched distantly upon the matter he showed a blank face.

It might be that the affection had passed; on the other hand, it might return to him at the darkening. I had no means to decide. His manner was still a trifle distrait and peculiar, and I did not like the dullness in his eye. At any rate, I should spend the day in his company, and the evening would decide the question.

I proposed shooting, which he promptly vetoed. He was no good at walking, he said, and the birds were wild. This seriously limited the possible occupations. Fishing there was none, and hill-climbing was out of the question. He proposed a game at billiards, and I pointed to the glory of the morning. It would have been sacrilege to waste such sunshine in knocking balls about. Finally we agreed to drive somewhere and have lunch, and he ordered the dogcart.

In spite of all forebodings I enjoyed the day. We drove in the opposite direction from the woodland parts, right away across the moor to the coal country beyond. We lunched at the little mining town of Borrowmuir, in a small and noisy public house. The roads made bad going, the country was far from pretty, and yet the drive did not bore me. Ladlaw talked incessantly – talked as I had never heard man talk before. There was something indescribable in all he said, a different point of view, a lost groove of thought, a kind of innocence and archaic shrewdness in one. I can only give you a hint of it, by saying that it was like the mind of an early ancestor placed suddenly among modern surroundings. It was wise with a remote wisdom, and silly (now and then) with a quite antique and distant silliness.

I will give instances of both. He provided me with a theory of certain early fortifications, which must be true, which commends itself to the mind with overwhelming conviction, and yet which is so out of the way of common speculation that no man could have guessed it. I do not propose to set down the details, for I am working at it on my own account. Again, he told me the story of an old marriage custom, which till recently survived in this district – told it with full circumstantial detail and constant allusions to other customs which he could not possibly have known of. Now for the other side. He explained why well water is in winter warmer than a running stream, and this was his explanation: at the antipodes our winter is summer, consequently, the water of a well which comes through from the other side of the earth must be warm in winter and cold in summer, since in our summer it is winter there. You perceive what this is. It is no mere silliness, but a genuine effort of an early mind, which had just grasped the fact of the antipodes, to use it in explanation.

Gradually I was forced to the belief that it was not Ladlaw who was talking to me, but something speaking through him, something at once wiser and simpler. My old fear of the devil began to depart. This spirit, the exhalation, whatever it was, was ingenuous in its way, at least in its daylight aspect. For a moment I had an idea that it was a real reflex of Byzantine thought, and that by cross-examining I might make marvellous discoveries. The ardor of the scholar began to rise in me, and I asked a question about that much-debated point, the legal status of the apocrisiarii. To my vexation he gave no response. Clearly the intelligence of this familiar had its limits.

It was about three in the afternoon, and we had gone half of our homeward journey, when signs of the old terror began to appear. I was driving, and Ladlaw sat on my left. I noticed him growing nervous and silent, shivering at the flick of the whip, and turning halfway round toward me. Then he asked me to change places, and I had the unpleasant work of driving from the wrong side. After that I do not think he spoke once till we arrived at More, but sat huddled together, with the driving rug almost up to his chin – an eccentric figure of a man.

I foresaw another such night as the last, and I confess my heart sank. I had no stomach for more mysteries, and somehow with the approach of twilight the confidence of the day departed. The thing appeared in darker colours, and I found it in my mind to turn coward. Sibyl alone deterred me. I could not bear to think of her alone with this demented being. I remembered her shy timidity, her innocence. It was monstrous that the poor thing should be called on thus to fight alone with phantoms.

When we came to the House it was almost sunset. Ladlaw got out very carefully on the right side, and for a second stood by the horse. The sun was making our shadows long, and as I stood beyond him it seemed for a moment that his shadow was double. It may have been mere fancy, for I had not time to look twice. He was standing, as I have said, with his left side next the horse. Suddenly the harmless elderly cob fell into a very panic of fright, reared upright, and all but succeeded in killing its master. I was in time to pluck Ladlaw from under its feet, but the beast had become perfectly unmanageable, and we left a groom struggling to quiet it.

In the hall the butler gave me a telegram. It was from my clerk, summoning me back at once to an important consultation.

•   •   •   •   •

Here was a prompt removal of my scruples. There could be no question of my remaining, for the case was one of the first importance, which I had feared might break off my holiday. The consultation fell in vacation time to meet the convenience of certain people who were going abroad, and there was the most instant demand for my presence. I must go, and at once; and, as I hunted in the timetable, I found that in three hours’ time a night train for the south would pass Borrowmuir which might be stopped by special wire.

But I had no pleasure in my freedom. I was in despair about Sibyl, and I hated myself for my cowardly relief. The dreary dining room, the sinister bust, and Ladlaw crouching and quivering – the recollection, now that escape was before me, came back on my mind with the terror of a nightmare. My first thought was to persuade the Ladlaws to come away with me. I found them both in the drawing-room – Sibyl very fragile and pale, and her husband sitting as usual like a frightened child in the shadow of her skirts. A sight of him was enough to dispel my hope. The man was fatally ill, mentally, bodily; and who was I to attempt to minister to a mind diseased?

But Sibyl – she might be saved from the martyrdom. The servants would take care of him, and, if need be, a doctor might be got from Edinburgh to live in the house. So while he sat with vacant eyes staring into the twilight, I tried to persuade Sibyl to think of herself. I am frankly a sun worshiper. I have no taste for arduous duty, and the quixotic is my abhorrence. I laboured to bring my cousin to this frame of mind. I told her that her first duty was to herself, and that this vigil of hers was beyond human endurance. But she had no ears for my arguments.

“While Bob is ill I must stay with him,” she said always in answer, and then she thanked me for my visit, till I felt a brute and a coward. I strove to quiet my conscience, but it told me always that I was fleeing from my duty; and then, when I was on the brink of a nobler resolution, a sudden overmastering terror would take hold of me, and I would listen hysterically for the sound of the dogcart on the gravel.

At last it came, and in a sort of fever I tried to say the conventional farewells. I shook hands with Ladlaw, and when I dropped his hand it fell numbly on his knee. Then I took my leave, muttering hoarse nonsense about having had a “charming visit,” and “hoping soon to see them both in town.” As I backed to the door, I knocked over a lamp on a small table. It crashed on the floor and went out, and at the sound Ladlaw gave a curious childish cry. I turned like a coward, and ran across the hall to the front door, and scrambled into the dogcart.

The groom would have driven me sedately through the park, but I must have speed or go mad. I took the reins from him and put the horse into a canter. We swung through the gates and out into the moor road, for I could have no peace till the ghoulish elder world was exchanged for the homely ugliness of civilization. Once only I looked back, and there against the sky line, with a solitary lit window, the House of More stood lonely in the red desert.

[*]   I have identified the bust, which, when seen under other circumstances, had little power to affect me. It was a copy of the head of Justinian in the Tesci Museum at Venice, and several duplicates exist, dating apparently from the seventh century, and showing traces of Byzantine decadence in the scroll work on the hair. It is engraved in M. Delacroix’s Byzantium, and, I think, in Windscheid’s Pandektenlehrbuch.

THE FACE IN THE MIRROR

Helen Mathers

1903

The letter was gone. In vain I shook out my satin gown, and blamed the folly that had made me take this, the only love letter that had ever been dear to me, downstairs to dinner in that vast house, where even human beings were liable to get lost, how much more so, then, a scrap of paper!

My thoughts threw back – it was safe at dinner, for occasionally I touched it in my pocket, and thus bore with a dull neighbour gladly; and afterwards I had not moved from a deep ottoman where different persons had come and talked to me till bedtime. If I drew my treasure out with my handkerchief, it might still be there perhaps, crushed out of sight – or if visible, the men probably found it when turning out the lights, and it was furnishing rich food for merriment in the servants’ quarters at that very moment!

But there was a bare chance that I had left it in the drawing-room – that they had overlooked it – and I was resolved that as soon as the house was perfectly quiet, I would steal down, and make a search.

It was not yet twelve – but the women kept early hours, and the men would be in Lord William’s smoking-room, an immense distance away, and the servants’ wing was yet farther – so I thought I was pretty safe, and at five minutes to twelve I took my candle, and stole softly down the corridors and staircase, crossed the wide hall, and, turning the handle of the drawing-room door, went in.

How ghostly it looked – how strange! At night, familiar things wear unfamiliar faces – the very colours of the flowers are different, and one has a feeling of intrusion, as if inanimate things had also their hours of rest, and resented disturbance from outside humans. At a distance, the deep orange-pink brocade of the ottoman I sought looked almost black, but what was my joy, on reaching it, to behold, sticking up between the cushion and the padded side, a tiny gleam of white, that proved to be the corner of my letter!

I pounced upon, and pressed it to my lips. All thought of fear, of isolation in the vast sleeping place forgotten, I almost danced to the door, the pictured faces on the wall seeming to advance upon me, as in passing, the light in my hand struck them, though they looked, I thought, as if they, too, were angry at my unseasonable visit. As I closed the door behind me, something stole on my ear, and ravished it; so enthrallingly sweet was it, so enticing, that with eager ear bent towards it, and neck outstretched, I instantly followed that exquisite music – not knowing whence it came, not knowing whither it would lead me – just because it drew my feet, my spirit, and would have drawn me over a precipice, I truly believe, had it passed beyond it, so little control had I over my own body at that moment.

Swiftly I went, scarce heeding through what doors I passed, which way I turned – only presently I became aware that I was in the deserted corridors of a disused portion of the house, and still, now far, now near, that haunting melody drew me on, such melody as surely human hands never drew out of earthly instrument, yet, such melody as while thrilling me with the most exquisite pleasure, also brought tears to my eyes, for anguish there was in it, and love, and deep despair!

On every side were closed doors that looked as if they had never been opened; on the ground was dust – dust that might have lain there a century – damp and chill was the air, but I felt neither cold nor fear, as, dying away in a lingering cadence of mournful beauty, the music crossed the threshold of an open door beyond me, and I stood alone with thumping heart in the midst of an apartment hung with mouldering velvet draperies that in colour, methought, had once been green.

The candle light in my hand but made the gloom, the desuetude of the room, deeper; the charm, the power that had irresistibly brought my feet hither, had ceased with the music; I was no longer a creature subjugated through my ears, entranced into ecstasy by sweet sounds that realised my dreams of heaven – I was just a lonely, shivering girl, lost in a remote part of a castle the size of a village, and almost certainly unable to find the way back by which I came.

Have you ever known what it is to feel murder in the air – to feel it all about you – to know that by stretching out your hand you can actually touch the murderer; has no telepathic message ever passed to you from some mere stranger, warning you that he has committed, or will commit, an awful crime? Such a feeling came overpoweringly upon me when, looking down, I saw on the dusty boards at my feet a great discoloured splash, as if a ewer of blood had been spilt violently, and no one had washed the pool away … Suddenly an unreasoning terror laid hold of me ungovernable, as when in panic men strike women down – and I turned to escape headlong. But even in turning, my body froze – my eyes were drawn to a mirror (the only one the room contained) on my right, and across which there passed slowly the face of a girl no older than I … lovely indeed was it, with a loveliness haunting and penetrating as the melody that had drawn me hither, but what horror, what agony were there – and on it the look that few have seen, and none in all its intensity save the murderer … for this girl was in the act of being murdered, and was looking at me as if I – I were actually committing the crime! This was her spirit – so she may have looked in the flesh when her blood gushed out, and left that stain showing dim at my feet … all the hatred of death, the passion for life, summed up in the flashing moment that seemed an eternity to murdered and murderer alike, aye, and to me as the mirror showed clear – and the only thing that moved in that accursed room was I!

I know not to this day how I got myself away from the stain, the mirror – or how I found my way through those passages and corridors back to the inhabited part of the castle … perhaps the letter, which I had never once let go, gave me courage, perhaps I knew that I must not, dared not stumble or fall, with that behind me … but when at last I reached my room, and sank down before an almost burnt out fire, I cried like a child, cried for that murdered girl who had once been young, and perhaps loved even as I – and I wondered if that enchanting melody had been used to draw her to her death, even as it had drawn me to behold her spirit, revisiting the scene of the crime.

At breakfast next morning a servant entered, carrying a salver, upon which was a shoe buckle of brilliants that I knew, and he asked to which lady present it belonged, as it had been found that morning in a passage of the disused portion of the castle.

I claimed it for mine, and as I took it, met Lady William’s eyes full – then she looked at her husband, who was looking at her, then both went on talking as if the incident were quite natural, though some of the women smiled, others regarded me curiously, then turned inquiring glances on the men, as if asking with which of them I had held a tryst. But the men’s faces expressed nothing save surprise, and though afterwards I got chaffed about my nocturnal wanderings, no one present seemed to know what Lord and Lady William and I knew – if the look I had seen them exchange meant anything at all.

Only when I told my hostess later, she laughed my story away – “You had been dreaming,” she said; “was not the fire out when you woke up?”

I asked her, then, “What of the buckle?”

“You lost it in some other part of the house – and a servant picked it up, and meaning either to restore it, or not, dropped or deliberately placed it in the disused wing, which, nevertheless, is often used by the servants when up to nefarious practices,” she said.

“And my dress?” I answered. “Come and see it” – and she came.

The ivory satin train was half a yard deep in dust and dirt – the front was disfigured by the candle grease that had fallen on it as my hand trembled. I could never wear the gown again.

“Clearly you walk in your sleep,” Lady William said with perfect sang-froid; “Kenneth must cure you of such tricks – if what I hear is true?”

I said that it might be true – and my hand stole to my bosom, where, for greater safety, the letter whose loss had brought about such a striking experience lay, and to which I had not yet written an answer – though long ago, had not my heart and eyes given it?

“I have asked him for Christmas,” she said, “and he comes on Saturday.” She smiled, and came and kissed me, but was resolute not to discuss what had happened to me overnight.

“And you must let me give you a new frock,” she said, “as a punishment for living in an old castle with miles of dirty passages!”

And she sent for her maid, and would not go away until the woman had got my measurements, and she promised me that my frock should arrive before Kenneth, and so it did.

