A Book of Ghosts: 14
Author: Various authors
Date: 1863-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: A collection of ten stories of the uncanny 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
– 14 –

THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT

MobileRead Edition
2021

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

Contents were originally published 1864 ~ 1923. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- The Underground Ghost  –1864
by John Berwick Harwood
(1828–1899)

- The Secret Chamber  –1876
by Margaret Oliphant
(1828–1897)

- Present at a Hanging  –1888
by Ambrose Bierce
(1842–1914)

- At the Dip of the Road  –1896
by Mary Louisa Molesworth
(1839–1921)

- The Sand-Walker  –1906
by Fergus Hume
(1859–1932)

- Bone to His Bone  –1912
by Edmund Gill Swain
(1861–1938)

- The Haunted Orchard  –1912
by Richard Le Gallienne
(1866–1947)

- The Bowmen  –1915
by Arthur Machen
(1863–1947)

- The Past  –1920
by Ellen Glasgow
(1873–1945)

- The Haunted Dolls’ House  –1923
by M. R. James
(1862–1936)

THE UNDERGROUND GHOST

John Berwick Harwood

1866

“Beg pardon sir; you’d like to go underground this morning, Missis thought. Large party, sir, in the Dolphin room, going down at eleven; and our Cheshire mines are thought very curious, particularly Setton Bassett, sir. Supply half Europe, they do, sir; and uncommon pretty the galleries look by torchlight. Very celebrated mine, ours, sir, and worth notice; and only half-a-crown charge for each person, when many go at one time with the guides. Shall I say you’ll go, sir?”

I should have had some curiosity, in any case, to explore one of those noted Cheshire salt-mines, which, if dwarfish in their proportions, when compared with those of Poland, are still worth visiting; but in the present case, though the waiter did not know it, since he did not know me, there was an especial attraction for me to accept his invitation. The mine was the property of my mother’s uncle, and might one day be my own; might, that is, if three healthy cousins should die off before my delicate and ailing self. Still there was enough of contingent ownership in the thing, to give it an interest in my eyes. I was what is called a rising junior at the bar; but overwork and late hours had combined to sap what was a weakly constitution from the first. My health had given way, after a struggle, and symptoms of consumption, which fell disease was hereditary in my family, had at last begun to manifest themselves. The doctors were peremptory in ordering me to a warm climate, for at least a couple of years, and I had chosen Malta as the place of my reluctant exile. My passage was taken on board the Astarte, a fine steamer plying between Liverpool and the principal Mediterranean ports. When I reached Liverpool, however, on the eve of the day of sailing, I found to my annoyance, that a vexatious delay must intervene. Some accident had happened, while in the Mersey, to the Astarte’s machinery, and it would take five, or more probably six days, to repair the damage. There was nothing for it but to wait; my berth was taken, and my fare paid; and thus it fell out that, after killing time by a short tour through the more accessible parts of North Wales, I thought I would visit Setton Bassett, and behold with my own eyes that famous salt-mine, of which as much had been talked in our family, as though it had been one of the seven wonders of the world. I was not on the best of terms with my uncle, so I had put up at the little inn incognito.

I stood at the sitting-room window, after the waiter left me, looking out at the dull gray of the November sky and the yellowing pastures of the dairy county. There was no rain, but also no gleam of sunshine; and the still waters of the mere within rifle-shot of the hotel – the pike-fishing in which attracted many an angler to the district – looked as dark as lead. The canal, with the green and red barges sleeping on its weedy surface; the marshy meadows; the ugly factory chimneys, peeping out among the bare treetops afar off – these things made up anything but an enlivening prospect. My mind wandered off to the orange-groves and cloudless skies of Malta, to the pleasant voyage up the storied Mediterranean – I was a good sailor, and had no dread of seasickness to dash the enjoyment of the trip – and then my thoughts strayed back to my abandoned chambers in Hare Court, Temple. It had not been without a pang that I had wrenched myself away from law and equity, musty black-letter commentaries and brand new reports; and I sighed involuntarily as I thought how I had been forced to drop behind in the race of life, and to yield the palm to others. But life itself was in the balance, and I had no choice in the matter.

“Only waiting for you, sir,” said the napkin-bearing attendant, jerking the door open, and poking the fire as waiters will, when no other exercise for their restless activity presents itself. I declare that I had forgotten the salt-mine, the proposed excursion, and my own consent to make one among the pilgrims. But I could not be always reading yesterday’s newspaper; and I had seen Llangollen and Valle Crucis and Rows of Chester, and the castles of Chirk and Bran; and however little attractive the dive might prove, it would be as well to have seen the family salt-mine, while a couple of hours at least would thus be got rid of. It was Saturday; and on Monday at noon, the splendid screw steamship Astarte, with her freight and passengers, was to drop down to the Mersey, and carry me along with her. I had but two days, therefore, to kill, and this underground exploring would answer as well as anything else. I put on my great-coat, therefore, and followed William the waiter.

There were a good many sight-seers going down, besides the large and rather noisy family party occupying the Dolphin room, and which included three or four young ladies. Besides these, there were three or four recruits from the commercial, and as many from the coffee-room – all of whom had been impressed into the service by the eloquence of the glib waiter, who, I rather think, must have received some fee from the head-guide for each visitor to the mine. This guide, like his two subordinates, was a plain, shrewd-faced miner, in a rough suit of unbleached flannel, well provided with torches, lanterns, and other requisites for such an expedition. He assured us, with gruff civility, that there was no sort of danger, if we only kept together, took care of the lights, and minded what he told us; and after this exordium, he led the way to the pit, which was half a mile off. A gin, turned by an old wall-eyed white horse, sufficed to lower the cage which held us, in detachment, and we were soon underground.

A pretty sight was that mine, though I suspect it was not by any means so superior a specimen of its class as the waiter’s interested panegyrics would have led us to believe. But it was pretty and curious withal, to see the stretch of long galleries running away to the dim distance, to see the “halls” and “chambers” into which we suddenly emerged, and whose roofs were propped on columns of salt, and decked with frieze and cornice never carved by earthly chisel. Part of the mine was in full yield; the picks and shovels of the workmen rang against the rocky walls and floor, awakening a thousand sullen echoes from the excavations; and shaggy ponies came clattering and stumbling past, dragging trucks laden with corves of salt, some in block, and some in splinters, along the tramways. There were a good many men and boys busy in the regular routine of the mine, and the sight of this industry seemed the main attraction in the eyes of my fellow-pilgrims. They were all hearty, hale, north-country folks, except myself; the Dolphin party in especial being from Yorkshire, as they told everybody, and who had previously seen no mines but coal-pits. My own experience was still more restricted; but I did not take the same interest in the details of the labour of extracting salt as my temporary companions, most of whom so loudly evinced their interest in “clay-stones” or “jewels.”

Besides, somehow, I felt the loud blithe mirth of the rest, who seemed as frolicsome as school children on a holiday, jar a little with my own highly-wrought and irritable nerves. I was sickly and peevish, I dare say; but at any rate, I shrank instinctively away from the laughter and conversation of the rest of the party, and turned off into one of the lateral galleries of the mine. I had a lantern – we all carried lanterns or torches – and it was wonderful how the light which it gave was reflected back from the pellucid walls, which might have been hewn in rock crystal, so bright and pure was the salt through which the passage had been cut. The rough facets of the great crystalline lumps sparkled like monstrous gems, and the floor was rough with glittering fragments. This passage was intersected by others of varying width, some of which were broad corridors, with grooved floors, where trams had once been laid; while others were mere fissures, in the forming of which spade and pick could have played but a secondary part. I wandered on, and on, and still on, musing as I went, and taking little heed to my course.

Suddenly I stumbled, tripped over some loose masses of salt, and fell on my hands and knees, managing – and only just managing – to save the lantern which I carried from being extinguished in the fall. The floor of the cavern was very uneven in that part, and I had inadvertently walked into a sort of pit or basin of no great depth, and half filled with sand and moist salt, more or less pulverized. I rose and looked about me. Evidently, I had strayed from the direct track, thanks to my old habit of indulging in reverie, and had mechanically taken a wrong turning among some of the many passages. The place where I now found myself was by no means similar to the part of the mine that was in full yield, and from which I had wandered. Instead of being dry, airy, and full of life and bustle, the passage where I stood was damp, and quite silent, not a sound being audible except the drip, drip of the water that oozed through the roof in fifty places, and fell sullenly splashing into the little pools of dark green brine that lay among the stones. The floor was of stones, not of salt; and what salt was left in heaps was mixed with sand and loam, so as to be worthless for marketable purposes. It was plain that I was in some neglected corner of the mine; it was plain, too, that I had lost my way.

I am not, I think, more timid at heart than other Englishmen of my age and habits, but I must own that the first sensation I experienced was one of actual alarm. I remembered the words of the guide, when he told us that there was no danger so long as we kept together and near him. I had smiled when I heard this gruff caution, regarding it as a mere common-place speech, or perhaps a phrase designed to enhance the value of our conductor’s services; but now the warning came back to me with unwelcome emphasis, and as I breathed with difficulty the clammy and heavy air of the vault, a shudder ran through my whole frame. In the next instant, I rallied my courage, laughed contemptuously at my own fears, and stepped out manfully along the passage. The abandoned salt pit, the moist and sticky brine of which adhered to my clothes, showed me at least what to avoid, and I knew that I must have entered the passage from the right. But, alas! On emerging from the passage into a sort of square chamber, in which some rude benches, carved out of the rock-salt for the miners’ use in bygone times, were cut in the gleaming walls, I found that no less than six openings gave access to different parts of the mine, and I was fairly at fault.

How I had strayed so far without paying any attention to the bearings of my heedless course, is what, perhaps, none but an absent man can understand; and I, unluckily, was an absent man. It was not the first time, by many, that I had lost my way; but my former escapades had all occurred under the free sky, in the blessed summer sunlight, and the worst that had ever come of them was the temporary inconvenience of losing my dinner. But it is one thing to range about a mazy wood, or to roam in circles among the great purple moors, and another to be lost underground, in the dank air and darkness of a living tomb. I remarked, too, that the candle in my lantern would not last very long – from one to two hours perhaps, but certainly not longer. It was annoying, very annoying, to be left thus alone. I did not like to own to myself that it was dangerous.

How strange it was, I thought, that I did not hear the very faintest sound from the scene of all those busy labours in the mine. I listened – listened intently. Not a sound; not so much as the faint click of a distant pickaxe, or the crash of a falling block of salt; not the welcome sound of a human voice; not the tramp of one of those shaggy ponies that drew the corves. I had never before realised what the weight of solitude – enforced solitude – could be. I listened; I waited. Not the faintest indication that any other mortal but myself was below ground, reached my ears. Angry with my own fears, vexed with my own carelessness, that had brought me to this pass, I selected at hazard one of the passages opening into the chamber, and entered it, walking fast, but holding the lantern well in front, to avoid any fresh pitfalls which might lie in wait for the unwary foot. The passage was but some ten yards long, and then it branched off into two narrower corridors, the widest of which led me to a wide but low-browed cave of mixed salt and stone. I entered it stooping, but soon found that I should be obliged to proceed on hands and knees, if at all, so I retraced my steps: and, tracing the other corridor to its extremity, found myself once more in the square chamber which I had left a few minutes before.

And now I began to own to myself that I felt anything but hopeful of a speedy deliverance. My best chance was, that I might be missed, and sought for, since it was evident that I might wander aimlessly, as in a labyrinth, until my candle was spent, and then I should be indeed in sorry case. But should I be missed? I had no friend among the party of blithe sight-seers. If they remembered the existence of the pale, taciturn stranger who had seemed to shrink from their companionship, no doubt they would think that he had made his way back to the shaft, and got some of the miners to draw him up “to bank,” and the guides were only too likely to think so too. I should be inquired for at the inn, of course, but not till dinner-time, and my absence might very probably be misinterpreted. The people knew nothing of me; my luggage was of the lightest; I might be thought of merely as a bilking scamp, who had levanted without paying his bill. And even a night spent in that cheerless place would, to one in my failing health, be no trifling misfortune. Already my feet were cold and wet with the tenacious brine; the cold moist air had brought back my cough, and I shivered in the chill atmosphere of the vault where I stood. Yet perhaps there were people near me, within earshot all the time, for I could not believe that the mine had been suddenly deserted. I shouted, and shouted again, the many crevices and passages giving back the sound of my voice with strange and sullen dissonance.

Presently, though no answering call was returned, I saw a light, far off and dim, but rapidly advancing towards me along the gallery that lay on my left, and which was one of the six I have mentioned. Nearer and nearer it came; no flare of torches, but the steady gleam of a small lamp; and then, to my surprise, I saw that the human figure that soon became visible was not that of a miner. The light of the lantern fell faintly on the pale face, colourless as marble, but delicate and pretty enough, of a young and slender girl – a lady, evidently, by her dress, and whom I instantly conjectured to have been one of the party of explorers. But how came she there, and alone? Was she lost, like me? Or – “Did you not call a minute ago? I can show you the way, if you like.”

Common-place words these; but they were spoken with a peculiar quiet intonation, that impressed me in spite of myself. The voice was sweet and low, but almost solemn in its calm. There was something strange, too, in the composure and the unsmiling gravity of one so young, while her very presence in that out-of-the-way part of the mine perplexed me. My first idea was, that the young lady, like myself, had lost her way in the intricacies of the pit; but this supposition her confidence of bearing seemed to contradict. No doubt she knew the mine well, or she would scarcely have offered to guide me to safety. This was an additional proof that she could not have been one of the merry, rosy-cheeked Yorkshire girls who had made part of the explorers that morning. Most likely, some fresh party had descended to see the mine, and this young lady – some resident in the neighbourhood – had accompanied her friends to a place which she knew well. And yet, why alone?

Then I snapped the thread of my thoughts rather abruptly, as I remembered that I had not uttered a single syllable of thanks or explanation to my fair rescuer, who had, no doubt, been the only member of the party to which she belonged who had happened to hear the cries for aid, of which I was beginning to be heartily ashamed. A man’s self-love is easily piqued, and I felt a hot flush of shame rise to my cheek as I thought in how pitiful a light I probably appeared to the sole spectator of what must seem my poltroonery in shouting for help. I therefore put on a bold front, and made a few remarks in as sprightly a tone as I could adopt upon the absurdity of my position, and went so far as to express my regret for any trouble or inconvenience I might have occasioned the fair damsel on behalf of so insignificant a person as myself. At the same time, I thanked her for her kindness, and admitted that I should not be sorry to regain the upper air.

She bowed her head slightly, and in the same grave, unsmiling manner as before, and turned towards the passage whence she had come, merely replying in answer to my speech: “This is the way we must take.”

I followed her as she swiftly and steadily glided forward, traversing the long and narrow passage lamp in hand. At the end of the passage was a sort of hexagonal vault, full of openings in its dull, white walls, where the salt was much corroded by the moisture that dripped from the roof. The floor was covered with white incrustations, and several of the entrances were more or less choked with earth and rocks. My guide selected one of the narrowest of the galleries, without a moment’s hesitation, and entered it with the same quick but light step. It was a mere fissure of irregular width, so very narrow in parts that it seemed as if the rocks were closing their stony jaws to bar our egress, while the height was considerable. Once I fancied, as I looked up, that I could see a faint glimmer of daylight filtered down through the overlying rocks, but it may have been mere fancy. For some moments, not a word was spoken. I was the first to break the silence.

“I had no idea,” said I, in a lively tone that cost me an effort, for I could scarcely keep my teeth from chattering as I spoke, so chilly and moist was the atmosphere of the unsunned caves – “I had no idea that I had wandered so far, or indeed that the mine was so large. I can recognise none of these objects by which we are passing, and yet some of them are worth looking at. How pretty is this, for instance!” And I came to a stop, glancing about me with involuntary admiration, as I found myself in a large natural grotto into which the fissure led. The lofty but broken roof was of rock-salt, but stained of many hues, green and crimson, orange, brown, scarlet, by the infiltration of water, which dripped abundantly from the cracks in the rough ceiling, and which probably contained metallic oxides in greater or less amount. The floor was of stone, wet and furrowed by the trickling of fifty tiny rivulets, which meandered over the honey-combed surface, till they were lost over the smooth lip of a long and narrow chasm that intersected the grotto. But the beauty of the place was in the infinite variety of fantastic columns, some of pure white salt, some of the same salt discoloured and crumbling, that composed the walls. As the feeble light of the lanterns flashed on the pellucid surfaces of these fairy pillars, some simple and rude as the Doric, some slender and frail, some more elaborate in the intricacies of their mouldings than the Corinthian or Byzantine, I could not restrain my exclamations of surprise and delight. For a moment I forgot the cold, the damp, the discomfort, and said, half to myself: “What a wonderful sight! If a human artist had carved those delicate capitals and rich decorations, what a rush would there be to see his handiwork! But I dare say even the county handbook does not condescend to describe this place, which is worthy to be the palace of the king of the gnomes.”

“Few know of this place,” said my conductress, in the same measured, passionless voice as before. She had stopped when I stopped, and she stood motionless as a statue, and as pale as if she had been a figure hewn out of alabaster, rather than a creature of flesh and blood. It was the first word of the nature of a remark which had fallen from her, and I tried to draw her into conversation by descanting on the beauty of the singular grotto, and the spaciousness of the mine. She said very little, but her reticence did not seem to be caused by any poverty of intellect. There was, however, a peculiar want of warmth or enthusiasm, whether the subject were art or nature, in what little my fair guide could be induced to say. Nor was she by any means communicative as to herself. My attempts to discover whether she really lived in the neighbourhood, were quietly baffled, and when I said that “doubtless her friends would begin to be alarmed at her long absence for which I feared that my own stupid blundering was to blame,” she merely bowed, and led the way as before. On we went, through a network of passages, that only seemed to grow more Daedalian every moment, but through which my companion glided along as unswervingly as if she held in her hand an unfailing clue. Many of these galleries were evidently the work of man, hearing traces of pick and spade; while others, heaped with rubbish, and obstructed by rude columns of salt, were as plainly natural caves. In all, however, the air was heavy, chill, and moist, and water dripped from the walls, and fell gurgling down hidden fissures into some unseen depths below. I was confident that I had passed none of these places that day, and began to suspect that my guide was leading me a long round, so as to show me all the lions of the mine, instead of taking a shortcut to the workings. At another time, this desire to impress a stranger with a full notion of local marvels would have amused me; but my cough got worse; I shivered, and longed for the excursion to come to a close. Yet there was an awkwardness in suggesting this. I ventured on a safe remark.

“It is bitterly cold,” said I, with a shudder, for the damp seemed to be piercing to the very marrow of my bones. “Do you not find it so?”

“Very cold!” She said no more; but those two common-place words were spoken in a voice that awed me, somehow, in spite of myself, and seemed to freeze me into silence. On we went, and I trusted that we must be approaching the working-part of the mine, for the candle in my lantern was reduced to a mere morsel, and must soon be burned out. But ill as I felt, and hard as it was for my weak lungs to endure the unwholesome air, I almost forgot this in my perplexity as to my conductress. I could not make her out at all. I had met with romantic young ladies, silly young ladies, sensible young ladies, even haughty and vain young ladies, but never with any one like my guide. Why was she leading me thus, what I felt must be a circuitous course through the mine? Why—

She came to a dead stop, slowly-turned, and confronted me. The hood of her grey cloak, an old-fashioned article of attire, such as I had not seen for many years, was drawn over her head, and it threw her face partly into shadow; but her eyes were bright and clear, though there was something in their cold steady look that made me shiver afresh, as if the air of the mine had grown even more icy and oppressive than before.

“Tell me about yourself. Tell me what you are going to do. What are your plans, I mean,” she said in the same manner as before, like a sleepwalker unconsciously uttering words that volition does not prompt.

I laughed, and blundered out some would-be witty rejoinder on my own good-fortune in having inspired so charming a person with sufficient interest in my fate to suggest the question; but the flippant words died away on my lips half spoken, as she waved her hand, not impatiently, not coquettishly, but with a calm dignity of bearing that matched well her bloodless cheek and the carriage of her proud head. “You are to sail in the Astarte – is it not so?” said this singular girl, without a smile or a falter in her low but very distinctive voice. I owned the fact, in no slight surprise. I had mentioned to no one at Setton Bassett the name of the ship in which my passage was taken. The idea of a mystification, of a trick, dawned upon me, but I was at a loss to guess how my strange guide could have obtained the information she evidently possessed. Did she know more of me than this? My name, for instance, my profession, and my reason for quitting England? If so, at any rate she made no parade of her knowledge. She merely raised her hand for a moment – it was ungloved, and there were rings of price sparkling on the thin white fingers – and her eyes seemed to gather a new expression of sadness and warning as she said: “Beware of the Astarte! If you love your life – and oh, it is bitter to die young – do not sail in that ship.”

Slowly the hand she had lifted in warning fell to her side, and holding up the lamp as before, she turned away, and preceded me along the galleries. I followed her, perplexed, half angry, half alarmed. I began to fear that I was the sport of a mad woman. And then a new fancy seized me. Perhaps I myself might be delirious, and the mine, the endless galleries, and my strange guide, were visions of a disordered brain, a frightful dream, from which I vainly strove to awake. Presently, it occurred to me for the first time that my new-found friend’s feet made no sound as they trod the broken and rugged pavement, slippery and heaped with rubbish. Certain it was that she moved firmly and swiftly on, without any sign of difficulty or fatigue, while I stumbled and splashed, splashed and stumbled, and at times found it hard to keep up with her. But as regarded the noiselessness of her tread, I could not solve the doubt If I stopped, she stopped too, not after a pause, but instantly. And I heard nothing but my own labouring breath and hacking cough, and the sound of my own weary feet crunching the splinters of salt.

A little while, and even this was forgotten in a new source of apprehension. I had for some time vaguely conceived the idea that, as in a labyrinth, we were walking in a circle; and gradually I began to fancy that I had seen this or that block of salt or darkling arch before, and that I had passed through some of the corridors at least once before. But suspicion was changed to certainty when I suddenly espied, lying on the ground in one of the galleries, one of my own gloves. I had dropped this glove some time before, for I had missed it soon after the arrival of the Unknown. As I picked it up, I glanced keenly around me, and thought I recognised the opening that led into the square chamber. I was right; in another moment I had followed my mysterious guide into the square chamber itself. More than an hour’s weary toil, for my candle was all but spent, had brought us back to the point from which we had started. I was angry at last; all my involuntary awe for my strange conductress was lost, and I stamped my foot hard upon the floor as I asked if she had been amusing herself at my expense, or whether she, too, were ignorant of the topography of the mine, and had misled me by accident. I spoke in wrath, and almost in menace; but there was no reply, save one long moan, as from a child in pain, that rang sadly through the vault. I turned my head, but I could see nothing; and when I again confronted what I now deemed my treacherous guide, a sort of mist seemed to dim my eyes, and I saw, or thought I saw, her form grow faint and indistinct, fading and fading like breath upon a mirror, but with still the same calm face, the same grave look of sorrow and warning, until that too faded, and nothing was left opposite to me – nothing but the rocky wall. I sprang forward, incredulous, and touched the wall with my hand. As I did so, a repetition of the moaning cry made me start, and far down the passage where I had seen her first, I saw her again – the pure, pale outline of the young face, the tall, slender form in the grey mantle, with the hood drawn over the head, the lamp shining in the outstretched hand. How came she there?

“This is too much!” cried I passionately, and convinced that I was the victim of a trick, though how such a trick could have been effected, I did not care to consider. “I will not bear this juggling. I will not—”

As I spoke, I darted forward to overtake the receding figure, and my foot tripping among the loose stones of the floor, as I ran, I fell heavily, crushing the lantern beneath me, and being instantly involved in Egyptian darkness. Bruised and hurt, I gave no heed to the pain of the fall, but sprang up, and strained my eyes in the direction where the lamp had been last seen. There was not a spark – not a sound. No light, no rustle of her dress, no faint sound of a distant footfall, nothing but darkness and silence. Eagerly I listened, eagerly I watched, but in vain. I tried to call aloud, but my tongue refused its office; and when I did raise a weak shout, I felt my natural repugnance to the darkness deepen as no answer came.

“She is doing this to frighten me,” I murmured; “she is hiding behind some pillar. Whoever she is, she never could be cruel enough to leave me here in the dark alone, to perish.”

Silence, still silence. Any sound, even that moan, at which my very heartstrings had quivered, would have been better than that. Darkness, blank, blank darkness. I tried to shout, tried to grope my way out, but the sides of the rocky vault were slippery to the touch, and when I found an opening, I stumbled and fell again, and had not strength to rise. Oh, it was very cold, cold and dark. This must be death.

•   •   •   •   •

“A drop more brandy, Jem; the last did him good, I can’t feel any pulse yet, though. Don’t crowd so about him, lads. Give him air! That’s enough of the brandy, but don’t leave off chafing the hands. He’ll come round!”

With my dulled ear, I heard these words, but scarcely understood them, and from between the half-closed lids my weak eyes could feebly distinguish a glare of torches, and several rough men in miners’ garb, and one in black with a kind, shrewd face – the doctor, no doubt. I saw all his, in a stupid sort of indifferent way, as if it had been a pageant, and then I seemed to sink down into a black sea of roaring water, and fainted for the second time.

I was in bed at last. I had been in bed some days, very ill, and with a brain too deadened, and a frame too exhausted, to take note of time. When my senses returned, I asked what was the date, and hearing it, knew that the Astarte had sailed without me, and that my passage-money was lost. It was not for weeks, and until my slow convalescence had ripened into recovery from the illness brought on by cold and the wetting I had experienced, that the doctor asked me how I came to separate myself from the rest of the company, and to get lost in the mine.

“It so happened,” said he, “that work was suspended unusually early on that day, as there was a wake at Swivelsby, and the miners had a sort of half-holiday by annual custom. The mine was therefore abandoned, and but for the lucky chance, that when you were missed at the inn, and inquiries were made, an intelligent boy, the son of a miner, declared that you had never come up to bank at all, it is probable that no search would have taken place. As it was, long hours passed before a party started in quest of you; and it is fortunate that they were in time. Setton Bassett mine has witnessed more than one tragic incident, even in my day.”

“To what do you allude, doctor?” asked I eagerly.

“Eighteen years ago, a young lady, a Miss Walcott, became separated from her friends, as you did, in that mine,” answered the doctor. “I had not as yet settled in the district, and only know the details from report, and very imperfectly. I believe, however, that the poor girl, who had made one of a large family party, was bound on a visit to an aunt who lived a few miles off; her own parents then residing at Hallings Court, near here. The day was a stormy one; the carriages drove off in a heavy fall of rain; and I believe the missing one was understood by her mother to be staying at her aunt’s, and vice versa, for there was no alarm till help was impossible. The poor girl’s body was found – for she perished of cold and hunger in that maze of galleries – in the very spot where we found you, and – Bless me, how pale you look, my dear sir. Take some cordial, and lie down, and no more talking – not a word more, I insist.”

