A Book of Ghosts: 17
Author: Various authors
Date: 1831-12-31T15:00:00+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
– 17 –

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 1832 ~ 1916. This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- The Silent Man
–1832
by Henry Fothergill Chorley
(1808–1872)

- The Open Door
–1882
by Mrs J.H. Riddell
(1832–1906)

- John Charrington’s Wedding
–1891
by Edith Nesbit
(1858–1924)

- The Return
–1892
by Robert Murray Gilchrist
(1868–1917)

- Herself
–1894
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
(1835–1915)

- The Mystery of the Felwyn Tunnel
–1897
by Mrs. L.T. Meade
(1844–1914)
and Robert Eustace
(1854–1943)

- The Story of Baelbrow
–1898
by E. Heron [Kate Pritchard]
(1851–1935)
and H. Heron [Hesketh Pritchard]
(1876–1922)

- “To Let”
–1906
by B. M. Croker
(1847–1920)

- The Man with the Roller
–1912
by E. G. Swain
(1861–1938)

- The Kiss
–1916
by M. E. Royce
(?–?)

THE SILENT MAN

Henry Fothergill Chorley

1832

There are periods in every man’s life overcast with gloom and difficulty – when the day is full of trouble, and the dreams of the night of disquiet; and when the pilgrim is ready to lie down with his burden and die, because there is no hand to help him. Such a period in mine was comprised in about fifteen months of the years 1793 and 1794, which I spent in a large sea-port town in the north. I was then three and twenty; and the concurrence of many perplexing and calamitous events cast upon me on my entrance into life a load of care, from the pressure of which I then thought it impossible that I should ever rise.

During the winter of 1793, I inhabited an ancient and deserted house in the quieter part of town; its extensive suites of dim and decaying rooms scantily furnished were not a residence calculated to restore a cheerful tone to my spirits. The property had been suffered to fall to ruin; and the conclusion of a long protracted lawsuit was alone awaited, to level the stately old mansion with the ground, and to dispose of the land on which it stood for more profitable purposes. Behind it lay a melancholy and weed-grown garden, shaded by large dingy elms and poplars; in the centre of this was a stagnant fish-pond, flanked on one side by a ruinous summer-house, on the other by the glassless frames of a conservatory. Beyond this dismal spectacle was seen the taper spire of a church, and, yet more dimly in the distance, cumbrous piles of warehouses, which stood up in the busier parts of town; silent edifices of wealth and activity, strangely contrasted with the desolation of the foreground.

I had sat, one night, poring over old papers, until the midnight chime warned me up stairs to rest. I had chosen my sleeping room to the front; it was small, but the better for that in a house where increase of space was also increase of dreariness. The feet of my bed faced the window; and close to my head was a door, which I could open and shut without rising. For the further understanding of my scene, I must say that my room was at the top of the principal staircase, which was lighted by an immense Venetian window in the back of the house, the height of two stories.

On the night of which I speak, I suppose that I fell asleep soon after I went to bed. I know that my dreams were of agony, for I woke with a start, and found myself sitting upright, my forehead covered with a cold perspiration. As soon, however, as I became fully awake, I was surprised with an unusual appearance upon my glass which stood upon the table in the window. In the centre of its dark, oblong field there burned a small but intense spot of steady and living fire, irregular, but unchanging, in shape, and casting no glimmer on any surrounding object. In my first confusion, I was unable to reason upon what I saw; a second look convinced me that it must arise from the reflection of light through the keyhole of my chamber-door. At once it struck me that someone must be without; and, anxious to ascertain who it could be, and with what intent come thither, I sprang out of bed, and, after waiting an instant for sound or signal without, and hearing none, I threw the door open wide.

The sight which met my eye was sufficiently awful, though different from what my heated imagination had conjured up; being neither robber nor visitant of a more appalling character (for, be it known, my present residence was haunted). When I opened the door, a flood of light brighter than the blaze of noonday burst into the room, filling every remote corner, and showing every object without – the broken balustrade of the massy oak staircase, and the cobwebs on the large, round-headed window – with wonderful directness. The tops of the trees in the garden had caught the glow; the spire of the church seemed swathed in gold; and behind these, the cause of this illumination, a volume of brilliant, wreathing fire, overtopping the tallest buildings by a height equal to their own, rose silently into the sky, while above huge clouds of crimsoned smoke rolled heavily off in the north quarter of the heavens.

Every object in the immediate neighbourhood of the scene of devastation was traced out with startling vividness: the groups of people on the tops of houses, sweeping to and fro, as small as pygmies; the ships in the river beyond were all clearly visible, and brought close to the eye. But to me the chief awe of this scene was its complete and unbroken silence. I was far too removed from it to hear the tumult in the streets, the hissing of the ascending flames, the cries of the helpless or the alarmed. The wind bore away in another direction the solemn toll of the fire-bell; and the whole scene, at that dead hour, wore the strange and awful guise of some show conjured up by a potent magician, it was so unlike any sight familiar to my previous experience.

After the silent gaze of a few instants, I dressed myself in haste; and, having called up my servant, and ordered him to sit up for me, I repaired as quickly as I could to that part of town where the conflagration was raging. It was nearly a mile from my house, but I needed no direction as to the precise spot, for crowds of awakened people were streaming thitherward from every quarter. Presently, as I advanced, their numbers became so dense as to make it a matter of some difficulty to proceed; and, long before I came within a stone’s throw of the spot, all further progress was impossible. The building on fire was a huge distillery: and, as the stores of manufactured spirits were reached, one after the other, enormous jets of intense colourless flame burst perpendicularly upward – the night fortunately being still – while every instant the fall of some floor or chimney was succeeded by a flight of sparks; and the sullen roaring of triumphant element was heard in a deep undertone amid the shouts of the firemen and the murmurs of the vast concourse of spectators. To give a yet deeper interest to the scene, the two unhappy watchmen belonging in the premises had been seen to perish in the flames, the spread of which had been so rapid that all that could now be hoped for was to prevent their communicating with the surrounding streets. The fire had already destroyed a court of small houses in the immediate vicinity.