But before that, and this is a true and strange thing, each night, close on twelve, I would be seized with an intense longing to hear that melody again, and my feet would begin to move of their own accord towards the door, and there would be so fierce a struggle between my will and their intention, that I would have to sit down, and hold fast to the arms of the chair, and wish that Kenneth were here to hold me in his, and keep my feet from itching to follow the music, that I knew was ravishing the silence, and which I was at too great a distance to hear. And I longed to see once more that face in the mirror – to question it – to ask if the murderer had escaped, or if he had walked free among his fellow-men with the blood stain on his hand hidden – and for that awful injustice done to her, she must come back for ever and ever to her death chamber, luring with the spell of ensnaring music, strangers to the spot where, helpless, she met her death, unavenged to this day!

Night by night, the longing grew – taking such fierce hold upon me, that the sweat would pour off my brow, and by main force I would hold myself still till half-past twelve, when the fierce struggle relaxed, and, exhausted, I would fall into deep slumber.

And even in the day time the ebullient gaiety that used to distinguish me was gone, and I could not lose myself in thoughts of Kenneth and his coming; I could not even feel that I loved him very much; I was as one in a thrall, and even when I read his love-letters, I wondered if that murdered girl had been loved as Kenneth loved me – if it were because love had made her life so sweet, and she so loath to leave it, that the horror of her fate had made such imprint on her face as life departed … and the desire burned and burned in me to find out the real truth of the apparition and the ghostly melody, and which my hostess knew, but would not tell me.

I found the gown that she had ordered for me laid out on my bed when I came home from driving, on the day before I expected Kenneth, and I gazed upon it with no pleasure – I would so much rather have had the secret of the melody, and the face in the mirror, that she would not give me.

I had brought no maid, and as the woman lent to me by Lady William laced my frock for dinner, I looked idly at her face – reflected behind mine in the glass, and then I looked again, struck by something faintly familiar in it – not the features, which were very pretty, but the expression – where had I seen one like it, and when?

Her trained fingers did their work deftly, but there was no spring in them, and no life in her aspect; looking closely at her, I could see that she was completely absorbed in one idea – and that one of fear – and the fear in her face was the faint shadow of the vivid, overmastering one that I had seen in the face of the murdered girl in the mirror.

I know little of magnetism, of the power of the physical touch, or I might argue that her fingers carried a nerve message to my brain, but somehow I realised that the girl was in trouble, that a man was at the bottom of it, that if ever one woman stood in need of another woman’s help, this one did now.

She arranged the flowers on the bodice of my dress, gave me my gloves, fan, and handkerchief, all without the least relaxing of that strained, waiting look on her face, and it was on my lips to ask what her trouble was, though I knew how frankly the lower orders resent such sympathy from their betters, and seldom forgive those who offer it.

But the dinner bell was ringing, and I went downstairs, and at dinner I contrived to study each one of the menservants present, and before dessert had arrived at a conclusion – the man who had brought me my buckle was at the bottom of the trouble. Also, by the perfectly infallible rule that makes the prettiest and brightest women choose the very worst possible men, this one was as sorry a knave, for all his powder and smart livery, as ever I saw.

He, too, seemed in a dream, and made several small mistakes in waiting at table – and it was an ugly dream too, judging by his expression, an expression that became a direct menace to some person unknown, when, watching him closely, I saw him, alone for a moment at the sideboard, slip into his coat-tail pocket a sharp knife, that the butler had used for carving game. I could see the dent it made in his coat as he moved to and fro, and I knew that he had hidden it there for no good purpose, yet how was I to hinder him from carrying that purpose out?

A deaf old man, greedily intent on his plate, had taken me in, and a man desperately enamoured of the girl next to him, was on my left, so I had plenty of time in which to think the matter out, and in which to put two and two together, the maid’s looks upstairs, the man’s below, and yet I was too dense to do so – then.

At dessert a telegram was handed to Lady William, and she left the table at once, after sending round the message to her husband, and within an hour had left the castle to go to her mother who was dangerously ill.

I could not worry her with the matter of a footman’s vagaries at such a time, and having begged us all to stay on, and insisted that I should not put off Kenneth, she departed, and after a dull evening in the drawing-room among women, half of whom meditated flight on the morrow, I went upstairs to bed.

The maid, Esther, was usually in waiting to unlace me, but tonight she was not there, and, expecting her every minute, and unable to unfasten my frock for myself, I took up a book, and read on for quite half an hour. I can never quite account to myself for not ringing, but I did not; and only when I looked at the clock, and saw that it wanted five minutes to twelve, did I realise that I had felt no overpowering desire to explore the haunted room, as at this hour I usually did.

But I could not sleep in an evening gown, and I was about to ring the bell, possibly to get no response, when suddenly there came over me an entirely different sensation to any I had felt before; this was one of overwhelming horror, something that froze my marrow, palsied the tongue with which I tried to cry out, engulfed me as in a billow of icy water that knocked breath and sight out of me as it passed … through that sense of disaster, of peril, flashed the thought, “Why is not Esther here – and why did that man hide the knife? He knows of the haunted chamber, or he could not have found my buckle there …”

I snatched one of the lighted candles from the toilette table, and the matches that lay beside it, and sped down the staircase, across the hall, along those corridors and passages through which a haunting melody had beckoned me; but there was no strain of music now – not even the far-off cry of a woman lured to her fate by the lover who had betrayed her; but was not that a light athwart the dark passage, and did it not come from the haunted room? I was yet some fifty yards from it, when a stifled moan, stifled in the uttering, spurred me on, and I dashed in at the door to find Esther gagged and on her knees, while the man, who had secreted the knife at dinner, stood over her, about to strike.

He breathed hard, and glared at me as I struck the weapon out of his hand, then set my foot upon it, and I have since thought it strange that he did not regain possession of it, for we were but two weak women against six feet of ruffian manhood, and he could easily have killed the pair of us if he had had the pluck, and the presence of mind.

But my unforeseen entry, the hour, the situation, unmanned him; and also he had been drinking, and looked a mere loutish brute as he backed away from me, and so through the door, and out of sight.

Then I kneeled down, and took the gag out of the poor girl’s mouth, and the look of the murdered that had been on her face when I burst in (involuntarily my eyes sought the mirror, but it was vacant) gradually faded. She kissed my hand, and burst into tears over it, and, as we kneeled together on the dusty floor, she told me her story. How this man had courted only to deceive her, and now was paying his addresses to one of the ladies’ maids staying in the house, to whom she had threatened to tell the truth, if he persisted in his attentions to her.

They had been wont to meet here, in the haunted chamber, and Esther had kept the tryst William had made with her, when he had suddenly set upon, and gagged her, and but for my appearance would have killed and hidden her away in one of the old cellars, where her bones might have remained undiscovered to all time.

“He found your buckle, miss,” said Esther, “and only brought it back for fear you should come by daylight to look for it – and bring others with you who might find their way here again. But ’twas God Himself sent you here tonight” – then suddenly she screamed out “Look!” and pointed to the mirror, across which a face flitted that seemed to be looking directly at us, a face that smiled at me, and looked a blessing at me, if ever a spirit face did.

And I knew then, that she had called me, first by that haunting melody, to show me the way, then by spiritual means to save another loving woman from the tragedy that had been her own, and now having prevented it, she would “walk” no more, since she had accomplished what was better than revenge.

Esther has been in our service many years; her child is at school, and she is fairly happy. The man Rufus was never heard of again, and it is thought that he lost his life in the floods that were out that night. And sometimes I sit down to the piano and try to put into notes the melody that still sounds so plain in my ears, and the children laugh, and say, “mother is picking out a tune,” but Kenneth knows better.

THE SCREAMING SKULL

F. Marion Crawford

1908

I have often heard it scream. No, I am not nervous, I am not imaginative, and I never believed in ghosts, unless that thing is one. Whatever it is, it hates me almost as much as it hated Luke Pratt, and it screams at me.

If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that someone at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest. I have always blamed myself for Mrs. Pratt’s death, and I suppose I was responsible for it in a way, though heaven knows I never wished her anything but long life and happiness. If I had not told that story she might be alive yet. That is why the thing screams at me, I fancy.

She was a good little woman, with a sweet temper, all things considered, and a nice gentle voice; but I remember hearing her shriek once when she thought her little boy was killed by a pistol that went off, though everyone was sure that it was not loaded. It was the same scream; exactly the same, with a sort of rising quaver at the end; do you know what I mean? Unmistakable.

The truth is, I had not realised that the doctor and his wife were not on good terms. They used to bicker a bit now and then when I was here, and I often noticed that little Mrs. Pratt got very red and bit her lip hard to keep her temper, while Luke grew pale and said the most offensive things. He was that sort when he was in the nursery, I remember, and afterward at school. He was my cousin, you know; that is how I came by this house; after he died, and his boy Charley was killed in South Africa, there were no relations left. Yes, it’s a pretty little property, just the sort of thing for an old sailor like me who has taken to gardening.

One always remembers one’s mistakes much more vividly than one’s cleverest things, doesn’t one? I’ve often noticed it. I was dining with the Pratts one night, when I told them the story that afterwards made so much difference. It was a wet night in November, and the sea was moaning. Hush! – if you don’t speak you will hear it now….

Do you hear the tide? Gloomy sound, isn’t it? Sometimes, about this time of year – hallo! – there it is! Don’t be frightened, man – it won’t eat you – it’s only a noise, after all! But I’m glad you’ve heard it, because there are always people who think it’s the wind, or my imagination, or something. You won’t hear it again tonight, I fancy, for it doesn’t often come more than once. Yes – that’s right. Put another stick on the fire, and a little more stuff into that weak mixture you’re so fond of. Do you remember old Blauklot the carpenter, on that German ship that picked us up when the Clontarf went to the bottom? We were hove to in a howling gale one night, as snug as you please, with no land within five hundred miles, and the ship coming up and falling off as regularly as clockwork – “Biddy te boor beebles ashore tis night, poys!” old Blauklot sang out, as he went off to his quarters with the sail-maker. I often think of that, now that I’m ashore for good and all.

Yes, it was on a night like this, when I was at home for a spell, waiting to take the Olympia out on her first trip – it was on the next voyage that she broke the record, you remember – but that dates it. Ninety-two was the year, early in November.

The weather was dirty, Pratt was out of temper, and the dinner was bad, very bad indeed, which didn’t improve matters, and cold, which made it worse. The poor little lady was very unhappy about it, and insisted on making a Welsh rarebit on the table to counteract the raw turnips and the half-boiled mutton. Pratt must have had a hard day. Perhaps he had lost a patient. At all events, he was in a nasty temper.

“My wife is trying to poison me, you see!” he said. “She’ll succeed someday.” I saw that she was hurt, and I made believe to laugh, and said that Mrs. Pratt was much too clever to get rid of her husband in such a simple way; and then I began to tell them about Japanese tricks with spun glass and chopped horsehair and the like.

Pratt was a doctor, and knew a lot more than I did about such things, but that only put me on my mettle, and I told a story about a woman in Ireland who did for three husbands before anyone suspected foul play.

Did you never hear that tale? The fourth husband managed to keep awake and caught her, and she was hanged. How did she do it? She drugged them, and poured melted lead into their ears through a little horn funnel when they were asleep…. No – that’s the wind whistling. It’s backing up to the southward again. I can tell by the sound. Besides, the other thing doesn’t often come more than once in an evening even at this time of year – when it happened. Yes, it was in November. Poor Mrs. Pratt died suddenly in her bed not long after I dined here. I can fix the date, because I got the news in New York by the steamer that followed the Olympia when I took her out on her first trip. You had the Leofric the same year? Yes, I remember. What a pair of old buffers we are coming to be, you and I. Nearly fifty years since we were apprentices together on the Clontarf. Shall you ever forget old Blauklot? “Biddy te boor beebles ashore, poys!” Ha, ha! Take a little more, with all that water. It’s the old Hulstkamp I found in the cellar when this house came to me, the same I brought Luke from Amsterdam five-and-twenty years ago. He had never touched a drop of it. Perhaps he’s sorry now, poor fellow.

Where did I leave off? I told you that Mrs. Pratt died suddenly – yes. Luke must have been lonely here after she was dead, I should think; I came to see him now and then, and he looked worn and nervous, and told me that his practice was growing too heavy for him, though he wouldn’t take an assistant on any account. Years went on, and his son was killed in South Africa, and after that he began to be queer. There was something about him not like other people. I believe he kept his senses in his profession to the end; there was no complaint of his having made bad mistakes in cases, or anything of that sort, but he had a look about him—

Luke was a red-headed man with a pale face when he was young, and he was never stout; in middle age he turned a sandy grey, and after his son died he grew thinner and thinner, till his head looked like a skull with parchment stretched over it very tight, and his eyes had a sort of glare in them that was very disagreeable to look at.

He had an old dog that poor Mrs. Pratt had been fond of, and that used to follow her everywhere. He was a bulldog, and the sweetest tempered beast you ever saw, though he had a way of hitching his upper lip behind one of his fangs that frightened strangers a good deal. Sometimes, of an evening, Pratt and Bumble – that was the dog’s name – used to sit and look at each other a long time, thinking about old times, I suppose, when Luke’s wife used to sit in that chair you’ve got. That was always her place, and this was the doctor’s, where I’m sitting. Bumble used to climb up by the footstool – he was old and fat by that time, and could not jump much, and his teeth were getting shaky. He would look steadily at Luke, and Luke looked steadily at the dog, his face growing more and more like a skull with two little coals for eyes; and after about five minutes or so, though it may have been less, old Bumble would suddenly begin to shake all over, and all on a sudden he would set up an awful howl, as if he had been shot, and tumble out of the easy-chair and trot away, and hide himself under the sideboard, and lie there making odd noises.

Considering Pratt’s looks in those last months, the thing is not surprising, you know. I’m not nervous or imaginative, but I can quite believe he might have sent a sensitive woman into hysterics – his head looked so much like a skull in parchment.

At last I came down one day before Christmas, when my ship was in dock and I had three weeks off. Bumble was not about, and I said casually that I supposed the old dog was dead.

“Yes,” Pratt answered, and I thought there was something odd in his tone even before he went on after a little pause. “I killed him,” he said presently. “I could not stand it any longer.”

I asked what it was that Luke could not stand, though I guessed well enough.

“He had a way of sitting in her chair and glaring at me, and then howling.” Luke shivered a little. “He didn’t suffer at all, poor old Bumble,” he went on in a hurry, as if he thought I might imagine he had been cruel. “I put dionine into his drink to make him sleep soundly, and then I chloroformed him gradually, so that he could not have felt suffocated even if he was dreaming. It’s been quieter since then.”