•   •   •   •   •

I have no explanation of the above facts to offer. I have endeavoured, far from England, to set down every detail of the occurrence as simply and succinctly as possible. I should be thankful if I could disabuse my mind of the ghastly doubt and horror that cling to it, and which haunt me when I recall the events of that day in the Cheshire salt-mine. The good doctor, when he heard my statement, did his best to convince me that what I saw was a mere hallucination, due to my disordered health and excited nerves. I wish I could think so; but further inquiries, made before I left England, served to assure me that I was not the only person who was supposed to have seen the presence that I had beheld in the disused portion of the mine.

One word more. The warning was no idle one, though I doubt whether I should not have been ashamed to have heeded it, had not illness chained me to my sickbed. Before I was able to quit Setton Bassett, news came that the fine steamship Astarte had been cast away on the rocks of Cape Spartel, and that most of the crew and passengers had perished miserably in the surf.

THE SECRET CHAMBER

Margaret Oliphant

1876

I

Castle Gowrie is one of the most famous and interesting in all Scotland. It is a beautiful old house, to start with – perfect in old feudal grandeur, with its clustered turrets and walls that could withstand an army – its labyrinths, its hidden stairs, its long mysterious passages – passages that seem in many cases to lead to nothing, but of which no one can be too sure what they lead to. The front, with its fine gateway and flanking towers, is approached now by velvet lawns, and a peaceful, beautiful old avenue, with double rows of trees, like a cathedral; and the woods out of which these grey towers rise, look as soft and rich in foliage, if not so lofty in growth, as the groves of the South. But this softness of aspect is all new to the place – that is, new within the century or two which count for but little in the history of a dwelling-place, some part of which, at least, has been standing since the days when the Saxon Athelings brought such share of the arts as belonged to them to solidify and regulate the original Celtic art which reared incised stones upon rude burial-places, and twined mystic knots on its crosses, before historic days. Even of this primitive decoration there are relics at Gowrie, where the twistings and twinings of Runic cords appear still on some bits of ancient wall, solid as rocks, and almost as everlasting. From these to the graceful French turrets, which recall many a grey château, what a long interval of years! But these are filled with stirring chronicles enough, besides the dim, not always decipherable records, which different developments of architecture have left on the old house. The Earls of Gowrie had been in the heat of every commotion that took place on or about the Highland line for more generations than any but a Celtic pen could record. Rebellions, revenges, insurrections, conspiracies, nothing in which blood was shed and lands lost, took place in Scotland, in which they had not had a share; and the annals of the house are very full, and not without many a stain. They had been a bold and vigorous race – with much evil in them, and some good; never insignificant, whatever else they might be. It could not be said, however, that they are remarkable nowadays. Since the first Stuart rising, known in Scotland as “the Fifteen,” they have not done much that has been worth recording; but yet their family history has always been of an unusual kind. The Randolphs could not be called eccentric in themselves: on the contrary, when you knew them, they were at bottom a respectable race, full of all the country-gentleman virtues; and yet their public career, such as it was, had been marked by the strange leaps and jerks of vicissitude. You would have said an impulsive, fanciful family – now making a grasp at some visionary advantage, now rushing into some wild speculation, now making a sudden sally into public life – but soon falling back into mediocrity, not able apparently, even when the impulse was purely selfish and mercenary, to keep it up. But this would not have been at all a true conception of the family character; their actual virtues were not of the imaginative order, and their freaks were a mystery to their friends. Nevertheless these freaks were what the general world was most aware of in the Randolph race. The late Earl had been a representative peer of Scotland (they had no English title), and had made quite a wonderful start, and for a year or two had seemed about to attain a very eminent place in Scotch affairs; but his ambition was found to have made use of some very equivocal modes of gaining influence, and he dropped accordingly at once and for ever from the political firmament. This was quite a common circumstance in the family. An apparently brilliant beginning, a discovery of evil means adopted for ambitious ends, a sudden subsidence, and the curious conclusion at the end of everything that this schemer, this unscrupulous speculator or politician, was a dull, good man after all – unambitious, contented, full of domestic kindness and benevolence. This family peculiarity made the history of the Randolphs a very strange one, broken by the oddest interruptions, and with no consistency in it. There was another circumstance, however, which attracted still more the wonder and observation of the public. For one who can appreciate such a recondite matter as family character, there are hundreds who are interested in a family secret, and this the house of Randolph possessed in perfection. It was a mystery which piqued the imagination and excited the interest of the entire country. The story went, that somewhere hid amid the massive walls and tortuous passages there was a secret chamber in Gowrie Castle. Everybody knew of its existence; but save the earl, his heir, and one other person, not of the family, but filling a confidential post in their service, no mortal knew where this mysterious hiding-place was. There had been countless guesses made at it, and expedients of all kinds invented to find it out. Every visitor who ever entered the old gateway, nay, even passing travellers who saw the turrets from the road, searched keenly for some trace of this mysterious chamber. But all guesses and researches were equally in vain.

I was about to say that no ghost-story I ever heard of has been so steadily and long believed. But this would be a mistake, for nobody knew even with any certainty that there was a ghost connected with it. A secret chamber was nothing wonderful in so old a house. No doubt they exist in many such old houses, and are always curious and interesting – strange relics, more moving than any history, of the time when a man was not safe in his own house, and when it might be necessary to secure a refuge beyond the reach of spies or traitors at a moment’s notice. Such a refuge was a necessity of life to a great medieval noble. The peculiarity about this secret chamber, however, was that some secret connected with the very existence of the family was always understood to be involved in it. It was not only the secret hiding-place for an emergency, a kind of historical possession presupposing the importance of his race, of which a man might be honestly proud; but there was something hidden in it of which assuredly the race could not be proud. It is wonderful how easily a family learns to pique itself upon any distinctive possession. A ghost is a sign of importance not to be despised; a haunted room is worth as much as a small farm to the complacency of the family that owns it. And no doubt the younger branches of the Gowrie family – the lightminded portion of the race – felt this, and were proud of their unfathomable secret, and felt a thrill of agreeable awe and piquant suggestion go through them, when they remembered the mysterious something which they did not know in their familiar home. That thrill ran through the entire circle of visitors, and children, and servants, when the Earl peremptorily forbade a projected improvement, or stopped a reckless exploration. They looked at each other with a pleasurable shiver. “Did you hear?” they said. “He will not let Lady Gowrie have that closet she wants so much in that bit of wall. He sent the workmen about their business before they could touch it, though the wall is twenty feet thick if it is an inch; ah!” said the visitors, looking at each other; and this lively suggestion sent tinglings of excitement to their very finger-points; but even to his wife, mourning the commodious closet she had intended, the Earl made no explanations. For anything she knew, it might be there, next to her room, this mysterious lurking-place; and it may be supposed that this suggestion conveyed to Lady Gowrie’s veins a thrill more keen and strange, perhaps too vivid to be pleasant. But she was not in the favoured or unfortunate number of those to whom the truth could be revealed.

I need not say what the different theories on the subject were. Some thought there had been a treacherous massacre there, and that the secret chamber was blocked by the skeletons of murdered guests – a treachery no doubt covering the family with shame in its day, but so condoned by long softening of years as to have all the shame taken out of it. The Randolphs could not have felt their character affected by any such interesting historical record. They were not so morbidly sensitive. Some said, on the other hand, that Earl Robert, the wicked Earl, was shut up there in everlasting penance, playing cards with the devil for his soul. But it would have been too great a feather in the family cap to have thus got the devil, or even one of his angels, bottled up, as it were, and safely in hand, to make it possible that any lasting stigma could be connected with such a fact as this. What a thing it would be to know where to lay one’s hand upon the Prince of Darkness, and prove him once for all, cloven foot and everything else, to the confusion of gainsayers!

So this was not to be received as a satisfactory solution, nor could any other be suggested which was more to the purpose. The popular mind gave it up, and yet never gave it up; and still everybody who visits Gowrie, be it as a guest, be it as a tourist, be it only as a gazer from a passing carriage, or from the flying railway train which just glimpses its turrets in the distance, daily and yearly spends a certain amount of curiosity, wonderment, and conjecture about the Secret Chamber – the most piquant and undiscoverable wonder which has endured unguessed and undeciphered to modern times.

This was how the matter stood when young John Randolph, Lord Lindores, came of age. He was a young man of great character and energy, not like the usual Randolph strain – for, as we have said, the type of character common in this romantically-situated family, notwithstanding the erratic incidents common to them, was that of dullness and honesty, especially in their early days. But young Lindores was not so. He was honest and honourable, but not dull. He had gone through almost a remarkable course at school and at the university – not perhaps in quite the ordinary way of scholarship, but enough to attract men’s eyes to him. He had made more than one great speech at the Union. He was full of ambition, and force, and life, intending all sorts of great things, and meaning to make his position a stepping-stone to all that was excellent in public life. Not for him the country-gentleman existence which was congenial to his father. The idea of succeeding to the family honours and becoming a Scotch peer, either represented or representative, filled him with horror; and filial piety in his case was made warm by all the energy of personal hopes when he prayed that his father might live, if not for ever, yet longer than any Lord Gowrie had lived for the last century or two. He was as sure of his election for the county the next time there was a chance, as anybody can be certain of anything; and in the meantime he meant to travel, to go to America, to go no one could tell where, seeking for instruction and experience, as is the manner of high-spirited young men with parliamentary tendencies in the present day. In former times he would have gone “to the wars in the Hie Germanie,” or on a crusade to the Holy Land; but the days of the crusaders and of the soldiers of fortune being over, Lindores followed the fashion of his time. He had made all his arrangements for his tour, which his father did not oppose. On the contrary, Lord Gowrie encouraged all those plans, though with an air of melancholy indulgence which his son could not understand. “It will do you good,” he said, with a sigh. “Yes, yes, my boy; the best thing for you.” This, no doubt, was true enough; but there was an implied feeling that the young man would require something to do him good – that he would want the soothing of change and the gratification of his wishes, as one might speak of a convalescent or the victim of some calamity. This tone puzzled Lindores, who, though he thought it a fine thing to travel and acquire information, was as scornful of the idea of being done good to as is natural to any fine young fellow fresh from Oxford and the triumphs of the Union. But he reflected that the old school had its own way of treating things, and was satisfied. All was settled accordingly for this journey, before he came home to go through the ceremonial performances of the coming of age, the dinner of the tenantry, the speeches, the congratulations, his father’s banquet, his mother’s ball. It was in summer, and the country was as gay as all the entertainments that were to be given in his honour. His friend who was going to accompany him on his tour, as he had accompanied him through a considerable portion of his life – Almeric Ffarrington, a young man of the same aspirations – came up to Scotland with him for these festivities. And as they rushed through the night on the Great Northern Railway, in the intervals of two naps, they had a scrap of conversation as to these birthday glories. “It will be a bore, but it will not last long,” said Lindores. They were both of the opinion that anything that did not produce information or promote culture was a bore.

“But is there not a revelation to be made to you, among all the other things you have to go through?” said Ffarrington. “Have not you to be introduced to the secret chamber, and all that sort of thing? I should like to be of the party there, Lindores.”

“Ah,” said the heir, “I had forgotten that part of it,” which, however, was not the case. “Indeed I don’t know if I am to be told. Even family dogmas are shaken nowadays.”

“Oh, I should insist on that,” said Ffarrington, lightly. “It is not many who have the chance of paying such a visit – better than Home and all the mediums. I should insist upon that.”

“I have no reason to suppose that it has any connection with Home or the mediums,” said Lindores, slightly nettled. He was himself an esprit fort; but a mystery in one’s own family is not like vulgar mysteries. He liked it to be respected.

“Oh, no offence,” said his companion. “I have always thought that a railway train would be a great chance for the spirits. If one was to show suddenly in that vacant seat beside you, what a triumphant proof of their existence that would be! but they don’t take advantage of their opportunities.”

Lindores could not tell what it was that made him think at that moment of a portrait he had seen in a back room at the castle of old Earl Robert, the wicked Earl. It was a bad portrait – a daub – a copy made by an amateur of the genuine portrait, which, out of horror of Earl Robert and his wicked ways, had been removed by some intermediate lord from its place in the gallery. Lindores had never seen the original – nothing but this daub of a copy. Yet somehow this face occurred to him by some strange link of association – seemed to come into his eyes as his friend spoke. A slight shiver ran over him. It was strange. He made no reply to Ffarrington, but he set himself to think how it could be that the latent presence in his mind of some anticipation of this approaching disclosure, touched into life by his friend’s suggestion, should have called out of his memory a momentary realisation of the acknowledged magician of the family. This sentence is full of long words; but unfortunately long words are required in such a case. And the process was very simple when you traced it out. It was the clearest case of unconscious cerebration. He shut his eyes by way of securing privacy while he thought it out; and being tired, and not at all alarmed by his unconscious cerebration, before he opened them again fell fast asleep.

And his birthday, which was the day following his arrival at Glenlyon, was a very busy day. He had not time to think of anything but the immediate occupations of the moment. Public and private greetings, congratulations, offerings, poured upon him. The Gowries were popular in this generation, which was far from being usual in the family. Lady Gowrie was kind and generous, with that kindness which comes from the heart, and which is the only kindness likely to impress the keen-sighted popular judgment; and Lord Gowrie had but little of the equivocal reputation of his predecessors. They could be splendid now and then on great occasions, though in general they were homely enough; all which the public likes. It was a bore, Lindores said; but yet the young man did not dislike the honours, and the adulation, and all the hearty speeches and good wishes. It is sweet to a young man to feel himself the centre of all hopes. It seemed very reasonable to him – very natural – that he should be so, and that the farmers should feel a pride of anticipation in thinking of his future speeches in Parliament. He promised to them with the sincerest good faith that he would not disappoint their expectations – that he would feel their interest in him an additional spur. What so natural as that interest and these expectations? He was almost solemnised by his own position – so young, looked up to by so many people – so many hopes depending on him; and yet it was quite natural. His father, however, was still more solemnised than Lindores – and this was strange, to say the least. His face grew graver and graver as the day went on, till it almost seemed as if he were dissatisfied with his son’s popularity, or had some painful thought weighing on his mind. He was restless and eager for the termination of the dinner, and to get rid of his guests; and as soon as they were gone, showed an equal anxiety that his son should retire too. “Go to bed at once, as a favour to me,” Lord Gowrie said. “You will have a great deal of fatigue – tomorrow.” “You need not be afraid for me, sir,” said Lindores, half affronted; but he obeyed, being tired. He had not once thought of the secret to be disclosed to him, through all that long day. But when he woke suddenly with a start in the middle of the night, to find the candles all lighted in his room, and his father standing by his bedside, Lindores instantly thought of it, and in a moment felt that the leading event – the chief incident of all that had happened – was going to take place now.

II

Lord Gowrie was very grave, and very pale. He was standing with his hand on his son’s shoulder to wake him; his dress was unchanged from the moment they had parted. And the sight of this formal costume was very bewildering to the young man as he started up in his bed. But next moment he seemed to know exactly how it was, and, more than that, to have known it all his life. Explanation seemed unnecessary. At any other moment, in any other place, a man would be startled to be suddenly woke up in the middle of the night. But Lindores had no such feeling; he did not even ask a question, but sprang up, and fixed his eyes, taking in all the strange circumstances, on his father’s face.

“Get up, my boy,” said Lord Gowrie, “and dress as quickly as you can; it is full time. I have lighted your candles, and your things are all ready. You have had a good long sleep.”

Even now he did not ask, What is it? as under any other circumstances he would have done. He got up without a word, with an impulse of nervous speed and rapidity of movement such as only excitement can give, and dressed himself, his father helping him silently. It was a curious scene: the room gleaming with lights, the silence, the hurried toilet, the stillness of deep night all around. The house, though so full, and with the echoes of festivity but just over, was quiet as if there was not a creature within it – more quiet, indeed, for the stillness of vacancy is not half so impressive as the stillness of hushed and slumbering life.

Lord Gowrie went to the table when this first step was over, and poured out a glass of wine from a bottle which stood there – a rich, golden-coloured, perfumy wine, which sent its scent through the room. “You will want all your strength,” he said; “take this before you go. It is the famous Imperial Tokay; there is only a little left, and you will want all your strength.”

Lindores took the wine; he had never drunk any like it before, and the peculiar fragrance remained in his mind, as perfumes so often do, with a whole world of association in them. His father’s eyes dwelt upon him with a melancholy sympathy. “You are going to encounter the greatest trial of your life,” he said; and taking the young man’s hand into his, felt his pulse. “It is quick, but it is quite firm, and you have had a good long sleep.” Then he did what it needs a great deal of pressure to induce an Englishman to do – he kissed his son on the cheek. “God bless you!” he said, faltering. “Come, now, everything is ready, Lindores.”

He took up in his hand a small lamp, which he had apparently brought with him, and led the way. By this time Lindores began to feel himself again, and to wake to the consciousness of all his own superiorities and enlightenments. The simple sense that he was one of the members of a family with a mystery, and that the moment of his personal encounter with this special power of darkness had come, had been the first thrilling, overwhelming thought. But now as he followed his father, Lindores began to remember that he himself was not altogether like other men; that there was that in him which would make it natural that he should throw some light, hitherto unthought of, upon this carefully-preserved darkness. What secret even there might be in it – secret of hereditary tendency, of psychic force, of mental conformation, or of some curious combination of circumstances at once more and less potent than these – it was for him to find out. He gathered all his forces about him, reminded himself of modern enlightenment, and bade his nerves be steel to all vulgar horrors. He, too, felt his own pulse as he followed his father. To spend the night perhaps amongst the skeletons of that old-world massacre, and to repent the sins of his ancestors – to be brought within the range of some optical illusion believed in hitherto by all the generations, and which, no doubt, was of a startling kind, or his father would not look so serious – any of these he felt himself quite strong to encounter. His heart and spirit rose. A young man has but seldom the opportunity of distinguishing himself so early in his career; and his was such a chance as occurs to very few. No doubt it was something that would be extremely trying to the nerves and imagination. He called up all his powers to vanquish both. And along with this call upon himself to exertion, there was the less serious impulse of curiosity: he would see at last what the Secret Chamber was, where it was, how it fitted into the labyrinths of the old house. This he tried to put in its due place as a most interesting object. He said to himself that he would willingly have gone a long journey at any time to be present at such an exploration; and there is no doubt that in other circumstances a secret chamber, with probably some unthought-of historical interest in it, would have been a very fascinating discovery. He tried very hard to excite himself about this; but it was curious how fictitious he felt the interest, and how conscious he was that it was an effort to feel any curiosity at all on the subject. The fact was, that the Secret Chamber was entirely secondary – thrown back, as all accessories are, by a more pressing interest. The overpowering thought of what was in it drove aside all healthy, natural curiosity about itself.

It must not be supposed, however, that the father and son had a long way to go to have time for all these thoughts. Thoughts travel at lightning speed, and there was abundant leisure for this between the time they had left the door of Lindores’ room and gone down the corridor, no further off than to Lord Gowrie’s own chamber, naturally one of the chief rooms of the house. Nearly opposite this, a few steps further on, was a little neglected room devoted to lumber, with which Lindores had been familiar all his life. Why this nest of old rubbish, dust, and cob-webs should be so near the bedroom of the head of the house had been a matter of surprise to many people – to the guests who saw it while exploring, and to each new servant in succession who planned an attack upon its ancient stores, scandalised by finding it to have been neglected by their predecessors. All their attempts to clear it out had, however, been resisted, nobody could tell how, or indeed thought it worth while to inquire. As for Lindores, he had been used to the place from his childhood, and therefore accepted it as the most natural thing in the world. He had been in and out a hundred times in his play. And it was here, he remembered suddenly, that he had seen the bad picture of Earl Robert which had so curiously come into his eyes on his journeying here, by a mental movement which he had identified at once as unconscious cerebration. The first feeling in his mind, as his father went to the open door of this lumber-room, was a mixture of amusement and surprise. What was he going to pick up there? some old pentacle, some amulet or scrap of antiquated magic to act as armour against the evil one? But Lord Gowrie, going on and setting down the lamp on the table, turned round upon his son with a face of agitation and pain which barred all further amusement: he grasped him by the hand, crushing it between his own. “Now my boy, my dear son,” he said, in tones that were scarcely audible. His countenance was full of the dreary pain of a looker-on – one who has no share in the excitement of personal danger, but has the more terrible part of watching those who are in deadliest peril. He was a powerful man, and his large form shook with emotion; great beads of moisture stood upon his forehead. An old sword with a cross handle lay upon a dusty chair among other dusty and battered relics. “Take this with you,” he said, in the same inaudible, breathless way – whether as a weapon, whether as a religious symbol, Lindores could not guess. The young man took it mechanically. His father pushed open a door which it seemed to him he had never seen before, and led him into another vaulted chamber. Here even the limited powers of speech Lord Gowrie had retained seemed to forsake him, and his voice became a mere hoarse murmur in his throat. For want of speech he pointed to another door in the further corner of this small vacant room, gave him to understand by a gesture that he was to knock there, and then went back into the lumber-room. The door into this was left open, and a faint glimmer of the lamp shed light into this little intermediate place – this debatable land between the seen and the unseen. In spite of himself, Lindores’ heart began to beat. He made a breathless pause, feeling his head go round. He held the old sword in his hand, not knowing what it was. Then, summoning all his courage, he went forward and knocked at the closed door. His knock was not loud, but it seemed to echo all over the silent house. Would everybody hear and wake, and rush to see what had happened? This caprice of imagination seized upon him, ousting all the firmer thoughts, the steadfast calm of mind with which he ought to have encountered the mystery. Would they all rush in, in wild déshabille, in terror and dismay, before the door opened? How long it was of opening! He touched the panel with his hand again. – This time there was no delay. In a moment, as if thrown suddenly open by some one within, the door moved. It opened just wide enough to let him enter, stopping half-way as if some one invisible held it, wide enough for welcome, but no more. Lindores stepped across the threshold with a beating heart. What was he about to see? the skeletons of the murdered victims? a ghostly charnel-house full of bloody traces of crime? He seemed to be hurried and pushed in as he made that step. What was this world of mystery into which he was plunged – what was it he saw?

He saw – nothing – except what was agreeable enough to behold – an antiquated room hung with tapestry, very old tapestry of rude design, its colours faded into softness and harmony; between its folds here and there a panel of carved wood, rude too in design, with traces of half-worn gilding; a table covered with strange instruments, parchments, chemical tubes, and curious machinery, all with a quaintness of form and dimness of material that spoke of age. A heavy old velvet cover, thick with embroidery faded almost out of all colour, was on the table; on the wall above it, something that looked like a very old Venetian mirror, the glass so dim and crusted that it scarcely reflected at all, on the floor an old soft Persian carpet, worn into a vague blending of all colours. This was all that he thought he saw. His heart, which had been thumping so loud as almost to choke him, stopped that tremendous upward and downward motion like a steam piston; and he grew calm. Perfectly still, dim, unoccupied: yet not so dim either; there was no apparent source of light, no windows, curtains of tapestry drawn everywhere – no lamp visible, no fire – and yet a kind of strange light which made everything quite clear. He looked round, trying to smile at his terrors, trying to say to himself that it was the most curious place he had ever seen – that he must show Ffarrington some of that tapestry – that he must really bring away a panel of that carving – when he suddenly saw that the door was shut by which he had entered – nay, more than shut, undiscernible, covered like all the rest of the walls by that strange tapestry. At this his heart began to beat again in spite of him. He looked round once more, and woke up to more vivid being with a sudden start. Had his eyes been incapable of vision on his first entrance? Unoccupied? Who was that in the great chair?

It seemed to Lindores that he had seen neither the chair nor the man when he came in. There they were, however, solid and unmistakable; the chair carved like the panels, the man seated in front of the table. He looked at Lindores with a calm and open gaze, inspecting him. The young man’s heart seemed in his throat fluttering like a bird, but he was brave, and his mind made one final effort to break this spell. He tried to speak, labouring with a voice that would not sound, and with lips too parched to form a word. “I see how it is,” was what he wanted to say. It was Earl Robert’s face that was looking at him; and startled as he was, he dragged forth his philosophy to support him. What could it be but optical delusions, unconscious cerebration, occult seizure by the impressed and struggling mind of this one countenance? But he could not hear himself speak any word as he stood convulsed, struggling with dry lips and choking voice.

The Appearance smiled, as if knowing his thoughts – not unkindly, not malignly – with a certain amusement mingled with scorn. Then he spoke, and the sound seemed to breathe through the room not like any voice that Lindores had ever heard, a kind of utterance of the place, like the rustle of the air or the ripple of the sea. “You will learn better tonight: this is no phantom of your brain; it is I.”

“In God’s name,” cried the young man in his soul; he did not know whether the words ever got into the air or not, if there was any air; – “in God’s name, who are you?”

The figure rose as if coming to him to reply; and Lindores, overcome by the apparent approach, struggled into utterance. A cry came from him – he heard it this time – and even in his extremity felt a pang the more to hear the terror in his own voice. But he did not flinch, he stood desperate, all his strength concentrated in the act; he neither turned nor recoiled. Vaguely gleaming through his mind came the thought that to be thus brought in contact with the unseen was the experiment to be most desired on earth, the final settlement of a hundred questions; but his faculties were not sufficiently under command to entertain it. He only stood firm, that was all.

And the figure did not approach him; after a moment it subsided back again into the chair – subsided, for no sound, not the faintest, accompanied its movements. It was the form of a man of middle age, the hair white, but the beard only crisped with grey, the features those of the picture – a familiar face, more or less like all the Randolphs, but with an air of domination and power altogether unlike that of the race. He was dressed in a long robe of dark colour, embroidered with strange lines and angles. There was nothing repellent or terrible in his air – nothing except the noiselessness, the calm, the absolute stillness, which was as much in the place as in him, to keep up the involuntary trembling of the beholder. His expression was full of dignity and thoughtfulness, and not malignant or unkind. He might have been the kindly patriarch of the house, watching over its fortunes in a seclusion that he had chosen. The pulses that had been beating in Lindores were stilled. What was his panic for? A gleam even of self-ridicule took possession of him, to be standing there like an absurd hero of antiquated romance with the rusty, dusty sword – good for nothing, surely not adapted for use against this noble old magician – in his hand—

“You are right,” said the voice, once more answering his thoughts; “what could you do with that sword against me, young Lindores? Put it by. Why should my children meet me like an enemy? You are my flesh and blood. Give me your hand.”