Anxious to approach as near as I possibly could, it occurred to me that I might perhaps effect my purpose through a quiet, narrow street, terminating only in a warehouse which stood almost immediately opposite to the burning pile. Through this there was a thoroughfare allowed by sufferance, and with all speed I made my way around thither, through a labyrinth of alleys, in my eagerness forgetting that this warehouse was enclosed in a court shut up by strong gates, which were not likely to be open during a time of such confusion. This I found to be the case: the building was an empty one, and seemed to be left to its fate; and I was turning away in disappointment, when my attention was arrested by the scene without, which was to me more impressive than any I had yet witnessed.

The street in question was one of those anomalies which are found in the densest hearts of large towns, being quiet, clean, and dull; and the houses, of antique fashion, had been obviously built for some class of people better than that by which they were now occupied. On the causeways and in the windows stood the scared inhabitants, looking upwards in silence; and every now and then some strong man appeared reeling under a load of bedding or furniture belonging to the poor families who had lived in the court close to the distillery, and, having been awakened to a sense of their danger only just in time to save their lives, had been able to rescue little of their property. It was a touching sight to examine one face after another and to read one strong prevailing emotion upon every countenance; and it was grievous to hear the wailings of the poor homeless creatures who had been kindly received in the different houses, many of whom had lost all that they were worth in the world, the hardily accumulated earnings of years.

Apart from these and close in the shadow of the courtyard wall at the end of the street, I presently discovered an old man sitting disconsolately on a pile of stones. He was neatly dressed, but bare-headed; and his white locks were long and few. Beside him was a large chest; and while everyone else seemed to have his counsellor and comforter, this sufferer alone was neglected , if not shunned; and he looked as if rooted there in stupid despair, reckless as to what could now befall him, and neither soliciting nor receiving the assistance of anyone. There was a mixture of meekness and agony in his fixed gaze, and a listless indifference in his attitude that arrested my compassion at once; and I asked a respectable woman, who was standing on a step with a child in her arms, if she knew who he was, and why the same good offices that were extended to his neighbours were so pointedly withheld from him.

“Why, sir,” she answered readily, “I should like to know who would dare to speak with him or offer him anything. He’s unlucky.”

“You mean that he is not in his right mind,” said I.

“I do not know that,” she replied, shaking her head oracularly. “He has lived in yonder court for these six and twenty years, and I do not think in that time he has said as many words to any of us – nobody but himself ever entered his house.”

“What is his name?”

“He is called Graham, we believe,” she said, “but we are not sure; no letters have ever come to him that we know of. He is well off in the world, for he does no work – and we are used to call him ‘the Silent Man.’ The children are afraid of him, though his custom was to go little abroad till it was dusk. He neither lends nor borrows, nor, so far as we have seen, goes to church.”

“And what is to become of him now that his house is burned down? Is he to sit here in the cold all night? I will go—”

“Lord bless you, sir!” said the good dame, laying her hand upon my arm, “don’t think of such a thing. Take care what you do; he will shift for himself somehow or other, I have no doubt.” And when she saw that I was bent upon accosting this singular being, she turned away from me hastily, as if afraid to share in the peril which, as her speech implied, I should bring upon myself, by offering him any assistance.

But my resolution was taken. I went up to the subject of our discourse, and touched him lightly on the shoulder. It would seem that he had been in a reverie; for he started, and looked up suddenly, and I was anew struck by the singular cast of his face. “You seem cold, my friend,” said I; “will you not come under shelter?” He made no answer, but shook his head.

“At least,” persevered I, “you cannot intend to remain where you are – it will be your death. Will you come home with me for the night, if you have no further occasion to stay here? I cannot promise you good accommodation, but, at all events, warmth and shelter – or, do you wait for someone else to join you?”

He answered in a low voice, but it was the voice and with the accent of a gentleman, “No one.”

“Well then,” said I, “you had surely better accept my offer – or, can anything more be done for you here? Is this your property—” I hesitated as I spoke, for I imagined him to be stupefied by the extent of his calamity.

“Beside me,” was his answer, pointing to the large chest.

“Then I beg you to make up your mind at once. It is far to go, it is true; but anything is better than staying here. Come – let me assist you to rise,” said I, taking hold of his arm.

He arose mechanically, as though he only half comprehended my meaning. “I do not know,” said he, in a bewildered manner, “but I suppose it is best. Thank you.”

I could make little of these broken words, but the supposition that his intellects were disordered, or that he was depressed beyond the power of speech by the total want of sympathy which had been shown him. But the common duty of humanity was not to be misunderstood; and, after addressing to him one or two other questions, to which he seemed unable or unwilling to reply, I gave him my arm. He looked wistfully down upon the chest; it was large, but, upon attempting to raise it, I felt it to be so light that I almost thought it must be empty. So, without making any further difficulties, I took it under my other arm, and, covering his bare head with my hat, we walked away slowly through the wondering people, who gave way as we passed. I was in hopes that my companion was so much absorbed in his own feelings that he did not notice this new gesture of distrust.

I never felt so totally in the dark as to what I was doing at that moment. He could not or would not speak in answer to my further inquiries, but tottered on, leaning upon my arm. It was nearly an hour before we reached the old house; and he seemed on our arrival to be so much exhausted that I directed my servant to carry him upstairs and lay him upon my bed. I caused a fire to be lighted, and administered to him such cordials as were expedient, without any resistance on his part. The only sign of consciousness that he showed was suddenly rising up and looking round him; his eye lighted upon his chest, and then, as if he were satisfied that his treasure was safe, he sunk back, and in a few moments was quietly asleep.