I wondered what he meant, for the words slipped out as if he could not help saying them. I’ve understood since. He meant that he did not hear that noise so often after the dog was out of the way. Perhaps he thought at first that it was old Bumble in the yard howling at the moon, though it’s not that kind of noise, is it? Besides, I know what it is, if Luke didn’t. It’s only a noise, after all, and a noise never hurt anybody yet. But he was much more imaginative than I am. No doubt there really is something about this place that I don’t understand; but when I don’t understand a thing, I call it a phenomenon, and I don’t take it for granted that it’s going to kill me, as he did. I don’t understand everything, by long odds, nor do you, nor does any man who has been to sea. We used to talk of tidal waves, for instance, and we could not account for them; now we account for them by calling them submarine earthquakes, and we branch off into fifty theories, any one of which might make earthquakes quite comprehensible if we only knew what they are. I fell in with one of them once, and the inkstand flew straight up from the table against the ceiling of my cabin. The same thing happened to Captain Lecky – I dare say you’ve read about it in his “Wrinkles.” Very good. If that sort of thing took place ashore, in this room for instance, a nervous person would talk about spirits and levitation and fifty things that mean nothing, instead of just quietly setting it down as a “phenomenon” that has not been explained yet. My view of that voice, you see.

Besides, what is there to prove that Luke killed his wife? I would not even suggest such a thing to anyone but you. After all, there was nothing but the coincidence that poor little Mrs. Pratt died suddenly in her bed a few days after I told that story at dinner. She was not the only woman who ever died like that. Luke got the doctor over from the next parish, and they agreed that she had died of something the matter with her heart. Why not? It’s common enough.

Of course, there was the ladle. I never told anybody about that, and it made me start when I found it in the cupboard in the bedroom. It was new, too – a little tinned iron ladle that had not been in the fire more than once or twice, and there was some lead in it that had been melted, and stuck to the bottom of the bowl, all grey, with hardened dross on it. But that proves nothing. A country doctor is generally a handy man, who does everything for himself, and Luke may have had a dozen reasons for melting a little lead in a ladle. He was fond of sea-fishing, for instance, and he may have cast a sinker for a night-line; perhaps it was a weight for the hall clock, or something like that. All the same, when I found it I had a rather queer sensation, because it looked so much like the thing I had described when I told them the story. Do you understand? It affected me unpleasantly, and I threw it away; it’s at the bottom of the sea a mile from the Spit, and it will be jolly well rusted beyond recognising if it’s ever washed up by the tide.

You see, Luke must have bought it in the village, years ago, for the man sells just such ladles still. I suppose they are used in cooking. In any case, there was no reason why an inquisitive housemaid should find such a thing lying about, with lead in it, and wonder what it was, and perhaps talk to the maid who heard me tell the story at dinner – for that girl married the plumber’s son in the village, and may remember the whole thing.

You understand me, don’t you? Now that Luke Pratt is dead and gone, and lies buried beside his wife, with an honest man’s tombstone at his head, I should not care to stir up anything that could hurt his memory. They are both dead, and their son, too. There was trouble enough about Luke’s death, as it was.

How? He was found dead on the beach one morning, and there was a coroner’s inquest. There were marks on his throat, but he had not been robbed. The verdict was that he had come to his end “by the hands or teeth of some person or animal unknown,” for half the jury thought it might have been a big dog that had thrown him down and gripped his windpipe, though the skin of his throat was not broken. No one knew at what time he had gone out, nor where he had been. He was found lying on his back above high-water mark, and an old cardboard bandbox that had belonged to his wife lay under his hand, open. The lid had fallen off. He seemed to have been carrying home a skull in the box – doctors are fond of collecting such things. It had rolled out and lay near his head, and it was a remarkably fine skull, rather small, beautifully shaped and very white, with perfect teeth. That is to say, the upper jaw was perfect, but there was no lower one at all, when I first saw it.

Yes, I found it here when I came. You see, it was very white and polished, like a thing meant to be kept under a glass case, and the people did not know where it came from, nor what to do with it; so they put it back into the bandbox and set it on the shelf of the cupboard in the best bedroom, and of course they showed it to me when I took possession. I was taken down to the beach, too, to be shown the place where Luke was found, and the old fisherman explained just how he was lying, and the skull beside him. The only point he could not explain was why the skull had rolled up the sloping sand toward Luke’s head instead of rolling downhill to his feet. It did not seem odd to me at the time, but I have often thought of it since, for the place is rather steep. I’ll take you there tomorrow if you like – I made a sort of cairn of stones there afterward.

When he fell down, or was thrown down – whichever happened – the bandbox struck the sand, and the lid came off, and the thing came out and ought to have rolled down. But it didn’t. It was close to his head, almost touching it, and turned with the face toward it. I say it didn’t strike me as odd when the man told me; but I could not help thinking about it afterward, again and again, till I saw a picture of it all when I closed my eyes; and then I began to ask myself why the plaguey thing had rolled up instead of down, and why it had stopped near Luke’s head instead of anywhere else, a yard away, for instance.

You naturally want to know what conclusion I reached, don’t you? None that at all explained the rolling, at all events. But I got something else into my head, after a time, that made me feel downright uncomfortable.

Oh, I don’t mean as to anything supernatural! There may be ghosts, or there may not be. If there are, I’m not inclined to believe that they can hurt living people except by frightening them, and, for my part, I would rather face any shape of ghost than a fog in the Channel when it’s crowded. No. What bothered me was just a foolish idea, that’s all, and I cannot tell how it began, nor what made it grow till it turned into a certainty.

I was thinking about Luke and his poor wife one evening over my pipe and a dull book, when it occurred to me that the skull might possibly be hers, and I have never got rid of the thought since. You’ll tell me there’s no sense in it, no doubt; that Mrs. Pratt was buried like a Christian and is lying in the churchyard where they put her, and that it’s perfectly monstrous to suppose her husband kept her skull in her old bandbox in his bedroom. All the same, in the face of reason, and common sense, and probability, I’m convinced that he did. Doctors do all sorts of queer things that would make men like you and me feel creepy, and those are just the things that don’t seem probable, nor logical, nor sensible to us.

Then, don’t you see? – if it really was her skull, poor woman, the only way of accounting for his having it is that he really killed her, and did it in that way, as the woman killed her husbands in the story, and that he was afraid there might be an examination someday which would betray him. You see, I told that too, and I believe it had really happened some fifty or sixty years ago. They dug up the three skulls, you know, and there was a small lump of lead rattling about in each one. That was what hanged the woman. Luke remembered that, I’m sure. I don’t want to know what he did when he thought of it; my taste never ran in the direction of horrors, and I don’t fancy you care for them either, do you? No. If you did, you might supply what is wanting to the story.

It must have been rather grim, eh? I wish I did not see the whole thing so distinctly, just as everything must have happened. He took it the night before she was buried, I’m sure, after the coffin had been shut, and when the servant girl was asleep. I would bet anything, that when he’d got it, he put something under the sheet in its place, to fill up and look like it. What do you suppose he put there, under the sheet?

I don’t wonder you take me up on what I’m saying! First I tell you that I don’t want to know what happened, and that I hate to think about horrors, and then I describe the whole thing to you as if I had seen it. I’m quite sure that it was her work-bag that he put there. I remember the bag very well, for she always used it of an evening; it was made of brown plush, and when it was stuffed full it was about the size of – you understand. Yes, there I am, at it again! You may laugh at me, but you don’t live here alone, where it was done, and you didn’t tell Luke the story about the melted lead. I’m not nervous, I tell you, but sometimes I begin to feel that I understand why some people are. I dwell on all this when I’m alone, and I dream of it, and when that thing screams – well, frankly, I don’t like the noise any more than you do, though I should be used to it by this time.

I ought not to be nervous. I’ve sailed in a haunted ship. There was a Man in the Top, and two-thirds of the crew died of the West Coast fever inside of ten days after we anchored; but I was all right, then and afterward. I have seen some ugly sights, too, just as you have, and all the rest of us. But nothing ever stuck in my head in the way this does.

You see, I’ve tried to get rid of the thing, but it doesn’t like that. It wants to be there in its place, in Mrs. Pratt’s bandbox in the cupboard in the best bedroom. It’s not happy anywhere else. How do I know that? Because I’ve tried it. You don’t suppose that I’ve not tried, do you? As long as it’s there it only screams now and then, generally at this time of year, but if I put it out of the house it goes on all night, and no servant will stay here twenty-four hours. As it is, I’ve often been left alone and have been obliged to shift for myself for a fortnight at a time. No one from the village would ever pass a night under the roof now, and as for selling the place, or even letting it, that’s out of the question. The old women say that if I stay here I shall come to a bad end myself before long.

I’m not afraid of that. You smile at the mere idea that anyone could take such nonsense seriously. Quite right. It’s utterly blatant nonsense, I agree with you. Didn’t I tell you that it’s only a noise after all when you started and looked round as if you expected to see a ghost standing behind your chair?

I may be all wrong about the skull, and I like to think that I am – when I can. It may be just a fine specimen which Luke got somewhere long ago, and what rattles about inside when you shake it may be nothing but a pebble, or a bit of hard clay, or anything. Skulls that have lain long in the ground generally have something inside them that rattles, don’t they? No, I’ve never tried to get it out, whatever it is; I’m afraid it might be lead, don’t you see? And if it is, I don’t want to know the fact, for I’d much rather not be sure. If it really is lead, I killed her quite as much as if I had done the deed myself. Anybody must see that, I should think. As long as I don’t know for certain, I have the consolation of saying that it’s all utterly ridiculous nonsense, that Mrs. Pratt died a natural death and that the beautiful skull belonged to Luke when he was a student in London. But if I were quite sure, I believe I should have to leave the house; indeed I do, most certainly. As it is, I had to give up trying to sleep in the best bedroom where the cupboard is.

You ask me why I don’t throw it into the pond – yes, but please don’t call it a “confounded bugbear” – it doesn’t like being called names.

There! Lord, what a shriek! I told you so! You’re quite pale, man. Fill up your pipe and draw your chair nearer to the fire, and take some more drink. Old Hollands never hurt anybody yet. I’ve seen a Dutchman in Java drink half a jug of Hulstkamp in a morning without turning a hair. I don’t take much rum myself, because it doesn’t agree with my rheumatism, but you are not rheumatic and it won’t damage you. Besides, it’s a very damp night outside. The wind is howling again, and it will soon be in the south-west; do you hear how the windows rattle? The tide must have turned too, by the moaning.

We should not have heard the thing again if you had not said that. I’m pretty sure we should not. Oh yes, if you choose to describe it as a coincidence, you are quite welcome, but I would rather that you should not call the thing names again, if you don’t mind. It may be that the poor little woman hears, and perhaps it hurts her, don’t you know? Ghost? No! You don’t call anything a ghost that you can take in your hands and look at in broad daylight, and that rattles when you shake it. Do you, now? But it’s something that hears and understands; there’s no doubt about that.

I tried sleeping in the best bedroom when I first came to the house, just because it was the best and the most comfortable, but I had to give it up. It was their room, and there’s the big bed she died in, and the cupboard is in the thickness of the wall, near the head, on the left. That’s where it likes to be kept, in its bandbox. I only used the room for a fortnight after I came, and then I turned out and took the little room downstairs, next to the surgery, where Luke used to sleep when he expected to be called to a patient during the night.

I was always a good sleeper ashore; eight hours is my dose, eleven to seven when I’m alone, twelve to eight when I have a friend with me. But I could not sleep after three o’clock in the morning in that room – a quarter past, to be accurate – as a matter of fact, I timed it with my old pocket chronometer, which still keeps good time, and it was always at exactly seventeen minutes past three. I wonder whether that was the hour when she died?

It was not what you have heard. If it had been that I could not have stood it two nights. It was just a start and a moan and hard breathing for a few seconds in the cupboard, and it could never have waked me under ordinary circumstances, I’m sure. I suppose you are like me in that, and we are just like other people who have been to sea. No natural sounds disturb us at all, not all the racket of a square-rigger hove to in a heavy gale, or rolling on her beam ends before the wind. But if a lead pencil gets adrift and rattles in the drawer of your cabin table you are awake in a moment. Just so – you always understand. Very well, the noise in the cupboard was no louder than that, but it waked me instantly.

I said it was like a “start.” I know what I mean, but it’s hard to explain without seeming to talk nonsense. Of course you cannot exactly “hear” a person “start”; at the most, you might hear the quick drawing of the breath between the parted lips and closed teeth, and the almost imperceptible sound of clothing that moved suddenly though very slightly. It was like that.

You know how one feels what a sailing vessel is going to do, two or three seconds before she does it, when one has the wheel. Riders say the same of a horse, but that’s less strange, because the horse is a live animal with feelings of its own, and only poets and landsmen talk about a ship being alive, and all that. But I have always felt somehow that besides being a steaming machine or a sailing machine for carrying weights, a vessel at sea is a sensitive instrument, and a means of communication between nature and man, and most particularly the man at the wheel, if she is steered by hand. She takes her impressions directly from wind and sea, tide and stream, and transmits them to the man’s hand, just as the wireless telegraph picks up the interrupted currents aloft and turns them out below in the form of a message.

You see what I am driving at; I felt that something started in the cupboard, and I felt it so vividly that I heard it, though there may have been nothing to hear, and the sound inside my head waked me suddenly. But I really heard the other noise. It was as if it were muffled inside a box, as far away as if it came through a long-distance telephone; and yet I knew that it was inside the cupboard near the head of my bed. My hair did not bristle and my blood did not run cold that time. I simply resented being waked up by something that had no business to make a noise, any more than a pencil should rattle in the drawer of my cabin table on board ship. For I did not understand; I just supposed that the cupboard had some communication with the outside air, and that the wind had got in and was moaning through it with a sort of very faint screech. I struck a light and looked at my watch, and it was seventeen minutes past three. Then I turned over and went to sleep on my right ear. That’s my good one; I’m pretty deaf with the other, for I struck the water with it when I was a lad in diving from the foretopsail yard. Silly thing to do, it was, but the result is very convenient when I want to go to sleep when there’s a noise.