A shiver ran through the young man’s frame. The hand that was held out to him was large and shapely and white, with a straight line across the palm – a family token upon which the Randolphs prided themselves – a friendly hand; and the face smiled upon him, fixing him with those calm, profound, blue eyes. “Come,” said the voice. The word seemed to fill the place, melting upon him from every corner, whispering round him with softest persuasion. He was lulled and calmed in spite of himself. Spirit or no spirit, why should not he accept this proferred courtesy? What harm could come of it? The chief thing that retained him was the dragging of the old sword, heavy and useless, which he held mechanically, but which some internal feeling – he could not tell what – prevented him from putting down. Superstitition, was it?

“Yes, that is superstition,” said his ancestor, serenely; “put it down and come.”

“You know my thoughts,” said Lindores; “I did not speak.”

“Your mind spoke, and spoke justly. Put down that emblem of brute force and superstition together. Here it is the intelligence that is supreme. Come.”

Lindores stood doubtful. He was calm; the power of thought was restored to him. If this benevolent venerable patriarch was all he seemed, why his father’s terror? why the secrecy in which his being was involved? His own mind, though calm, did not seem to act in the usual way. Thoughts seemed to be driven across it as by a wind. One of these came to him suddenly now—

“How there looked him in the face,

An angel beautiful and bright,

And how he knew it was a fiend.”

The words were not ended, when Earl Robert replied suddenly with impatience in his voice, “Fiends are of the fancy of men; like angels and other follies. I am your father. You know me; and you are mine, Lindores. I have power beyond what you can understand; but I want flesh and blood to reign and to enjoy. Come, Lindores!”

He put out his other hand. The action, the look, were those of kindness, almost of longing, and the face was familiar, the voice was that of the race. Supernatural! was it supernatural that this man should live here shut up for ages? and why? and how? Was there any explanation of it? The young man’s brain began to reel. He could not tell which was real – the life he had left half an hour ago, or this. He tried to look round him, but could not; his eyes were caught by those other kindred eyes, which seemed to dilate and deepen as he looked at them, and drew him with a strange compulsion. He felt himself yielding, swaying towards the strange being who thus invited him. What might happen if he yielded? And he could not turn away, he could not tear himself from the fascination of those eyes. With a sudden strange impulse which was half despair and half a bewildering half-conscious desire to try one potency against another, he thrust forward the cross of the old sword between him and those appealing hands. “In the name of God!” he said.

Lindores never could tell whether it was that he himself grew faint, and that the dimness of swooning came into his eyes after this violence and strain of emotion, or if it was his spell that worked. But there was an instantaneous change. Everything swam around him for the moment, a giddiness and blindness seized him, and he saw nothing but the vague outlines of the room, empty as when he entered it. But gradually his consciousness came back, and he found himself standing on the same spot as before, clutching the old sword, and gradually, as though a dream, recognised the same figure emerging out of the mist which – was it solely in his own eyes? – had enveloped everything. But it was no longer in the same attitude. The hands which had been stretched out to him were busy now with some of the strange instruments on the table, moving about, now in the action of writing, now as if managing the keys of a telegraph. Lindores felt that his brain was all atwist and set wrong; but he was still a human being of his century. He thought of the telegraph with a keen thrill of curiosity in the midst of his reviving sensations. What communication was this which was going on before his eyes? The magician worked on. He had his face turned towards his victim, but his hands moved with unceasing activity. And Lindores, as he grew accustomed to the position, began to weary – to feel like a neglected suitor waiting for an audience. To be wound up to such a strain of feeling, then left to wait, was intolerable; impatience seized upon him. What circumstances can exist, however horrible, in which a human being will not feel impatience? He made a great many efforts to speak before he could succeed. It seemed to him that his body felt more fear than he did – that his muscles were contracted, his throat parched, his tongue refusing its office, although his mind was unaffected and undismayed. At last he found an utterance in spite of all resistance of his flesh and blood.

“Who are you?” he said hoarsely. “You that live here and oppress this house?”

The vision raised its eyes full upon him, with again that strange shadow of a smile, mocking yet not unkind. “Do you remember me,” he said, “on your journey here?”

“That was – a delusion.” The young man gasped for breath.

“More like that you are a delusion. You have lasted but one-and-twenty years, and I – for centuries.”

“How? For centuries – and why? Answer me – are you man or demon?” cried Lindores, tearing the words as he felt out of his own throat. “Are you living or dead?”

The magician looked at him with the same intense gaze as before. “Be on my side, and you shall know everything, Lindores. I want one of my own race. Others I could have in plenty; but I want you. A Randolph, a Randolph! and you. Dead! do I seem dead? You shall have everything – more than dreams can give – if you will be on my side.”

Can he give what he has not? was the thought that ran through the mind of Lindores. But he could not speak it. Something that choked and stifled him was in his throat.

“Can I give what I have not? I have everything – power, the one thing worth having; and you shall have more than power, for you are young – my son! Lindores!”

To argue was natural, and gave the young man strength. “Is this life,” he said, “here? What is all your power worth – here? To sit for ages, and make a race unhappy?”

A momentary convulsion came across the still face. “You scorn me”, he cried, with an appearance of emotion, “because you do not understand how I move the world. Power! ’Tis more than fancy can grasp. And you shall have it!” said the wizard, with what looked like a show of enthusiasm. He seemed to come nearer, to grow larger. He put forth his hand again, this time so close that it seemed impossible to escape. And a crowd of wishes seemed to rush upon the mind of Lindores. What harm to try if this might be true? To try what it meant – perhaps nothing, delusions, vain show, and then there could be no harm; or perhaps there was knowledge to be had, which was power. Try, try, try! the air buzzed about him. The room seemed full of voices urging him. His bodily frame rose into a tremendous whirl of excitement, his veins seemed to swell to bursting, his lips seemed to force a yes, in spite of him, quivering as they came apart. The hiss of the s seemed in his ears. He changed it into the name which was a spell too, and cried, “Help me, God!” not knowing why.

Then there came another pause – he felt as if he had been dropped from something that had held him, and had fallen, and was faint. The excitement had been more than he could bear. Once more everything swam around him, and he did not know where he was. Had he escaped altogether? was the first waking wonder of consciousness in his mind. But when he could think and see again, he was still in the same spot, surrounded by the old curtains and the carved panels – but alone. He felt, too, that he was able to move, but the strangest dual consciousness was in him throughout all the rest of his trial. His body felt to him as a frightened horse feels to a traveller at night – a thing separate from him, more frightened than he was – starting aside at every step, seeing more than its master. His limbs shook with fear and weakness, almost refusing to obey the action of his will, trembling under him with jerks aside when he compelled himself to move. The hair stood upright on his head – every finger trembled as with palsy – his lips, his eyelids, quivered with nervous agitation. But his mind was strong, stimulated to a desperate calm. He dragged himself round the room, he crossed the very spot where the magician had been – all was vacant, silent, clear. Had he vanquished the enemy? This thought came into his mind with an involuntary triumph. The old strain of feeling came back. Such efforts might be produced, perhaps, only by imagination, by excitement, by delusion—

Lindores looked up, by a sudden attraction he could not tell what: and the blood suddenly froze in his veins that had been so boiling and fermenting. Some one was looking at him from the old mirror on the wall. A face not human and lifelike, like that of the inhabitant of this place, but ghostly and terrible, like one of the dead; and while he looked, a crowd of other faces came behind, all looking at him, some mournfully, some with a menace in their terrible eyes. The mirror did not change, but within its small dim space seemed to contain an innumerable company, crowded above and below, all with one gaze at him. His lips dropped apart with a gasp of horror. More and more and more! He was standing close by the table when this crowd came. Then all at once there was laid upon him a cold hand. He turned; close to his side, brushing him with his robe, holding him fast by the arm, sat Earl Robert in his great chair. A shriek came from the young man’s lips. He seemed to hear it echoing away into unfathomable distance. The cold touch penetrated to his very soul.

“Do you try spells upon me, Lindores? That is a tool of the past. You shall have something better to work with. And are you so sure of whom you call upon? If there is such a one, why should He help you who never called on Him before?”

Lindores could not tell if these words were spoken; it was a communication rapid as the thoughts in the mind. And he felt as if something answered that was not all himself. He seemed to stand passive and hear the argument. “Does God reckon with a man in trouble, whether he has ever called to Him before? I call now” (now he felt it was himself that said): “go, evil spirit! – go, dead and cursed! – go, in the name of God!”

He felt himself flung violently against the wall. A faint laugh, stifled in the throat, and followed by a groan, rolled round the room; the old curtains seemed to open here and there, and flutter, as if with comings and goings. Lindores leaned with his back against the wall, and all his senses restored to him. He felt blood trickle down his neck; and in this contact once more with the physical, his body, in its madness of fright, grew manageable. For the first time he felt wholly master of himself. Though the magician was standing in his place, a great, majestic, appalling figure, he did not shrink. “Liar!” he cried, in a voice that rang and echoed as in natural air – “clinging to miserable life like a worm – like a reptile; promising all things, having nothing, but this den, unvisited by the light of day. Is this your power – your superiority to men who die? is it for this that you oppress a race, and make a house unhappy? I vow, in God’s name, your reign is over! You and your secret shall last no more.”

There was no reply. But Lindores felt his terrible ancestor’s eyes getting once more that mesmeric mastery over him which had already almost overcome his powers. He must withdraw his own, or perish. He had a human horror of turning his back upon that watchful adversary: to face him seemed the only safety; but to face him was to be conquered. Slowly, with a pang indescribable, he tore himself from that gaze: it seemed to drag his eyes out of their sockets, his heart out of his bosom. Resolutely, with the daring of desperation, he turned round to the spot where he entered – the spot where no door was – hearing already in anticipation the step after him – feeling the grip that would crush and smother his exhausted life – but too desperate to care.

III

How wonderful is the blue dawning of the new day before the sun! not rosy-fingered, like that Aurora of the Greeks who comes later with all her wealth; but still, dreamy, wonderful, stealing out of the unseen, abashed by the solemnity of the new birth. When anxious watchers see that first brightness come stealing upon the waiting skies, what mingled relief and renewal of misery is in it! another long day to toil through – yet another sad night over! Lord Gowrie sat among the dust and cobwebs, his lamp flaring idly into the blue morning. He had heard his son’s human voice, though nothing more; and he expected to have him brought out by invisible hands, as had happened to himself, and left lying in long deathly swoon outside that mystic door. This was how it had happened to heir after heir, as told from father to son, one after another, as the secret came down. One or two bearers of the name Lindores had never recovered; most of them had been saddened and subdued for life. He remembered sadly the freshness of existence which had never come back to himself; the hopes that had never blossomed again; the assurance with which never more he had been able to go about the world. And now his son would be as himself – the glory gone out of his living – his ambitions, his aspirations wrecked. He had not been endowed as his boy was – he had been a plain, honest man, and nothing more; but experience and life had given him wisdom enough to smile by times at the coquetries of mind in which Lindores indulged. Were they all over now, those freaks of young intelligence, those enthusiasms of the soul? The curse of the house had come upon him – the magnetism of that strange presence, ever living, ever watchful, present in all the family history. His heart was sore for his son; and yet along with this there was a certain consolation to him in having henceforward a partner in the secret – some one to whom he could talk of it as he had not been able to talk since his own father died. Almost all the mental struggles which Gowrie had known had been connected with this mystery; and he had been obliged to hide them in his bosom – to conceal them even when they rent him in two. Now he had a partner in his trouble. This was what he was thinking as he sat through the night. How slowly the moments passed! He was not aware of the daylight coming in. After a while even thought got suspended in listening. Was not the time nearly over? He rose and began to pace about the encumbered space, which was but a step or two in extent. There was an old cupboard in the wall, in which there were restoratives – pungent essences and cordials, and fresh water which he had himself brought – everything was ready; presently the ghastly body of his boy, half dead, would be thrust forth into his care.

But this was not how it happened. While he waited, so intent that his whole frame seemed to be capable of hearing, he heard the closing of the door, boldly shut with a sound that rose in muffled echoes through the house, and Lindores himself appeared, ghastly indeed as a dead man, but walking upright and firmly, the lines of his face drawn, and his eyes staring. Lord Gowrie uttered a cry. He was more alarmed by this unexpected return than by the helpless prostration of the swoon which he had expected. He recoiled from his son as if he too had been a spirit. “Lindores!” he cried; was it Lindores, or some one else in his place? The boy seemed as if he did not see him. He went straight forward to where the water stood on the dusty table, and took a great draught, then turned to the door. “Lindores!” said his father, in miserable anxiety; “don’t you know me?” Even then the young man only half looked at him, and put out a hand almost as cold as the hand that had clutched himself in the Secret Chamber; a faint smile came upon his face. “Don’t stay here,” he whispered; “come! come!”

Lord Gowrie drew his son’s arm within his own, and felt the thrill through and through him of nerves strained beyond mortal strength. He could scarcely keep up with him as he stalked along the corridor to his room, stumbling as if he could not see, yet swift as an arrow. When they reached his room he turned and closed and locked the door, then laughed as he staggered to the bed. “That will not keep him out, will it?” he said.

“Lindores,” said his father, “I expected to find you unconscious. I am almost more frightened to find you like this. I need not ask if you have seen him—”

“Oh, I have seen him. The old liar! Father, promise to expose him, to turn him out – promise to clear out that accursed old nest! It is our own fault. Why have we left such a place shut out from the eye of day? Isn’t there something in the Bible about those who do evil hating the light?”

“Lindores! you don’t often quote the Bible.”

“No, I suppose not; but there is more truth in – many things than we thought.”

“Lie down,” said the anxious father. “Take some of this wine – try to sleep.”

“Take it away; give me no more of that devil’s drink. Talk to me – that’s better. Did you go through it all the same, poor papa? – and hold me fast. You are warm – you are honest!” he cried. He put forth his hands over his father’s, warming them with the contact. He put his cheek like a child against his father’s arm. He gave a faint laugh, with the tears in his eyes. “Warm and honest,” he repeated. “Kind flesh and blood! and did you go through it all the same?”

“My boy!” cried the father, feeling his heart glow and swell over the son who had been parted from him for years by that development of young manhood and ripening intellect which so often severs and loosens the ties of home. Lord Gowrie had felt that Lindores half despised his simple mind and duller imagination; but this childlike clinging overcame him, and tears stood in his eyes. “I fainted, I suppose. I never knew how it ended. They made what they liked of me. But you, my brave boy, you came out of your own will.”

Lindores shivered. “I fled!” he said. “No honour in that. I had not courage to face him longer. I will tell you by-and-by. But I want to know about you.”

What an ease it was to the father to speak! For years and years this had been shut up in his breast. It had made him lonely in the midst of his friends.

“Thank God,” he said, “that I can speak to you, Lindores. Often and often I have been tempted to tell your mother. But why should I make her miserable? She knows there is something; she knows when I see him, but she knows no more.”

“When you see him?” Lindores raised himself, with a return of his first ghastly look, in his bed. Then he raised his clenched fist wildly, and shook it in the air. “Vile devil, coward, deceiver!”

“Oh hush, hush, hush, Lindores! God help us! what troubles you may bring!”

“And God help me, whatever troubles I bring,” said the young man. “I defy him, father. An accursed being like that must be less, not more powerful, than we are – with God to back us. Only stand by me: stand by me—”

“Hush, Lindores! You don’t feel it yet – never to get out of hearing of him all your life! He will make you pay for it – if not now, after; when you remember he is there; whatever happens, knowing everything! But I hope it will not be so bad with you as with me, my poor boy. God help you indeed if it is, for you have more imagination and more mind. I am able to forget him sometimes when I am occupied – when in the hunting-field, going across country. But you are not a hunting man, my poor boy,” said Lord Gowrie, with a curious mixture of a regret, which was less serious than the other. Then he lowered his voice. “Lindores, this is what has happened to me since the moment I gave him my hand.”

“I did not give him my hand.”

“You did not give him your hand? God bless you, my boy! You stood out?” he cried, with tears again rushing to his eyes; “and they say – they say – but I don’t know if there is any truth in it.” Lord Gowrie got up from his son’s side, and walked up and down with excited steps. “If there should be truth in it! Many people think the whole thing is a fancy. If there should be truth in it, Lindores!”

“In what, father?”

“They say, if he is once resisted his power is broken – once refused. You could stand against him – you! Forgive me, my boy, as I hope God will forgive me, to have thought so little of His best gifts,” cried Lord Gowrie, coming back with wet eyes; and stooping, he kissed his son’s hand. “I thought you would be more shaken by being more mind than body,” he said, humbly. “I thought if I could but have saved you from the trial; and you are the conqueror!”

“Am I the conqueror? I think all my bones are broken, father – out of their sockets,” said the young man, in a low voice. “I think I shall go to sleep.”

“Yes, rest, my boy. It is the best thing for you,” said the father, though with a pang of momentary disappointment.

Lindores fell back upon the pillow. He was so pale that there were moments when the anxious watcher thought him not sleeping but dead. He put his hand out feebly, and grasped his father’s hand. “Warm – honest,” he said, with a feeble smile about his lips, and fell asleep.

•   •   •   •   •

The daylight was full in the room, breaking through shutters and curtains and mocking at the lamp that still flared on the table. It seemed an emblem of the disorders, mental and material, of this strange night; and, as such, it affected the plain imagination of Lord Gowrie, who would have fain got up to extinguish it, and whose mind returned again and again, in spite of him, to this symptom of disturbance. By-and-by, when Lindores’ grasp relaxed, and he got his hand free, he got up from his son’s bedside, and put out the lamp, putting it carefully out of the way. With equal care he put away the wine from the table, and gave the room its ordinary aspect, softly opening a window to let in the fresh air of the morning. The park lay fresh in the early sunshine, still, except for the twittering of the birds, refreshed with dews, and shining in that soft radiance of the morning which is over before mortal cares are stirring. Never, perhaps, had Gowrie looked out upon the beautiful world around his house without a thought of the weird existence which was going on so near to him, which had gone on for centuries, shut up out of sight of the sunshine. The Secret Chamber had been present with him since ever he saw it. He had never been able to get free of the spell of it. He had felt himself watched, surrounded, spied upon, day after day, since he was of the age of Lindores, and that was thirty years ago. He turned it all over in his mind, as he stood there and his son slept. It had been on his lips to tell it all to his boy, who had now come to inherit the enlightenment of his race. And it was a disappointment to him to have it all forced back again, and silence imposed upon him once more. Would he care to hear it when he woke? would he not rather, as Lord Gowrie remembered to have done himself, thrust the thought as far as he could away from him, and endeavour to forget for the moment – until the time came when he would not be permitted to forget? He had been like that himself, he recollected now. He had not wished to hear his own father’s tale. “I remember,” he said to himself; “I remember” – turning over everything in his mind – if Lindores might only be willing to hear the story when he woke! But then he himself had not been willing when he was Lindores, and he could understand his son, and could not blame him; but it would be a disappointment. He was thinking this when he heard Lindores’ voice calling him. He went back hastily to his bedside. It was strange to see him in his evening dress with his worn face, in the fresh light of the morning, which poured in at every crevice. “Does my mother know?” said Lindores; “what will she think?”

“She knows something; she knows you have some trial to go through. Most likely she will be praying for us both; that’s the way of women,” said Lord Gowrie, with the tremulous tenderness which comes into a man’s voice sometimes when he speaks of a good wife. “I’ll go and ease her mind, and tell her all is well over—”

“Not yet. Tell me first,” said the young man, putting his hand upon his father’s arm.

What an ease it was! “I was not so good to my father,” he thought to himself, with sudden penitence for the long-past, long-forgotten fault, which, indeed, he had never realised as a fault before. And then he told his son what had been the story of his life – how he had scarcely ever sat alone without feeling, from some corner of the room, from behind some curtain, those eyes upon him; and how, in the difficulties of his life, that secret inhabitant of the house had been present, sitting by him and advising him. “Whenever there has been anything to do: when there has been a question between two ways, all in a moment I have seen him by me: I feel when he is coming. It does not matter where I am – here or anywhere – as soon as ever there is a question of family business; and always he persuades me to the wrong way, Lindores. Sometimes I yield to him, how can I help it? He makes everything so clear; he makes wrong seem right. If I have done unjust things in my day—”

“You have not, father.”

“I have: there were these Highland people I turned out. I did not mean to do it, Lindores; but he showed me that it would be better for the family. And my poor sister that married Tweedside and was wretched all her life. It was his doing, that marriage; he said she would be rich, and so she was, poor thing, poor thing! and died of it. And old Macalister’s lease–Lindores, Lindores! when there is any business it makes my heart sick. I know he will come, and advise wrong, and tell me – something I will repent after.”

“The thing to do is to decide beforehand, that, good or bad, you will not take his advice.”

Lord Gowrie shivered. “I am not strong like you, or clever; I cannot resist. Sometimes I repent in time and don’t do it; and then! But for your mother and you children, there is many a day I would not have given a farthing for my life.”

“Father,” said Lindores, springing from his bed, “two of us together can do many things. Give me your word to clear out this cursed den of darkness this very day.”

“Lindores, hush, hush, for the sake of heaven!”

“I will not, for the sake of heaven! Throw it open – let everybody who likes see it – make an end of the secret – pull down everything, curtains, walls. What do you say? – sprinkle holy water? Are you laughing at me?”

“I did not speak,” said Earl Gowrie, growing very pale, and grasping his son’s arm with both his hands. “Hush, boy; do you think he does not hear?”

And then there was a low laugh close to them – so close that both shrank; a laugh no louder than a breath.

“Did you laugh – father?”

“No, Lindores.” Lord Gowrie had his eyes fixed. He was as pale as the dead. He held his son tight for a moment; then his gaze and his grasp relaxed, and he fell back feebly in a chair.

“You see!” he said; “whatever we do it will be the same; we are under his power.”

And then there ensued the blank pause with which baffled men confront a hopeless situation. But at that moment the first faint stirrings of the house – a window being opened, a bar undone, a movement of feet, and subdued voices – became audible in the stillness of the morning. Lord Gowrie roused himself at once. “We must not be found like this,” he said; “we must not show how we have spent the night. It is over, thank God! and oh, my boy, forgive me! I am thankful there are two of us to bear it; it makes the burden lighter – though I ask your pardon humbly for saying so. I would have saved you if I could, Lindores.”

“I don’t wish to have been saved; but I will not bear it. I will end it,” the young man said, with an oath out of which his emotion took all profanity. His father said, “Hush, hush.” With a look of terror and pain, he left him; and yet there was a thrill of tender pride in his mind. How brave the boy was! even after he had been there. Could it be that this would all come to nothing, as every other attempt to resist had done before?

•   •   •   •   •

“I suppose you know all about it now, Lindores,” said his friend Ffarrington, after breakfast; “luckily for us who are going over the house. What a glorious old place it is!”

“I don’t think that Lindores enjoys the glorious old place today,” said another of the guests under his breath. “How pale he is! He doesn’t look as if he had slept.”

“I will take you over every nook where I have ever been,” said Lindores. He looked at his father with almost command in his eyes. “Come with me, all of you. We shall have no more secrets here.”

“Are you mad?” said his father in his ear.

“Never mind,” cried the young man. “Oh, trust me; I will do it with judgment. Is everybody ready?” There was an excitement about him that half frightened, half roused the party. They all rose, eager, yet doubtful. His mother came to him and took his arm.

“Lindores! you will do nothing to vex your father; don’t make him unhappy. I don’t know your secrets, you two; but look, he has enough to bear.”

“I want you to know our secrets, mother. Why should we have secrets from you?”

“Why, indeed?” she said, with tears in her eyes. “But, Lindores, my dearest boy, don’t make it worse for him.”

“I give you my word, I will be wary,” he said; and she left him to go to his father, who followed the party, with an anxious look upon his face.

“Are you coming, too?” he asked.

“I? No; I will not go: but trust him – trust the boy, John.”

“He can do nothing; he will not be able to do anything,” he said.

And thus the guests set out on their round – the son in advance, excited and tremulous, the father anxious and watchful behind. They began in the usual way, with the old staterooms and picture-gallery; and in a short time the party had half forgotten that there was anything unusual in the inspection. When, however, they were half-way down the gallery, Lindores stopped short with an air of wonder. “You have had it put back then?” he said. He was standing in front of the vacant space where Earl Robert’s portrait ought to have been. “What is it?” they all cried, crowding upon him, ready for any marvel. But as there was nothing to be seen, the strangers smiled among themselves. “Yes, to be sure, there is nothing so suggestive as a vacant place,” said a lady who was of the party. “Whose portrait ought to be there, Lord Lindores?”

He looked at his father, who made a slight assenting gesture, then shook his head drearily.

“Who put it there?” Lindores said, in a whisper.

“It is not there; but you and I see it,” said Lord Gowrie, with a sigh.

Then the strangers perceived that something had moved the father and the son, and, notwithstanding their eager curiosity, obeyed the dictates of politeness, and dispersed into groups looking at the other pictures. Lindores set his teeth and clenched his hands. Fury was growing upon him – not the awe that filled his father’s mind. “We will leave the rest of this to another time,” he cried, turning to the others, almost fiercely. “Come, I will show you something more striking now.” He made no further pretence of going systematically over the house. He turned and went straight upstairs, and along the corridor. “Are we going over the bedrooms?” some one said. Lindores led the way straight to the old lumber-room, a strange place for such a gay party. The ladies drew their dresses about them. There was not room for half of them. Those who could get in began to handle the strange things that lay about, touching them with dainty fingers, exclaiming how dusty they were. The window was half blocked up by old armour and rusty weapons; but this did not hinder the full summer daylight from penetrating in a flood of light. Lindores went in with fiery determination on his face. He went straight to the wall, as if he would go through, then paused with a blank gaze. “Where is the door?” he said.

“You are forgetting yourself,” said Lord Gowrie, speaking over the heads of the others. “Lindores! you know very well there never was any door there; the wall is very thick; you can see by the depth of the window. There is no door there.”

The young man felt it over with his hand. The wall was smooth, and covered with the dust of ages. With a groan he turned away. At this moment a suppressed laugh, low, yet distinct, sounded close by him. “You laughed?” he said, fiercely, to Ffarrington, striking his hand upon his shoulder.

“I – laughed! Nothing was farther from my thoughts,” said his friend, who was curiously examining something that lay upon an old carved chair. “Look here! what a wonderful sword, cross-hilted! Is it an Andrea? What’s the matter, Lindores?”

Lindores had seized it from his hands; he dashed it against the wall with a suppressed oath. The two or three people in the room stood aghast.

“Lindores!” his father said, in a tone of warning. The young man dropped the useless weapon with a groan. “Then God help us!” he said; “but I will find another way.”