For me sleep was out of the question. I sat by his bedside all night, wondering in what strange new adventure I had involved myself, and shaping a thousand conjectures as to what might happen next. My mysterious guest could hardly be a poor man, for his linen was beautifully fine, and he wore a delicate gold ring upon one of his attenuated fingers. He could – but it was useless; anything beyond the wildest castle-building was impossible. And, summoning a faithful physician and clergyman betimes in the morning, I detailed to them the chances which had burdened me with so singular an inmate. I introduced the physician into the old man’s chamber; but to him as to myself was his behavior a riddle: he took no notice of what passed. The medical man pronounced it to be his judgement that the old man was suffering from exhaustion or abstinence, but that otherwise he had no symptom of disease upon him, and recommended me to allow him to lie still, and feed him as often as he would permit with nourishing food. The clergyman promised for our satisfaction to endeavour to collect some further particulars as to his history and habits in the neighbourhood where he had resided; and they left me in as little comfortable state as may well be imagined.

I found no difficulty in following Dr. Richards’ suggestions. The patient was passive, took whatever was offered to him, and seemed to doze almost all the day. I could not make up my mind to leave the house, and spent the greater part of my time in the stranger’s chamber. Any attempt to engage him in conversation, or even to obtain an answer to a question, was in vain; and I can scarcely describe the strange uneasiness which I felt creeping over me when evening set in and my two friends had paid their unsatisfactory visit – I say unsatisfactory, because the physician was entirely at fault as to the state of the invalid, and the clergyman had been unable to discover anything beyond what I had heard on the previous evening. Either would have remained with me all night, but they were called to distant parts of the town by the imperative duties of their profession – and again I was left alone.

Some will, I am sure, comprehend the feeling of heart-sickness with which I took my seat by the fire. The night was wild and stormy, and I sat for two hours without speaking or moving. At length, to my great amazement, the current of my unpleasant thoughts was interrupted by the first spontaneous speech which my inexplicable guest had yet made. “Come hither,” he said faintly.

I obeyed, and stood before his bedside, waiting for an instant to see whether he would speak again – but he was silent as before. I then said – “Can I do anything for you?”

“No,” replied he promptly; “unless you will sit still, and listen to my story.”

“Anything you wish,” answered I eagerly, wondering what kind of communication I was about to hear.

“Well then,” said he, raising himself up a little – “and yet I hardly know why even now I should recall the past. Yet I will once more before I go – and it may explain to you what you ought to know. You stepped forward to assist me when I was otherwise deserted, and I am not ungrateful. But I lose time; my tales is long, and I have far to go before midnight.”

He paused; and I, taking advantage of the moment’s silence, drew my chair close to his side; and, in the midst of a storm without, wilder than I have ever heard before or since, I listened to his story.

“I have no friend or relation in the world that I know of,” said he. “I am the natural son of a nobleman – but he has long since been dead; and the title, with the estates, has passed to a distant branch of the family. From my cradle my fate was marked out to be a strange one. I was educated and pampered in my father’s house till I was eighteen, without the remotest idea that I was not his legitimate heir. Then, when he married, the veil was torn off, the delusion dissipated, at a moment’s warning. I was told of my origin, but not the name of my mother – and to this day I have no idea who she was. I fancied that she died in giving me birth – perhaps for her folly disowned by her relations, who scarcely ever heard of my existence. I was turned out of doors, with a caution that, if ever I ventured to appear in my father’s presence again, or to bear his name, I should forfeit his favour towards me, which would otherwise be continued in the shape of a liberal annual allowance.

“I had always been on a delicate frame, with feeble spirits and an imaginative disposition, but with wilder thoughts and passions than ever I had dared to reveal. You may judge how such a message, coarsely delivered to me by my father’s chaplain, a debauched old man, was likely to affect me. My father had never shown any love to me – but I loved, I depended upon, him. And now I remonstrated, I entreated, with all the eloquence of strong and indignant feelings. I begged for an interview with my unnatural parent; it was denied me, with words of opprobrium that are yet ringing in my ears. The curse of their bitterness has clung to me ever since. I left – I will not mention the name of my home – a being marked out for unhappiness – and felt, while I groaned under the load of my misery, that it was laid upon me for life.

“The world, however, was before me. I was well provided with money, young and handsome; and over the morbid sadness of my heart I threw so thick a mask of gaiety, that even I myself was at times deceived, and fancied that I was happy. I would not stay in England; but spent the next five years in exploring the continent. Italy, Germany, France, all became as homes to me. But I was alone: I had no friends, though many acquaintances; and when any one of these strove to approach nearer to the secrets of my heart than the common intercourse of society permits, he found himself repelled; and refrained from further endeavours, he scarcely knew why.

“I have no time to trace out the workings of feelings – I will only mention facts. When I was in Paris, in the year 17 – , the talk of the circles was entirely of a celebrated Sybil, Madame de Villerac, a woman whose age, for she was known to be no longer young, had not impaired her wit and beauty. Her predictions were said to be astonishingly precise and correct; and she was consulted and believed in by the loftiest and wisest in the land, although there were some, of more scrupulous or timid spirits, who did not speak of her without a shudder. I was resolved to prove her skill. I was presented to her at a grand fête, given by the Spanish ambassador. She was certainly the most striking-looking woman I ever saw. I well remember her imposing appearance. She was seated at a card-table, dressed in rich black velvet, with one solitary feather waving across her brow. ‘You can play at Ecarte,’ said the Chevalier Fleuret to me, rising from his seat; and, after simply naming us to each other, he pointed to the vacant chair, and left us alone together. Before I had time to think, I was engaged in deep play with this extraordinary and commanding woman. But conversation presently stole in, and we slackened our attention to the game. She spoke with astonishing eloquence: our talk was of the world and its ways. Then I endeavoured to lead it to topics of graver interest – the past and the future – and, half in badinage, half in earnest, I ventured to ask if there was really any virtue in cards to unravel the secrets of destiny. She smiled scornfully, and, looking me full in the face, asked me, in the most indifferent tone imaginable – ‘Shall I try?’

“Of course I answered in the affirmative.

“‘Remember, then, Chevalier Graham,’ replied she, ‘that I am not answerable for what I shall find. Am I to tell you all the truth?’

“‘All – every word.’

“‘Once again I warn you – but I see it is thrown away. Here, then’ – and I drew a card from her proffered handful. After some unintelligible ceremony, she spread them before her. For an instant she looked intensely serious – then, as if she were resolved to carry off the matter as a pleasantry – ‘Good and evil, as usual,’ she said. “I am no prophetess to foretell unmingled fairy luck – what do you think of an heiress for a wife – if you are to die by her hand?’