That was the first night, and the same thing happened again and several times afterward, but not regularly, though it was always at the same time, to a second; perhaps I was sometimes sleeping on my good ear, and sometimes not. I overhauled the cupboard and there was no way by which the wind could get in, or anything else, for the door makes a good fit, having been meant to keep out moths, I suppose; Mrs. Pratt must have kept her winter things in it, for it still smells of camphor and turpentine.

After about a fortnight I had had enough of the noises. So far I had said to myself that it would be silly to yield to it and take the skull out of the room. Things always look differently by daylight, don’t they? But the voice grew louder – I suppose one may call it a voice – and it got inside my deaf ear, too, one night. I realised that when I was wide awake, for my good ear was jammed down on the pillow, and I ought not to have heard a foghorn in that position. But I heard that, and it made me lose my temper, unless it scared me, for sometimes the two are not far apart. I struck a light and got up, and I opened the cupboard, grabbed the bandbox and threw it out of the window, as far as I could.

Then my hair stood on end. The thing screamed in the air, like a shell from a twelve-inch gun. It fell on the other side of the road. The night was very dark, and I could not see it fall, but I know it fell beyond the road. The window is just over the front door, it’s fifteen yards to the fence, more or less, and the road is ten yards wide. There’s a quickset hedge beyond, along the glebe that belongs to the vicarage.

I did not sleep much more that night. It was not more than half an hour after I had thrown the bandbox out when I heard a shriek outside – like what we’ve had tonight, but worse, more despairing, I should call it; and it may have been my imagination, but I could have sworn that the screams came nearer and nearer each time. I lit a pipe, and walked up and down for a bit, and then took a book and sat up reading, but I’ll be hanged if I can remember what I read nor even what the book was, for every now and then a shriek came up that would have made a dead man turn in his coffin.

A little before dawn someone knocked at the front door. There was no mistaking that for anything else, and I opened my window and looked down, for I guessed that someone wanted the doctor, supposing that the new man had taken Luke’s house. It was rather a relief to hear a human knock after that awful noise.

You cannot see the door from above, owing to the little porch. The knocking came again, and I called out, asking who was there, but nobody answered, though the knock was repeated. I sang out again, and said that the doctor did not live here any longer. There was no answer, but it occurred to me that it might be some old countryman who was stone deaf. So I took my candle and went down to open the door. Upon my word, I was not thinking of the thing yet, and I had almost forgotten the other noises. I went down convinced that I should find somebody outside, on the doorstep, with a message. I set the candle on the hall table, so that the wind should not blow it out when I opened. While I was drawing the old-fashioned bolt I heard the knocking again. It was not loud, and it had a queer, hollow sound, now that I was close to it, I remember, but I certainly thought it was made by some person who wanted to get in.

It wasn’t. There was nobody there, but as I opened the door inward, standing a little on one side, so as to see out at once, something rolled across the threshold and stopped against my foot.

I drew back as I felt it, for I knew what it was before I looked down. I cannot tell you how I knew, and it seemed unreasonable, for I am still quite sure that I had thrown it across the road. It’s a French window, that opens wide, and I got a good swing when I flung it out. Besides, when I went out early in the morning, I found the bandbox beyond the thickset hedge.

You may think it opened when I threw it, and that the skull dropped out; but that’s impossible, for nobody could throw an empty cardboard box so far. It’s out of the question; you might as well try to fling a ball of paper twenty-five yards, or a blown bird’s egg.

To go back, I shut and bolted the hall door, picked the thing up carefully, and put it on the table beside the candle. I did that mechanically, as one instinctively does the right thing in danger without thinking at all – unless one does the opposite. It may seem odd, but I believe my first thought had been that somebody might come and find me there on the threshold while it was resting against my foot, lying a little on its side, and turning one hollow eye up at my face, as if it meant to accuse me. And the light and shadow from the candle played in the hollows of the eyes as it stood on the table, so that they seemed to open and shut at me. Then the candle went out quite unexpectedly, though the door was fastened and there was not the least draught; and I used up at least half a dozen matches before it would burn again.

I sat down rather suddenly, without quite knowing why. Probably I had been badly frightened, and perhaps you will admit there was no great shame in being scared. The thing had come home, and it wanted to go upstairs, back to its cupboard. I sat still and stared at it for a bit, till I began to feel very cold; then I took it and carried it up and set it in its place, and I remember that I spoke to it, and promised that it should have its bandbox again in the morning.

You want to know whether I stayed in the room till daybreak? Yes, but I kept a light burning, and sat up smoking and reading, most likely out of fright; plain, undeniable fear, and you need not call it cowardice either, for that’s not the same thing. I could not have stayed alone with that thing in the cupboard; I should have been scared to death, though I’m not more timid than other people. Confound it all, man, it had crossed the road alone, and had got up the doorstep and had knocked to be let in.

When the dawn came, I put on my boots and went out to find the bandbox. I had to go a good way round, by the gate near the high-road, and I found the box open and hanging on the other side of the hedge. It had caught on the twigs by the string, and the lid had fallen off and was lying on the ground below it. That shows that it did not open till it was well over; and if it had not opened as soon as it left my hand, what was inside it must have gone beyond the road too.

That’s all. I took the box upstairs to the cupboard, and put the skull back and locked it up. When the girl brought me my breakfast she said she was sorry, but that she must go, and she did not care if she lost her month’s wages. I looked at her, and her face was a sort of greenish, yellowish white. I pretended to be surprised, and asked what was the matter; but that was of no use, for she just turned on me and wanted to know whether I meant to stay in a haunted house, and how long I expected to live if I did, for though she noticed I was sometimes a little hard of hearing, she did not believe that even I could sleep through those screams again – and if I could, why had I been moving about the house and opening and shutting the front door, between three and four in the morning? There was no answering that, since she had heard me, so off she went, and I was left to myself. I went down to the village during the morning and found a woman who was willing to come and do the little work there is and cook my dinner, on condition that she might go home every night. As for me, I moved downstairs that day, and I have never tried to sleep in the best bedroom since. After a little while I got a brace of middle-aged Scotch servants from London, and things were quiet enough for a long time. I began by telling them that the house was in a very exposed position, and that the wind whistled round it a good deal in the autumn and winter, which had given it a bad name in the village, the Cornish people being inclined to superstition and telling ghost stories. The two hard-faced, sandy-haired sisters almost smiled, and they answered with great contempt that they had no great opinion of any Southern bogey whatever, having been in service in two English haunted houses, where they had never seen so much as the Boy in Gray, whom they reckoned no very particular rarity in Forfarshire.

They stayed with me several months, and while they were in the house we had peace and quiet. One of them is here again now, but she went away with her sister within the year. This one – she was the cook – married the sexton, who works in my garden. That’s the way of it. It’s a small village and he has not much to do, and he knows enough about flowers to help me nicely, besides doing most of the hard work; for though I’m fond of exercise, I’m getting a little stiff in the hinges. He’s a sober, silent sort of fellow, who minds his own business, and he was a widower when I came here – Trehearn is his name, James Trehearn. The Scotch sisters would not admit that there was anything wrong about the house, but when November came they gave me warning that they were going, on the ground that the chapel was such a long walk from here, being in the next parish, and that they could not possibly go to our church. But the younger one came back in the spring, and as soon as the banns could be published she was married to James Trehearn by the vicar, and she seems to have had no scruples about hearing him preach since then. I’m quite satisfied, if she is! The couple live in a small cottage that looks over the churchyard.

I suppose you are wondering what all this has to do with what I was talking about. I’m alone so much that when an old friend comes to see me, I sometimes go on talking just for the sake of hearing my own voice. But in this case there is really a connection of ideas. It was James Trehearn who buried poor Mrs. Pratt, and her husband after her in the same grave, and it’s not far from the back of his cottage. That’s the connection in my mind, you see. It’s plain enough. He knows something; I’m quite sure that he does, by his manner, though he’s such a reticent beggar.

Yes, I’m alone in the house at night now, for Mrs. Trehearn does everything herself, and when I have a friend the sexton’s niece comes in to wait on the table. He takes his wife home every evening in winter, but in summer, when there’s light, she goes by herself. She’s not a nervous woman, but she’s less sure than she used to be that there are no bogies in England worth a Scotchwoman’s notice. Isn’t it amusing, the idea that Scotland has a monopoly of the supernatural? Odd sort of national pride, I call that, don’t you?

That’s a good fire, isn’t it? When driftwood gets started at last there’s nothing like it, I think. Yes, we get lots of it, for I’m sorry to say there are still a great many wrecks about here. It’s a lonely coast, and you may have all the wood you want for the trouble of bringing it in. Trehearn and I borrow a cart now and then, and load it between here and the Spit. I hate a coal fire when I can get wood of any sort. A log is company, even if it’s only a piece of a deck-beam or timber sawn off, and the salt in it makes pretty sparks. See how they fly, like Japanese hand-fireworks! Upon my word, with an old friend and a good fire and a pipe, one forgets all about that thing upstairs, especially now that the wind has moderated. It’s only a lull, though, and it will blow a gale before morning.

You think you would like to see the skull? I’ve no objection. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a look at it, and you never saw a more perfect one in your life, except that there are two front teeth missing in the lower jaw.

Oh yes – I had not told you about the jaw yet. Trehearn found it in the garden last spring when he was digging a pit for a new asparagus bed. You know we make asparagus beds six or eight feet deep here. Yes, yes – I had forgotten to tell you that. He was digging straight down, just as he digs a grave; if you want a good asparagus bed made, I advise you to get a sexton to make it for you. Those fellows have a wonderful knack at that sort of digging.

Trehearn had got down about three feet when he cut into a mass of white lime in the side of the trench. He had noticed that the earth was a little looser there, though he says it had not been disturbed for a number of years. I suppose he thought that even old lime might not be good for asparagus, so he broke it out and threw it up. It was pretty hard, he says, in biggish lumps, and out of sheer force of habit he cracked the lumps with his spade as they lay outside the pit beside him; the jawbone of a skull dropped out of one of the pieces. He thinks he must have knocked out the two front teeth in breaking up the lime, but he did not see them anywhere. He’s a very experienced man in such things, as you may imagine, and he said at once that the jaw had probably belonged to a young woman, and that the teeth had been complete when she died. He brought it to me, and asked me if I wanted to keep it; if I did not, he said he would drop it into the next grave he made in the churchyard, as he supposed it was a Christian jaw, and ought to have decent burial, wherever the rest of the body might be. I told him that doctors often put bones into quicklime to whiten them nicely, and that I supposed Dr. Pratt had once had a little lime pit in the garden for that purpose, and had forgotten the jaw. Trehearn looked at me quietly.

“Maybe it fitted that skull that used to be in the cupboard upstairs, sir,” he said. “Maybe Dr. Pratt had put the skull into the lime to clean it, or something, and when he took it out he left the lower jaw behind. There’s some human hair sticking in the lime, sir.”

I saw there was, and that was what Trehearn said. If he did not suspect something, why in the world should he have suggested that the jaw might fit the skull? Besides, it did. That’s proof that he knows more than he cares to tell. Do you suppose he looked before she was buried? Or perhaps – when he buried Luke in the same grave—

Well, well, it’s of no use to go over that, is it? I said I would keep the jaw with the skull, and I took it upstairs and fitted it into its place. There’s not the slightest doubt about the two belonging together, and together they are.

Trehearn knows several things. We were talking about plastering the kitchen a while ago, and he happened to remember that it had not been done since the very week when Mrs. Pratt died. He did not say that the mason must have left some lime on the place, but he thought it, and that it was the very same lime he had found in the asparagus pit. He knows a lot. Trehearn is one of your silent beggars who can put two and two together. That grave is very near the back of his cottage, too, and he’s one of the quickest men with a spade I ever saw. If he wanted to know the truth, he could, and no one else would ever be the wiser unless he chose to tell. In a quiet village like ours, people don’t go and spend the night in the churchyard to see whether the sexton potters about by himself between ten o’clock and daylight.

What is awful to think of, is Luke’s deliberation, if he did it; his cool certainty that no one would find him out; above all, his nerve, for that must have been extraordinary. I sometimes think it’s bad enough to live in the place where it was done, if it really was done. I always put in the condition, you see, for the sake of his memory, and a little bit for my own sake, too.

I’ll go upstairs and fetch the box in a minute. Let me light my pipe; there’s no hurry! We had supper early, and it’s only half-past nine o’clock. I never let a friend go to bed before twelve, or with less than three glasses – you may have as many more as you like, but you shan’t have less, for the sake of old times.

It’s breezing up again, do you hear? That was only a lull just now, and we are going to have a bad night.

A thing happened that made me start a little when I found that the jaw fitted exactly. I’m not very easily startled in that way myself, but I have seen people make a quick movement, drawing their breath sharply, when they had thought they were alone and suddenly turned and saw someone very near them. Nobody can call that fear. You wouldn’t, would you? No. Well, just when I had set the jaw in its place under the skull, the teeth closed sharply on my finger. It felt exactly as if it were biting me hard, and I confess that I jumped before I realised that I had been pressing the jaw and the skull together with my other hand. I assure you I was not at all nervous. It was broad daylight, too, and a fine day, and the sun was streaming into the best bedroom. It would have been absurd to be nervous, and it was only a quick mistaken impression, but it really made me feel queer. Somehow it made me think of the funny verdict of the coroner’s jury on Luke’s death, “by the hand or teeth of some person or animal unknown.” Ever since that I’ve wished I had seen those marks on his throat, though the lower jaw was missing then.

I have often seen a man do insane things with his hands that he does not realise at all. I once saw a man hanging on by an old awning stop with one hand, leaning backward, outboard, with all his weight on it, and he was just cutting the stop with the knife in his other hand when I got my arms round him. We were in mid-ocean, going twenty knots. He had not the smallest idea what he was doing; neither had I when I managed to pinch my finger between the teeth of that thing. I can feel it now. It was exactly as if it were alive and were trying to bite me. It would if it could, for I know it hates me, poor thing! Do you suppose that what rattles about inside is really a bit of lead? Well, I’ll get the box down presently, and if whatever it is happens to drop out into your hands that’s your affair. If it’s only a clod of earth or a pebble, the whole matter would be off my mind, and I don’t believe I should ever think of the skull again; but somehow I cannot bring myself to shake out the bit of hard stuff myself. The mere idea that it may be lead makes me confoundedly uncomfortable, yet I’ve got the conviction that I shall know before long. I shall certainly know. I’m sure Trehearn knows, but he’s such a silent beggar.