“There is a very interesting room close by,” said Lord Gowrie, hastily – “this way! Lindores has been put out by – some changes that have been made without his knowledge,” he said, calmly. “You must not mind him. He is disappointed. He is perhaps too much accustomed to have his own way.”

But Lord Gowrie knew that no one believed him. He took them to the adjoining room, and told them some easy story of an apparition that was supposed to haunt it. “Have you ever seen it?” the guests said, pretending interest. “Not I; but we don’t mind ghosts in this house,” he answered, with a smile. And then they resumed their round of the old noble mystic house.

•   •   •   •   •

I cannot tell the reader what young Lindores has done to carry out his pledged word and redeem his family. It may not be known, perhaps, for another generation, and it will not be for me to write that concluding chapter: but when, in the ripeness of time, it can be narrated, no one will say that the mystery of Gowrie Castle has been a vulgar horror, though there are some who are disposed to think so now.

PRESENT AT A HANGING

Ambrose Bierce

1888

An old man named Daniel Baker, living near Lebanon, Iowa, was suspected by his neighbors of having murdered a peddler who had obtained permission to pass the night at his house. This was in 1853, when peddling was more common in the Western country than it is now, and was attended with considerable danger. The peddler with his pack traversed the country by all manner of lonely roads, and was compelled to rely upon the country people for hospitality. This brought him into relation with queer characters, some of whom were not altogether scrupulous in their methods of making a living, murder being an acceptable means to that end. It occasionally occurred that a peddler with diminished pack and swollen purse would be traced to the lonely dwelling of some rough character and never could be traced beyond. This was so in the case of “old man Baker,” as he was always called. (Such names are given in the western “settlements” only to elderly persons who are not esteemed; to the general disrepute of social unworth is affixed the special reproach of age.) A peddler came to his house and none went away – that is all that anybody knew.

Seven years later the Rev. Mr. Cummings, a Baptist minister well known in that part of the country, was driving by Baker’s farm one night. It was not very dark: there was a bit of moon somewhere above the light veil of mist that lay along the earth. Mr. Cummings, who was at all times a cheerful person, was whistling a tune, which he would occasionally interrupt to speak a word of friendly encouragement to his horse. As he came to a little bridge across a dry ravine he saw the figure of a man standing upon it, clearly outlined against the gray background of a misty forest. The man had something strapped on his back and carried a heavy stick – obviously an itinerant peddler. His attitude had in it a suggestion of abstraction, like that of a sleepwalker. Mr. Cummings reined in his horse when he arrived in front of him, gave him a pleasant salutation and invited him to a seat in the vehicle – “if you are going my way,” he added. The man raised his head, looked him full in the face, but neither answered nor made any further movement. The minister, with good-natured persistence, repeated his invitation. At this the man threw his right hand forward from his side and pointed downward as he stood on the extreme edge of the bridge. Mr. Cummings looked past him, over into the ravine, saw nothing unusual and withdrew his eyes to address the man again. He had disappeared. The horse, which all this time had been uncommonly restless, gave at the same moment a snort of terror and started to run away. Before he had regained control of the animal the minister was at the crest of the hill a hundred yards along. He looked back and saw the figure again, at the same place and in the same attitude as when he had first observed it. Then for the first time he was conscious of a sense of the supernatural and drove home as rapidly as his willing horse would go.

On arriving at home he related his adventure to his family, and early the next morning, accompanied by two neighbors, John White Corwell and Abner Raiser, returned to the spot. They found the body of old man Baker hanging by the neck from one of the beams of the bridge, immediately beneath the spot where the apparition had stood. A thick coating of dust, slightly dampened by the mist, covered the floor of the bridge, but the only footprints were those of Mr. Cummings’ horse.

In taking down the body the men disturbed the loose, friable earth of the slope below it, disclosing human bones already nearly uncovered by the action of water and frost. They were identified as those of the lost peddler. At the double inquest the coroner’s jury found that Daniel Baker died by his own hand while suffering from temporary insanity, and that Samuel Morritz was murdered by some person or persons to the jury unknown.

AT THE DIP OF THE ROAD

Mary Louisa Molesworth

1896

Have I ever seen a ghost?

I do not know.

That is the only reply I can truthfully make to the question nowadays so often asked. And sometimes, if inquirers care to hear more, I go on to tell them the one experience which makes it impossible for me to reply positively either in the affirmative or negative, and restricts me to “I do not know.”

This was the story.

I was staying with relations in the country. Not a very isolated or out-of-the-way part of the world, and yet rather inconvenient of access by the railway. For the nearest station was six miles off. Though the family I was visiting were nearly connected with me I did not know much of their home or its neighbourhood, as the head of the house, an uncle of mine by marriage, had only come into the property a year or two previously to the date of which I am writing, through the death of an elder brother.

It was a nice place. A good comfortable old house, a prosperous, satisfactory estate. Everything about it was in good order, from the farmers, who always paid their rents, to the shooting, which was always good; from the vineries, which were noted, to the woods, where the earliest primroses in all the country side were yearly to be found.

And my uncle and aunt and their family deserved these pleasant things and made a good use of them.

But there was a touch of the commonplace about it all. There was nothing picturesque or romantic. The country was flat though fertile, the house, though old, was conveniently modern in its arrangements, airy, cheery, and bright.

“Not even a ghost, or the shadow of one,” I remember saying one day with a faint grumble.

“Ah, well – as to that,” said my uncle, “perhaps we—” but just then something interrupted him, and I forgot his unfinished speech.

Into the happy party of which for the time being I was one, there fell one morning a sudden thunderbolt of calamity. The post brought news of the alarming illness of the eldest daughter – Frances, married a year or two ago and living, as the crow flies, at no very great distance. But as the crow flies is not always as the railroad runs, and to reach the Aldoyns’ home from Fawne Court, my uncle’s place, was a complicated business – it was scarcely possible to go and return in a day.

“Can one of you come over?” wrote the young husband. “She is already out of danger, but longing to see her mother or one of you. She is worrying about the baby” – a child of a few months old – “and wishing for nurse.”

We looked at each other.

“Nurse must go at once,” said my uncle to me, as the eldest of the party. Perhaps I should here say that I am a widow, though not old, and with no close ties or responsibilities. “But for your aunt it is impossible.”

“Quite so,” I agreed. For she was at the moment painfully lamed by rheumatism.

“And the other girls are almost too young at such a crisis,” my uncle continued. “Would you, Charlotte—” and he hesitated. “It would be such a comfort to have personal news of her.”

“Of course I will go,” I said. “Nurse and I can start at once. I will leave her there, and return alone, to give you, I have no doubt, better news of poor Francie.”

He was full of gratitude. So were they all.

“Don’t hurry back tonight,” said my uncle. “Stay till – till Monday if you like.” But I could not promise. I knew they would be glad of news at once, and in a small house like my cousin’s, at such a time, an inmate the more might be inconvenient.

“I will try to return tonight,” I said. And as I sprang into the carriage I added: “Send to Moore to meet the last train, unless I telegraph to the contrary.”

My uncle nodded; the boys called after me, “All right;” the old butler bowed assent, and I was satisfied.

Nurse and I reached our journey’s end promptly, considering the four or five junctions at which we had to change carriages. But on the whole “going,” the trains fitted astonishingly.

We found Frances better, delighted to see us, eager for news of her mother, and, finally, disposed to sleep peacefully now that she knew that there was an experienced person in charge. And both she and her husband thanked me so much that I felt ashamed of the little I had done. Mr. Aldoyn begged me to stay till Monday; but the house was upset, and I was eager to carry back my good tidings.

“They are meeting me at Moore by the last train,” I said. “No, thank you, I think it is best to go.”

“You will have an uncomfortable journey,” he replied. “It is Saturday, and the trains will be late, and the stations crowded with the market people. It will be horrid for you, Charlotte.”

But I persisted.

It was rather horrid. And it was queer. There was a sort of uncanny eeriness about that Saturday evening’s journey that I have never forgotten. The season was very early spring. It was not very cold, but chilly and ungenial. And there were such odd sorts of people about. I travelled second-class; for I am not rich, and I am very independent. I did not want my uncle to pay my fare, for I liked the feeling of rendering him some small service in return for his steady kindness to me. The first stage of my journey was performed in the company of two old naturalists travelling to Scotland to look for some small plant which was to be found only in one spot in the Highlands. This I gathered from their talk to each other. You never saw two such extraordinary creatures as they were. They both wore black kid gloves much too large for them, and the ends of the fingers waved about like feathers.

Then followed two or three short transits, interspersed with weary waitings at stations. The last of these was the worst, and tantalising, too, for by this time I was within a few miles of Moore. The station was crowded with rough folk, all, it seemed to me, more or less tipsy. So I took refuge in a dark waiting-room on the small side line by which I was to proceed, where I felt I might have been robbed and murdered and no one the wiser.

But at last came my slow little train, and in I jumped, to jump out again still more joyfully some fifteen minutes later when we drew up at Moore.

I peered about for the carriage. It was not to be seen; only two or three tax-carts or dog-carts, farmers’ vehicles, standing about, while their owners, it was easy to hear, were drinking far more than was good for them in the taproom of the Unicorn. Thence, nevertheless – not to the taproom, but to the front of the inn – I made my way, though not undismayed by the shouts and roars breaking the stillness of the quiet night. “Was the Fawne Court carriage not here?” I asked.

The landlady was a good-natured woman, especially civil to any member of the “Court” family. But she shook her head.

“No, no carriage had been down today. There must have been some mistake.”

There was nothing for it but to wait till she could somehow or other disinter a fly and a horse, and, worst of all a driver. For the “men” she had to call were all rather – “well, ma’am, you see it’s Saturday night. We weren’t expecting any one.”

And when, after waiting half an hour, the fly at last emerged, my heart almost failed me. Even before he drove out of the yard, it was very plain that if ever we reached Fawne Court alive, it would certainly be more thanks to good luck than to the driver’s management.

But the horse was old and the man had a sort of instinct about him. We got on all right till we were more than half way to our journey’s end. The road was straight and the moonlight bright, especially after we had passed a certain corner, and got well out of the shade of the trees which skirted the first part of the way.

Just past this turn there came a dip in the road. It went down, down gradually, for a quarter of a mile or more, and I looked up anxiously, fearful of the horse taking advantage of the slope. But no, he jogged on, if possible more slowly than before, though new terrors assailed me when I saw that the driver was now fast asleep, his head swaying from side to side with extraordinary regularity. After a bit I grew easier again; he seemed to keep his equilibrium, and I looked out at the side window on the moon-flooded landscape, with some interest. I had never seen brighter moonlight.

Suddenly from out of the intense stillness and loneliness a figure, a human figure, became visible. It was that of a man, a young and active man, running along the footpath a few feet to our left, apparently from some whim, keeping pace with the fly. My first feeling was of satisfaction that I was no longer alone, at the tender mercies of my stupefied charioteer. But, as I gazed, a slight misgiving came over me. Who could it be running along this lonely road so late, and what was his motive in keeping up with us so steadily. It almost seemed as if he had been waiting for us, yet that, of course, was impossible. He was not very highwayman-like certainly; he was well-dressed – neatly-dressed that is to say, like a superior gamekeeper – his figure was remarkably good, tall and slight, and he ran gracefully. But there was something queer about him, and suddenly the curiosity that had mingled in my observation of him was entirely submerged in alarm, when I saw that, as he ran, he was slowly but steadily drawing nearer and nearer to the fly.

“In another moment he will be opening the door and jumping in,” I thought, and I glanced before me only to see that the driver was more hopelessly asleep than before; there was no chance of his hearing if I called out. And get out I could not without attracting the strange runner’s attention, for as ill-luck would have it, the window was drawn up on the right side, and I could not open the door without rattling the glass. While, worse and worse, the left hand window was down! Even that slight protection wanting!

I looked out once more. By this time the figure was close, close to the fly. Then an arm was stretched out and laid along the edge of the door, as if preparatory to opening it, and then, for the first time I saw his face. It was a young face, but terribly, horribly pale and ghastly, and the eyes – all was so visible in the moonlight – had an expression such as I had never seen before or since. It terrified me, though afterwards on recalling it, it seemed to me that it might have been more a look of agonised appeal than of menace of any kind.

I cowered back into my corner and shut my eyes, feigning sleep. It was the only idea that occurred to me. My heart was beating like a sledge hammer. All sorts of thoughts rushed through me; among them I remember saying to myself: “He must be an escaped lunatic – his eyes are so awfully wild.”

How long I sat thus I don’t know – whenever I dared to glance out furtively he was still there. But all at once a strange feeling of relief came over me. I sat up – yes, he was gone! And though, as I took courage, I leaned out and looked round in every direction, not a trace of him was to be seen, though the road and the fields were bare and clear for a long distance round.

When I got to Fawne Court I had to wake the lodge-keeper – every one was asleep. But my uncle was still up, though not expecting me, and very distressed he was at the mistake about the carriage.

“However,” he concluded, “all’s well that ends well. It’s delightful to have your good news. But you look sadly pale and tired, Charlotte.”

Then I told him of my fright – it seemed now so foolish of me, I said. But my uncle did not smile – on the contrary.

“My dear,” he said. “It sounds very like our ghost, though, of course, it may have been only one of the keepers.”

He told me the story. Many years ago in his grandfather’s time, a young and favourite gamekeeper had been found dead in a field skirting the road down there. There was no sign of violence upon the body; it was never explained what had killed him. But he had had in his charge a watch – a very valuable one – which his master for some reason or other had handed to him to take home to the house, not wishing to keep it on him. And when the body was found late that night, the watch was not on it. Since then, so the story goes, on a moonlight night the spirit of the poor fellow haunts the spot. It is supposed that he wants to tell what had become of his master’s watch, which was never found. But no one has ever had courage to address him.

“He never comes farther than the dip in the road,” said my uncle. “If you had spoken to him, Charlotte, I wonder if he would have told you his secret?”

He spoke half laughingly, but I have never quite forgiven myself for my cowardice. It was the look in those eyes!

THE SAND-WALKER

Fergus Hume

1906

I make no endeavour to explain this experience. Explanation of it is impossible. I can conceive no theory upon which to base even the most slender attempt. It baffles me, it has always baffled me and it will continue to baffle me. Yet the impress of the thing loses nothing of its vividness with time. It is as clear before me now, as it was within a few hours of its event. I believe I heard a ghost knocking; I am certain I saw a ghost moving. “Indigestion, fancy, an overwrought and distorted brain,” you will say, no doubt.

I wish I could think it was. But it wasn’t. The sequel to that glimpse of the dead was too terrible, the cause too pertinent to the effect, to permit for one moment of any attribution to disorder, mental or alimentary. No – What I saw was actual self-existent. I will set down the facts for you as they occurred, and you shall explain them away – if you can. Then, if you remain unconvinced – go to Gartholm, by the German Ocean, and hear what the folk there have to say. They are a stodgy people, incapable utterly of the most insignificant hyperbole. They will tell you this tale plainly as I tell it to you. They believe as I believe.

It was in the summer of ’96. I was travelling in “woollens” for the great Huddersfield firm of Carbury and Crank. Furnished with a gig and a fast-trotting mare, it was my duty to exploit the more scattered parts of the country, where the railroad was still unknown and civilisation, as we use the term, tarried a while.

Gartholm is the name given to a certain wide, low-lying plain, shut in from the North Sea by mile upon mile of sandhills. They are heaped up like hummocks along the coast. It was along a kind of causeway running straight through many miles of grain that I drove that hot July. I had never been in these parts, and I rejoiced at such ample evidence of fertility. It argued prosperity for those around; hence good business for myself and my employers. I made up my mind to remain there for at least a month. I left in less than half that time.

As if the plain itself were not sufficiently damp and low-lying, the village of Gartholm had been built in a kind of central depression, immediately beside the river. In other respects it differed but slightly from the ordinary English village, save that there was no inn. Close by the tower of the rubble-built church there was a pot-house, licensed for the sale of liquor “to be drunk on the premises,” but I failed there to get sleeping room either for myself or Tilly, my weary mare.

Darkness was close upon us and I was worn out with my day’s drive. There seemed little prospect of comfort, even had I gained admittance to this miserable hovel. But that was denied me. The landlord, a bulky monumental lump of indolence, stood in the doorway and effectually blocked all entrance. A dozen or so of idlers collected to admire Tilly and amuse themselves at my expense. And I realised that there were worse fates than that of being cast upon an uninhabited island, even in this England of ours at the close of the nineteenth century.

While I was in this plight, arguing with the landlord and endeavouring to arrive approximately at the sense of his dialect, a being, human by contrast to those around, made his appearance from out of the crowd, and approached my gig. He turned out to be the village schoolmaster, and those around called him “Muster Abram.”

“You are looking for a lodging?” he said, in a smooth and (by comparison) strangely civilised voice.

“I am,” I replied, soothing Tilly, who, small blame to her, in no wise appreciated her immediate surroundings. I’m Dick Trossall, C.T. to Carbury and Crank, if you’ve ever heard of ’em in this forsaken hole.”

“C.T.?” repeated Master Abraham interrogatively, cocking his one eye (he had lost the other) which was as bright as any robin’s.

“Commercial Traveller,” said I in explanation; “or bagman if you like it better. You don’t comprehend Queen’s English I see in these parts.”

“Hardly; when so abbreviated. But if it really be board and lodging you seek, you can get that only from Mrs. Jarzil at the Beach Farm.”

There was a murmur from those at hand, as he said the name, and, I thought, a somewhat dubious expression upon the faces of one or two. I did not on the whole, feel drawn towards Mrs. Jarzil and her farm, and I looked at the schoolmaster enquiringly. Utterly ignoring this, and vouchsafing me no reply, he proceeded straightway to climb into my gig, without so much as “by your leave.” There was neither modesty nor undue hesitancy about Master Abraham.

“We will get on, then to Mrs. Jarzil’s farm,” said I. A touch from the whip and Tilly was off at a good spanking trot in the direction Master Abraham had indicated. In a few moments we were out of sight of the hangers-on and driving through the street – into another causeway similar to the first. In the distance we could see the house lying under the lee of the sandhills. A dismal sort of place it seemed, and wholly solitary.

“Yes, yonder is the Beach Farm,” said the schoolmaster, “and Mrs. Jarzil—” He stopped suddenly, so that I turned to look at him.

“What on earth is the matter with Mrs. Jarzil?”

“Nothing, nothing – I was merely wondering, not so much if she could, as whether she would, accommodate you. You see Mrs. Jarzil had some trouble with her last lodger. He was a botanist. He called himself Amber – Samuel Amber. Some two years ago it was; he boarded at the Beach Farm, then suddenly he disappeared.”

“Disappeared? Good Lord! what do you mean?”

“Exactly what I say. He walked out of yonder house one night, and never returned.”

We were close to the house now. It loomed up suddenly in the mist, which lay thick and heavy over the sandhills. I felt horribly depressed. Apart from the intense gloominess of the surroundings, the damp and darkness and desolation, all of which had perhaps more than their due effect upon my jaded nerves, I was conscious of an indefinite sense of uneasiness. This one-eyed creature at my elbow made me decidedly uncomfortable. I have not a robust nervous system at the best of times, and he with his sinister innuendoes was fast gaining a hold upon me.

“There was a daughter, you see,” he went on, before I could speak.

“Oh, there was a daughter, was there?” I repeated, somewhat relieved. It might be, after all, that he was nothing more than a mere scandal-monger. I fervently hoped so.

“Yes; and Mr. Amber made love to her – at least so it is supposed. At all events she disappeared, too.”

“At the same time as the man?”

“Lottie was her name,” continued Master Abraham, utterly heedless of my query, “and a pretty pink and white creature she was, with the loveliest golden hair. I used to call her Venus of the Fen. She was at the Farm when Amber first arrived. After a while he left, and she with him. He did not return for a twelvemonth, and then only to – to disappear.”

“What on earth are you telling me all this rigmarole for? I don’t care twopence for any of your Ambers and Lotties or Venuses either, for that matter. If the girl was as pretty as you say, I don’t blame the man for going off with her. I presume she was a willing party to the arrangement.”

“Mrs. Jarzil will have it that Amber forced her daughter to elope with him. You see he returned a year later – alone.”

“Well, what explanation did he make?”

“None – none whatever.”

“And what did the lady have to say to that?”

“Nothing. Amber took up his residence at the Farm as before, and remained there until – until he disappeared.”

Upon my soul I was beginning to feel thoroughly scared.

“Do you mean to tell me that Mrs. Jarzil got rid of him by foul play?”

“Oh, dear me, no; nothing of the kind. Mrs. Jarzil is a most religious woman.”

“Then what the – ; perhaps you will kindly make yourself clear. For what reason do you retail to me this parcel of rubbish?”

“Only this—” He laid his skinny hand upon my arm. We were turning into the drive which led up to the house. He pointed with the other hand towards the sand-ridge.

“Only what?”

The man nodded. Then he whispered to me. “The Sand-Walker, you know.”

An elderly woman had come to the door and was standing there. The chief thing I noticed about her was her determinedly masculine appearance. For the rest she was a veritable study in half tone. Her hair, her dress, her complexion, in fact everything about her, was of various shades of grey. Her mouth denoted a vile if not a violent temper.

My reception was anything but cordial; in fact at the outset she refused altogether to take me in, but under the persuasive eloquence of Master Abraham she relented so far as to agree to board me by the week at what to me seemed an exorbitant charge. She was evidently grasping as well as religious – a highly unpleasant combination I thought. But in the circumstances I had no option but to accept the inevitable. It was a case of any port in a storm.

As I proceeded to drive round to the stable to put up Tilly – a thing which I invariably attended to myself – Master Abraham accompanied me. And somehow I was glad of even his company. There was not a living soul about. I asked him why this was.

“Mrs. Jarzil keeps no servants,” he replied. “She has not kept any since Lottie and Mr. Amber went away; or rather, to be precise, since Mr. Amber disappeared.”

“How is that?”

“She can get none to come here – or to remain if they do come. They are afraid of the Sand-Walker.”

I asked him point blank what he meant. But I could get nothing out of him.

“Whatever you do, don’t go on to the beaches at dusk,” was all he said. Then he vanished. I say vanished advisedly, for though I ran after him to the door for the moment I could see no sign of him; I rushed on round the corner of the house, and came plump on to Mrs. Jarzil.

“Master Abraham!” I gasped.

Then Mrs. Jarzil pointed down the road, and I saw a flying figure disappearing into the darkness.

“Why does he run off like that?” I asked. I began to think I was losing my senses.

“Everyone runs from Beach Farm,” replied the woman in the coolest manner possible, and with that she left me staring in amazement.

I don’t think anyone could dub me a coward, but this place unnerved me. Both within and without the house all was mysterious, weird, and uncanny. My spirits sank to zero and my nerves were strung up to a tension positively unendurable. Even the bright light from the kitchen fire filled me with apprehension. I could not touch food or drink.

Mrs. Jarzil, gliding about the room, in no wise reassured me. Masculine and ponderous as she was, the deftness and stealthiness of her movements were uncomfortably incongruous. She spoke not a word. She totally ignored my presence. I began to loathe the woman. But I determined that anything was better than the horrible suspense I was enduring. So I went straight for the thing which was making havoc of me.

“What is the Sand-Walker, Mrs. Jarzil?”

At the moment she was polishing a dish cover. As I spoke it crashed on the floor. I never saw a woman turn quite so pale as she did then.

“Who has been talking to you about the Sand-Walker?”

“Master Abraham,” was my answer. By this time she was visibly shaking.

“Fool!” she exclaimed. “A triple fool, and dangerous, too. See here, you Mr. Trossall. I am willing to board you, but not to answer your silly questions. And if you don’t like my house and my ways, you can leave them both. I can do without you. God knows I have had enough of boarders.”

Though it was rash, and for all I knew dangerous, willy-nilly the name Amber slipped my tongue. But she had regained her self-possession now, and laughed contemptuously as she picked up the dish cover.

“I see Abraham’s been telling you my story. It is not a very pretty story, is it? Yes, Mr. Amber was a scoundrel. He carried off my daughter Lottie to London. Ay, and he had the boldness, too, to return here after his wickedness. I said nothing. It was my duty to forgive him, like a Christian, and I did. Although a mother, I am a Christian first. Poor Lottie! Poor child! I wonder where she is now.”

“Do you know where Mr. Amber is?”

“Yes, Abraham told you no doubt that he disappeared. One would think he had been caught up into the moon; the way the fools round here talk. Yet the explanation is perfectly simple. The man was accustomed to walk on the Beaches at night. There are quicksands there, and he fell into one.”

“How do you know that?”

“I found his hat by one of the worst of them. He had sunk. I am glad he did. He ruined my life and Lottie’s. But ‘Vengeance is Mine; I will repay saith the Lord.’”

“And this Sand-Walker; who, what is it?”

“That does not concern you. I have told you enough. I am not going to answer all your silly questions,” she reiterated.

Not another word would she say. Still I felt somewhat relieved. Abraham had contrived to surround with an atmosphere of mystery what after all was purely an accident. I saw that now; and I was able to go to bed in a much more tranquil state of mind than I would otherwise have done.

My room was just off the kitchen. I hadn’t been in it more than half an hour when I heard Mrs. Jarzil at her devotional exercises. I could hear her reading aloud certain Biblical extracts of a uniformly comminatory character. Her voice was peculiarly resonant and booming. Her choice seemed to me to range from Deuteronomy to Ezekiel and back again. “And Thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”

“And the earth opened her mouth and swallowed them up; they and all that appertained to them went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them.”

“The wicked are overthrown and are not.”

So for half an hour or more she went on, until I was in a cold perspiration. Then she knelt down and prayed, I was in hopes she had unbosomed herself for the night at all events. But then followed such a prayer as I have never heard. The ban of Jeremiah was a blessing to it. She cursed Amber, dead though he was. She cursed her daughter and called down upon her unfortunate head such visitations that I confess I shuddered. The woman was raving; yet all the time I could hear her sobbing, sobbing bitterly. The whole thing was ghastly, revolting. I would have given anything to get away.

At last she ceased, and, I presume, went to bed; though how she could sleep after such an indulgence was a marvel to me. But perhaps now that she had so assuaged her wrath, exhaustion if not relief would follow. I hoped so. At all events she was quiet. After a while I got up, to make sure that my door was securely fastened. Then I scrambled back to bed, and fell into an uneasy fitful doze. So I got through the long night. I never once slept soundly, and when I awoke in the morning I felt but little refreshed.

With the light came the sense of shame. I was inclined to deal severely with myself for my – as they now appeared to me – absurd apprehensions of the previous night. I made up my mind then and there that I should be a downright coward if I carried out my determination to leave the place. My room was comfortable, and the food was good. And I rated myself roundly for being such an impressionable booby. Besides, I knew enough to make me curious to know more.