“I half started up from my seat.

“‘Now you look as much shocked,’ said she, ‘as if I were indeed an oracle. Nay, positively not a word more’ – and as she spoke she fixed her eyes very pointedly on a remarkably handsome ruby ring which I wore.

“‘I have been told,’ said I, attempting to catch her tone, ‘that the only way to confirm the good and undo the evil is to bind the Sybil in some charm. May it please you to wear this ring for me for seven years and a day, and then I shall hope to be safe – it is a talisman.’

“She took it carelessly, as a matter of course, and, placing it upon her finger, ‘Come,’ said she, ‘we will join the company.’

•   •   •   •   •

“Two years afterwards I was married to the most beautiful woman in Italy, after a week’s acquaintance. I met her in Venice; and was completely dazzled by the fascinations, whether of personal beauty, or of the grace, wit, and elegance of her manners. She seemed, like myself, totally unconnected; but I asked no questions. I wore her chains; I laid myself at her feet, and was accepted. Known only as a passing stranger, I escaped all unmeaning congratulations; and, careless of the envy of unsuccessful rivals, I carried off my beautiful wife in triumph. I married her, literally, from the fancy of a moment. Nor did I discover, till some weeks after we were united, that I had fulfilled the first prediction, and that my wife was heiress to great wealth as well as the possessor of great beauty. ‘I have kept this a secret,’ said she, ‘because I was resolved never to be wooed and won for my money.’

“This was plausible, but not true. On becoming gradually acquainted with Clementine’s history, I found that she had in truth had few, if any, honourable suitors; and I was curious to discover what circumstances could have enabled me to distance all thousand of inamorati of Italy. Then she had accepted my devotions so readily, so eagerly! But my researches were in vain. There was a mystery about her not to be penetrated. I soon found that we were to be totally separate as far as the interests of the heart were concerned. What my wife’s secret was I had not the remotest idea; but her love – I should have said her liking – for me waned daily. And ere long I felt a strange and indescribable distrust creeping over me, a sense that I was tied to one who might be said to have another existence, independent of aught that I knew. I foresaw that this state of things could not last, and went on, blindly, madly, to my own undoing.

“One evening, when we were sitting together, ‘It is strange, my Clementina,’ said I, ‘that I do not yet know the name of your mother.’ She had changed hers, I had been given to understand, in order to possess some property bequeathed to her upon that condition.

“‘Do you think so?’ she replied carelessly – and then, half rising from her couch and casting a piercing look upon me – ‘It is odd, too, that I forget the name of yours.’

“I was dumb, and changed the conversation. A few evenings after this, however, in passing through her dressing-room, when my wife had gone to a ball, I chanced to find her jewel-casket open. At the top of many ornaments lay a miniature. Good heaven! – and I recognized the original at once – the never-to-be-forgotten eye of pride, the stately brow, the rich, dark hair – and, to confirm my assurance, there were these words traced on the back – ‘Clementine de Villerac’s last gift to her daughter’ – and underneath, in a hand which I knew to be my wife’s – ‘My mother died when I was seventeen’ – so that I had married the daughter, the heiress, of that mysterious Sybil; while it was next to a certainty that others, knowing from whom she was descended, had been deterred from approaching her.

“I shut up my knowledge in my breast – but thenceforth my peace of mind was gone forever. Upon my gloomy and irritable temperament the possession of such a secret wrought me increasing agony. I struggled with the presentiments which it engendered: I tried reason – I tried religion, society, solitude, change of place, study – all would not do. And what was remarkable, during four years of conflict such as this, my wife never seemed to advert to what would have grieved and surprised any other woman. So long as she received her accustomed tribute of admiration, and we lived with the semblance of tolerable concord, she was content. I suppose that the privileges which a married woman enjoys were what she sought in accepting my hand, and, satisfied in the possession of these, she concerned herself no further.

“Each year widened this mutual estrangement of feeling. As Clementina’s beauty waned – and it waned early – she seemed more covetous of homage, and to allow herself greater latitude of conduct than formerly, while the mantle of my spirit grew darker and darker day by day. The second part of my mother-in-law’s prediction arose unceasingly to my recollection. We came to England; and here I perceived, with a sort of gloomy apathy, that Clementina’s deviations from a correct demeanour became daily wider – that in fact she allowed the attentions of other men in an unsuitable degree. My own father was dead, having, on his death, left me a fortune equivalent to my former yearly income. I was still young, had unbroken health – and yet God knows how often I have stood at a window of our sumptuous house and envied the most miserable beggar, old, poverty-stricken, and diseased, that crawled past for his daily alms. I had lost what little relish I ever had for the common pleasures of life. Gaming was to me no excitement, music only a source of pain, and the mere animal enjoyment of bodily exercises a weariness. I resembled one of those unhappy beings of whom one has to read in the old records of superstition, who are bound by spells that they have no power to break, and whose lives are as a long and weary dream of dull misery.

“It was about this time, now thirty years ago, that the devotion of a certain Lord Mordown to my wife became so evident that I resolved to arouse myself while there was yet time. I remonstrated with her kindly, yet spiritedly; and she as usual made no answer. On the evening of the day when I mentioned this hateful subject to her, she repaired alone to a masquerade, where she met the nobleman in question. I learned in the course of the evening, no matter how, that it was necessary that I should take speedy measures in my own defence, if at all; and, revolving many plans in my mind, I sat, in an unwonted tumult of feeling, awaiting her return.

“She came home much earlier than usual. I ran to meet her, and handed her out of her carriage. I remarked an unusual paleness on her lip, an unusual tremor of hand. ‘I am very ill,’ she said, almost throwing herself into my arms. I led her upstairs in silence. She called her maid to undress her as speedily as she could. I suppose that the seeds of some malignant disease had been lying dormant in her constitution, and that the excitement and the heat of entertainment had suddenly ripened them, for in another hour she was in a raging fever. I dismissed her attendants, resolving to watch her myself. She grew worse; and about two in the morning she was seized with violent delirium, and cried out for water.