I’ll go upstairs now and get it. What? You had better go with me? Ha, ha! do you think I’m afraid of a bandbox and a noise? Nonsense!

Bother the candle, it won’t light! As if the ridiculous thing understood what it’s wanted for! Look at that – the third match. They light fast enough for my pipe. There, do you see? It’s a fresh box, just out of the tin safe where I keep the supply on account of the dampness. Oh, you think the wick of the candle may be damp, do you? All right, I’ll light the beastly thing in the fire. That won’t go out, at all events. Yes, it sputters a bit, but it will keep lighted now. It burns just like any other candle, doesn’t it? The fact is, candles are not very good about here. I don’t know where they come from, but they have a way of burning low occasionally, with a greenish flame that spits tiny sparks, and I’m often annoyed by their going out of themselves. It cannot be helped, for it will be long before we have electricity in our village. It really is rather a poor light, isn’t it?

You think I had better leave you the candle and take the lamp, do you? I don’t like to carry lamps about, that’s the truth. I never dropped one in my life, but I have always thought I might, and it’s so confoundedly dangerous if you do. Besides, I am pretty well used to these rotten candles by this time.

You may as well finish that glass while I’m getting it, for I don’t mean to let you off with less than three before you go to bed. You won’t have to go upstairs, either, for I’ve put you in the old study next to the surgery – that’s where I live myself. The fact is, I never ask a friend to sleep upstairs now. The last man who did was Crackenthorpe, and he said he was kept awake all night. You remember old Crack, don’t you? He stuck to the Service, and they’ve just made him an admiral. Yes, I’m off now – unless the candle goes out. I couldn’t help asking if you remembered Crackenthorpe. If anyone had told us that the skinny little idiot he used to be was to turn out the most successful of the lot of us, we should have laughed at the idea, shouldn’t we? You and I did not do badly, it’s true – but I’m really going now. I don’t mean to let you think that I’ve been putting it off by talking! As if there were anything to be afraid of! If I were scared, I should tell you so quite frankly, and get you to go upstairs with me.

•   •   •   •   •

Here’s the box. I brought it down very carefully, so as not to disturb it, poor thing. You see, if it were shaken, the jaw might get separated from it again, and I’m sure it wouldn’t like that. Yes, the candle went out as I was coming downstairs, but that was the draught from the leaky window on the landing. Did you hear anything? Yes, there was another scream. Am I pale, do you say? That’s nothing. My heart is a little queer sometimes, and I went upstairs too fast. In fact, that’s one reason why I really prefer to live altogether on the ground floor.

Wherever that shriek came from, it was not from the skull, for I had the box in my hand when I heard the noise, and here it is now; so we have proved definitely that the screams are produced by something else. I’ve no doubt I shall find out someday what makes them. Some crevice in the wall, of course, or a crack in a chimney, or a chink in the frame of a window. That’s the way all ghost stories end in real life. Do you know, I’m jolly glad I thought of going up and bringing it down for you to see, for that last shriek settles the question. To think that I should have been so weak as to fancy that the poor skull could really cry out like a living thing!

Now I’ll open the box, and we’ll take it out and look at it under the bright light. It’s rather awful to think that the poor lady used to sit there, in your chair, evening after evening, in just the same light, isn’t it? But then – I’ve made up my mind that it’s all rubbish from beginning to end, and that it’s just an old skull that Luke had when he was a student; and perhaps he put it into the lime merely to whiten it, and could not find the jaw.

I made a seal on the string, you see, after I had put the jaw in its place, and I wrote on the cover. There’s the old white label on it still, from the milliner’s, addressed to Mrs. Pratt when the hat was sent to her, and as there was room I wrote on the edge: “A skull, once the property of the late Luke Pratt, M.D.” I don’t quite know why I wrote that, unless it was with the idea of explaining how the thing happened to be in my possession. I cannot help wondering sometimes what sort of hat it was that came in the bandbox. What colour was it, do you think? Was it a gay spring hat with a bobbing feather and pretty ribands? Strange that the very same box should hold the head that wore the finery – perhaps. No – we made up our minds that it just came from the hospital in London where Luke did his time. It’s far better to look at it in that light, isn’t it? There’s no more connection between that skull and poor Mrs. Pratt than there was between my story about the lead and—

Good Lord! Take the lamp – don’t let it go out, if you can help it – I’ll have the window fastened again in a second – I say, what a gale! There, it’s out! I told you so! Never mind, there’s the firelight – I’ve got the window shut – the bolt was only half down. Was the box blown off the table? Where the deuce is it? There! That won’t open again, for I’ve put up the bar. Good dodge, an old-fashioned bar – there’s nothing like it. Now, you find the bandbox while I light the lamp. Confound those wretched matches! Yes, a pipe spill is better – it must light in the fire – I hadn’t thought of it – thank you – there we are again. Now, where’s the box? Yes, put it back on the table, and we’ll open it.

That’s the first time I have ever known the wind to burst that window open; but it was partly carelessness on my part when I last shut it. Yes, of course I heard the scream. It seemed to go all round the house before it broke in at the window. That proves that it’s always been the wind and nothing else, doesn’t it? When it was not the wind, it was my imagination. I’ve always been a very imaginative man: I must have been, though I did not know it. As we grow older we understand ourselves better, don’t you know?

I’ll have a drop of the Hulstkamp neat, by way of an exception, since you are filling up your glass. That damp gust chilled me, and with my rheumatic tendency I’m very much afraid of a chill, for the cold sometimes seems to stick in my joints all winter when it once gets in.

By George, that’s good stuff! I’ll just light a fresh pipe, now that everything is snug again, and then we’ll open the box. I’m so glad we heard that last scream together, with the skull here on the table between us, for a thing cannot possibly be in two places at the same time, and the noise most certainly came from outside, as any noise the wind makes must. You thought you heard it scream through the room after the window was burst open? Oh yes, so did I, but that was natural enough when everything was open. Of course we heard the wind. What could one expect?

Look here, please. I want you to see that the seal is intact before we open the box together. Will you take my glasses? No, you have your own. All right. The seal is sound, you see, and you can read the words of the motto easily. “Sweet and low” – that’s it – because the poem goes on “Wind of the Western sea,” and says, “blow him again to me,” and all that. Here is the seal on my watch-chain, where it’s hung for more than forty years. My poor little wife gave it to me when I was courting, and I never had any other. It was just like her to think of those words – she was always fond of Tennyson.

It’s of no use to cut the string, for it’s fastened to the box, so I’ll just break the wax and untie the knot, and afterward we’ll seal it up again. You see, I like to feel that the thing is safe in its place, and that nobody can take it out. Not that I should suspect Trehearn of meddling with it, but I always feel that he knows a lot more than he tells.

You see, I’ve managed it without breaking the string, though when I fastened it I never expected to open the bandbox again. The lid comes off easily enough. There! Now look!

What? Nothing in it? Empty? It’s gone, man, the skull is gone!

•   •   •   •   •

No, there’s nothing the matter with me. I’m only trying to collect my thoughts. It’s so strange. I’m positively certain that it was inside when I put on the seal last spring. I can’t have imagined that: it’s utterly impossible. If I ever took a stiff glass with a friend now and then, I would admit that I might have made some idiotic mistake when I had taken too much. But I don’t, and I never did. A pint of ale at supper and half a go of rum at bedtime was the most I ever took in my good days. I believe it’s always we sober fellows who get rheumatism and gout! Yet there was my seal, and there is the empty bandbox. That’s plain enough.

I say, I don’t half like this. It’s not right. There’s something wrong about it, in my opinion. You needn’t talk to me about supernatural manifestations, for I don’t believe in them, not a little bit! Somebody must have tampered with the seal and stolen the skull. Sometimes, when I go out to work in the garden in summer, I leave my watch and chain, on the table. Trehearn must have taken the seal then, and used it, for he would be quite sure that I should not come in for at least an hour.

If it was not Trehearn – oh, don’t talk to me about the possibility that the thing has got out by itself! If it has, it must be somewhere about the house, in some out-of-the-way corner, waiting. We may come upon it anywhere, waiting for us, don’t you know? – just waiting in the dark. Then it will scream at me; it will shriek at me in the dark, for it hates me, I tell you!

The bandbox is quite empty. We are not dreaming, either of us. There, I turn it upside down.

What’s that? Something fell out as I turned it over. It’s on the floor, it’s near your feet, I know it is, and we must find it. Help me to find it, man. Have you got it? For God’s sake, give it to me, quickly!

Lead! I knew it when I heard it fall. I knew it couldn’t be anything else by the little thud it made on the hearth-rug. So it was lead after all, and Luke did it.

I feel a little bit shaken up – not exactly nervous, you know, but badly shaken up, that’s the fact. Anybody would, I should think. After all, you cannot say that it’s fear of the thing, for I went up and brought it down – at least, I believed I was bringing it down, and that’s the same thing, and by George, rather than give in to such silly nonsense, I’ll take the box upstairs again and put it back in its place. It’s not that. It’s the certainty that the poor little woman came to her end in that way, by my fault, because I told the story. That’s what is so dreadful. Somehow, I had always hoped that I should never be quite sure of it, but there is no doubting it now. Look at that!

Look at it! That little lump of lead with no particular shape. Think of what it did, man! Doesn’t it make you shiver? He gave her something to make her sleep, of course, but there must have been one moment of awful agony. Think of having boiling lead poured into your brain. Think of it. She was dead before she could scream, but only think of – oh! there it is again – it’s just outside – I know it’s just outside – I can’t keep it out of my head! – oh! – oh!

•   •   •   •   •

You thought I had fainted? No, I wish I had, for it would have stopped sooner. It’s all very well to say that it’s only a noise, and that a noise never hurt anybody – you’re as white as a shroud yourself. There’s only one thing to be done, if we hope to close an eye tonight. We must find it and put it back into its bandbox and shut it up in the cupboard, where it likes to be. I don’t know how it got out, but it wants to get in again. That’s why it screams so awfully tonight – it was never so bad as this – never since I first—

Bury it? Yes, if we can find it, we’ll bury it, if it takes us all night. We’ll bury it six feet deep and ram down the earth over it, so that it shall never get out again, and if it screams, we shall hardly hear it so deep down. Quick, we’ll get the lantern and look for it. It cannot be far away; I’m sure it’s just outside – it was coming in when I shut the window, I know it.

Yes, you’re quite right. I’m losing my senses, and I must get hold of myself. Don’t speak to me for a minute or two; I’ll sit quite still and keep my eyes shut and repeat something I know. That’s the best way.

“Add together the altitude, the latitude, and the polar distance, divide by two and subtract the altitude from the half-sum; then add the logarithm of the secant of the latitude, the cosecant of the polar distance, the cosine of the half-sum and the sine of the half-sum minus the altitude” – there! Don’t say that I’m out of my senses, for my memory is all right, isn’t it?

Of course, you may say that it’s mechanical, and that we never forget the things we learned when we were boys and have used almost every day for a lifetime. But that’s the very point. When a man is going crazy, it’s the mechanical part of his mind that gets out of order and won’t work right; he remembers things that never happened, or he sees things that aren’t real, or he hears noises when there is perfect silence. That’s not what is the matter with either of us, is it?

Come, we’ll get the lantern and go round the house. It’s not raining – only blowing like old boots, as we used to say. The lantern is in the cupboard under the stairs in the hall, and I always keep it trimmed in case of a wreck.

No use to look for the thing? I don’t see how you can say that. It was nonsense to talk of burying it, of course, for it doesn’t want to be buried; it wants to go back into its bandbox and be taken upstairs, poor thing! Trehearn took it out, I know, and made the seal over again. Perhaps he took it to the churchyard, and he may have meant well. I daresay he thought that it would not scream any more if it were quietly laid in consecrated ground, near where it belongs. But it has come home. Yes, that’s it. He’s not half a bad fellow, Trehearn, and rather religiously inclined, I think. Does not that sound natural, and reasonable, and well meant? He supposed it screamed because it was not decently buried – with the rest. But he was wrong. How should he know that it screams at me because it hates me, and because it’s my fault that there was that little lump of lead in it?

No use to look for it, anyhow? Nonsense! I tell you it wants to be found – Hark! what’s that knocking? Do you hear it? Knock – knock – knock – three times, then a pause, and then again. It has a hollow sound, hasn’t it?

It has come home. I’ve heard that knock before. It wants to come in and be taken upstairs, in its box. It’s at the front door.

Will you come with me? We’ll take it in. Yes, I own that I don’t like to go alone and open the door. The thing will roll in and stop against my foot, just as it did before, and the light will go out. I’m a good deal shaken by finding that bit of lead, and, besides, my heart isn’t quite right – too much strong tobacco, perhaps. Besides, I’m quite willing to own that I’m a bit nervous tonight, if I never was before in my life.

That’s right, come along! I’ll take the box with me, so as not to come back. Do you hear the knocking? It’s not like any other knocking I ever heard. If you will hold this door open, I can find the lantern under the stairs by the light from this room without bringing the lamp into the hall – it would only go out.

The thing knows we are coming – hark! It’s impatient to get in. Don’t shut the door till the lantern is ready, whatever you do. There will be the usual trouble with the matches, I suppose – no, the first one, by Jove! I tell you it wants to get in, so there’s no trouble. All right with that door now; shut it, please. Now come and hold the lantern, for it’s blowing so hard outside that I shall have to use both hands. That’s it, hold the light low. Do you hear the knocking still? Here goes – I’ll open just enough with my foot against the bottom of the door – now!

Catch it! it’s only the wind that blows it across the floor, that’s all – there’s half a hurricane outside, I tell you! Have you got it? The bandbox is on the table. One minute, and I’ll have the bar up. There!

Why did you throw it into the box so roughly? It doesn’t like that, you know.

What do you say? Bitten your hand? Nonsense, man! You did just what I did. You pressed the jaws together with your other hand and pinched yourself. Let me see. You don’t mean to say you have drawn blood? You must have squeezed hard, by Jove, for the skin is certainly torn. I’ll give you some carbolic solution for it before we go to bed, for they say a scratch from a skull’s tooth may go bad and give trouble.