Albeit as silent as ever, I found Mrs. Jarzil civil and composed enough at breakfast. So although I had not succeeded in getting rid wholly of my aversion to the place, I started off in quest of business, saying that I would return about five o’clock.

I soon found out that so far as business went, at all events, I had fallen on my feet. The very excellent woollen goods of Messrs. Carbury and Crank appealed to these fen dwellers. They were a rheumatic lot. But that was more the fault of the locality than of themselves. At any rate the local dealers seized upon my samples with avidity, and I booked more orders in the day than I was accustomed to do in a week in some places. I returned therefore that evening to the Beach Farm in the best of spirits, but at the gate I encountered Master Abraham. He soon reduced them to a normal level.

“Well, how did you sleep?” he said, I thought with a twinkle in his eye.

“Like a top, of course; I always do.”

“You heard nothing at your window?”

“Of course not. What should I hear?”

“Then you didn’t go on to the Beaches?”

“Certainly not. I was only too glad to get to bed. Besides, were you not at particular pains to advise me against going there?”

“Yes, perhaps I was; and I repeat my advice. If you do, it will come to you at the window.”

I “What in heaven’s name do you mean, man?”

“I mean the Sand-Walker.”

At that moment Tilly made a bound forward – she hates standing – and there was nothing for it but to let her go. The schoolmaster took himself off, and I drove up to the door.

But I silently swore at that skinny Abraham for bringing back to me the uneasy feelings of the previous night. His warning still rang in my ears. I could not get rid of it. I was determined I would not pass the night in ignorance. I resolved to take the bull by the horns and face whatever there was to face then and there.

After a “high tea” (that was between sue and seven o’clock) I mentioned casually to Mrs. Jarzil that I was going for a stroll. She neither bade me go nor stay; so over the sandhills at the back of the house I scrambled until I found myself on the sea shore.

The beach was very dreary. All was still, save for the gentle swash of the wavelets breaking in upon the ribbed sand. There was but little wind To right and left of me there stretched an interminable vista of sand, vanishing only to blend itself in the distance with the heavy mists, which even at that season of the year hung around. The little land-locked pools were blood-red with reflection of the sun. Through the off-shore of the sea and sun were ablaze with crimson light. I felt an awful sense of desolation as I sat there in the dip of a sand-hill watching the departing sun ring its changes on the spectrum. The crimson merged to amethyst, the amethyst to pearl, until in sombre greyness the light shut down upon the lonely shore.

A mad purposeless impulse seized me. With a whoop I ran down the firm sand to the brink of the water. I stood there for some moments looking out to sea. When I turned, the mists were thick even between me and the sand-hills. Darkness came down fold over fold. Every moment the fog became more damp and clammy, the sense of desolation more intense. I was isolated from all that was human; from God for aught I knew.

Then I thought of the quicksands – of Mr. Amber – of Mr. Amber’s hat found lying there; and I ran back, as I thought, to the sandhills. But I must have moved circuitously, for I could not reach even their friendly shelter. I lost my bearings hopelessly. Where the sea or where the hills I knew not. I rushed first this way, and then that, heedless and without design, intent only on escaping from the enshrouding mists, from the awesome desolation.

Suddenly the sands quaked under me. I stopped. The fate of Korah and his brethren flashed through my mind. My heart drummed loudly in the stillness. The mists grew thicker, the night darker. Then it was I saw It beside me.

At first I thought it was mortal – human – for its shape was that of a man. With an exclamation of thankfulness I endeavoured to approach it. But try as I might, I could not get near it. It did not walk, it did not glide, it did not fly. It simply melted in the mist, yet always visible, always retreating. That was the horror of the Thing.

My flesh creeped. I felt an icy cold through every pore of my skin. With awful insistence it was borne in upon me I was in the presence of the dead. Yet I was powerless. I could utter no cry. I could not even stop myself. On, on I went following that melting receding thing, until suddenly my foot stumbled on a sand-hill. Then It became mist with the mist, and I saw It no more. I scrambled up the hill and wept like a child.

How I reached the Beach Farm I cannot tell. I stumbled, blind with terror into the lamplight of the kitchen. I almost fell into Mrs. Jarzil’s arms. She uttered no word of surprise, but sat there staring at my terror-stricken face and quivering limbs, silent and unsympathetic. At last she spoke.

“You have seen the Sand-Walker?”

“In God’s name what is it?”

“God has nothing to do with the Sand-Walker,” she replied. “It is wholly of hell.”

I could speak no more that night. By help of some raw spirit I managed to pull myself together sufficiently to scramble into bed. The very sheets were a comfort to me; at all events they were between me and It.

I was utterly exhausted, and for a few hours I slept. I awoke suddenly with every nerve on the stretch, every sense acute almost beyond bearing. Mrs. Jarzil was vociferating in the kitchen, and sobbing between whiles. Then, as surely as I am a man and a Christian, I heard three loud knocks upon the window-pane. Mrs. Jarzil turned her imprecations into prayer. In her deep voice she boomed out verses from the Psalms: “Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer.”

I could stand it no longer. I flung myself out of bed, wrapped the coverlet around me, and rushed into the kitchen. Mrs. Jarzil was kneeling. Her face poured with perspiration. She paused as I appeared. There were three loud knocks at the door.

“What – O God, what is it?” I cried.

“The Sand-Walker.”

Then she prayed again: “I will abide in Thy tabernacle for ever. I will trust in the cover of Thy wings.”

I made for the door, but Mrs. Jarzil seized me by the arm. “Don’t let him in, don’t let him in. He wants me. It is Amber, I tell you. It is Amber.”

“Amber! The Sand-Walker!”

“Yes, yes. He is the Sand-Walker. He wants me – down on the Beaches. If you open the door I am bound to go. He draws me; he compels me. But the Lord is my strength, and shall prevail against the powers of hell.”

I had to prevent her from unbarring the door. She flung herself upon it and fumbled with the lock in frenzy. I dragged her back fearful lest she should admit the thing outside. Gradually she grew more calm, until at last she stood before me with a composure almost as terrible to behold as had been her frenzy.

“I have resisted the Devil, and he is fled!” she said. “You can go to bed now, Mr. Trossall. You will be disturbed no more. There will be no more knocking, no – more – knocking.” She caught up the candle to go. I detained her till I took a light from it. Then I went to bed. I kept the light burning all night, but there was no more knocking.

Next morning not a word passed between us about what had occurred. I ate my breakfast and drove off to my business. In the main street I met Abraham. I hailed him.

“Is there no other place where I can find a lodging?” I asked him.

“Ah! so you have been on the Beaches?”

“Yes. I was there yesterday evening.”

“You have seen the Sand-Walker?”

“For God’s sake don’t speak of it,” I said. For it terrified me even in the open day – here with the sunshine hot upon me. “And you have heard the knocking?”

“Yes, I have heard everything – seen everything; let that suffice. Can I find another lodging, I ask you?”

“No; there is none other in the district. But why need you fear? It is she – not you, the Sand-Walker wants, ay, and he’ll get her one night.”

“You know this Sand-Walker, as you call him, is Amber.”

“All Gartholm knows that. He has been walking for a year past now on the Beaches. No one would go there now for any money you could offer them – at least not after sundown. I warned you, you remember.”

“I know you did. But nevertheless I went, you see. And this Sand-Walker saved my life. For he led me back to the sand hills when I had lost myself hopelessly in the fog.”

“It’s not you he wants, I tell you, it’s she.”

“Why does he want her?” I asked.

The man’s tone was very strange.

“Ask of the quicksands!” he replied; and with that disappeared in a hurry. I was getting quite accustomed to this, and would have been surprised had he taken his leave in anything approaching a rational manner.

Now, you may perhaps hardly credit it, but I tossed a shilling then and there to decide my action in the immediate future. “Heads I go, tails I stay.”

The coin spun up in the sunlight. Tails it was. So I was to remain, and in that devil-haunted house. Well, at all events I was doing a brisk trade. There was some comfort in that.

During the next ten days I drove for miles over the district, and did uncommonly well everywhere. I found that the legend of the Beach Farm was universally familiar, and they all shook their heads very gravely indeed when they learned that I lodged there. In fact, I am not at all sure that this was not of assistance to me rather than otherwise. I became an object of intense interest, and, no doubt, of sympathy had I known it.

After that terrible night, there was a lull in the torment of the Sand-Walker. Occasionally it rapped at the door or the window, but that was all. As for me I walked no more on the Beaches.

But the time was near at hand when the Devil would have his own. It came one evening about six o’clock. There had been heavy rain, and the marshy lands were flooded and the mists were thick around. Overhead all was opaque and grey, and the ground was sodden under foot. I was anxious to get home, and Tilly was doing all she knew.

“On arrival I looked after her as was my wont, first and foremost. When I had made her comfortable for the night I returned to the kitchen. To my surprise I found Mrs. Jarzil in conversation with a girl, in whom from Abraham’s description, meagre though it had been, I had no difficulty in recognising his Venus of the Fen. She was certainly pretty. I agreed with Abraham there. She was crying bitterly, whilst her mother raged at her. They both stopped short as I entered – a sense of delicacy, no doubt.

“Whatever is the matter?” I asked, surveying the pair of them.

“Oh, sir, you are mother’s new lodger, aren’t you?” said the girl. “Master Abraham told me as she had one. Do please ask her to hear reason, do, I implore you, sir.”

“I will allow no one to interfere with my private affairs,” said Mrs. Jarzil, stamping her foot. “If you are wise you will not seek to make public your disgrace.”

“There is no disgrace. I have done nothing to be ashamed of, I tell you.”

“No disgrace? No disgrace in allowing yourself to be beguiled by that man – to be fooled by his good looks and soft speeches?”

“What do you mean, mother? I have nothing to do with Mr. Amber.”

“Liar, you ran away with him. What more could you have to do with him, I should like to know?”

Lottie’s spirit rose, and with it the colour to her cheeks. “I ran away with him? Indeed I did nothing of the kind. It was you who made me run away. You treated me so cruelly that I determined to go into service in London. I was sick to death of your scolding, and your preaching and praying, and this dismal house, and these horrible mists, and never a soul to speak to, sick to death of it I tell you. That’s why I went. Mr. Amber indeed!” (this with a toss of her head). “I have more taste than to take up with the likes of him. I met him as he was leaving here. I was walking, and he offered me a lift—”

“Abr’am saw you; Abr’am saw you both!” interrupted her mother savagely. “He told me you had eloped with the man.”

“That was a lie. I parted from Mr. Amber at the London railway station. From that time to this I have never set eyes upon him. For my own sake I made him promise to hold his tongue.”

“He did – he did!” cried Mrs. Jarzil, wildly. “God help him and me, he did. He returned here, but he said nothing – made no explanation. I believed he had ruined you. Now, oh now, I see it all. And you have ruined me.”

“Oh, mother, what do you mean?”

“Why did you not let him speak? Oh, why did you not write and explain? I believed – I thought he had robbed me of you – and I revenged myself upon him.

“Revenged yourself?” I cried. I began to have an inkling of what was coming. But Mrs. Jarzil paid no heed to me. She shook Lottie furiously.”

“Do you know what your silence has cost me?” (She was beside herself now). “It has cost me my soul – my soul, I say. Oh, why did you let me believe him guilty? I killed him. I murdered him for your sake. It was not vengeance, it was not justice, it was crime – crime and evil.”

“You – killed – Mr. Amber?”

“Yes; I killed him. I swore he should pay for what he had done. His own curiosity did for him. I played upon it. I lured him to the quicksands.”

“The quicksands?” I repeated, horrified.

“I placed a lantern on the brink of the most dangerous of them,” the woman continued, feverishly. “He used habitually to walk on the Beaches at dark. His curiosity did the rest. He had to see what that light was. I knew he would. It was the last light he ever saw in this world. Yes, you call it murder. It was murder. But it was your fault – your fault. And now he walks, and taps at the door for me. He wants me; he wants me. I thought I had justice on my side – that I was avenging your disgrace; and I fought with my soul; oh, how I fought! But now – I see he is right. It is I who must now be punished. I must go. I must go. Oh, God be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Lottie lay stretched on the floor. She had fainted. I placed myself between her mother and the door. I dared not let her out.

“Where would you go?” I cried, seizing her by the arm and frustrating a desperate effort to get away. She was fairly demented, and seemed possessed of strength almost demoniacal.

“To the Beaches – to my death. Let me go – let me go. An eye for an eye, I say – a tooth for a tooth. That is the law of God. Hark! Listen! He calls – he calls me.” (I could hear nothing but the howling of the wind.) “I must go, I must go, I must—”

She was too quick for me. Before I had time to stop her she was away into the desolate night. I rushed after her. In her present condition there was no knowing what she might do. Clearly her mind was unhinged. I could hardly see for the rain. It was nearly dark too. But on through the mire and the mist I went. I jostled up against a man. It was Abraham. I remembered it was he who had caused all this, and with the thought I lost control of myself. I gripped him by the throat.

“You dog – you liar! Lottie the girl has come back!”

“I – I – I know!” he gasped. “I was coming up to see her. Leave me alone. What do you mean by this?”

“You deserve it, and more, you villain. You know well the girl did not go with Amber. You lied to her mother; you made her think so. You were in love with her yourself. The man’s death lies at your door more than at hers. She has gone to the Beaches – to her death, I tell you – unless she is stopped.”

Then I realised that I was wasting time. I hastened on, regretting deeply that my feelings had so got the better of me just then.

It was blowing half a gale, though it was not till I had crossed the sandhills that I realised it. Then the full blast of the wind struck me. It was as much as I could do to keep my feet. I could not see the woman anywhere, though I peered into the gloom until my head swam. Not a sign of her or any living creature could I see. There was nothing but the roar of the wind and the sea, and the swish of the driving rain.

Then I thought I heard a cry – a faint cry. I ploughed my way down in the direction whence I fancied it came. I became aware that Abraham had followed me. He was close behind me. Together we groped blindly on.

“He’ll get her this time!” shouted the man.

“Come on! Come on!” I roared at him. “Yonder she is.”

“And yonder the Sand-Walker.”

The wretch hung back. Then a gust of wind, more concentrated and more fierce than before, seemed to rend an opening in the fog. Two shadows could be seen fluttering along – one a man of unusual height, the other a woman, reeling and swaying. She followed the Thing. As we gazed, a light appeared in the distance, radiant as a star. Its brilliance grew, and spread far and wide through the fog. The tall figure moved up to and past the light – the other following, always following.

She staggered and flung up her arms, and a wild and despairing cry rang out above the elements. And the light gradually died away, and the wind howled on, driving the mists across the sinking figure.

Slowly she sank into the sand, deeper and deeper. One last terrible moan reached us where we were, then she disappeared. For the moment the storm seemed to hush. Then all was darkness.

BONE TO HIS BONE

Edmund Gill Swain

1912

William Whitehead, Fellow of Emmanuel College, in the University of Cambridge, became Vicar of Stoneground in the year 1731. The annals of his incumbency were doubtless short and simple: they have not survived. In his day were no newspapers to collect gossip, no Parish Magazines to record the simple events of parochial life. One event, however, of greater moment then than now, is recorded in two places. Vicar Whitehead failed in health after 23 years of work, and journeyed to Bath in what his monument calls “the vain hope of being restored.” The duration of his visit is unknown; it is reasonable to suppose that he made his journey in the summer, it is certain that by the month of November his physician told him to lay aside all hope of recovery.

Then it was that the thoughts of the patient turned to the comfortable straggling vicarage he had left at Stoneground, in which he had hoped to end his days. He prayed that his successor might be as happy there as he had been himself. Setting his affairs in order, as became one who had but a short time to live, he executed a will, bequeathing to the Vicars of Stoneground, for ever, the close of ground he had recently purchased because it lay next the vicarage garden. And by a codicil, he added to the bequest his library of books. Within a few days, William Whitehead was gathered to his fathers.

A mural tablet in the north aisle of the church, records, in Latin, his services and his bequests, his two marriages, and his fruitless journey to Bath. The house he loved, but never again saw, was taken down 40 years later, and re-built by Vicar James Devie. The garden, with Vicar Whitehead’s “close of ground” and other adjacent lands, was opened out and planted, somewhat before 1850, by Vicar Robert Towerson. The aspect of everything has changed. But in a convenient chamber on the first floor of the present vicarage the library of Vicar Whitehead stands very much as he used it and loved it, and as he bequeathed it to his successors “for ever.”

The books there are arranged as he arranged and ticketed them. Little slips of paper, sometimes bearing interesting fragments of writing, still mark his places. His marginal comments still give life to pages from which all other interest has faded, and he would have but a dull imagination who could sit in the chamber amidst these books without ever being carried back 180 years into the past, to the time when the newest of them left the printer’s hands.

Of those into whose possession the books have come, some have doubtless loved them more, and some less; some, perhaps, have left them severely alone. But neither those who loved them, nor those who loved them not, have lost them, and they passed, some century and a half after William Whitehead’s death, into the hands of Mr. Batchel, who loved them as a father loves his children. He lived alone, and had few domestic cares to distract his mind. He was able, therefore, to enjoy to the full what Vicar Whitehead had enjoyed so long before him. During many a long summer evening would he sit poring over long-forgotten books; and since the chamber, otherwise called the library, faced the south, he could also spend sunny winter mornings there without discomfort. Writing at a small table, or reading as he stood at a tall desk, he would browse amongst the books like an ox in a pleasant pasture.

There were other times also, at which Mr. Batchel would use the books. Not being a sound sleeper (for book-loving men seldom are), he elected to use as a bedroom one of the two chambers which opened at either side into the library. The arrangement enabled him to beguile many a sleepless hour amongst the books, and in view of these nocturnal visits he kept a candle standing in a sconce above the desk, and matches always ready to his hand.

There was one disadvantage in this close proximity of his bed to the library. Owing, apparently, to some defect in the fittings of the room, which, having no mechanical tastes, Mr. Batchel had never investigated, there could be heard, in the stillness of the night, exactly such sounds as might arise from a person moving about amongst the books. Visitors using the other adjacent room would often remark at breakfast, that they had heard their host in the library at one or two o’clock in the morning, when, in fact, he had not left his bed. Invariably Mr. Batchel allowed them to suppose that he had been where they thought him. He disliked idle controversy, and was unwilling to afford an opening for supernatural talk. Knowing well enough the sounds by which his guests had been deceived, he wanted no other explanation of them than his own, though it was of too vague a character to count as an explanation. He conjectured that the window-sashes, or the doors, or “something,” were defective, and was too phlegmatic and too unpractical to make any investigation. The matter gave him no concern.

Persons whose sleep is uncertain are apt to have their worst nights when they would like their best. The consciousness of a special need for rest seems to bring enough mental disturbance to forbid it. So on Christmas Eve, in the year 1907, Mr. Batchel, who would have liked to sleep well, in view of the labours of Christmas Day, lay hopelessly wide awake. He exhausted all the known devices for courting sleep, and, at the end, found himself wider awake than ever. A brilliant moon shone into his room, for he hated window-blinds. There was a light wind blowing, and the sounds in the library were more than usually suggestive of a person moving about. He almost determined to have the sashes “seen to,” although he could seldom be induced to have anything “seen to.” He disliked changes, even for the better, and would submit to great inconvenience rather than have things altered with which he had become familiar.

As he revolved these matters in his mind, he heard the clocks strike the hour of midnight, and having now lost all hope of falling asleep, he rose from his bed, got into a large dressing gown which hung in readiness for such occasions, and passed into the library, with the intention of reading himself sleepy, if he could.

The moon, by this time, had passed out of the south, and the library seemed all the darker by contrast with the moonlit chamber he had left. He could see nothing but two blue-grey rectangles formed by the windows against the sky, the furniture of the room being altogether invisible. Groping along to where the table stood, Mr. Batchel felt over its surface for the matches which usually lay there; he found, however, that the table was cleared of everything. He raised his right hand, therefore, in order to feel his way to a shelf where the matches were sometimes mislaid, and at that moment, whilst his hand was in mid-air, the matchbox was gently put into it!

Such an incident could hardly fail to disturb even a phlegmatic person, and Mr. Batchel cried “Who’s this?” somewhat nervously. There was no answer. He struck a match, looked hastily round the room, and found it empty, as usual. There was everything, that is to say, that he was accustomed to see, but no other person than himself.

It is not quite accurate, however, to say that everything was in its usual state. Upon the tall desk lay a quarto volume that he had certainly not placed there. It was his quite invariable practice to replace his books upon the shelves after using them, and what we may call his library habits were precise and methodical. A book out of place like this, was not only an offence against good order, but a sign that his privacy had been intruded upon. With some surprise, therefore, he lit the candle standing ready in the sconce, and proceeded to examine the book, not sorry, in the disturbed condition in which he was, to have an occupation found for him.

The book proved to be one with which he was unfamiliar, and this made it certain that some other hand than his had removed it from its place. Its title was “The Compleat Gard’ner” of M. de la Quintinye made English by John Evelyn Esquire. It was not a work in which Mr. Batchel felt any great interest. It consisted of divers reflections on various parts of husbandry, doubtless entertaining enough, but too deliberate and discursive for practical purposes. He had certainly never used the book, and growing restless now in mind, said to himself that some boy having the freedom of the house, had taken it down from its place in the hope of finding pictures.

But even whilst he made this explanation he felt its weakness. To begin with, the desk was too high for a boy. The improbability that any boy would place a book there was equalled by the improbability that he would leave it there. To discover its uninviting character would be the work only of a moment, and no boy would have brought it so far from its shelf.

Mr. Batchel had, however, come to read, and habit was too strong with him to be wholly set aside. Leaving “The Compleat Gard’ner” on the desk, he turned round to the shelves to find some more congenial reading.

Hardly had he done this when he was startled by a sharp rap upon the desk behind him, followed by a rustling of paper. He turned quickly about and saw the quarto lying open. In obedience to the instinct of the moment, he at once sought a natural cause for what he saw. Only a wind, and that of the strongest, could have opened the book, and laid back its heavy cover; and though he accepted, for a brief moment, that explanation, he was too candid to retain it longer. The wind out of doors was very light. The window sash was closed and latched, and, to decide the matter finally, the book had its back, and not its edges, turned towards the only quarter from which a wind could strike.

Mr. Batchel approached the desk again and stood over the book. With increasing perturbation of mind (for he still thought of the matchbox) he looked upon the open page. Without much reason beyond that he felt constrained to do something, he read the words of the half completed sentence at the turn of the page—

“at dead of night he left the house and passed into the solitude of the garden.”

But he read no more, nor did he give himself the trouble of discovering whose midnight wandering was being described, although the habit was singularly like one of his own. He was in no condition for reading, and turning his back upon the volume he slowly paced the length of the chamber, “wondering at that which had come to pass.”

He reached the opposite end of the chamber and was in the act of turning, when again he heard the rustling of paper, and by the time he had faced round, saw the leaves of the book again turning over. In a moment the volume lay at rest, open in another place, and there was no further movement as he approached it. To make sure that he had not been deceived, he read again the words as they entered the page. The author was following a not uncommon practise of the time, and throwing common speech into forms suggested by Holy Writ: “So dig,” it said, “that ye may obtain.”

This passage, which to Mr. Batchel seemed reprehensible in its levity, excited at once his interest and his disapproval. He was prepared to read more, but this time was not allowed. Before his eye could pass beyond the passage already cited, the leaves of the book slowly turned again, and presented but a termination of five words and a colophon.

The words were, “to the North, an Ilex.” These three passages, in which he saw no meaning and no connection, began to entangle themselves together in Mr. Batchel’s mind. He found himself repeating them in different orders, now beginning with one, and now with another. Any further attempt at reading he felt to be impossible, and he was in no mind for any more experiences of the unaccountable. Sleep was, of course, further from him than ever, if that were conceivable. What he did, therefore, was to blow out the candle, to return to his moonlit bedroom, and put on more clothing, and then to pass downstairs with the object of going out of doors.

It was not unusual with Mr. Batchel to walk about his garden at night-time. This form of exercise had often, after a wakeful hour, sent him back to his bed refreshed and ready for sleep. The convenient access to the garden at such times lay through his study, whose French windows opened on to a short flight of steps, and upon these he now paused for a moment to admire the snow-like appearance of the lawns, bathed as they were in the moonlight. As he paused, he heard the city clocks strike the half-hour after midnight, and he could not forbear repeating aloud

“at dead of night he left the house and passed into the solitude of the garden.”

It was solitary enough. At intervals the screech of an owl, and now and then the noise of a train, seemed to emphasise the solitude by drawing attention to it and then leaving it in possession of the night. Mr. Batchel found himself wondering and conjecturing what Vicar Whitehead, who had acquired the close of land to secure quiet and privacy for garden, would have thought of the railways to the west and north. He turned his face northwards, whence a whistle had just sounded, and saw a tree beautifully outlined against the sky. His breath caught at the sight. Not because the tree was unfamiliar. Mr. Batchel knew all his trees. But what he had seen was “to the north, an Ilex.”

Mr. Batchel knew not what to make of it all. He had walked into the garden hundreds of times and as often seen the Ilex, but the words out of the “Compleat Gard’ner” seemed to be pursuing him in a way that made him almost afraid. His temperament, however, as has been said already, was phlegmatic. It was commonly said, and Mr. Batchel approved the verdict, whilst he condemned its inexactness, that “his nerves were made of fiddle-string,” so he braced himself afresh and set upon his walk round the silent garden, which he was accustomed to begin in a northerly direction, and was now too proud to change. He usually passed the Ilex at the beginning of his perambulation, and so would pass it now.

He did not pass it. A small discovery, as he reached it, annoyed and disturbed him. His gardener, as careful and punctilious as himself, never failed to house all his tools at the end of a day’s work. Yet there, under the Ilex, standing upright in moonlight brilliant enough to cast a shadow of it, was a spade.

Mr. Batchel’s second thought was one of relief. After his extraordinary experiences in the library (he hardly knew now whether they had been real or not) something quite commonplace would act sedatively, and he determined to carry the spade to the tool-house.

The soil was quite dry, and the surface even a little frozen, so Mr. Batchel left the path, walked up to the spade, and would have drawn it towards him. But it was as if he had made the attempt upon the trunk of the Ilex itself. The spade would not be moved. Then, first with one hand, and then with both, he tried to raise it, and still it stood firm. Mr. Batchel, of course, attributed this to the frost, slight as it was. Wondering at the spade’s being there, and annoyed at its being frozen, he was about to leave it and continue his walk, when the remaining words of the “Compleat Gard’ner” seemed rather to utter themselves, than to await his will—

“So dig, that ye may obtain.”