“It was the work of some demon that the prediction never occurred to me so strongly as at that moment. Will you not turn me out from your shelter? I say that the horrid idea of contradicting my destiny possessed me – so that I sat still, and called for no help. Every servant slept in a different part of the house. I tell you I sat still, listening to her ravings, with unmoved ear and cool calculating brow. ‘It will be daylight soon,’ I said to myself, ‘and the servants will be up, and will hear’ – and the voice was urging me, close in mine ear, to break loose from the spell which had enchanted me for so long. I heard it say – ‘Thy fate is in thy power!’ It tempted me again – I shuddered – a distant glimmer of dawn began to lighten the heavy sky – I went to my wife’s bedside, and – it was the work of a moment – the next, she lay a corpse before me.

“From that hour I was mad. Days, months, years – but let me hasten to say what I most wish. When I was released from confinement as a convalescent, I bribed the sexton of the church in which she was buried to disinter for me the remains of my ill-starred Clementina. They have been beside me ever since as a penance, as a memorial. When I am gone, open yonder chest. You will find only a few bones and a little dust, which you will restore to consecrated ground, and writings which will put you in possession of a handsome fortune. I have nothing more…”

He stopped suddenly. I hastened to call for light, the candle having burnt out in the course of his story. I supposed that the narrator had failed from exhaustion: but, when my servant obeyed the summons and I approached the stranger’s bed, I perceived he had expired.

THE OPEN DOOR

Charlotte Riddell

1882

Some people do not believe in ghosts. For that matter, some people do not believe in anything. There are persons who even affect incredulity concerning that open door at Ladlow Hall. They say it did not stand wide open – that they could have shut it; that the whole affair was a delusion; that they are sure it must have been a conspiracy; that they are doubtful whether there is such a place as Ladlow on the face of the earth; that the first time they are in Meadowshire they will look it up.

That is the manner in which this story, hitherto unpublished, has been greeted by my acquaintances. How it will be received by strangers is quite another matter. I am going to tell what happened to me exactly as it happened, and readers can credit or scoff at the tale as it pleases them. It is not necessary for me to find faith and comprehension in addition to a ghost story, for the world at large. If such were the case, I should lay down my pen.

Perhaps, before going further, I ought to premise there was a time when I did not believe in ghosts either. If you had asked me one summer’s morning years ago when you met me on London Bridge if I held such appearances to be probable or possible, you would have received an emphatic “No” for answer.

But, at this rate, the story of the Open Door will never be told; so we will, with your permission, plunge into it immediately.

•    •    •    •

“Sandy!”

“What do you want?”

“Should you like to earn a sovereign?”

“Of course I should.”

A somewhat curt dialogue, but we were given to curtness in the office of Messrs Frimpton, Frampton and Fryer, auctioneers and estate agents, St. Benet’s Hill, City.

(My name is not Sandy or anything like it, but the other clerks so styled me because of a real or fancied likeness to some character, an ill-looking Scotchman, they had seen at the theatre. From this it may be inferred I was not handsome. Far from it. The only ugly specimen in my family, I knew I was very plain; and it chanced to be no secret to me either that I felt grievously discontented with my lot. I did not like the occupation of clerk in an auctioneer’s office, and I did not like my employers.

We are all of us inconsistent, I suppose, for it was a shock to me to find they entertained a most cordial antipathy to me.)

“Because,” went on Parton, a fellow, my senior by many years – a fellow who delighted in chaffing me, “I can tell you how to lay hands on one.”

“How?” I asked, sulkily enough, for I felt he was having what he called his fun.

“You know that place we let to Carrison, the tea-dealer?”

Carrison was a merchant in the China trade, possessed of fleets of vessels and towns of warehouses; but I did not correct Parton’s expression, I simply nodded.

“He took it on a long lease, and he can’t live in it; and our governor said this morning he wouldn’t mind giving anybody who could find out what the deuce is the matter, a couple of sovereigns and his travelling expenses.”

“Where is the place?” I asked, without turning my head; for the convenience of listening I had put my elbows on the desk and propped up my face with both hands.

“Away down in Meadowshire, in the heart of the grazing country.”

“And what is the matter?” I further enquired.

“A door that won’t keep shut.”

“What?”

“A door that will keep open, if you prefer that way of putting it,” said Parton.

“You are jesting.”

“If I am, Carrison is not, or Fryer either. Carrison came here in a nice passion, and Fryer was in a fine rage; I could see he was, though he kept his temper outwardly. They have had an active correspondence it appears, and Carrison went away to talk to his lawyer. Won’t make much by that move, I fancy.”

“But tell me,” I entreated, “why the door won’t keep shut?”

“They say the place is haunted.”

“What nonsense!” I exclaimed.

“Then you are just the person to take the ghost in hand. I thought so while old Fryer was speaking.”

“If the door won’t keep shut,” I remarked, pursuing my own train of thought, “why can’t they let it stay open?”

“I have not the slightest idea. I only know there are two sovereigns to be made, and that I give you a present of the information.”

And having thus spoken, Parton took down his hat and went out, either upon his own business or that of his employers.

There was one thing I can truly say about our office, we were never serious in it. I fancy that is the case in most offices nowadays; at all events, it was the case in ours. We were always chaffing each other, playing practical jokes, telling stupid stories, scamping our work, looking at the clock, counting the weeks to next St. Lubbock’s Day, counting the hours to Saturday.

For all that we were all very earnest in our desire to have our salaries raised, and unanimous in the opinion no fellows ever before received such wretched pay. I had twenty pounds a year, which I was aware did not half provide for what I ate at home. My mother and sisters left me in no doubt on the point, and when new clothes were wanted I always hated to mention the fact to my poor worried father.

We had been better off once, I believe, though I never remember the time. My father owned a small property in the country, but owing to the failure of some bank, I never could understand what bank, it had to be mortgaged; then the interest was not paid, and the mortgages foreclosed, and we had nothing left save the half-pay of a major, and about a hundred a year which my mother brought to the common fund.