Come inside again and let me see it by the lamp. I’ll bring the bandbox – never mind the lantern, it may just as well burn in the hall, for I shall need it presently when I go up the stairs. Yes, shut the door if you will; it makes it more cheerful and bright. Is your finger still bleeding? I’ll get you the carbolic in an instant; just let me see the thing.

Ugh! There’s a drop of blood on the upper jaw. It’s on the eye-tooth. Ghastly, isn’t it? When I saw it running along the floor of the hall, the strength almost went out of my hands, and I felt my knees bending; then I understood that it was the gale, driving it over the smooth boards. You don’t blame me? No, I should think not! We were boys together, and we’ve seen a thing or two, and we may just as well own to each other that we were both in a beastly funk when it slid across the floor at you. No wonder you pinched your finger picking it up, after that, if I did the same thing out of sheer nervousness, in broad daylight, with the sun streaming in on me.

Strange that the jaw should stick to it so closely, isn’t it? I suppose it’s the dampness, for it shuts like a vice – I have wiped off the drop of blood, for it was not nice to look at. I’m not going to try to open the jaws, don’t be afraid! I shall not play any tricks with the poor thing, but I’ll just seal the box again, and we’ll take it upstairs and put it away where it wants to be. The wax is on the writing-table by the window. Thank you. It will be long before I leave my seal lying about again, for Trehearn to use, I can tell you. Explain? I don’t explain natural phenomena, but if you choose to think that Trehearn had hidden it somewhere in the bushes, and that the gale blew it to the house against the door, and made it knock, as if it wanted to be let in, you’re not thinking the impossible, and I’m quite ready to agree with you.

Do you see that? You can swear that you’ve actually seen me seal it this time, in case anything of the kind should occur again. The wax fastens the strings to the lid, which cannot possibly be lifted, even enough to get in one finger. You’re quite satisfied, aren’t you? Yes. Besides, I shall lock the cupboard and keep the key in my pocket hereafter.

Now we can take the lantern and go upstairs. Do you know? I’m very much inclined to agree with your theory that the wind blew it against the house. I’ll go ahead, for I know the stairs; just hold the lantern near my feet as we go up. How the wind howls and whistles! Did you feel the sand on the floor under your shoes as we crossed the hall?

Yes – this is the door of the best bedroom. Hold up the lantern, please. This side, by the head of the bed. I left the cupboard open when I got the box. Isn’t it queer how the faint odour of women’s dresses will hang about an old closet for years? This is the shelf. You’ve seen me set the box there, and now you see me turn the key and put it into my pocket. So that’s done!

•   •   •   •   •

Good-night. Are you sure you’re quite comfortable? It’s not much of a room, but I daresay you would as soon sleep here as upstairs tonight. If you want anything, sing out; there’s only a lath and plaster partition between us. There’s not so much wind on this side by half. There’s the Hollands on the table, if you’ll have one more nightcap. No? Well, do as you please. Good-night again, and don’t dream about that thing, if you can.

•   •   •   •   •

The following paragraph appeared in the Penraddon News, 23rd November, 1906:

Mysterious Death of a Retired Sea Captain

The village of Tredcombe is much disturbed by the strange death of Captain Charles Braddock, and all sorts of impossible stories are circulating with regard to the circumstances, which certainly seem difficult of explanation. The retired captain, who had successfully commanded in his time the largest and fastest liners belonging to one of the principal transatlantic steamship companies, was found dead in his bed on Tuesday morning in his own cottage, a quarter of a mile from the village. An examination was made at once by the local practitioner, which revealed the horrible fact that the deceased had been bitten in the throat by a human assailant, with such amazing force as to crush the windpipe and cause death. The marks of the teeth of both jaws were so plainly visible on the skin that they could be counted, but the perpetrator of the deed had evidently lost the two lower middle incisors. It is hoped that this peculiarity may help to identify the murderer, who can only be a dangerous escaped maniac. The deceased, though over sixty-five years of age, is said to have been a hale man of considerable physical strength, and it is remarkable that no signs of any struggle were visible in the room, nor could it be ascertained how the murderer had entered the house. Warning has been sent to all the insane asylums in the United Kingdom, but as yet no information has been received regarding the escape of any dangerous patient.

The coroner’s jury returned the somewhat singular verdict that Captain Braddock came to his death “by the hands or teeth of some person unknown.” The local surgeon is said to have expressed privately the opinion that the maniac is a woman, a view he deduces from the small size of the jaws, as shown by the marks of the teeth. The whole affair is shrouded in mystery. Captain Braddock was a widower, and lived alone. He leaves no children.

[Note. – Students of ghost lore and haunted houses will find the foundation of the foregoing story in the legends about a skull which is still preserved in the farmhouse called Bettiscombe Manor, situated, I believe, on the Dorsetshire coast.]

THE MARBLE CHILD

E. Nesbit

1910

All over the pavement of the church spread the exaggerated cross-hatching of the old pews’ oak, a Smithfield market of intersecting lines such as children made with cards in the old days when kings and knaves had fat legs bulging above their serviceable feet, and queens had skirts to their gowns and were not cut across their royal middles by mirrors reflecting only the bedizened torso of them and the charge – heart, trefoil, or the like – in the right-hand top corner of the oblong that framed them.

The pew had qualities: tall fat hassocks, red cushions, a comparative seclusion, and, in the case of the affluent, red curtains drawn at sermon-time.

The child, wearied by the spectacle of a plump divine in black gown and Geneva bands, thumping the pulpit-cushions in the madness of incomprehensible oratory, surrendered his ears to the noise of intonations which, in his own treble, would have earned the reprimand, “Naughty temper.” His eyes, however, were, through some oversight of the gods of his universe, still his own. They found their own pasture: not, to be sure, the argent and sable of gown and bands, still less the gules of flushed denunciatory gills.

There is fair pasture in an old church which, when Norman work was broken down, men loved and built again as from the heart, with pillars and arches, which, to their rude time, symbolised all that the heart desires to materialise, in symbolic stone. The fretted tombs where the effigies of warrior and priest lay life-like in dead marble, the fretted canopies that brooded above their rest. Tall pillars like the trunks of the pine woods that smelt so sweet, the marvel of the timbered roof – turned upside down it would be like a ship. And what could be easier than to turn it upside down? Imagination shrank bashfully from the pulpit already tightly tenanted, but the triforium was plainly and beautifully empty; there one could walk, squeezing happily through the deep thin arches and treading carefully by the unguarded narrow ledge. Only if one played too long in the roof aunts nudged, and urgent whispers insisted that one must not look about like that in church. When this moment came it came always as a crisis foreseen, half dreaded, half longed-for. After that the child kept his eyes lowered, and looked only at the faded red hassocks from which the straw bulged, and in brief, guarded, intimate moments, at the other child.

The other child was kneeling, always, whether the congregation knelt or stood or sat. Its hands were clasped. Its face was raised, but its back bowed under a weight – the weight of the font, for the other child was of marble and knelt always in the church, Sundays and weekdays. There had been once three marble figures holding up the shallow basin, but two had crumbled or been broken away, and now it seemed that the whole weight of the superimposed marble rested on those slender shoulders.

The child who was not marble was sorry for the other. He must be very tired.

The child who was not marble – his name was Ernest – that child of weary eyes and bored brain, pitied the marble boy while he envied him.

“I suppose he doesn’t really feel, if he’s stone,” he said. “That’s what they mean by the stony-hearted tyrant. But if he does feel – How jolly it would be if he could come out and sit in my pew, or if I could creep under the font beside him. If he would move a little there would be just room for me.”

The first time that Ernest ever saw the marble child move was on the hottest Sunday in the year. The walk across the fields had been a breathless penance, the ground burned the soles of Ernest’s feet as red-hot ploughshares the feet of the saints. The corn was cut, and stood in stiff yellow stooks, and the shadows were very black. The sky was light, except in the west beyond the pine trees, where blue-black clouds were piled.

“Like witches’ feather-beds,” said Aunt Harriet, shaking out the folds of her lace shawl.

“Not before the child, dear,” whispered Aunt Emmeline.

Ernest heard her, of course. It was always like that: as soon as anyone spoke about anything interesting, Aunt Emmeline intervened. Ernest walked along very melancholy in his starched frill. The dust had whitened his strapped shoes, and there was a wrinkle in one of his white socks.

“Pull it up, child, pull it up,” said Aunt Jessie; and shielded from the world by the vast silk-veiled crinolines of three full-sized aunts, he pulled it up.

On the way to church, and indeed, in all walks abroad, you held the hand of an aunt; the circumferent crinolines made the holding an arm’s-length business, very tiring. Ernest was always glad when, in the porch, the hand was dropped. It was just as the porch was reached that the first lonely roll of thunder broke over the hills.

“I knew it,” said Aunt Jessie, in triumph; “but you would wear your blue silk.”

There was no more thunder till after the second lesson, which was hardly ever as interesting as the first, Ernest thought. The marble child looked more tired than usual, and Ernest lost himself in a dream-game where both of them got out from prison and played hide-and-seek among the tombstones. Then the thunder cracked deafeningly right over the church. Ernest forgot to stand up, and even the clergyman waited till it died away.

It was a most exciting service, well worth coming to church for, and afterwards people crowded in the wide porch and wondered whether it would clear, and wished they had brought their umbrellas. Some went back and sat in their pews till the servants should have had time to go home and return with umbrellas and cloaks. The more impetuous made clumsy rushes between the showers, bonnets bent, skirts held well up. Many a Sunday dress was ruined that day, many a bonnet fell from best to second-best.

And it was when Aunt Jessie whispered to him to sit still and be a good boy and learn a hymn, that he looked to the marble child with, “Isn’t it a shame?” in his heart and his eyes, and the marble child looked back, “Never mind, it will soon be over,” and held out its marble hands. Ernest saw them come toward him, reaching well beyond the rim of the basin under which they had always, till now, stayed.

“Oh!” said Ernest, quite out loud; and, dropping the hymn-book, held out his hands, or began to hold them out. For before he had done more than sketch the gesture, he remembered that marble does not move and that one must not be silly. All the same, marble had moved. Also Ernest had “spoken out loud” in church. Unspeakable disgrace!

He was taken home in conscious ignominy, treading in all the puddles to distract his mind from his condition.

He was put to bed early, as a punishment, instead of sitting up and learning his catechism under the charge of one of the maids while the aunts went to evening church. This, while it was terrible to Ernest, was in the nature of a reprieve to the housemaid, who found means to modify her own consequent loneliness. Far-away whispers and laughs from the back or kitchen windows assured Ernest that the front or polite side of the house was unguarded. He got up, simulated the appearance of the completely dressed, and went down the carpeted stairs, through the rosewood-furnished drawing-room, rose-scented and still as a deathbed, and so out through the French windows to the lawn, where already the beginnings of dew lay softly.

His going out had no definite aim. It was simply an act of rebellion such as, secure from observation, the timid may achieve; a demonstration akin to putting the tongue out behind people’s backs.

Having got himself out on the lawn, he made haste to hide in the shrubbery, disheartened by a baffling consciousness of the futility of safe revenges. What is the tongue put out behind the back of the enemy without the applause of some admirer?

The red rays of the setting sun made splendour in the dripping shrubbery.

“I wish I hadn’t,” said Ernest.

But it seemed silly to go back now, just to go out and to go back. So he went farther into the shrubbery and got out at the other side where the shrubbery slopes down into the wood, and it was nearly dark there – so nearly that the child felt more alone than ever.

And then quite suddenly he was not alone. Hands parted the hazels and a face he knew looked out from between them.

He knew the face, and yet the child he saw was not any of the children he knew.

“Well,” said the child with the face he knew; “I’ve been watching you. What did you come out for?”

“I was put to bed.”

“Do you not like it?”

“Not when it’s for punishment.”

“If you’ll go back now,” said the strange child, “I’ll come and play with you after you’re asleep.”

“You daren’t. Suppose the aunts catch you?”

“They won’t,” said the child, shaking its head and laughing. “I’ll race you to the house!”

Ernest ran. He won the race. For the other child was not there at all when he reached the house.

“How odd!” he said. But he was tired and there was thunder again and it was beginning to rain, large spots as big as pennies on the step of the French window. So he went back to bed, too sleepy to worry about the question of where he had seen the child before, and only a little disappointed because his revenge had been so brief and inadequate.

Then he fell asleep and dreamed that the marble child had crept out from under the font, and that he and it were playing hide-and-seek among the pews in the gallery at church. It was a delightful dream and lasted all night, and when he woke he knew that the child he had seen in the wood in yesterday’s last light was the marble child from the church.

This did not surprise him as much as it would surprise you: the world where children live is so full of amazing and incredible-looking things that turn out to be quite real. And if Lot’s wife could be turned into a pillar of salt, why should not a marble child turn into a real one? It was all quite plain to Ernest, but he did not tell anyone: because he had a feeling that it might not be easy to make it plain to them.

“That child doesn’t look quite the thing,” said Aunt Emmeline at breakfast. “A dose of Gregory’s, I think, at eleven.”

Ernest’s morning was blighted. Did you ever take Gregory’s powder? It is worse than quinine, worse than senna, worse than anything except castor oil.

But Ernest had to take it – in raspberry jam.

“And don’t make such faces,” said Aunt Emmeline, rinsing the spoon at the pantry sink. “You know it’s all for your own good.”

As if the thought that it is for one’s own good ever kept anyone from making faces!

The aunts were kind in their grown-up crinolined way. But Ernest wanted someone to play with. Every night in his dreams he played with the marble child. And at church on Sunday the marble child still held out its hands, farther than before.

“Come along then,” Ernest said to it, in that voice with which heart speaks to heart; “come and sit with me behind the red curtains. Come!”

The marble child did not look at him. Its head seemed to be bent farther forward than ever before.

When it came to the second hymn Ernest had an inspiration. All the rest of the churchful, sleepy and suitable, were singing:

“The roseate hues of early dawn,

The brightness of the day,

The crimson of the sunset sky,

How fast they fade away.”

Ernest turned his head towards the marble child and softly mouthed (you could hardly call it singing):

“The rosy tews of early dawn,

The brightness of the day;

Come out, come out, come out, come out,

Come out with me and play.”

And he pictured the rapture of that moment when the marble child should respond to this appeal, creep out from under the font, and come and sit beside him on the red cushions beyond the red curtains. The aunts would not see, of course. They never saw the things that mattered. No one would see except Ernest. He looked hard at the marble child.