Mr. Batchel’s power of independent action now deserted him. He took the spade, which no longer resisted, and began to dig. “Five spadefuls and no more,” he said aloud. “This is all foolishness.”

Four spadefuls of earth he then raised and spread out before him in the moonlight. There was nothing unusual to be seen. Nor did Mr. Batchel decide what he would look for, whether coins, jewels, documents in canisters, or weapons. In point of fact, he dug against what he deemed his better judgment, and expected nothing. He spread before him the fifth and last spadeful of earth, not quite without result, but with no result that was at all sensational. The earth contained a bone. Mr. Batchel’s knowledge of anatomy was sufficient to show him that it was a human bone. He identified it, even by moonlight, as the radius, a bone of the forearm, as he removed the earth from it, with his thumb.

Such a discovery might be thought worthy of more than the very ordinary interest Mr. Batchel showed. As a matter of fact, the presence of a human bone was easily to be accounted for. Recent excavations within the church had caused the upturning of numberless bones, which had been collected and reverently buried. But an earth-stained bone is also easily overlooked, and this radius had obviously found its way into the garden with some of the earth brought out of the church.

Mr. Batchel was glad, rather than regretful at this termination to his adventure. He was once more provided with something to do. The re-interment of such bones as this had been his constant care, and he decided at once to restore the bone to consecrated earth. The time seemed opportune. The eyes of the curious were closed in sleep, he himself was still alert and wakeful. The spade remained by his side and the bone in his hand. So he betook himself, there and then, to the churchyard. By the still generous light of the moon, he found a place where the earth yielded to his spade, and within a few minutes the bone was laid decently to earth, some 18 inches deep.

The city clocks struck one as he finished. The whole world seemed asleep, and Mr. Batchel slowly returned to the garden with his spade. As he hung it in its accustomed place he felt stealing over him the welcome desire to sleep. He walked quietly on to the house and ascended to his room. It was now dark: the moon had passed on and left the room in shadow. He lit a candle, and before undressing passed into the library. He had an irresistible curiosity to see the passages in John Evelyn’s book which had so strangely adapted themselves to the events of the past hour.

In the library a last surprise awaited him. The desk upon which the book had lain was empty. “The Compleat Gard’ner” stood in its place on the shelf. And then Mr. Batchel knew that he had handled a bone of William Whitehead, and that in response to his own entreaty.

THE HAUNTED ORCHARD

Richard Le Gallienne

1912

Spring was once more in the world. As she sang to herself in the faraway woodlands her voice reached even the ears of the city, weary with the long winter. Daffodils flowered at the entrances to the Subway, furniture removing vans blocked the side streets, children clustered like blossoms on the doorsteps, the open cars were running, and the cry of the “cash clo’” man was once more heard in the land.

Yes, it was the spring, and the city dreamed wistfully of lilacs and the dewy piping of birds in gnarled old apple-trees, of dogwood lighting up with sudden silver the thickening woods, of water-plants unfolding their glossy scrolls in pools of morning freshness.

On Sunday mornings, the outbound trains were thronged with eager pilgrims, hastening out of the city, to behold once more the ancient marvel of the spring; and, on Sunday evenings, the railway termini were a-flower with banners of blossom from rifled woodland and orchard carried in the hands of the returning pilgrims, whose eyes still shone with the spring magic, in whose ears still sang the fairy music.

And as I beheld these signs of the vernal equinox I knew that I, too, must follow the music, forsake awhile the beautiful siren we call the city, and in the green silences meet once more my sweetheart Solitude.

As the train drew out of the Grand Central, I hummed to myself,

“I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden,
in a greener, cleaner land”

and so I said goodbye to the city, and went forth with beating heart to meet the spring.

I had been told of an almost forgotten corner on the south coast of Connecticut, where the spring and I could live in an inviolate loneliness – a place uninhabited save by birds and blossoms, woods and thick grass, and an occasional silent farmer, and pervaded by the breath and shimmer of the Sound.

Nor had rumor lied, for when the train set me down at my destination I stepped out into the most wonderful green hush, a leafy Sabbath silence through which the very train, as it went farther on its way, seemed to steal as noiselessly as possible for fear of breaking the spell.

After a winter in the town, to be dropped thus suddenly into the intense quiet of the country-side makes an almost ghostly impression upon one, as of an enchanted silence, a silence that listens and watches but never speaks, finger on lip. There is a spectral quality about everything upon which the eye falls: the woods, like great green clouds, the wayside flowers, the still farmhouses half lost in orchard bloom – all seem to exist in a dream. Everything is so still, everything so supernaturally green. Nothing moves or talks, except the gentle susurrus of the spring wind swaying the young buds high up in the quiet sky, or a bird now and again, or a little brook singing softly to itself among the crowding rushes.

Though, from the houses one notes here and there, there are evidently human inhabitants of this green silence, none are to be seen. I have often wondered where the countryfolk hide themselves, as I have walked hour after hour, past farm and croft and lonely dooryards, and never caught sight of a human face. If you should want to ask the way, a farmer is as shy as a squirrel, and if you knock at a farmhouse door, all is as silent as a rabbit-warren.

As I walked along in the enchanted stillness, I came at length to a quaint old farmhouse – “old Colonial” in its architecture – embowered in white lilacs, and surrounded by an orchard of ancient apple-trees which cast a rich shade on the deep spring grass. The orchard had the impressiveness of those old religious groves, dedicated to the strange worship of sylvan gods, gods to be found now only in Horace or Catullus, and in the hearts of young poets to whom the beautiful antique Latin is still dear.

The old house seemed already the abode of Solitude. As I lifted the latch of the white gate and walked across the forgotten grass, and up on to the veranda already festooned with wistaria, and looked into the window, I saw Solitude sitting by an old piano, on which no composer later than Bach had ever been played.

In other words, the house was empty; and going round to the back, where old barns and stables leaned together as if falling asleep, I found a broken pane, and so climbed in and walked through the echoing rooms. The house was very lonely. Evidently no one had lived in it for a long time. Yet it was all ready for some occupant, for whom it seemed to be waiting. Quaint old four-poster bedsteads stood in three rooms – dimity curtains and spotless linen – old oak chests and mahogany presses; and, opening drawers in Chippendale sideboards, I came upon beautiful frail old silver and exquisite china that set me thinking of a beautiful grandmother of mine, made out of old lace and laughing wrinkles and mischievous old blue eyes.

There was one little room that particularly interested me, a tiny bedroom all white, and at the window the red roses were already in bud. But what caught my eye with peculiar sympathy was a small bookcase, in which were some twenty or thirty volumes, wearing the same forgotten expression – forgotten and yet cared for – which lay like a kind of memorial charm upon everything in the old house. Yes, everything seemed forgotten and yet everything, curiously – even religiously – remembered. I took out book after book from the shelves, once or twice flowers fell out from the pages – and I caught sight of a delicate handwriting here and there and frail markings. It was evidently the little intimate library of a young girl. What surprised me most was to find that quite half the books were in French – French poets and French romancers: a charming, very rare edition of Ronsard, a beautifully printed edition of Alfred de Musset, and a copy of Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. How did these exotic books come to be there alone in a deserted New England farmhouse?

This question was to be answered later in a strange way. Meanwhile I had fallen in love with the sad, old, silent place, and as I closed the white gate and was once more on the road, I looked about for someone who could tell me whether or not this house of ghosts might be rented for the summer by a comparatively living man.

I was referred to a fine old New England farmhouse shining white through the trees a quarter of a mile away. There I met an ancient couple, a typical New England farmer and his wife; the old man, lean, chin-bearded, with keen gray eyes flickering occasionally with a shrewd humor, the old lady with a kindly old face of the withered-apple type and ruddy. They were evidently prosperous people, but their minds – for some reason I could not at the moment divine – seemed to be divided between their New England desire to drive a hard bargain and their disinclination to let the house at all.

Over and over again they spoke of the loneliness of the place. They feared I would find it very lonely. No one had lived in it for a long time, and so on. It seemed to me that afterwards I understood their curious hesitation, but at the moment only regarded it as a part of the circuitous New England method of bargaining. At all events, the rent I offered finally overcame their disinclination, whatever its cause, and so I came into possession – for four months – of that silent old house, with the white lilacs, and the drowsy barns, and the old piano, and the strange orchard; and, as the summer came on, and the year changed its name from May to June, I used to lie under the apple-trees in the afternoons, dreamily reading some old book, and through half-sleepy eyelids watching the silken shimmer of the Sound.

I had lived in the old house for about a month, when one afternoon a strange thing happened to me. I remember the date well. It was the afternoon of Tuesday, June 13th. I was reading, or rather dipping here and there, in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. As I read, I remember that a little unripe apple, with a petal or two of blossom still clinging to it, fell upon the old yellow page. Then I suppose I must have fallen into a dream, though it seemed to me that both my eyes and my ears were wide open, for I suddenly became aware of a beautiful young voice singing very softly somewhere among the leaves. The singing was very frail, almost imperceptible, as though it came out of the air. It came and went fitfully, like the elusive fragrance of sweetbrier – as though a girl was walking to and fro, dreamily humming to herself in the still afternoon. Yet there was no one to be seen. The orchard had never seemed more lonely. And another fact that struck me as strange was that the words that floated to me out of the aerial music were French, half sad, half gay snatches of some long-dead singer of old France, I looked about for the origin of the sweet sounds, but in vain. Could it be the birds that were singing in French in this strange orchard? Presently the voice seemed to come quite close to me, so near that it might have been the voice of a dryad singing to me out of the tree against which I was leaning. And this time I distinctly caught the words of the sad little song:

“Chante, rossignol, chante,

Toi qui as le coeur gai;

Tu as le coeur à rire,

Moi, je l’ai-t-à pleurer.”

But, though the voice was at my shoulder, I could see no one, and then the singing stopped with what sounded like a sob; and a moment or two later I seemed to hear a sound of sobbing far down the orchard. Then there followed silence, and I was left to ponder on the strange occurrence. Naturally, I decided that it was just a day-dream between sleeping and waking over the pages of an old book; yet when next day and the day after the invisible singer was in the orchard again, I could not be satisfied with such mere matter-of-fact explanation.

“A la claire fontaine,”

went the voice to and fro through the thick orchard boughs,

“M’en allant promener,

J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle

Que je m’y suis baigné,

Lui y a longtemps que je t’aime,

Jamais je ne t’oubliai.”

It was certainly uncanny to hear that voice going to and fro the orchard, there somewhere amid the bright sun-dazzled boughs – yet not a human creature to be seen – not another house even within half a mile. The most materialistic mind could hardly but conclude that here was something “not dreamed of in our philosophy.” It seemed to me that the only reasonable explanation was the entirely irrational one – that my orchard was haunted: haunted by some beautiful young spirit, with some sorrow of lost joy that would not let her sleep quietly in her grave.

And next day I had a curious confirmation of my theory. Once more I was lying under my favorite apple-tree, half reading and half watching the Sound, lulled into a dream by the whir of insects and the spices called up from the earth by the hot sun. As I bent over the page, I suddenly had the startling impression that someone was leaning over my shoulder and reading with me, and that a girl’s long hair was falling over me down on to the page. The book was the Ronsard I had found in the little bedroom. I turned, but again there was nothing there. Yet this time I knew that I had not been dreaming, and I cried out:

“Poor child! tell me of your grief – that I may help your sorrowing heart to rest.”

But, of course, there was no answer; yet that night I dreamed a strange dream. I thought I was in the orchard again in the afternoon and once again heard the strange singing – but this time, as I looked up, the singer was no longer invisible. Coming toward me was a young girl with wonderful blue eyes filled with tears and gold hair that fell to her waist. She wore a straight, white robe that might have been a shroud or a bridal dress. She appeared not to see me, though she came directly to the tree where I was sitting. And there she knelt and buried her face in the grass and sobbed as if her heart would break. Her long hair fell over her like a mantle, and in my dream I stroked it pityingly and murmured words of comfort for a sorrow I did not understand…. Then I woke suddenly as one does from dreams. The moon was shining brightly into the room. Rising from my bed, I looked out into the orchard. It was almost as bright as day. I could plainly see the tree of which I had been dreaming, and then a fantastic notion possessed me. Slipping on my clothes, I went out into one of the old barns and found a spade. Then I went to the tree where I had seen the girl weeping in my dream and dug down at its foot.

I had dug little more than a foot when my spade struck upon some hard substance, and in a few more moments I had uncovered and exhumed a small box, which, on examination, proved to be one of those pretty old-fashioned Chippendale work-boxes used by our grandmothers to keep their thimbles and needles in, their reels of cotton and skeins of silk. After smoothing down the little grave in which I had found it, I carried the box into the house, and under the lamplight examined its contents.

Then at once I understood why that sad young spirit went to and fro the orchard singing those little French songs – for the treasure-trove I had found under the apple-tree, the buried treasure of an unquiet, suffering soul, proved to be a number of love-letters written mostly in French in a very picturesque hand – letters, too, written but some five or six years before. Perhaps I should not have read them – yet I read them with such reverence for the beautiful, impassioned love that animated them, and literally made them “smell sweet and blossom in the dust,” that I felt I had the sanction of the dead to make myself the confidant of their story. Among the letters were little songs, two of which I had heard the strange young voice singing in the orchard, and, of course, there were many withered flowers and such like remembrances of bygone rapture.

Not that night could I make out all the story, though it was not difficult to define its essential tragedy, and later on a gossip in the neighborhood and a headstone in the churchyard told me the rest. The unquiet young soul that had sung so wistfully to and fro the orchard was my landlord’s daughter. She was the only child of her parents, a beautiful, willful girl, exotically unlike those from whom she was sprung and among whom she lived with a disdainful air of exile. She was, as a child, a little creature of fairy fancies, and as she grew up it was plain to her father and mother that she had come from another world than theirs. To them she seemed like a child in an old fairytale strangely found on his hearth by some shepherd as he returns from the fields at evening – a little fairy girl swaddled in fine linen, and dowered with a mysterious bag of gold.

Soon she developed delicate spiritual needs to which her simple parents were strangers. From long truancies in the woods she would come home laden with mysterious flowers, and soon she came to ask for books and pictures and music, of which the poor souls that had given her birth had never heard. Finally she had her way, and went to study at a certain fashionable college; and there the brief romance of her life began. There she met a romantic young Frenchman who had read Ronsard to her and written her those picturesque letters I had found in the old mahogany work-box. And after a while the young Frenchman had gone back to France, and the letters had ceased. Month by month went by, and at length one day, as she sat wistful at the window, looking out at the foolish sunlit road, a message came. He was dead. That headstone in the village churchyard tells the rest. She was very young to die – scarcely nineteen years; and the dead who have died young, with all their hopes and dreams still like unfolded buds within their hearts, do not rest so quietly in the grave as those who have gone through the long day from morning until evening and are only too glad to sleep.

•   •   •   •   •

Next day I took the little box to a quiet corner of the orchard, and made a little pyre of fragrant boughs – for so I interpreted the wish of that young, unquiet spirit – and the beautiful words are now safe, taken up again into the aerial spaces from which they came.

But since then the birds sing no more little French songs in my old orchard.

THE BOWMEN

Arthur Machen

1915

It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away; and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls.

On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and Sedan would inevitably follow.

All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron.

There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, “It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,” and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.

There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.

There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man improvised a new version of the battlesong, “Goodbye, goodbye to Tipperary,” ending with “And we shan’t get there”. And they all went on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked, “What price Sidney Street?” And the few machine guns did their best. But everybody knew it was of no use. The dead grey bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond.

“World without end. Amen,” said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered – he says he cannot think why or wherefore – a queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue, with the motto, Adsit Anglis Sanctus Geogius – May St. George be a present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey advancing mass – 300 yards away – he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so that the King’s ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.

For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal crying, “Array, array, array!”

His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons. He heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: “St. George! St. George!”

“Ha! messire; ha! sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!”

“St. George for merry England!”

“Harow! Harow! Monseigneur St. George, succour us.”

“Ha! St. George! Ha! St. George! a long bow and a strong bow.”

“Heaven’s Knight, aid us!”

And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts.

•   •   •   •   •

The other men in the trench were firing all the while. They had no hope; but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley. Suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in the plainest English, “Gawd help us!” he bellowed to the man next to him, “but we’re blooming marvels! Look at those grey… gentlemen, look at them! D’ye see them? They’re not going down in dozens, nor in ’undreds; it’s thousands, it is. Look! look! there’s a regiment gone while I’m talking to ye.”

“Shut it!” the other soldier bellowed, taking aim, “what are ye gassing about!”

But he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke, for, indeed, the grey men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the guttural scream of the German officers, the crackle of their revolvers as they shot the reluctant; and still line after line crashed to the earth.

All the while the Latin-bred soldier heard the cry: “Harow! Harow! Monseigneur, dear saint, quick to our aid! St. George help us!”

“High Chevalier, defend us!”

The singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air; the heathen horde melted from before them.

“More machine guns!” Bill yelled to Tom.

“Don’t hear them,” Tom yelled back. “But, thank God, anyway; they’ve got it in the neck.”

•   •   •   •   •

In fact, there were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before that salient of the English army, and consequently there was no Sedan. In Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the Great General Staff decided that the contemptible English must have employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also that St. George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English.

THE PAST

Ellen Glasgow

1920

I had no sooner entered the house than I knew something was wrong. Though I had never been in so splendid a place before – it was one of those big houses just off Fifth Avenue – I had a suspicion from the first that the magnificence covered a secret disturbance. I was always quick to receive impressions, and when the black iron doors swung together behind me, I felt as if I were shut inside a prison.

When I gave my name and explained that I was the new secretary, I was delivered into the charge of an elderly lady’s-maid, who looked as if she had been crying. Without speaking a word, though she nodded kindly enough, she led me down the hall, and then up a flight of stairs at the back of the house to a pleasant bedroom in the third story. There was a great deal of sunshine, and the walls, which were painted a soft yellow, made the room very cheerful. It would be a comfortable place to sit in when I was not working, I thought, while the sad-faced maid stood watching me remove my wraps and hat.

“If you are not tired, Mrs. Vanderbridge would like to dictate a few letters,” she said presently, and they were the first words she had spoken.

“I am not a bit tired. Will you take me to her?” One of the reasons, I knew, which had decided Mrs. Vanderbridge to engage me was the remarkable similarity of our handwriting. We were both Southerners, and though she was now famous on two continents for her beauty, I couldn’t forget that she had got her early education at the little academy for young ladies in Fredericksburg. This was a bond of sympathy in my thoughts at least, and, heaven knows, I needed to remember it while I followed the maid down the narrow stairs and along the wide hall to the front of the house.

In looking back after a year, I can recall every detail of that first meeting. Though it was barely four o’clock, the electric lamps were turned on in the hall, and I can still see the mellow light that shone over the staircase and lay in pools on the old pink rugs, which were so soft and fine that I felt as if I were walking on flowers. I remember the sound of music from a room somewhere on the first floor, and the scent of lilies and hyacinths that drifted from the conservatory. I remember it all, every note of music, every whiff of fragrance; but most vividly I remember Mrs. Vanderbridge as she looked round, when the door opened, from the wood fire into which she had been gazing. Her eyes caught me first. They were so wonderful that for a moment I couldn’t see anything else; then I took in slowly the dark red of her hair, the clear pallor of her skin, and the long, flowing lines of her figure in a tea-gown of blue silk. There was a white bearskin rug under her feet, and while she stood there before the wood fire, she looked as if she had absorbed the beauty and color of the house as a crystal vase absorbs the light. Only when she spoke to me, and I went nearer, did I detect the heaviness beneath her eyes and the nervous quiver of her mouth, which drooped a little at the corners. Tired and worn as she was, I never saw her afterward – not even when she was dressed for the opera – look quite so lovely, so much like an exquisite flower, as she did on that first afternoon. When I knew her better, I discovered that she was a changeable beauty; there were days when all the color seemed to go out of her, and she looked dull and haggard; but at her best no one I’ve ever seen could compare with her.

She asked me a few questions, and though she was pleasant and kind, I knew that she scarcely listened to my responses. While I sat down at the desk and dipped my pen into the ink, she flung herself on the couch before the fire with a movement which struck me as hopeless. I saw her feet tap the white fur rug, while she plucked nervously at the lace on the end of one of the gold-colored sofa pillows. For an instant the thought flashed through my mind that she had been taking something – a drug of some sort – and that she was suffering now from the effects of it. Then she looked at me steadily, almost as if she were reading my thoughts, and I knew that I was wrong. Her large radiant eyes were as innocent as a child’s.

She dictated a few notes – all declining invitations – and then, while I still waited pen in hand, she sat up on the couch with one of her quick movements, and said in a low voice, “I am not dining out tonight, Miss Wrenn. I am not well enough.”

“I am sorry for that.” It was all I could think of to say, for I did not understand why she should have told me.

“If you don’t mind, I should like you to come down to dinner. There will be only Mr. Vanderbridge and myself.”

“Of course I will come if you wish it.” I couldn’t very well refuse to do what she asked me, yet I told myself, while I answered, that if I had known she expected me to make one of the family, I should never, not even at twice the salary, have taken the place. It didn’t take me a minute to go over my slender wardrobe in my mind and realize that I had nothing to wear that would look well enough.

“I can see you don’t like it,” she added after a moment, almost wistfully, “but it won’t be often. It is only when we are dining alone.”

This, I thought, was even queerer than the request – or command – for I knew from her tone, just as plainly as if she had told me in words, that she did not wish to dine alone with her husband.

“I am ready to help you in any way – in any way that I can,” I replied, and I was so deeply moved by her appeal that my voice broke in spite of my effort to control it. After my lonely life, I dare say I should have loved anyone who really needed me, and from the first moment that I read the appeal in Mrs. Vanderbridge’s face I felt that I was willing to work my fingers to the bone for her. Nothing that she asked of me was too much when she asked it in that voice, with that look.

“I am glad you are nice,” she said, and for the first time she smiled – a charming, girlish smile with a hint of archness. “We shall get on beautifully, I know, because I can talk to you. My last secretary was English, and I frightened her almost to death whenever I tried to talk to her.” Then her tone grew serious. “You won’t mind dining with us. Roger – Mr. Vanderbridge – is the most charming man in the world.”

“Is that his picture?”

“Yes, the one in the Florentine frame. The other is my brother. Do you think we are alike?”

“Since you’ve told me, I notice a likeness.” Already I had picked up the Florentine frame from the desk, and was eagerly searching the features of Mr. Vanderbridge. It was an arresting face, dark, thoughtful, strangely appealing, and picturesque – though this may have been due, of course, to the photographer. The more I looked at it, the more there grew upon me an uncanny feeling of familiarity; but not until the next day, while I was still trying to account for the impression that I had seen the picture before, did there flash into my mind the memory of an old portrait of a Florentine nobleman in a loan collection last winter. I can’t remember the name of the painter – I am not sure that it was known – but this photograph might have been taken from the painting. There was the same imaginative sadness in both faces, the same haunting beauty of feature, and one surmised that there must be the same rich darkness of coloring. The only striking difference was that the man in the photograph looked much older than the original of the portrait, and I remembered that the lady who had engaged me was the second wife of Mr. Vanderbridge and some ten or fifteen years younger, I had heard, than her husband.

“Have you ever seen a more wonderful face?” asked Mrs. Vanderbridge. “Doesn’t he look as if he might have been painted by Titian?”

“Is he really so handsome as that?”

“He is a little older and sadder, that is all. When we were married it was exactly like him.” For an instant she hesitated and then broke out almost bitterly, “Isn’t that a face any woman might fall in love with, a face any woman – living or dead – would not be willing to give up?”

Poor child, I could see that she was overwrought and needed someone to talk to, but it seemed queer to me that she should speak so frankly to a stranger. I wondered why anyone so rich and so beautiful should ever be unhappy – for I had been schooled by poverty to believe that money is the first essential of happiness – and yet her unhappiness was as evident as her beauty, or the luxury that enveloped her. At that instant I felt that I hated Mr. Vanderbridge, for whatever the secret tragedy of their marriage might be, I instinctively knew that the fault was not on the side of the wife. She was as sweet and winning as if she were still the reigning beauty in the academy for young ladies. I knew with a knowledge deeper than any conviction that she was not to blame, and if she wasn’t to blame, then who under heaven could be at fault except her husband?

In a few minutes a friend came in to tea, and I went upstairs to my room, and unpacked the blue taffeta dress I had bought for my sister’s wedding. I was still doubtfully regarding it when there was a knock at my door, and the maid with the sad face came in to bring me a pot of tea. After she had placed the tray on the table, she stood nervously twisting a napkin in her hands while she waited for me to leave my unpacking and sit down in the easy chair she had drawn up under the lamp.

“How do you think Mrs. Vanderbridge is looking?” she asked abruptly in a voice that held a breathless note of suspense. Her nervousness and the queer look in her face made me stare at her sharply. This was a house, I was beginning to feel, where everybody, from the mistress down, wanted to question me. Even the silent maid had found voice for interrogation.

“I think her the loveliest person I’ve ever seen,” I answered after a moment’s hesitation. There couldn’t be any harm in telling her how much I admired her mistress.

“Yes, she is lovely – everyone thinks so – and her nature is as sweet as her face.” She was becoming loquacious. “I have never had a lady who was so sweet and kind. She hasn’t always been rich, and that may be the reason she never seems to grow hard and selfish, the reason she spends so much of her life thinking of other people. It’s been six years now, ever since her marriage, that I’ve lived with her, and in all that time I’ve never had a cross word from her.”

“One can see that. With everything she has, she ought to be as happy as the day is long.”

“She ought to be.” Her voice dropped, and I saw her glance suspiciously at the door, which she had closed when she entered. “She ought to be, but she isn’t. I have never seen anyone so unhappy as she has been of late – ever since last summer. I suppose I oughtn’t to talk about it, but I’ve kept it to myself so long that I feel as if it was killing me. If she was my own sister, I couldn’t be any fonder of her, and yet I have to see her suffer day after day, and not say a word – not even to her. She isn’t the sort of lady you could speak to about a thing like that.”

She broke down, and dropping on the rug at my feet, hid her face in her hands. It was plain that she was suffering acutely, and while I patted her shoulder, I thought what a wonderful mistress Mrs. Vanderbridge must be to have attached a servant to her so strongly.

“You must remember that I am a stranger in the house, that I scarcely know her, that I’ve never so much as laid eyes on her husband,” I said warningly, for I’ve always avoided, as far as possible, the confidences of servants.

“But you look as if you could be trusted.” The maid’s nerves, as well as the mistress’s, were on edge, I could see. “And she needs somebody who can help her. She needs a real friend – somebody who will stand by her no matter what happens.”