We might have managed on our income, I think, if we had not been so painfully genteel; but we were always trying to do something quite beyond our means, and consequently debts accumulated, and creditors ruled us with rods of iron.

Before the final smash came, one of my sisters married the younger son of a distinguished family, and even if they had been disposed to live comfortably and sensibly she would have kept her sisters up to the mark. My only brother, too, was an officer, and of course the family thought it necessary he should see we preserved appearances.

It was all a great trial to my father, I think, who had to bear the brunt of the dunning and harass, and eternal shortness of money; and it would have driven me crazy if I had not found a happy refuge when matters were going wrong at home at my aunt’s. She was my father’s sister, and had married so “dreadfully below her” that my mother refused to acknowledge the relationship at all.

For these reasons and others, Parton’s careless words about the two sovereigns stayed in my memory.

I wanted money badly – I may say I never had sixpence in the world of my own – and I thought if I could earn two sovereigns I might buy some trifles I needed for myself, and present my father with a new umbrella. Fancy is a dangerous little jade to flirt with, as I soon discovered.

She led me on and on. First I thought of the two sovereigns; then I recalled the amount of the rent Mr. Carrison agreed to pay for Ladlow Hall; then I decided he would gladly give more than two sovereigns if he could only have the ghost turned out of possession. I fancied I might get ten pounds – twenty pounds. I considered the matter all day, and I dreamed of it all night, and when I dressed myself next morning I was determined to speak to Mr. Fryer on the subject.

I did so – I told that gentleman Parton had mentioned the matter to me, and that if Mr. Fryer had no objection, I should like to try whether I could not solve the mystery. I told him I had been accustomed to lonely houses, and that I should not feel at all nervous; that I did not believe in ghosts, and as for burglars, I was not afraid of them.

“I don’t mind your trying,” he said at last. “Of course you understand it is no cure, no pay. Stay in the house for a week; if at the end of that time you can keep the door shut, locked, bolted, or nailed up, telegraph for me, and I will go down – if not, come back. If you like to take a companion there is no objection.”

I thanked him, but said I would rather not have a companion.

“There is only one thing, sir, I should like,” I ventured.

“And that—?” he interrupted.

“Is a little more money. If I lay the ghost, or find out the ghost, I think I ought to have more than two sovereigns.”

“How much more do you think you ought to have?” he asked.

His tone quite threw me off my guard, it was so civil and conciliatory, and I answered boldly:

“Well, if Mr. Carrison cannot now live in the place perhaps he wouldn’t mind giving me a ten-pound note.”

Mr. Fryer turned, and opened one of the books lying on his desk. He did not look at or refer to it in any way – I saw that.

“You have been with us how long, Edlyd?” he said.

“Eleven months tomorrow,” I replied.

“And our arrangement was, I think, quarterly payments, and one month’s notice on either side?”

“Yes, sir.” I heard my voice tremble, though I could not have said what frightened me.

“Then you will please to take your notice now. Come in before you leave this evening, and I’ll pay you three months’ salary, and then we shall be quits.”

“I don’t think I quite understand,” I was beginning, when he broke in:

“But I understand, and that’s enough. I have had enough of you and your airs, and your indifference, and your insolence here. I never had a clerk I disliked as I do you. Coming and dictating terms, forsooth! No, you shan’t go to Ladlow. Many a poor chap” – (he said “devil”) – “would have been glad to earn half a guinea, let alone two sovereigns; and perhaps you may be before you are much older.”

“Do you mean that you won’t keep me here any longer, sir?” I asked in despair. “I had no intention of offending you. I—”

“Now you need not say another word,” he interrupted, “for I won’t bandy words with you. Since you have been in this place you have never known your position, and you don’t seem able to realize it. When I was foolish enough to take you, I did it on the strength of your connections, but your connections have done nothing for me. I have never had a penny out of any one of your friends – if you have any. You’ll not do any good in business for yourself or anybody else, and the sooner you go to Australia” – (here he was very emphatic) – “and get off these premises, the better I shall be pleased.”

I did not answer him – I could not. He had worked himself to a white heat by this time, and evidently intended I should leave his premises then and there. He counted five pounds out of his cash-box, and, writing a receipt, pushed it and the money across the table, and bade me sign and be off at once.

My hand trembled so I could scarcely hold the pen, but I had presence of mind enough left to return one pound ten in gold, and three shillings and fourpence I had, quite by the merest good fortune, in my waistcoat pocket.

“I can’t take wages for work I haven’t done,” I said, as well as sorrow and passion would let me. “Good-morning,” and I left his office and passed out among the clerks.

I took from my desk the few articles belonging to me, left the papers it contained in order, and then, locking it, asked Parton if he would be so good as to give the key to Mr. Fryer.

“What’s up?” he asked “Are you going?”

I said, “Yes, I am going”.

“Got the sack?”

“That is exactly what has happened.”

“Well, I’m ———!” exclaimed Mr. Parton.

I did not stop to hear any further commentary on the matter, but bidding my fellow-clerks good-bye, shook the dust of Frimpton’s Estate and Agency Office from off my feet.

I did not like to go home and say I was discharged, so I walked about aimlessly, and at length found myself in Regent Street. There I met my father, looking more worried than usual.

“Do you think, Phil,” he said (my name is Theophilus), “you could get two or three pounds from your employers?”

Maintaining a discreet silence regarding what had passed, I answered:

“No doubt I could.”

“I shall be glad if you will then, my boy,” he went on, “for we are badly in want of it.”

I did not ask him what was the special trouble. Where would have been the use? There was always something – gas, or water, or poor-rates, or the butcher, or the baker, or the bootmaker. Well, it did not much matter, for we were well accustomed to the life; but, I thought, “if ever I marry, we will keep within our means.” And then there rose up before me a vision of Patty, my cousin – the blithest, prettiest, most useful, most sensible girl that ever made sunshine in a poor man’s house.

My father and I had parted by this time, and I was still walking aimlessly on, when all at once an idea occurred to me. Mr. Fryer had not treated me well or fairly. I would hoist him on his own petard. I would go to headquarters, and try to make terms with Mr. Carrison direct.