“You must come out,” he said; and again, “You must come, you must.”

And the marble child did come. It crept out and came to sit by him, holding his hand. It was a cold hand certainly, but it did not feel like marble.

And the next thing he knew, an aunt was shaking him and whispering with fierceness tempered by reverence for the sacred edifice:

“Wake up, Ernest. How can you be so naughty?”

And the marble child was back in its place under the font.

When Ernest looks back on that summer it seems to have thundered every time he went to church. But of course this cannot really have been the case.

But it was certainly a very lowering purple-skied day which saw him stealthily start on the adventure of his little life. He was weary of aunts – they were kind yet just; they told him so and he believed them. But their justice was exactly like other people’s nagging, and their kindness he did not want at all. He wanted someone to play with.

“May we walk up to the churchyard?” was a request at first received graciously as showing a serious spirit. But its reiteration was considered morbid, and his walks took the more dusty direction of the County Asylum.

His longing for the only child he knew, the marble child, exacerbated by denial, drove him to rebellion. He would run away. He would live with the marble child in the big church porch; they would eat berries from the wood near by, just as children did in books, and hide there when people came to church.

So he watched his opportunity and went quietly out through the French window, skirted the side of the house where all the windows were blank because of the old window-tax, took the narrow strip of lawn at a breathless run, and found safe cover among the rhododendrons.

The church-door was locked, of course, but he knew where there was a broken pane in the vestry window, and his eye had marked the lop-sided tombstone underneath it. By climbing upon that and getting a knee in the carved water-spout – He did it, got his hand through, turned the catch of the window, and fell through upon the dusty table of the vestry.

The door was ajar and he passed into the empty church. It seemed very large and grey now that he had it to himself. His feet made a loud echoing noise that was disconcerting. He had meant to call out, “Here I am!” But in the face of these echoes he could not.

He found the marble child, its head bent more than ever, its hands reaching out quite beyond the edge of the font; and when he was quite close he whispered:

“Here I am. – Come and play!”

But his voice trembled a little. The marble child was so plainly marble. And yet it had not always been marble. He was not sure. Yet—

“I am sure,” he said. “You did talk to me in the shrubbery, didn’t you?”

But the marble child did not move or speak.

“You did come and hold my hand last Sunday,” he said, a little louder.

And only the empty echoes answered him.

“Come out,” he said then, almost afraid now of the church’s insistent silence. “I’ve come to live with you altogether. Come out of your marble, do come out!”

He reached up to stroke the marble cheek. A sound thrilled him, a loud everyday sound. The big key turning in the lock of the south door. The aunts!

“Now they’ll take me back,” said Ernest; “you might have come.”

But it was not the aunts. It was the old pew-opener, come to scrub the chancel. She came slowly in with pail and brush; the pail slopped a little water on to the floor close to Ernest as she passed him, not seeing.

Then the marble child moved, turned toward Ernest with speaking lips and eyes that saw.

“You can stay with me forever if you like,” it said, “but you’ll have to see things happen. I have seen things happen.”

“What sort of things?” Ernest asked.

“Terrible things.”

“What things shall I have to see?”

“Her,” – the marble child moved a free arm to point to the old woman on the chancel steps – “and your aunt who will be here presently, looking for you. Do you hear the thunder? Presently the lightning will strike the church. It won’t hurt us, but it will fall on them.”

Ernest remembered in a flash how kind Aunt Emmeline had been when he was ill, how Aunt Jessie had given him his chessmen, and Aunt Harriet had taught him how to make paper rosettes for picture-frames.

“I must go and tell them,” he said.

“If you go, you’ll never see me again,” said the marble child, and put its arms round his neck.

“Can’t I come back to you when I’ve told them?” Ernest asked, returning the embrace.

“There will be no coming back,” said the marble child.

“But I want you. I love you best of everybody in the world,” Ernest said.

“I know.”

“I’ll stay with you,” said Ernest.

The marble child said nothing.

“But if I don’t tell them I shall be the same as a murderer,” Ernest whispered. “Oh! let me go, and come back to you.”

“I shall not be here.”

“But I must go. I must,” said Ernest, torn between love and duty.

“Yes.”

“And I shan’t have you any more?” the living child urged.

“You’ll have me in your heart,” said the marble child – “that’s where I want to be. That’s my real home.”

They kissed each other again.

•   •   •   •   •

“It was certainly a direct Providence,” Aunt Emmeline used to say in later years to really sympathetic friends, “that I thought of going up to the church when I did. Otherwise nothing could have saved dear Ernest. He was terrified, quite crazy with fright, poor child, and he rushed out at me from behind our pew shouting, ‘Come away, come away, auntie, come away!’ and dragged me out. Mrs. Meadows providentially followed, to see what it was all about, and the next thing was the catastrophe.”

“The church was struck by a thunder-bolt was it not?” the sympathetic friend asks.

“It was indeed – a deafening crash, my dear – and then the church slowly crumbled before our eyes. The south wall broke like a slice of cake when you break it across – and the noise and the dust! Mrs. Meadows never had her hearing again, poor thing, and her mind was a little affected too. I became unconscious, and Ernest – well, it was altogether too much for the child. He lay between life and death for weeks. Shock to the system, the physician said. He had been rather run down before. We had to get a little cousin to come and live with us afterwards. The physicians said that he required young society.”

“It must indeed have been a shock,” says the sympathetic friend, who knows there is more to come.

“His intellect was quite changed, my dear,” Aunt Emmeline resumes; “on regaining consciousness he demanded the marble child! Cried and raved, my dear, always about the marble child. It appeared he had had fancies about one of the little angels that supported the old font, not the present font, my dear. We presented that as a token of gratitude to Providence for our escape. Of course we checked his fancifulness as well as we could, but it lasted quite a long time.”

“What became of the little marble angel?” the friend inquires as in friendship bound.

“Crushed to powder, dear, in the awful wreck of the church. Not a trace of it could be found. And poor Mrs. Meadows! So dreadful, those delusions.”

“What form did her delusions take?” the friend, anxious to be done with the old story, hastily asks.

“Well, she always declared that two children ran out to warn me and that one of them was very unusual looking. ‘It wasn’t no flesh and blood, ma’am,’ she used to say in her ungrammatical way; ‘it was a little angel a-taking care of Master Ernest. It ’ad ’old of ’is ’and. And I say it was ’is garden angel, and its face was as bright as a lily in the sun.’”

The friend glances at the India cabinet, and Aunt Emmeline rises and unlocks it.

“Ernest must have been behaving in a very naughty and destructive way in the church – but the physician said he was not quite himself probably, for when they got him home and undressed him, they found this in his hand.”

Then the sympathising friend polishes her glasses and looks, not for the first time, at the relic from the drawer of the India cabinet. It is a white marble finger.

Thus flow the reminiscences of Aunt Emmeline. The memories of Ernest run as this tale runs.

THE TARN

Hugh Walpole

1923

I

As Foster moved unconsciously across the room, bent towards the bookcase, and stood leaning forward a little, choosing now one book, now another with his eye, his host, seeing the muscles of the back of his thin, scraggy neck stand out above his low flannel collar, thought of the ease with which he could squeeze that throat and the pleasure, the triumphant, lustful pleasure, that such an action would give him.

The low white-walled, white-ceilinged room was flooded with the mellow, kindly Lakeland sun. October is a wonderful month in the English Lakes, golden, rich, and perfumed, slow suns moving through apricot-tinted skies to ruby evening glories; the shadows lie then thick about that beautiful country, in dark purple patches, in long web-like patterns of silver gauze, in thick splotches of amber and grey. The clouds pass in galleons across the mountains, now veiling, now revealing, now descending with ghost-like armies to the very breast of the plains, suddenly rising to the softest of blue skies and lying thin in lazy languorous colour.

Fenwick’s cottage looked across to Low Fells; on his right, seen through side windows, sprawled the hills above Ullswater.

Fenwick looked at Foster’s back and felt suddenly sick, so that he sat down, veiling his eyes for a moment with his hand. Foster had come up there, come all the way from London, to explain, to want to put things right. For how many years had he known Foster? Why, for twenty at least, and during all those years Foster had been for ever determined to put things right with everybody. He could not bear to be disliked; he hated that anyone should think ill of him; he wanted everyone to be his friend. That was one reason, perhaps, why Foster had got on so well, had prospered so in his career; one reason, too, why Fenwick had not.

For Fenwick was the opposite of Foster in this. He did not want friends; he certainly did not care that people should like him – that is, people for whom, for one reason or another, he had contempt – and he had contempt for quite a number of people.

Fenwick looked at that long, thin, bending back and felt his knees tremble. Soon Foster would turn round and that high reedy voice would pipe out something about the books. “What jolly books you have, Fenwick!” How many, many times in the long watches of the night when Fenwick could not sleep had he heard that pipe sounding close there – yes, in the very shadows of his bed! And how many times had Fenwick replied to it: “I hate you! You are the cause of my failure in life! You have been in my way always. Always, always, always! Patronising and pretending, and in truth showing others what a poor thing you thought me, how great a failure, how conceited a fool! I know. You can hide nothing from me! I can hear you!”

For twenty years now Foster had been persistently in Fenwick’s way. There had been that affair, so long ago now, when Robins had wanted a sub-editor for his wonderful review, the Parthenon, and Fenwick had gone to see him and they had had a splendid talk. How magnificently Fenwick had talked that day, with what enthusiasm he had shown Robins (who was blinded by his own conceit, anyway) the kind of paper the Parthenon might be, how Robins had caught his own enthusiasm, how he had pushed his fat body about the room, crying, “Yes, yes, Fenwick – that’s fine! That’s fine indeed!” – and then how, after all, Foster had got that job.

The paper had only lived for a year or so, it is true, but the connection with it had brought Foster into prominence just as it might have brought Fenwick!

•   •   •   •   •

Then five years later there was Fenwick’s novel, The Bitter Aloe – the novel upon which he had spent three years of blood-and-tears endeavour – and then, in the very same week of publication, Foster brings out The Circus, the novel that made his name, although, Heaven knows, the thing was poor sentimental trash. You may say that one novel cannot kill another – but can it not? Had not The Circus appeared would not that group of London know-alls – that conceited, limited, ignorant, self-satisfied crowd, who nevertheless can do, by their talk, so much to affect a book’s good or evil fortunes – have talked about The Bitter Aloe, and so forced it into prominence? As it was, the book was stillborn, and The Circus went on its prancing, triumphant way.

After that there had been many occasions – some small, some big – and always in one way or another that thin, scraggy body of Foster’s was interfering with Fenwick’s happiness.

The thing had become, of course, an obsession with Fenwick. Hiding up there in the heart of the Lakes, with no friends, almost no company, and very little money, he was given too much to brooding over his failure. He was a failure, and it was not his own fault. How could it be his own fault with his talents and his brilliance? It was the fault of modern life and its lack of culture, the fault of the stupid material mess that made up the intelligence of human beings – and the fault of Foster.

Always Fenwick hoped that Foster would keep away from him. He did not know what he would not do did he see the man. And then one day to his amazement he received a telegram: “Passing through this way. May I stop with you Monday and Tuesday? Giles Foster.”

Fenwick could scarcely believe his eyes, and then – from curiosity, from cynical contempt, from some deeper, more mysterious motive that he dared not analyse – he had telegraphed “Come.”

And here the man was. And he had come – would you believe it? – to “put things right.” He had heard from Hamlin Eddis that “Fenwick was hurt with him, had some kind of a grievance.”

“I didn’t like to feel that, old man, and so I thought I’d just stop by and have it out with you, see what the matter was, and put it right.”

Last night after supper Foster had tried to put it right. Eagerly, his eyes like a good dog’s who is asking for a bone that he knows that he thoroughly deserves, he had held out his hand and asked Fenwick to “say what was up.”

Fenwick simply had said that nothing was up; Hamlin Eddis was a damned fool.

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that!” Foster had cried, springing up out of his chair and putting his hand on Fenwick’s shoulder. “I’m glad of that, old man. I couldn’t bear for us not to be friends. We’ve been friends so long.”

Lord! how Fenwick hated him at that moment!

II

“What a jolly lot of books you have!” Foster turned round and looked at Fenwick with eager, gratified eyes. “Every book here is interesting! I like your arrangement of them too, and those open bookshelves – it always seems to me a shame to shut up books behind glass!”

Foster came forward and sat down quite close to his host. He even reached forward and laid his hand on his host’s knee. “Look here! I’m mentioning it for the last time – positively! But I do want to make quite certain. There is nothing wrong between us, is there, old man? I know you assured me last night, but I just want—”

Fenwick looked at him and, surveying him, felt suddenly an exquisite pleasure of hatred. He liked the touch of the man’s hand on his knee; he himself bent forward a little and, thinking how agreeable it would be to push Foster’s eyes in, deep, deep into his head, crunching them, smashing them to purple, leaving the empty, staring, bloody sockets, said:

“Why, no. Of course not. I told you last night. What could there be?”

The hand gripped the knee a little more tightly.

“I am so glad! That’s splendid! Splendid! I hope you won’t think me ridiculous, but I’ve always had an affection for you ever since I can remember. I’ve always wanted to know you better. I’ve admired your talents so greatly. That novel of yours – the – the – the one about the Aloe—”

“The Bitter Aloe?”

“Ah, yes, that was it. That was a splendid book. Pessimistic, of course, but still fine. It ought to have done better. I remember thinking so at the time.”

“Yes, it ought to have done better.”

“Your time will come, though. What I say is that good work always tells in the end.”

“Yes, my time will come.”

The thin, piping voice went on:

“Now, I’ve had more success than I deserved. Oh, yes, I have. You can’t deny it. I’m not being falsely modest. I mean it. I’ve got some talent, of course, but not so much as people say. And you! Why, you’ve got so much more than they acknowledge. You have, old man. You have indeed. Only – I do hope you’ll forgive my saying this – perhaps you haven’t advanced quite as you might have done. Living up here, shut away here, closed in by all these mountains, in this wet climate – always raining – why, you’re out of things! You don’t see people, don’t talk and discover what’s really going on. Why, look at me!”

Fenwick turned round and looked at him.