Again, as in the room downstairs, there flashed through my mind the suspicion that I had got into a place where people took drugs or drink – or were all out of their minds. I had heard of such houses.

“How can I help her? She won’t confide in me, and even if she did, what could I do for her?”

“You can stand by and watch. You can come between her and harm – if you see it.” She had risen from the floor and stood wiping her reddened eyes on the napkin. “I don’t know what it is, but I know it is there. I feel it even when I can’t see it.”

Yes, they were all out of their minds; there couldn’t be any other explanation. The whole episode was incredible. It was the kind of thing, I kept telling myself, that did not happen. Even in a book nobody could believe it.

“But her husband? He is the one who must protect her.”

She gave me a blighting look. “He would if he could. He isn’t to blame – you mustn’t think that. He is one of the best men in the world, but he can’t help her. He can’t help her because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t see it.”

A bell rang somewhere, and catching up the tea-tray, she paused just long enough to throw me a pleading word, “Stand between her and harm, if you see it.”

When she had gone I locked the door after her, and turned on all the lights in the room. Was there really a tragic mystery in the house, or were they all mad, as I had first imagined? The feeling of apprehension, of vague uneasiness, which had come to me when I entered the iron doors, swept over me in a wave while I sat there in the soft glow of the shaded electric light. Something was wrong. Somebody was making that lovely woman unhappy, and who, in the name of reason, could this somebody be except her husband? Yet the maid had spoken of him as “one of the best men in the world,” and it was impossible to doubt the tearful sincerity of her voice. Well, the riddle was too much for me. I gave it up at last with a sigh – dreading the hour that would call me downstairs to meet Mr. Vanderbridge. I felt in every nerve and fiber of my body that I should hate him the moment I looked at him.

But at eight o’clock, when I went reluctantly downstairs, I had a surprise. Nothing could have been kinder than the way Mr. Vanderbridge greeted me, and I could tell as soon as I met his eyes that there wasn’t anything vicious or violent in his nature. He reminded me more than ever of the portrait in the loan collection, and though he was so much older than the Florentine nobleman, he had the same thoughtful look. Of course I am not an artist, but I have always tried, in my way, to be a reader of personality; and it didn’t take a particularly keen observer to discern the character and intellect in Mr. Vanderbridge’s face. Even now I remember it as the noblest face I have ever seen; and unless I had possessed at least a shade of penetration, I doubt if I should have detected the melancholy. For it was only when he was thinking deeply that this sadness seemed to spread like a veil over his features. At other times he was cheerful and even gay in his manner; and his rich dark eyes would light up now and then with irrepressible humor. From the way he looked at his wife I could tell that there was no lack of love or tenderness on his side any more than there was on hers. It was obvious that he was still as much in love with her as he had been before his marriage, and my immediate perception of this only deepened the mystery that enveloped them. If the fault wasn’t his and wasn’t hers, then who was responsible for the shadow that hung over the house?

For the shadow was there. I could feel it, vague and dark, while we talked about the war and the remote possibilities of peace in the spring. Mrs. Vanderbridge looked young and lovely in her gown of white satin with pearls on her bosom, but her violet eyes were almost black in the candlelight, and I had a curious feeling that this blackness was the color of thought. Something troubled her to despair, yet I was as positive as I could be of anything I had ever been told that she had breathed no word of this anxiety or distress to her husband. Devoted as they were, a nameless dread, fear, or apprehension divided them. It was the thing I had felt from the moment I entered the house; the thing I had heard in the tearful voice of the maid. One could scarcely call it horror, because it was too vague, too impalpable, for so vivid a name; yet, after all these quiet months, horror is the only word I can think of that in any way expresses the emotion which pervaded the house.

I had never seen so beautiful a dinner table, and I was gazing with pleasure at the damask and glass and silver – there was a silver basket of chrysanthemums, I remember, in the center of the table – when I noticed a nervous movement of Mrs. Vanderbridge’s head, and saw her glance hastily towards the door and the staircase beyond. We had been talking animatedly, and as Mrs. Vanderbridge turned away, I had just made a remark to her husband, who appeared to have fallen into a sudden fit of abstraction, and was gazing thoughtfully over his soup-plate at the white and yellow chrysanthemums. It occurred to me, while I watched him, that he was probably absorbed in some financial problem, and I regretted that I had been so careless as to speak to him. To my surprise, however, he replied immediately in a natural tone, and I saw, or imagined that I saw, Mrs. Vanderbridge throw me a glance of gratitude and relief. I can’t remember what we were talking about, but I recall perfectly that the conversation kept up pleasantly, without a break, until dinner was almost half over. The roast had been served, and I was in the act of helping myself to potatoes, when I became aware that Mr. Vanderbridge had again fallen into his reverie. This time he scarcely seemed to hear his wife’s voice when she spoke to him, and I watched the sadness cloud his face while he continued to stare straight ahead of him with a look that was almost yearning in its intensity.

Again I saw Mrs. Vanderbridge, with her nervous gesture, glance in the direction of the hall, and to my amazement, as she did so, a woman’s figure glided noiselessly over the old Persian rug at the door, and entered the dining-room. I was wondering why no one spoke to her, why she spoke to no one, when I saw her sink into a chair on the other side of Mr. Vanderbridge and unfold her napkin. She was quite young, younger even than Mrs. Vanderbridge, and though she was not really beautiful, she was the most graceful creature I had ever imagined. Her dress was of gray stuff, softer and more clinging than silk, and of a peculiar misty texture and color, and her parted hair lay like twilight on either side of her forehead. She was not like anyone I had ever seen before – she appeared so much frailer, so much more elusive, as if she would vanish if you touched her. I can’t describe, even months afterward, the singular way in which she attracted and repelled me.

At first I glanced inquiringly at Mrs. Vanderbridge, hoping that she would introduce me, but she went on talking rapidly in an intense, quivering voice, without noticing the presence of her guest by so much as the lifting of her eyelashes. Mr. Vanderbridge still sat there, silent and detached, and all the time the eyes of the stranger – starry eyes with a mist over them – looked straight through me at the tapestried wall at my back. I knew she didn’t see me and that it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to her if she had seen me. In spite of her grace and her girlishness I did not like her, and I felt that this aversion was not on my side alone. I do not know how I received the impression that she hated Mrs. Vanderbridge – never once had she glanced in her direction – yet I was aware, from the moment of her entrance, that she was bristling with animosity, though animosity is too strong a word for the resentful spite, like the jealous rage of a spoiled child, which gleamed now and then in her eyes. I couldn’t think of her as wicked any more than I could think of a bad child as wicked. She was merely willful and undisciplined and – I hardly know how to convey what I mean – elfish.

After her entrance the dinner dragged on heavily. Mrs. Vanderbridge still kept up her nervous chatter, but nobody listened, for I was too embarrassed to pay any attention to what she said, and Mr. Vanderbridge had never recovered from his abstraction. He was like a man in a dream, not observing a thing that happened before him, while the strange woman sat there in the candlelight with her curious look of vagueness and unreality. To my astonishment not even the servants appeared to notice her, and though she had unfolded her napkin when she sat down, she wasn’t served with either the roast or the salad. Once or twice, particularly when a new course was served, I glanced at Mrs. Vanderbridge to see if she would rectify the mistake, but she kept her gaze fixed on her plate. It was just as if there were a conspiracy to ignore the presence of the stranger, though she had been, from the moment of her entrance, the dominant figure at the table. You tried to pretend she wasn’t there, and yet you knew – you knew vividly that she was gazing insolently straight through you.

The dinner lasted, it seemed, for hours, and you may imagine my relief when at last Mrs. Vanderbridge rose and led the way back into the drawing-room. At first I thought the stranger would follow us, but when I glanced round from the hall she was still sitting there beside Mr. Vanderbridge, who was smoking a cigar with his coffee.

“Usually he takes his coffee with me,” said Mrs. Vanderbridge, “but tonight he has things to think over.”

“I thought he seemed absent-minded.”

“You noticed it, then?” She turned to me with her straightforward glance. “I always wonder how much strangers notice. He hasn’t been well of late, and he has these spells of depression. Nerves are dreadful things, aren’t they?”

I laughed. “So I’ve heard, but I’ve never been able to afford them.”

“Well, they do cost a great deal, don’t they?” She had a trick of ending her sentences with a question. “I hope your room is comfortable, and that you don’t feel timid about being alone on that floor. If you haven’t nerves, you can’t get nervous, can you?”

“No, I can’t get nervous.” Yet while I spoke, I was conscious of a shiver deep down in me, as if my senses reacted again to the dread that permeated the atmosphere.

As soon as I could, I escaped to my room, and I was sitting there over a book, when the maid – her name was Hopkins, I had discovered – came in on the pretext of inquiring if I had everything I needed. One of the innumerable servants had already turned down my bed, so when Hopkins appeared at the door, I suspected at once that there was a hidden motive underlying her ostensible purpose.

“Mrs. Vanderbridge told me to look after you,” she began. “She is afraid you will be lonely until you learn the way of things.”

“No, I’m not lonely,” I answered. “I’ve never had time to be lonely.”

“I used to be like that; but time hangs heavy on my hands now. That’s why I’ve taken to knitting.” She held out a gray yarn muffler. “I had an operation a year ago, and since then Mrs. Vanderbridge has had another maid – a French one – to sit up for her at night and undress her. She is always so fearful of overtaxing us, though there isn’t really enough work for two lady’s-maids, because she is so thoughtful that she never gives any trouble if she can help it.”

“It must be nice to be rich,” I said idly, as I turned a page of my book. Then I added almost before I realized what I was saying, “The other lady doesn’t look as if she had so much money.”

Her face turned paler if that were possible, and for a minute I thought she was going to faint. “The other lady?”

“I mean the one who came down late to dinner – the one in the gray dress. She wore no jewels, and her dress wasn’t low in the neck.”

“Then you saw her?” There was a curious flicker in her face as if her pallor came and went.

“We were at the table when she came in. Has Mr. Vanderbridge a secretary who lives in the house?”

“No, he hasn’t a secretary except at his office. When he wants one at the house, he telephones to his office.”

“I wondered why she came, for she didn’t eat any dinner, and nobody spoke to her – not even Mr. Vanderbridge.”

“Oh, he never speaks to her. Thank God, it hasn’t come to that yet.”

“Then why does she come? It must be dreadful to be treated like that, and before the servants, too. Does she come often?”

“There are months and months when she doesn’t. I can always tell by the way Mrs. Vanderbridge picks up. You wouldn’t know her, she is so full of life – the very picture of happiness. Then one evening she – the Other One, I mean – comes back again, just as she did tonight, just as she did last summer, and it all begins over from the beginning.”

“But can’t they keep her out – the Other One? Why do they let her in?”

“Mrs. Vanderbridge tries hard. She tries all she can every minute. You saw her tonight?”

“And Mr. Vanderbridge? Can’t he help her?”

She shook her head with an ominous gesture. “He doesn’t know.”

“He doesn’t know she is there? Why, she was close by him. She never took her eyes off him except when she was staring through me at the wall.”

“Oh, he knows she is there, but not in that way. He doesn’t know that anyone else knows.”

I gave it up, and after a minute she said in a suppressed voice, “It seems strange that you should have seen her. I never have.”

“But you know all about her.”

“I know and I don’t know. Mrs. Vanderbridge lets things drop sometimes – she gets ill and feverish very easily – but she never tells me anything outright. She isn’t that sort.”

“Haven’t the servants told you about her – the Other One?”

At this, I thought, she seemed startled. “Oh, they don’t know anything to tell. They feel that something is wrong; that is why they never stay longer than a week or two – we’ve had eight butlers since autumn – but they never see what it is.”

She stooped to pick up the ball of yarn which had rolled under my chair. “If the time ever comes when you can stand between them, you will do it?” she asked.

“Between Mrs. Vanderbridge and the Other One?”

Her look answered me.

“You think, then, that she means harm to her?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows – but she is killing her.”

The clock struck ten, and I returned to my book with a yawn, while Hopkins gathered up her work and went out, after wishing me a formal good night. The odd part about our secret conferences was that as soon as they were over, we began to pretend so elaborately to each other that they had never been.

“I’ll tell Mrs. Vanderbridge that you are very comfortable,” was the last remark Hopkins made before she sidled out of the door and left me alone with the mystery.

It was one of those situations – I am obliged to repeat this over and over – that was too preposterous for me to believe in even while I was surrounded and overwhelmed by its reality. I didn’t dare face what I thought, I didn’t dare face even what I felt; but I went to bed shivering in a warm room, while I resolved passionately that if the chance ever came to me I would stand between Mrs. Vanderbridge and this unknown evil that threatened her.

In the morning Mrs. Vanderbridge went out shopping, and I did not see her until the evening, when she passed me on the staircase as she was going out to dinner and the opera. She was radiant in blue velvet, with diamonds in her hair and at her throat, and I wondered again how anyone so lovely could ever be troubled.

“I hope you had a pleasant day, Miss Wrenn,” she said kindly. “I have been too busy to get off any letters, but tomorrow we shall begin early.” Then, as if from an afterthought, she looked back and added, “There are some new novels in my sitting-room. You might care to look over them.”

When she had gone, I went upstairs to the sitting-room and turned over the books, but I couldn’t, to save my life, force an interest in printed romances after meeting Mrs. Vanderbridge and remembering the mystery that surrounded her. I wondered if “the Other One,” as Hopkins called her, lived in the house, and I was still wondering this when the maid came in and began putting the table to rights.

“Do they dine out often?” I asked.

“They used to, but since Mr. Vanderbridge hasn’t been so well, Mrs. Vanderbridge doesn’t like to go without him. She only went tonight because he begged her to.”

She had barely finished speaking when the door opened, and Mr. Vanderbridge came in and sat down in one of the big velvet chairs before the wood fire. He had not noticed us, for one of his moods was upon him, and I was about to slip out as noiselessly as I could when I saw that the Other One was standing in the patch of firelight on the hearthrug. I had not seen her come in, and Hopkins evidently was still unaware of her presence, for while I was watching, I saw the maid turn towards her with a fresh log for the fire. At the moment it occurred to me that Hopkins must be either blind or drunk, for without hesitating in her advance, she moved on the stranger, holding the huge hickory log out in front of her. Then, before I could utter a sound or stretch out a hand to stop her, I saw her walk straight through the gray figure and carefully place the log on the andirons.

So she isn’t real, after all, she is merely a phantom, I found myself thinking, as I fled from the room, and hurried along the hall to the staircase. She is only a ghost, and nobody believes in ghosts any longer. She is something that I know doesn’t exist, yet even though she can’t possibly be, I can swear that I have seen her. My nerves were so shaken by the discovery that as soon as I reached my room I sank in a heap on the rug, and it was here that Hopkins found me a little later when she came to bring me an extra blanket.

“You looked so upset I thought you might have seen something,” she said. “Did anything happen while you were in the room?”

“She was there all the time – every blessed minute. You walked right through her when you put the log on the fire. Is it possible that you didn’t see her?”

“No, I didn’t see anything out of the way.” She was plainly frightened. “Where was she standing?”

“On the hearthrug in front of Mr. Vanderbridge. To reach the fire you had to walk straight through her, for she didn’t move. She didn’t give way an inch.”

“Oh, she never gives way. She never gives way, living or dead.”

This was more than human nature could stand. “In heaven’s name,” I cried irritably, “who is she?”

“Don’t you know?” She appeared genuinely surprised. “Why, she is the other Mrs. Vanderbridge. She died fifteen years ago, just a year after they were married, and people say a scandal was hushed up about her, which he never knew. She isn’t a good sort, that’s what I think of her, though they say he almost worshiped her.”

“And she still has this hold on him?”

“He can’t shake it off, that’s what’s the matter with him, and if it goes on, he will end his days in an asylum. You see, she was very young, scarcely more than a girl, and he got the idea in his head that it was marrying him that killed her. If you want to know what I think, I believe she puts it there for a purpose.”

“You mean—?” I was so completely at sea that I couldn’t frame a rational question.

“I mean she haunts him purposely in order to drive him out of his mind. She was always that sort, jealous and exacting, the kind that clutches and strangles a man, and I’ve often thought, though I’ve no head for speculation, that we carry into the next world the traits and feelings that have got the better of us in this one. It seems to me only common sense to believe that we’re obliged to work them off somewhere until we are free of them. That is the way my first lady used to talk, anyhow, and I’ve never found anybody that could give me a more sensible idea.”

“And isn’t there any way to stop it? What has Mrs. Vanderbridge done?”

“Oh, she can’t do anything now. It has got beyond her, though she has had doctor after doctor, and tried everything she could think of. But, you see, she is handicapped because she can’t mention it to her husband. He doesn’t know that she knows.”

“And she won’t tell him?”

“She is the sort that would die first – just the opposite from the Other One – for she leaves him free, she never clutches and strangles. It isn’t her way.” For a moment she hesitated, and then added grimly – “I’ve wondered if you could do anything?”

“If I could? Why, I am a perfect stranger to them all.”

“That’s why I’ve been thinking it. Now, if you could corner her someday – the Other One – and tell her up and down to her face what you think of her.”

The idea was so ludicrous that it made me laugh in spite of my shaken nerves. “They would fancy me out of my wits! Imagine stopping an apparition and telling it what you think of it!”

“Then you might try talking it over with Mrs. Vanderbridge. It would help her to know that you see her also.”

But the next morning, when I went down to Mrs. Vanderbridge’s room, I found that she was too ill to see me. At noon a trained nurse came on the case, and for a week we took our meals together in the morning-room upstairs. She appeared competent enough, but I am sure that she didn’t so much as suspect that there was anything wrong in the house except the influenza which had attacked Mrs. Vanderbridge the night of the opera. Never once during that week did I catch a glimpse of the Other One, though I felt her presence whenever I left my room and passed through the hall below. I knew all the time as well as if I had seen her that she was hidden there, watching, watching—

At the end of the week Mrs. Vanderbridge sent for me to write some letters, and when I went into her room, I found her lying on the couch with a tea-table in front of her. She asked me to make the tea because she was still so weak, and I saw that she looked flushed and feverish, and that her eyes were unnaturally large and bright. I hoped she wouldn’t talk to me, because people in that state are apt to talk too much and then to blame the listener; but I had hardly taken my seat at the tea-table before she said in a hoarse voice – the cold had settled on her chest:

“Miss Wrenn, I have wanted to ask you ever since the other evening – did you – did you see anything unusual at dinner? From your face when you came out I thought – I thought—”

I met this squarely. “That I might have? Yes, I did see something.”

“You saw her?”

“I saw a woman come in and sit down at the table, and I wondered why no one served her. I saw her quite distinctly.”

“A small woman, thin and pale, in a gray dress?”

“She was so vague and – and misty, you know what I mean, that it is hard to describe her; but I should know her again anywhere. She wore her hair parted and drawn down over her ears. It was very dark and fine – as fine as spun silk.”

We were speaking in low voices, and unconsciously we had moved closer together while my idle hands left the tea things.

“Then you know,” she said earnestly, “that she really comes – that I am not out of my mind – that it is not an hallucination?”

“I know that I saw her. I would swear to it. But doesn’t Mr. Vanderbridge see her also?”

“Not as we see her. He thinks that she is in his mind only.” Then, after an uncomfortable silence, she added suddenly, “She is really a thought, you know. She is his thought of her – but he doesn’t know that she is visible to the rest of us.”

“And he brings her back by thinking of her?”

She leaned nearer while a quiver passed over her features and the flush deepened in her cheeks. “That is the only way she comes back – the only way she has the power to come back – as a thought. There are months and months when she leaves us in peace because he is thinking of other things, but of late, since his illness, she has been with him almost constantly.” A sob broke from her, and she buried her face in her hands. “I suppose she is always trying to come – only she is too vague – and hasn’t any form that we can see except when he thinks of her as she used to look when she was alive. His thought of her is like that, hurt and tragic and revengeful. You see, he feels that he ruined her life because she died when the child was coming – a month before it would have been born.”

“And if he were to see her differently, would she change? Would she cease to be revengeful if he stopped thinking her so?”

“God only knows. I’ve wondered and wondered how I might move her to pity.”

“Then you feel that she is really there? That she exists outside of his mind?”

“How can I tell? What do any of us know of the world beyond? She exists as much as I exist to you or you to me. Isn’t thought all that there is – all that we know?”

This was deeper than I could follow; but in order not to appear stupid, I murmured sympathetically,

“And does she make him unhappy when she comes?”

“She is killing him – and me. I believe that is why she does it.”

“Are you sure that she could stay away? When he thinks of her isn’t she obliged to come back?”

“Oh, I’ve asked that question over and over! In spite of his calling her so unconsciously, I believe she comes of her own will. I have always the feeling – it has never left me for an instant – that she could appear differently if she would. I have studied her for years until I know her like a book, and though she is only an apparition, I am perfectly positive that she wills evil to us both. Don’t you think he would change that if he could? Don’t you think he would make her kind instead of vindictive if he had the power?”

“But if he could remember her as loving and tender?”

“I don’t know. I give it up – but it is killing me.”

It was killing her. As the days passed I began to realize that she had spoken the truth. I watched her bloom fade slowly and her lovely features grow pinched and thin like the features of a starved person. The harder she fought the apparition, the more I saw that the battle was a losing one, and that she was only wasting her strength. So impalpable yet so pervasive was the enemy that it was like fighting a poisonous odor. There was nothing to wrestle with, and yet there was everything. The struggle was wearing her out – was, as she had said, actually “killing her”; but the physician who dosed her daily with drugs – there was need now of a physician – had not the faintest idea of the malady he was treating. In those dreadful days I think that even Mr. Vanderbridge hadn’t a suspicion of the truth. The past was with him so constantly – he was so steeped in the memories of it – that the present was scarcely more than a dream to him. It was, you see, a reversal of the natural order of things; the thought had become more vivid to his perceptions than any object. The phantom had been victorious so far, and he was like a man recovering from the effects of a narcotic. He was only half awake, only half alive to the events through which he lived, and the people who surrounded him. Oh, I realize that I am telling my story badly! – that I am slurring over the significant interludes! My mind has dealt so long with external details that I have almost forgotten the words that express invisible things. Though the phantom in the house was more real to me than the bread I ate or the floor on which I trod, I can give you no impression of the atmosphere in which we lived day after day – of the suspense, of the dread of something we could not define, of the brooding horror that seemed to lurk in the shadows of the firelight, of the feeling always, day and night, that some unseen person was watching us. How Mrs. Vanderbridge stood it without losing her mind, I have never known; and even now I am not sure that she could have kept her reason if the end had not come when it did. That I accidentally brought it about is one of the things in my life I am most thankful to remember.

It was an afternoon in late winter, and I had just come up from luncheon, when Mrs. Vanderbridge asked me to empty an old desk in one of the upstairs rooms. “I am sending all the furniture in that room away,” she said; “it was bought in a bad period, and I want to clear it out and make room for the lovely things we picked up in Italy. There is nothing in the desk worth saving except some old letters from Mr. Vanderbridge’s mother before her marriage.”

I was glad that she could think of anything so practical as furniture, and it was with relief that I followed her into the dim, rather musty room over the library, where the windows were all tightly closed. Years ago, Hopkins had once told me, the first Mrs. Vanderbridge had used this room for a while, and after her death her husband had been in the habit of shutting himself up alone here in the evenings. This, I inferred, was the secret reason why my employer was sending the furniture away. She had resolved to clear the house of every association with the past.

For a few minutes we sorted the letters in the drawers of the desk, and then, as I expected, Mrs. Vanderbridge became suddenly bored by the task she had undertaken. She was subject to these nervous reactions, and I was prepared for them even when they seized her so spasmodically. I remember that she was in the very act of glancing over an old letter when she rose impatiently, tossed it into the fire unread, and picked up a magazine she had thrown down on a chair.

“Go over them by yourself, Miss Wrenn,” she said, and it was characteristic of her nature that she should assume my trustworthiness. “If anything seems worth saving you can file it – but I’d rather die than have to wade through all this.”

They were mostly personal letters, and while I went on, carefully filing them, I thought how absurd it was of people to preserve so many papers that were entirely without value. Mr. Vanderbridge I had imagined to be a methodical man, and yet the disorder of the desk produced a painful effect on my systematic temperament. The drawers were filled with letters evidently unsorted, for now and then I came upon a mass of business receipts and acknowledgments crammed in among wedding invitations or letters from some elderly lady, who wrote interminable pale epistles in the finest and most feminine of Italian hands. That a man of Mr. Vanderbridge’s wealth and position should have been so careless about his correspondence amazed me until I recalled the dark hints Hopkins had dropped in some of her midnight conversations. Was it possible that he had actually lost his reason for months after the death of his first wife, during that year when he had shut himself alone with her memory? The question was still in my mind when my eyes fell on the envelope in my hand, and I saw that it was addressed to Mrs. Roger Vanderbridge. So this explained, in a measure at least, the carelessness and the disorder! The desk was not his, but hers, and after her death he had used it only during those desperate months when he barely opened a letter. What he had done in those long evenings when he sat alone here it was beyond me to imagine. Was it any wonder that the brooding should have permanently unbalanced his mind?

At the end of an hour I had sorted and filed the papers, with the intention of asking Mrs. Vanderbridge if she wished me to destroy the ones that seemed to be unimportant. The letters she had instructed me to keep had not come to my hand, and I was about to give up the search for them, when, in shaking the lock of one of the drawers, the door of a secret compartment fell open, and I discovered a dark object, which crumbled and dropped apart when I touched it. Bending nearer, I saw that the crumbled mass had once been a bunch of flowers, and that a streamer of purple ribbon still held together the frail structure of wire and stems. In this drawer someone had hidden a sacred treasure, and moved by a sense of romance and adventure, I gathered the dust tenderly in tissue paper, and prepared to take it downstairs to Mrs. Vanderbridge. It was not until then that some letters tied loosely together with a silver cord caught my eye, and while I picked them up, I remember thinking that they must be the ones for which I had been looking so long. Then, as the cord broke in my grasp and I gathered the letters from the lid of the desk, a word or two flashed back at me through the torn edges of the envelopes, and I realized that they were love letters written, I surmised, some fifteen years ago, by Mr. Vanderbridge to his first wife.

“It may hurt her to see them,” I thought, “but I don’t dare destroy them. There is nothing I can do except give them to her.”

As I left the room, carrying the letters and the ashes of the flowers, the idea of taking them to the husband instead of to the wife flashed through my mind. Then – I think it was some jealous feeling about the phantom that decided me – I quickened my steps to a run down the staircase.

“They would bring her back. He would think of her more than ever,” I told myself, “so he shall never see them. He shall never see them if I can prevent it.” I believe it occurred to me that Mrs. Vanderbridge would be generous enough to give them to him – she was capable of rising above her jealousy, I knew – but I determined that she shouldn’t do it until I had reasoned it out with her. “If anything on earth would bring back the Other One for good, it would be his seeing these old letters,” I repeated as I hastened down the hall.