No sooner thought than done. I hailed a passing omnibus, and was ere long in the heart of the city. Like other great men, Mr. Carrison was difficult of access – indeed, so difficult of access, that the clerk to whom I applied for an audience told me plainly I could not see him at all. I might send in my message if I liked, he was good enough to add, and no doubt it would be attended to. I said I should not send in a message, and was then asked what I would do. My answer was simple. I meant to wait till I did see him. I was told they could not have people waiting about the office in this way.

I said I supposed I might stay in the street. “Carrison didn’t own that,” I suggested.

The clerk advised me not to try that game, or I might get locked up.

I said I would take my chance of it.

After that we went on arguing the question at some length, and we were in the middle of a heated argument, in which several of Carrison’s “young gentlemen”, as they called themselves, were good enough to join, when we were all suddenly silenced by a grave-looking individual, who authoritatively enquired:

“What is all this noise about?”

Before anyone could answer I spoke up: “I want to see Mr. Carrison, and they won’t let me.”

“What do you want with Mr. Carrison?”

“I will tell that to himself only.”

“Very well, say on – I am Mr. Carrison.”

For a moment I felt abashed and almost ashamed of my persistency; next instant, however, what Mr. Fryer would have called my “native audacity” came to the rescue, and I said, drawing a step or two nearer to him, and taking off my hat:

“I wanted to speak to you about Ladlow hall, if you please, sir.”

In an instant the fashion of his face changed, a look of irritation succeeded to that of immobility; an angry contraction of the eyebrows disfigured the expression of his countenance.

“Ladlow Hall!” he repeated; “and what have you got to say about Ladlow Hall?”

“That is what I wanted to tell you, sir,” I answered, and a dead hush seemed to fall on the office as I spoke.

The silence seemed to attract his attention, for he looked sternly at the clerks, who were not using a pen or moving a finger.

“Come this way, then,” he said abruptly; and next minute I was in his private office.

“Now, what is it?” he asked, flinging himself into a chair, and addressing me, who stood, hat in hand, beside the great table in the middle of the room.

I began – I will say he was a patient listener – at the very beginning, and told my story straight through. I concealed nothing. I enlarged on nothing. A discharged clerk, I stood before him, and in the capacity of a discharged clerk, I said what I had to say. He heard me to the end, then he sat silent, thinking.

At last he spoke. “You have heard a great deal of conversation about Ladlow, I suppose?” he remarked.

“No sir; I have heard nothing except what I have told you.”

“And why do you desire to strive to solve such a mystery?”

“If there is any money to be made, I should like to make it, sir.”

“How old are you?”

“Two-and-twenty last January.”

“And how much salary had you at Frimpton’s?”

“Twenty pounds a year.”

“Humph! More than you are worth, I should say.”

“Mr. Fryer seemed to imagine so, sir, at any rate,” I agreed, sorrowfully.

“But what do you think?” he asked, smiling in spite of himself.

“I think I did quite as much work as the other clerks,” I answered.

“That is not saying much, perhaps,” he observed. I was of his opinion, but I held my peace.

“You will never make much of a clerk, I am afraid,” Mr. Carrison proceeded, fitting his disparaging remarks upon me as he might on a lay figure. “You don’t like desk work?”

“Not much, sir.”

“I should judge the best thing you could do would be to emigrate,” he went on, eyeing me critically.

“Mr. Fryer said I had better go to Australia or—” I stopped, remembering the alternative that gentleman had presented.

“Or where?” asked Mr. Carrison.

“The ———, sir” I explained, softly and apologetically.

He laughed – he lay back in his chair and laughed – and I laughed myself, though ruefully.

After all, twenty pounds was twenty pounds, though I had not thought much of the salary till I lost it.

We went on talking for a long time after that; he asked me all about my father and my early life, and how we lived, and where we lived, and the people we knew; and, in fact, put more questions than I can well remember.

“It seems a crazy thing to do,” he said at last; “and yet I feel disposed to trust you. The house is standing perfectly empty. I can’t live in it, and I can’t get rid of it; all my own furniture I have removed, and there is nothing in the place except a few old-fashioned articles belonging to Lord Ladlow. The place is a loss to me. It is of no use trying to let it, and thus, in fact, matters are at a deadlock. You won’t be able to find out anything, I know, because, of course, others have tried to solve the mystery ere now; still, if you like to try you may. I will make this bargain with you. If you like to go down, I will pay your reasonable expenses for a fortnight; and if you do any good for me, I will give you a ten-pound note for yourself. Of course I must be satisfied that what you have told me is true and that you are what you represent. Do you know anybody in the city who would speak for you?”

I could think of no one but my uncle. I hinted to Mr. Carrison he was not grand enough or rich enough, perhaps, but I knew nobody else to whom I could refer him.

“What!” he said, “Robert Dorland, of Cullum Street. He does business with us. If he will go bail for your good behaviour I shan’t want any further guarantee. Come along.”

And to my intense amazement, he rose, put on his hat, walked me across the outer office and along the pavements till we came to Cullum Street.

“Do you know this youth, Mr. Dorland?” he said, standing in front of my uncle’s desk, and laying a hand on my shoulder.

“Of course I do, Mr. Carrison,” answered my uncle, a little apprehensively; for, as he told me afterwards, he could not imagine what mischief I had been up to. “He is my nephew.”

“And what is your opinion of him – do you think he is a young fellow I may safely trust?”

My uncle smiled, and answered, “That depends on what you wish to trust him with.”

“A long column of addition, for instance.”

“It would be safer to give that task to somebody else.”

“Oh, uncle!” I remonstrated; for I had really striven to conquer my natural antipathy to figures – worked hard, and every bit of it against the collar.

My uncle got off his stool, and said, standing with his back to the empty fire-grate:

“Tell me what you wish the boy to do, Mr. Carrison, and I will tell you whether he will suit your purpose or not. I know him, I believe, better than he knows himself.”

In an easy, affable way, for so rich a man, Mr. Carrison took possession of the vacant stool, and nursing his right leg over his left knee, answered:

“He wants to go and shut the open door at Ladlow for me. Do you think he can do that?”