“Now, I have half the year in London, where one gets the best of everything, best talk, best music, best plays, and then I’m three months abroad, Italy or Greece or somewhere, and then three months in the country. Now that’s an ideal arrangement. You have everything that way.”

“Italy or Greece or somewhere!”

Something turned in Fenwick’s breast, grinding, grinding, grinding. How he had longed, oh, how passionately, for just one week in Greece, two days in Sicily! Sometimes he had thought that he might run to it, but when it had come to the actual counting of the pennies – and now this fool, this fathead, this self-satisfied, conceited, patronising—

He got up, looking out at the golden sun.

“What do you say to a walk?” he suggested. “The sun will last for a good hour yet.”

III

As soon as the words were out of his lips he felt as though someone else had said them for him. He even turned half-round to see whether anyone else were there. Ever since Foster’s arrival on the evening before he had been conscious of this sensation. A walk? Why should he take Foster for a walk, show him his beloved country, point out those curves and lines and hollows, the long silver shield of Ullswater, the cloudy purple hills hunched like blankets about the knees of some recumbent giant? Why? It was as though he had turned round to someone behind him and had said, “You have some further design in this.”

They started out. The road sank abruptly to the lake, then the path ran between trees at the water’s edge. Across the lake, tones of bright yellow light, crocus-hued, rode upon the blue. The hills were dark.

The very way that Foster walked bespoke the man. He was always a little ahead of you, pushing his long, thin body along with little eager jerks as though did he not hurry he would miss something that would be immensely to his advantage. He talked, throwing words over his shoulder to Fenwick as you throw crumbs of bread to a robin.

“Of course I was pleased. Who would not be? After all it’s a new prize. They’ve only been awarding it for a year or two, but it’s gratifying – really gratifying – to secure it. When I opened the envelope and found the cheque there – well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. You could, indeed. Of course, a hundred pounds isn’t much. But it’s the honour—”

Whither were they going? Their destiny was as certain as though they had no free-will. Free-will? There is no free-will. All is Fate. Fenwick suddenly laughed aloud.

Foster stopped.

“Why, what is it?”

“What’s what?”

“You laughed.”

“Something amused me.”

Foster slipped his arm through Fenwick’s.

“It is jolly to be walking alone together like this, arm-in-arm, friends. I’m a sentimental man, I won’t deny it. What I say is that life is short and one must love one’s fellow-beings or where is one? You live too much alone, old man.” He squeezed Fenwick’s arm. “That’s the truth of it.”

It was torture, exquisite, heavenly torture. It was wonderful to feel that thin, bony arm pressing against his. Almost you could hear the beating of that other heart. Wonderful to feel that arm and the temptation to take it in your two hands and to bend it and twist it and then to hear the bones crack … crack … crack…. Wonderful to feel that temptation rise through one’s body like boiling water and yet not to yield to it. For a moment Fenwick’s hand touched Foster’s. Then he drew himself apart.

“We’re at the village. This is the hotel where they all come in the summer. We turn off at the right here. I’ll show you my tarn.”

IV

“Your tarn?” asked Foster. “Forgive my ignorance, but what is a tarn exactly?”

“A tarn is a miniature lake, a pool of water lying in the lap of the hill. Very quiet, lovely, silent. Some of them are immensely deep.”

“I should like to see that.”

“It is some little distance – up a rough road. Do you mind?”

“Not a bit. I have long legs.”

“Some of them are immensely deep – unfathomable – nobody touched the bottom – but quiet, like glass, with shadows only—”

“Do you know, Fenwick, but I have always been afraid of water – I’ve never learnt to swim. I’m afraid to go out of my depth. Isn’t that ridiculous? But it is all because at my private school, years ago, when I was a small boy, some big fellows took me and held me with my head under the water and nearly drowned me. They did indeed. They went further than they meant to. I can see their faces.”

Fenwick considered this. The picture leapt to his mind. He could see the boys – large, strong fellows, probably – and this little skinny thing like a frog, their thick hands about his throat, his legs like grey sticks kicking out of the water, their laughter, their sudden sense that something was wrong, the skinny body all flaccid and still—

He drew a deep breath.

Foster was walking beside him now, not ahead of him, as though he were a little afraid, and needed reassurance. Indeed the scene had changed. Before and behind them stretched the uphill path, loose with shale and stones. On their right, on a ridge at the foot of the hill, were some quarries, almost deserted, but the more melancholy in the fading afternoon because a little work still continued there, faint sounds came from the gaunt listening chimneys, a stream of water ran and tumbled angrily into a pool below, once and again a black silhouette, like a question mark, appeared against the darkening hill.

It was a little steep here and Foster puffed and blew.

Fenwick hated him the more for that. So thin and spare, and still he could not keep in condition! They stumbled, keeping below the quarry, on the edge of the running water, now green, now a dirty white-grey, pushing their way along the side of the hill.

Their faces were set now towards Helvellyn. It rounded the cup of hills closing in the base and then sprawling to the right.

“There’s the tarn!” Fenwick exclaimed – and then added, “The sun’s not lasting as long as I had expected. It’s growing dark already.”

Foster stumbled and caught Fenwick’s arm.

“This twilight makes the hills look strange – like living men. I can scarcely see my way.”

“We’re alone here,” Fenwick answered. “Don’t you feel the stillness? The men will have left the quarry now and gone home. There is no one in all this place but ourselves. If you watch you will see a strange green light steal down over the hills. It lasts but for a moment, and then it is dark.

“Ah, here is my tarn. Do you know how I love this place, Foster? It seems to belong especially to me, just as much as all your work and your glory and fame and success seem to belong to you. I have this and you have that. Perhaps in the end we are even after all. Yes….

“But I feel as though that piece of water belonged to me and I to it, and as though we should never be separated – yes…. Isn’t it black?

“It is one of the deep ones. No one has ever sounded it. Only Helvellyn knows, and one day I fancy that it will take me, too, into its confidence – will whisper its secrets—”

Foster sneezed.

“Very nice. Very beautiful, Fenwick. I like your tarn. Charming. And now let’s turn back. That is a difficult walk beneath the quarry. It’s chilly, too.”

“Do you see that little jetty there?” Fenwick led Foster by the arm. “Someone built that out into the water. He had a boat there, I suppose. Come and look down. From the end of the little jetty it looks so deep and the mountains seem to close round.”

Fenwick took Foster’s arm and led him to the end of the jetty. Indeed the water looked deep here. Deep and very black. Foster peered down, then he looked up at the hills that did indeed seem to have gathered close around him. He sneezed again.

“I’ve caught a cold, I am afraid. Let’s turn homewards, Fenwick, or we shall never find our way.”

“Home then,” said Fenwick, and his hands closed about the thin, scraggy neck. For the instant the head half turned and two startled, strangely childish eyes stared; then, with a push that was ludicrously simple, the body was impelled forward, there was a sharp cry, a splash, a stir of something white against the swiftly gathering dusk, again and then again, then far-spreading ripples, then silence.

V

The silence extended. Having enwrapped the tarn, it spread as though with finger on lip to the already quiescent hills. Fenwick shared in the silence. He luxuriated in it. He did not move at all. He stood there looking upon the inky water of the tarn, his arms folded, a man lost in intensest thought. But he was not thinking. He was only conscious of a warm luxurious relief, a sensuous feeling that was not thought at all.

Foster was gone – that tiresome, prating, conceited, self-satisfied fool! Gone, never to return. The tarn assured him of that. It stared back into Fenwick’s face approvingly as though it said: “You have done well – a clean and necessary job. We have done it together, you and I. I am proud of you.”

He was proud of himself. At last he had done something definite with his life. Thought, eager, active thought, was beginning now to flood his brain. For all these years, he had hung around in this place doing nothing but cherish grievances, weak, backboneless – now at last there was action. He drew himself up and looked at the hills. He was proud – and he was cold. He was shivering. He turned up the collar of his coat. Yes, there was the faint green light that always lingered in the shadows of the hills for a brief moment before darkness came. It was growing late. He had better return.

Shivering now so that his teeth chattered, he started off down the path, and then was aware that he did not wish to leave the tarn. The tarn was friendly; the only friend he had in all the world. As he stumbled along in the dark, this sense of loneliness grew. He was going home to an empty house. There had been a guest in it last night. Who was it? Why, Foster, of course – Foster with his silly laugh and amiable, mediocre eyes. Well, Foster would not be there now. No, he never would be there again.

And suddenly Fenwick started to run. He did not know why, except that, now that he had left the tarn, he was lonely. He wished that he could have stayed there all night, but because he was cold he could not, and now he was running so that he might be at home with the lights and the familiar furniture – and all the things that he knew to reassure him.

As he ran the shale and stones scattered beneath his feet. They made a tit-tattering noise under him, and someone else seemed to be running too. He stopped, and the other runner also stopped. He breathed in the silence. He was hot now. The perspiration was trickling down his cheeks. He could feel a dribble of it down his back inside his shirt. His knees were pounding. His heart was thumping. And all around him, the hills were so amazingly silent, now like india-rubber clouds that you could push in or pull out as you do those india-rubber faces, grey against the night sky of a crystal purple upon whose surface, like the twinkling eyes of boats at sea, stars were now appearing.

His knees steadied, his heart beat less fiercely, and he began to run again. Suddenly he had turned the corner and was out at the hotel. Its lamps were kindly and reassuring. He walked then quietly along the lakeside path, and had it not been for the certainty that someone was treading behind him he would have been comfortable and at his ease. He stopped once or twice and looked back, and once he stopped and called out “Who’s there?” Only the rustling trees answered.

He had the strangest fancy, but his brain was throbbing so fiercely that he could not think, that it was the tarn that was following him, the tarn slipping, sliding along the road, being with him so that he should not be lonely. He could almost hear the tarn whisper in his ear: “We did that together, and so I do not wish you to bear all the responsibility yourself. I will stay with you, so that you are not lonely.”

He climbed the road towards home, and there were the lights of his house. He heard the gate click behind him as though it were shutting him in. He went into the sitting-room, lighted and ready. There were the books that Foster had admired.

The old woman who looked after him appeared.

“Will you be having some tea, sir?”

“No, thank you, Annie.”

“Will the other gentleman be wanting any?”

“No; the other gentleman is away for the night.”

“Then there will be only one for supper?”

“Yes, only one for supper.”

He sat in the corner of the sofa and fell instantly into a deep slumber.

VI

He woke when the old woman tapped him on the shoulder and told him that supper was served. The room was dark save for the jumping light of two uncertain candles. Those two red candlesticks – how he hated them up there on the mantelpiece! He had always hated them, and now they seemed to him to have something of the quality of Foster’s voice – that thin, reedy, piping tone.

He was expecting at every moment that Foster would enter, and yet he knew that he would not. He continued to turn his head towards the door, but it was so dark there that you could not see. The whole room was dark except just there by the fireplace, where the two candlesticks went whining with their miserable twinkling plaint.

He went into the dining-room and sat down to his meal. But he could not eat anything. It was odd – that place by the table where Foster’s chair should be. Odd, naked, and made a man feel lonely.

He got up once from the table and went to the window, opened it and looked out. He listened for something. A trickle as of running water, a stir, through the silence, as though some deep pool were filling to the brim. A rustle in the trees, perhaps. An owl hooted. Sharply, as though someone had spoken to him unexpectedly behind his shoulder, he closed the window and looked back, peering under his dark eyebrows into the room.

Later on he went up to bed.

VII

Had he been sleeping, or had he been lying lazily as one does, half-dozing, half-luxuriously not-thinking? He was wide awake now, utterly awake, and his heart was beating with apprehension. It was as though someone had called him by name. He slept always with his window a little open and the blind up. Tonight the moonlight shadowed in sickly fashion the objects in his room. It was not a flood of light nor yet a sharp splash, silvering a square, a circle, throwing the rest into ebony blackness. The light was dim, a little green, perhaps, like the shadow that comes over the hills just before dark.

He stared at the window, and it seemed to him that something moved there. Within, or rather against the green-grey light, something silver-tinted glistened. Fenwick stared. It had the look, exactly, of slipping water.

Slipping water! He listened, his head up, and it seemed to him that from beyond the window he caught the stir of water, not running, but rather welling up and up, gurgling with satisfaction as it filled and filled.

He sat up higher in bed, and then saw that down the wallpaper beneath the window water was undoubtedly trickling. He could see it lurch to the projecting wood of the sill, pause, and then slip, slither down the incline. The odd thing was that it fell so silently.

Beyond the window there was that odd gurgle, but in the room itself absolute silence. Whence could it come? He saw the line of silver rise and fall as the stream on the window-ledge ebbed and flowed.

He must get up and close the window. He drew his legs above the sheets and blankets and looked down.

He shrieked. The floor was covered with a shining film of water. It was rising. As he looked it had covered half the short stumpy legs of the bed. It rose without a wink, a bubble, a break! Over the sill it poured now in a steady flow, but soundless. Fenwick sat back in the bed, the clothes gathered to his chin, his eyes blinking, the Adam’s apple throbbing like a throttle in his throat.

But he must do something, he must stop this. The water was now level with the seats of the chairs, but still was soundless. Could he but reach the door!

He put down his naked foot, then cried again. The water was icy cold. Suddenly, leaning, staring at its dark unbroken sheen, something seemed to push him forward. He fell. His head, his face was under the icy liquid; it seemed adhesive and in the heart of its ice hot like melting wax. He struggled to his feet. The water was breast-high. He screamed again and again. He could see the looking-glass, the row of books, the picture of Dürer’s “Horse,” aloof, impervious. He beat at the water and flakes of it seemed to cling to him like scales of fish, clammy to his touch. He struggled, ploughing his way, towards the door.

The water now was at his neck. Then something had caught him by the ankle. Something held him. He struggled, crying, “Let me go! Let me go! I tell you to let me go! I hate you! I hate you! I will not come down to you! I will not—”

The water covered his mouth. He felt that someone pushed in his eyeballs with bare knuckles. A cold hand reached up and caught his naked thigh.

VIII

In the morning the little maid knocked and, receiving no answer, came in, as was her wont, with his shaving water. What she saw made her scream. She ran for the gardener.

They took the body with its staring, protruding eyes, its tongue sticking out between the clenched teeth, and laid it on the bed.

The only sign of disorder was an overturned water-jug. A small pool of water stained the carpet.

It was a lovely morning. A twig of ivy idly, in the little breeze, tapped the pane.