Mrs. Vanderbridge was lying on the couch before the fire, and I noticed at once that she had been crying. The drawn look in her sweet face went to my heart, and I felt that I would do anything in the world to comfort her. Though she had a book in her hand, I could see that she had not been reading. The electric lamp on the table by her side was already lighted, leaving the rest of the room in shadow, for it was a gray day with a biting edge of snow in the air. It was all very charming in the soft light; but as soon as I entered I had a feeling of oppression that made me want to run out into the wind. If you have ever lived in a haunted house – a house pervaded by an unforgettable past – you will understand the sensation of melancholy that crept over me the minute the shadows began to fall. It was not in myself – of this I am sure, for I have naturally a cheerful temperament – it was in the space that surrounded us and the air we breathed.

I explained to her about the letters, and then, kneeling on the rug in front of her, I emptied the dust of the flowers into the fire. There was, though I hate to confess it, a vindictive pleasure in watching it melt into the flames; and at the moment I believe I could have burned the apparition as thankfully. The more I saw of the Other One, the more I found myself accepting Hopkins’s judgment of her. Yes, her behavior, living and dead, proved that she was not “a good sort.”

My eyes were still on the flames when a sound from Mrs. Vanderbridge – half a sigh, half a sob – made me turn quickly and look up at her.

“But this isn’t his handwriting,” she said in a puzzled tone. “They are love letters, and they are to her – but they are not from him.” For a moment or two she was silent, and I heard the pages rustle in her hands as she turned them impatiently. “They are not from him,” she repeated presently, with an exultant ring in her voice. “They are written after her marriage, but they are from another man.” She was as sternly tragic as an avenging fate. “She wasn’t faithful to him while she lived. She wasn’t faithful to him even while he was hers—”

With a spring I had risen from my knees and was bending over her.

“Then you can save him from her. You can win him back! You have only to show him the letters, and he will believe.”

“Yes, I have only to show him the letters.” She was looking beyond me into the dusky shadows of the firelight, as if she saw the Other One standing there before her. “I have only to show him the letters,” I knew now that she was not speaking to me, “and he will believe.”

“Her power over him will be broken,” I cried out. “He will think of her differently. Oh, don’t you see? Can’t you see? It is the only way to make him think of her differently. It is the only way to break forever the thought that draws her back to him.”

“Yes, I see, it is the only way,” she said slowly; and the words were still on her lips when the door opened and Mr. Vanderbridge entered.

“I came for a cup of tea,” he began, and added with playful tenderness, “What is the only way?”

It was the crucial moment, I realized – it was the hour of destiny for these two – and while he sank wearily into a chair, I looked imploringly at his wife and then at the letters lying scattered loosely about her. If I had had my will I should have flung them at him with a violence which would have startled him out of his lethargy. Violence, I felt, was what he needed – violence, a storm, tears, reproaches – all the things he would never get from his wife.

For a minute or two she sat there, with the letters before her, and watched him with her thoughtful and tender gaze. I knew from her face, so lovely and yet so sad, that she was looking again at invisible things – at the soul of the man she loved, not at the body. She saw him, detached and spiritualized, and she saw also the Other One – for while we waited I became slowly aware of the apparition in the firelight – of the white face and the cloudy hair and the look of animosity and bitterness in the eyes. Never before had I been so profoundly convinced of the malignant will veiled by that thin figure. It was as if the visible form were only a spiral of gray smoke covering a sinister purpose.

“The only way,” said Mrs. Vanderbridge, “is to fight fairly even when one fights evil.” Her voice was like a bell, and as she spoke, she rose from the couch and stood there in her glowing beauty confronting the pale ghost of the past. There was a light about her that was almost unearthly – the light of triumph. The radiance of it blinded me for an instant. It was like a flame, clearing the atmosphere of all that was evil, of all that was poisonous and deadly. She was looking directly at the phantom, and there was no hate in her voice – there was only a great pity, a great sorrow and sweetness.

“I can’t fight you that way,” she said, and I knew that for the first time she had swept aside subterfuge and evasion, and was speaking straight to the presence before her. “After all, you are dead and I am living, and I cannot fight you that way. I give up everything. I give him back to you. Nothing is mine that I cannot win and keep fairly. Nothing is mine that belongs really to you.”

Then, while Mr. Vanderbridge rose, with a start of fear, and came towards her, she bent quickly, and flung the letters into the fire. When he would have stooped to gather the unburned pages, her lovely flowing body curved between his hands and the flames; and so transparent, so ethereal she looked, that I saw – or imagined that I saw – the firelight shine through her. “The only way, my dear, is the right way,” she said softly.

The next instant – I don’t know to this day how or when it began – I was aware that the apparition had drawn nearer, and that the dread and fear, the evil purpose, were no longer a part of her. I saw her clearly for a moment – saw her as I had never seen her before – young and gentle and – yes, this is the only word for it – loving. It was just as if a curse had turned into a blessing, for, while she stood there, I had a curious sensation of being enfolded in a kind of spiritual glow and comfort – only words are useless to describe the feeling because it wasn’t in the least like anything else I had ever known in my life. It was light without heat, glow without light – and yet it was none of these things. The nearest I can come to it is to call it a sense of blessedness – of blessedness that made you at peace with everything you had once hated.

Not until afterward did I realize that it was the victory of good over evil. Not until afterward did I discover that Mrs. Vanderbridge had triumphed over the past in the only way that she could triumph. She had won, not by resisting, but by accepting; not by violence, but by gentleness; not by grasping, but by renouncing. Oh, long, long afterward, I knew that she had robbed the phantom of power over her by robbing it of hatred. She had changed the thought of the past, in that lay her victory.

At the moment I did not understand this. I did not understand it even when I looked again for the apparition in the firelight, and saw that it had vanished. There was nothing there – nothing except the pleasant flicker of light and shadow on the old Persian rug.

THE HAUNTED DOLLS’ HOUSE

M. R. James

1923

“I suppose you get stuff of that kind through your hands pretty often?” said Mr. Dillet, as he pointed with his stick to an object which shall be described when the time comes: and when he said it, he lied in his throat, and knew that he lied. Not once in twenty years – perhaps not once in a lifetime – could Mr. Chittenden, skilled as he was in ferreting out the forgotten treasures of half a dozen counties, expect to handle such a specimen. It was collectors’ palaver, and Mr. Chittenden recognized it as such.

“Stuff of that kind, Mr. Dillet! It’s a museum piece, that is.”

“Well, I suppose there are museums that’ll take anything.”

“I’ve seen one, not as good as that, years back,” said Mr. Chittenden, thoughtfully. “But that’s not likely to come into the market: and I’m told they ’ave some fine ones of the period over the water. No: I’m only telling you the truth, Mr. Dillet, when I say that if you was to place an unlimited order with me for the very best that could be got – and you know I ’ave facilities for getting to know of such things, and a reputation to maintain – well, all I can say is, I should lead you straight up to that one and say, ‘I can’t do no better for you than that, Sir.’”

“Hear, hear!” said Mr. Dillet, applauding ironically with the end of his stick on the floor of the shop. “How much are you sticking the innocent American buyer for it, eh?”

“Oh, I shan’t be over hard on the buyer, American or otherwise. You see, it stands this way, Mr. Dillet – if I knew just a bit more about the pedigree—”

“Or just a bit less,” Mr. Dillet put in.

“Ha, ha! you will have your joke, Sir. No, but as I was saying, if I knew just a little more than what I do about the piece – though anyone can see for themselves it’s a genuine thing, every last corner of it, and there’s not been one of my men allowed to so much as touch it since it came into the shop – there’d be another figure in the price I’m asking.”

“And what’s that: five and twenty?”

“Multiply that by three and you’ve got it, Sir. Seventy-five’s my price.”

“And fifty’s mine,” said Mr. Dillet.

The point of agreement was, of course, somewhere between the two, it does not matter exactly where – I think sixty guineas. But half an hour later the object was being packed, and within an hour Mr. Dillet had called for it in his car and driven away. Mr. Chittenden, holding the cheque in his hand, saw him off from the door with smiles, and returned, still smiling, into the parlour where his wife was making the tea. He stopped at the door.

“It’s gone,” he said.

“Thank God for that!” said Mrs. Chittenden, putting down the teapot. “Mr. Dillet, was it?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Well, I’d sooner it was him than another.”

“Oh, I don’t know, he ain’t a bad feller, my dear.”

“Maybe not, but in my opinion he’d be none the worse for a bit of a shake up.”

“Well, if that’s your opinion, it’s my opinion he’s put himself into the way of getting one. Anyhow, we shan’t have no more of it, and that’s something to be thankful for.”

And so Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden sat down to tea.

And what of Mr. Dillet and of his new acquisition? What it was, the title of this story will have told you. What it was like, I shall have to indicate as well as I can.

There was only just room enough for it in the car, and Mr. Dillet had to sit with the driver: he had also to go slow, for though the rooms of the Dolls’ House had all been stuffed carefully with soft cotton-wool, jolting was to be avoided, in view of the immense number of small objects which thronged them; and the ten-mile drive was an anxious time for him, in spite of all the precautions he insisted upon. At last his front door was reached, and Collins, the butler, came out.

“Look here, Collins, you must help me with this thing – it’s a delicate job. We must get it out upright, see? It’s full of little things that mustn’t be displaced more than we can help. Let’s see, where shall we have it? (After a pause for consideration.) Really, I think I shall have to put it in my own room, to begin with at any rate. On the big table – that’s it.”

It was conveyed – with much talking – to Mr. Dillet’s spacious room on the first floor, looking out on the drive. The sheeting was unwound from it, and the front thrown open, and for the next hour or two Mr. Dillet was fully occupied in extracting the padding and setting in order the contents of the rooms.

When this thoroughly congenial task was finished, I must say that it would have been difficult to find a more perfect and attractive specimen of a Dolls’ House in Strawberry Hill Gothic than that which now stood on Mr. Dillet’s large kneehole table, lighted up by the evening sun which came slanting through three tall sash-windows.

It was quite six feet long, including the Chapel or Oratory which flanked the front on the left as you faced it, and the stable on the right. The main block of the house was, as I have said, in the Gothic manner: that is to say, the windows had pointed arches and were surmounted by what are called ogival hoods, with crockets and finials such as we see on the canopies of tombs built into church walls. At the angles were absurd turrets covered with arched panels. The Chapel had pinnacles and buttresses, and a bell in the turret and coloured glass in the windows. When the front of the house was open you saw four large rooms, bedroom, dining-room, drawing-room and kitchen, each with its appropriate furniture in a very complete state.

The stable on the right was in two storeys, with its proper complement of horses, coaches and grooms, and with its clock and Gothic cupola for the clock bell.

Pages, of course, might be written on the outfit of the mansion – how many frying-pans, how many gilt chairs, what pictures, carpets, chandeliers, four-posters, table linen, glass, crockery and plate it possessed; but all this must be left to the imagination. I will only say that the base or plinth on which the house stood (for it was fitted with one of some depth which allowed of a flight of steps to the front door and a terrace, partly balustraded) contained a shallow drawer or drawers in which were neatly stored sets of embroidered curtains, changes of raiment for the inmates, and, in short, all the materials for an infinite series of variations and refittings of the most absorbing and delightful kind.

“Quintessence of Horace Walpole, that’s what it is: he must have had something to do with the making of it.” Such was Mr. Dillet’s murmured reflection as he knelt before it in a reverent ecstasy. “Simply wonderful; this is my day and no mistake. Five hundred pound coming in this morning for that cabinet which I never cared about, and now this tumbling into my hands for a tenth, at the very most, of what it would fetch in town. Well, well! It almost makes one afraid something’ll happen to counter it. Let’s have a look at the population, anyhow.”

Accordingly, he set them before him in a row. Again, here is an opportunity, which some would snatch at, of making an inventory of costume: I am incapable of it.

There were a gentleman and lady, in blue satin and brocade respectively. There were two children, a boy and a girl. There was a cook, a nurse, a footman, and there were the stable servants, two postilions, a coachman, two grooms.

“Anyone else? Yes, possibly.”

The curtains of the four-poster in the bedroom were closely drawn round four sides of it, and he put his finger in between them and felt in the bed. He drew the finger back hastily, for it almost seemed to him as if something had – not stirred, perhaps, but yielded – in an odd live way as he pressed it. Then he put back the curtains, which ran on rods in the proper manner, and extracted from the bed a white-haired old gentleman in a long linen nightdress and cap, and laid him down by the rest. The tale was complete.

Dinnertime was now near, so Mr. Dillet spent but five minutes in putting the lady and children into the drawing-room, the gentleman into the dining-room, the servants into the kitchen and stables, and the old man back into his bed. He retired into his dressing-room next door, and we see and hear no more of him until something like eleven o’clock at night.

His whim was to sleep surrounded by some of the gems of his collection. The big room in which we have seen him contained his bed: bath, wardrobe, and all the appliances of dressing were in a commodious room adjoining: but his four-poster, which itself was a valued treasure, stood in the large room where he sometimes wrote, and often sat, and even received visitors. Tonight he repaired to it in a highly complacent frame of mind.

There was no striking clock within earshot – none on the staircase, none in the stable, none in the distant church tower. Yet it is indubitable that Mr. Dillet was startled out of a very pleasant slumber by a bell tolling One.

He was so much startled that he did not merely lie breathless with wide-open eyes, but actually sat up in his bed.

He never asked himself, till the morning hours, how it was that, though there was no light at all in the room, the Dolls’ House on the kneehole table stood out with complete clearness. But it was so. The effect was that of a bright harvest moon shining full on the front of a big white stone mansion – a quarter of a mile away it might be, and yet every detail was photographically sharp. There were trees about it, too – trees rising behind the chapel and the house. He seemed to be conscious of the scent of a cool still September night. He thought he could hear an occasional stamp and clink from the stables, as of horses stirring. And with another shock he realized that, above the house, he was looking, not at the wall of his room with its pictures, but into the profound blue of a night sky.

There were lights, more than one, in the windows, and he quickly saw that this was no four-roomed house with a movable front, but one of many rooms, and staircases – a real house, but seen as if through the wrong end of a telescope. “You mean to show me something,” he muttered to himself, and he gazed earnestly on the lighted windows. They would in real life have been shuttered or curtained, no doubt, he thought; but, as it was, there was nothing to intercept his view of what was being transacted inside the rooms.

Two rooms were lighted – one on the ground floor to the right of the door, one upstairs, on the left – the first brightly enough, the other rather dimly. The lower room was the dining-room: a table was laid, but the meal was over, and only wine and glasses were left on the table. The man of the blue satin and the woman of the brocade were alone in the room, and they were talking very earnestly, seated close together at the table, their elbows on it: every now and again stopping to listen, as it seemed. Once he rose, came to the window and opened it and put his head out and his hand to his ear. There was a lighted taper in a silver candlestick on a sideboard. When the man left the window he seemed to leave the room also; and the lady, taper in hand, remained standing and listening. The expression on her face was that of one striving her utmost to keep down a fear that threatened to master her – and succeeding. It was a hateful face, too; broad, flat and sly. Now the man came back and she took some small thing from him and hurried out of the room. He, too, disappeared, but only for a moment or two. The front door slowly opened and he stepped out and stood on the top of the perron, looking this way and that; then turned towards the upper window that was lighted, and shook his fist.

It was time to look at that upper window. Through it was seen a four-post bed: a nurse or other servant in an armchair, evidently sound asleep; in the bed an old man lying: awake, and, one would say, anxious, from the way in which he shifted about and moved his fingers, beating tunes on the coverlet. Beyond the bed a door opened. Light was seen on the ceiling, and the lady came in: she set down her candle on a table, came to the fireside and roused the nurse. In her hand she had an old-fashioned wine bottle, ready uncorked. The nurse took it, poured some of the contents into a little silver saucepan, added some spice and sugar from casters on the table, and set it to warm on the fire. Meanwhile the old man in the bed beckoned feebly to the lady, who came to him, smiling, took his wrist as if to feel his pulse, and bit her lip as if in consternation. He looked at her anxiously, and then pointed to the window, and spoke. She nodded, and did as the man below had done; opened the casement and listened – perhaps rather ostentatiously: then drew in her head and shook it, looking at the old man, who seemed to sigh.

By this time the posset on the fire was steaming, and the nurse poured it into a small two-handled silver bowl and brought it to the bedside. The old man seemed disinclined for it and was waving it away, but the lady and the nurse together bent over him and evidently pressed it upon him. He must have yielded, for they supported him into a sitting position, and put it to his lips. He drank most of it, in several draughts, and they laid him down. The lady left the room, smiling good night to him, and took the bowl, the bottle and the silver saucepan with her. The nurse returned to the chair, and there was an interval of complete quiet.

Suddenly the old man started up in his bed – and he must have uttered some cry, for the nurse started out of her chair and made but one step of it to the bedside. He was a sad and terrible sight – flushed in the face, almost to blackness, the eyes glaring whitely, both hands clutching at his heart, foam at his lips.

For a moment the nurse left him, ran to the door, flung it wide open, and, one supposes, screamed aloud for help, then darted back to the bed and seemed to try feverishly to soothe him – to lay him down – anything. But as the lady, her husband, and several servants, rushed into the room with horrified faces, the old man collapsed under the nurse’s hands and lay back, and the features, contorted with agony and rage, relaxed slowly into calm.

A few moments later, lights showed out to the left of the house, and a coach with flambeaux drove up to the door. A white-wigged man in black got nimbly out and ran up the steps, carrying a small leather trunk-shaped box. He was met in the doorway by the man and his wife, she with her handkerchief clutched between her hands, he with a tragic face, but retaining his self-control. They led the newcomer into the dining-room, where he set his box of papers on the table, and, turning to them, listened with a face of consternation at what they had to tell. He nodded his head again and again, threw out his hands slightly, declined, it seemed, offers of refreshment and lodging for the night, and within a few minutes came slowly down the steps entering the coach and driving off the way he had come. As the man in blue watched him from the top of the steps, a smile not pleasant to see stole slowly over his fat white face. Darkness fell over the whole scene as the lights of the coach disappeared.

But Mr. Dillet remained sitting up in the bed: he had rightly guessed that there would be a sequel. The house front glimmered out again before long. But now there was a difference. The lights were in other windows, one at the top of the house, the other illuminating the range of coloured windows of the chapel. How he saw through these is not quite obvious, but he did. The interior was as carefully furnished as the rest of the establishment, with its minute red cushions on the desks, its Gothic stall-canopies, and its western gallery and pinnacled organ with gold pipes. On the centre of the black and white pavement was a bier: four tall candles burned at the corners. On the bier was a coffin covered with a pall of black velvet.

As he looked the folds of the pall stirred. It seemed to rise at one end: it slid downwards: it fell away, exposing the black coffin with its silver handles and nameplate. One of the tall candlesticks swayed and toppled over. Ask no more, but turn, as Mr. Dillet hastily did, and look in at the lighted window at the top of the house, where a boy and girl lay in two truckle-beds, and a four-poster for the nurse rose above them. The nurse was not visible for the moment; but the father and mother were there, dressed now in mourning, but with very little sign of mourning in their demeanour. Indeed, they were laughing and talking with a good deal of animation, sometimes to each other, and sometimes throwing a remark to one or other of the children, and again laughing at the answers. Then the father was seen to go on tiptoe out of the room, taking with him as he went a white garment that hung on a peg near the door. He shut the door after him. A minute or two later it was slowly opened again, and a muffled head poked round it. A bent form of sinister shape stepped across to the truckle-beds, and suddenly stopped, threw up its arms and revealed, of course, the father, laughing. The children were in agonies of terror, the boy with the bedclothes over his head, the girl throwing herself out of bed into her mother’s arms. Attempts at consolation followed – the parents took the children on their laps, patted them, picked up the white gown and showed there was no harm in it, and so forth; and at last putting the children back into bed, left the room with encouraging waves of the hand. As they left it, the nurse came in, and soon the light died down.

Still Mr. Dillet watched immovable.

A new sort of light – not of lamp or candle – a pale ugly light, began to dawn around the door-case at the back of the room. The door was opening again. The seer does not like to dwell upon what he saw entering the room: he says it might be described as a frog – the size of a man – but it had scanty white hair about its head. It was busy about the truckle-beds, but not for long. The sound of cries – faint, as if coming out of a vast distance – but, even so, infinitely appalling, reached the ear.

There were signs of a hideous commotion all over the house: lights passed along and up, and doors opened and shut, and running figures passed within the windows. The clock in the stable turret tolled one, and darkness fell again.

It was only dispelled once more, to show the house front. At the bottom of the steps dark figures were drawn up in two lines, holding flaming torches. More dark figures came down the steps, bearing, first one, then another small coffin. And the lines of torchbearers with the coffins between them moved silently onward to the left.

The hours of night passed on – never so slowly, Mr. Dillet thought. Gradually he sank down from sitting to lying in his bed – but he did not close an eye: and early next morning he sent for the doctor.

The doctor found him in a disquieting state of nerves, and recommended sea-air. To a quiet place on the East Coast he accordingly repaired by easy stages in his car.

One of the first people he met on the sea front was Mr. Chittenden, who, it appeared, had likewise been advised to take his wife away for a bit of a change.

Mr. Chittenden looked somewhat askance upon him when they met: and not without cause.

“Well, I don’t wonder at you being a bit upset, Mr. Dillet. What? yes, well, I might say ’orrible upset, to be sure, seeing what me and my poor wife went through ourselves. But I put it to you, Mr. Dillet, one of two things: was I going to scrap a lovely piece like that on the one ’and, or was I going to tell customers: ‘I’m selling you a regular picture-palace-dramar in reel life of the olden time, billed to perform regular at one o’clock a.m.’? Why, what would you ’ave said yourself? And next thing you know, two Justices of the Peace in the back parlour, and pore Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden off in a spring cart to the County Asylum and everyone in the street saying, ‘Ah, I thought it ’ud come to that. Look at the way the man drank!’ – and me next door, or next door but one, to a total abstainer, as you know. Well, there was my position. What? Me ’ave it back in the shop? Well, what do you think? No, but I’ll tell you what I will do. You shall have your money back, bar the ten pound I paid for it, and you make what you can.”

Later in the day, in what is offensively called the “smoke-room” of the hotel, a murmured conversation between the two went on for some time.

“How much do you really know about that thing, and where it came from?”

“Honest, Mr. Dillet, I don’t know the ’ouse. Of course, it came out of the lumber room of a country ’ouse – that anyone could guess. But I’ll go as far as say this, that I believe it’s not a hundred miles from this place. Which direction and how far I’ve no notion. I’m only judging by guesswork. The man as I actually paid the cheque to ain’t one of my regular men, and I’ve lost sight of him; but I ’ave the idea that this part of the country was his beat, and that’s every word I can tell you. But now, Mr. Dillet, there’s one thing that rather physicks me – that old chap – I suppose you saw him drive up to the door – I thought so: now, would he have been the medical man, do you take it? My wife would have it so, but I stuck to it that was the lawyer, because he had papers with him, and one he took out was folded up.”

“I agree,” said Mr. Dillet. “Thinking it over, I came to the conclusion that was the old man’s will, ready to be signed.”

“Just what I thought,” said Mr. Chittenden, “and I took it that will would have cut out the young people, eh? Well, well! It’s been a lesson to me, I know that. I shan’t buy no more dolls’ houses, nor waste no more money on the pictures – and as to this business of poisonin’ grandpa, well, if I know myself, I never ’ad much of a turn for that. Live and let live: that’s bin my motto throughout life, and I ain’t found it a bad one.”

Filled with these elevated sentiments, Mr. Chittenden retired to his lodgings. Mr. Dillet next day repaired to the local Institute, where he hoped to find some clue to the riddle that absorbed him. He gazed in despair at a long file of the Canterbury and York Society’s publications of the Parish Registers of the district. No print resembling the house of his nightmare was among those that hung on the staircase and in the passages. Disconsolate, he found himself at last in a derelict room, staring at a dusty model of a church in a dusty glass case: Model of St. Stephen’s Church, Coxham. Presented by J. Merewether, Esq., of Ilbridge House, 1877. The work of his ancestor James Merewether, d. 1786. There was something in the fashion of it that reminded him dimly of his horror. He retraced his steps to a wall map he had noticed, and made out that Ilbridge House was in Coxham Parish. Coxham was, as it happened, one of the parishes of which he had retained the name when he glanced over the file of printed registers, and it was not long before he found in them the record of the burial of Roger Milford, aged 76, on the 11th of September, 1757, and of Roger and Elizabeth Merewether, aged 9 and 7, on the 19th of the same month. It seemed worth while to follow up this clue, frail as it was; and in the afternoon he drove out to Coxham. The east end of the north aisle of the church is a Milford chapel, and on its north wall are tablets to the same persons; Roger, the elder, it seems, was distinguished by all the qualities which adorn “the Father, the Magistrate, and the Man”: the memorial was erected by his attached daughter Elizabeth, “who did not long survive the loss of a parent ever solicitous for her welfare, and of two amiable children.” The last sentence was plainly an addition to the original inscription.

A yet later slab told of James Merewether, husband of Elizabeth, “who in the dawn of life practised, not without success, those arts which, had he continued their exercise, might in the opinion of the most competent judges have earned for him the name of the British Vitruvius: but who, overwhelmed by the visitation which deprived him of an affectionate partner and a blooming offspring, passed his Prime and Age in a secluded yet elegant Retirement: his grateful Nephew and Heir indulges a pious sorrow by this too brief recital of his excellences.”

The children were more simply commemorated. Both died on the night of the 12th of September.

Mr. Dillet felt sure that in Ilbridge House he had found the scene of his drama. In some old sketchbook, possibly in some old print, he may yet find convincing evidence that he is right. But the Ilbridge House of today is not that which he sought; it is an Elizabethan erection of the forties, in red brick with stone quoins and dressings. A quarter of a mile from it, in a low part of the park, backed by ancient, stag-horned, ivy-strangled trees and thick undergrowth, are marks of a terraced platform overgrown with rough grass. A few stone balusters lie here and there, and a heap or two, covered with nettles and ivy, of wrought stones with badly-carved crockets. This, someone told Mr. Dillet, was the site of an older house.

As he drove out of the village, the hall clock struck four, and Mr. Dillet started up and clapped his hands to his ears. It was not the first time he had heard that bell.

Awaiting an offer from the other side of the Atlantic, the dolls’ house still reposes, carefully sheeted, in a loft over Mr. Dillet’s stables, whither Collins conveyed it on the day when Mr. Dillet started for the sea coast.