My uncle looked steadily back at the speaker, and said, “I thought, Mr. Carrison, it was quite settled no one could shut it?”

Mr. Carrison shifted a little uneasily on his seat, and replied: “I did not set your nephew the task he fancies he would like to undertake.”

“Have nothing to do with it, Phil,” advised my uncle, shortly.

“You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Mr. Dorland?” asked Mr. Carrison, with a slight sneer.

“Don’t you, Mr. Carrison?” retorted my uncle.

There was a pause – an uncomfortable pause – during the course of which I felt the ten pounds, which, in imagination, I had really spent, trembling in the scale. I was not afraid. For ten pounds, or half the money, I would have faced all the inhabitants of spirit land. I longed to tell them so; but something in the way those two men looked at each other stayed my tongue.

“If you ask me the question here in the heart of the city, Mr. Dorland,” said Mr. Carrison, at length, slowly and carefully, “I answer ‘No’ ; but it you were to put it to me on a dark night at Ladlow, I should beg time to consider. I do not believe in supernatural phenomena myself, and yet – the door at Ladlow is as much beyond my comprehension as the ebbing and flowing of the sea.”

“And you can’t Live at Ladlow?” remarked my uncle.

“I can’t live at Ladlow, and what is more, I can’t get anyone else to live at Ladlow.”

“And you want to get rid of your lease?”

“I want so much to get rid of my lease that I told Fryer I would give him a handsome sum if he could induce anyone to solve the mystery. Is there any other information you desire, Mr. Dorland? Because if there is, you have only to ask and have. I feel I am not here in a prosaic office in the city of London, but in the Palace of Truth.”

My uncle took no notice of the implied compliment. When wine is good it needs no bush. If a man is habitually honest in his speech and in his thoughts, he desires no recognition of the fact.

“I don’t think so,” he answered; “it is for the boy to say what he will do. If he be advised by me he will stick to his ordinary work in his employers’ office, and leave ghost-hunting and spirit-laying alone.”

Mr. Carrison shot a rapid glance in my direction, a glance which, implying a secret understanding, might have influenced my uncle, could I have stooped to deceive my uncle.

“I can’t stick to my work there any longer,” I said. “I got my marching orders today.”

“What had you been doing, Phil?” asked my uncle.

“I wanted ten pounds to go and lay the ghost!” I answered, so dejectedly, that both Mr. Carrison and my uncle broke out laughing.

“Ten pounds!” cried my uncle, almost between laughing and crying. “Why, Phil boy, I had rather, poor man though I am, have given thee ten pounds than that thou should’st go ghost-hunting or ghost-laying.”

When he was very much in earnest my uncle went back to thee and thou of his native dialect. I liked the vulgarism, as my mother called it, and I knew my aunt loved to hear him use the caressing words to her. He had risen, not quite from the ranks it is true, but if ever a gentleman came ready born into the world it was Robert Dorland, upon whom at our home everyone seemed to look down.

“What will you do, Edlyd?” asked Mr. Carrison; “you hear what your uncle says, ‘Give up the enterprise’, and what I say; I do not want either to bribe or force your inclinations.”

“I will go, sir,” I answered quite steadily. “I am not afraid, and I should like to show you—” I stopped. I had been going to say, “I should like to show you I am not such a fool as you all take me for,” but I felt such an address would be too familiar, and refrained.

Mr. Carrison looked at me curiously. I think he supplied the end of the sentence for himself, but he only answered:

“I should like you to show me that door fast shut; at any rate, if you can stay in the place alone for a fortnight, you shall have your money.”

“I don’t like it, Phil,” said my uncle: “I don’t like this freak at all.”

“I am sorry for that, uncle,” I answered, “for I mean to go.”

“When?” asked Mr. Carrison.

“Tomorrow morning,” I replied.

“Give him five pounds, Dorland, please, and I will send you my cheque. You will account to me for that sum, you understand,” added Mr. Carrison, turning to where I stood.

“A sovereign will be quite enough,” I said.

“You will take five pounds, and account to me for it,” repeated Mr. Carrison, firmly; “also, you will write to me every day, to my private address, and if at any moment you feel the thing too much for you, throw it up. Good afternoon,” and without more formal leave-taking he departed.

“It is of no use talking to you, Phil, I suppose?” said my uncle.

“I don’t think it is,” I replied; “you won’t say anything to them at home, will you?”

“I am not very likely to meet any of them, am I?” he answered, without a shade of bitterness – merely stating a fact.

“I suppose I shall not see you again before I start,” I said, “so I will bid you good-bye now.”

“Good-bye, my lad; I wish I could see you a bit wiser and steadier.”

I did not answer him; my heart was very full, and my eyes too. I had tried, but office-work was not in me, and I felt it was just as vain to ask me to sit on a stool and pore over writing and figures as to think a person born destitute of musical ability could compose an opera.

Of course I went straight to Patty; though we were not then married, though sometimes it seemed to me as if we never should be married, she was my better half then as she is my better half now.

She did not throw cold water on the project; she did not discourage me. What she said, with her dear face aglow with excitement, was, “I only wish, Phil, I was going with you.” Heaven knows, so did I.

Next morning I was up before the milkman. I had told my people overnight I should be going out of town on business. Patty and I settled the whole plan in detail. I was to breakfast and dress there, for I meant to go down to Ladlow in my volunteer garments. That was a subject upon which my poor father and I never could agree; he called volunteering child’s play, and other things equally hard to bear; whilst my brother, a very carpet warrior to my mind, was never weary of ridiculing the force, and chaffing me for imagining I was “a soldier”.

Patty and I had talked matters over, and settled, as I have said, that I should dress at her father’s.

A young fellow I knew had won a revolver at a raffle, and willingly lent it to me. With that and my rifle I felt I could conquer an army.

It was a lovely afternoon when I found myself walking through leafy lanes in the heart of Meadowshire. With every vein of my heart I loved the country, and the country was looking its best just then: grass ripe for the mower, grain forming in the ear, rippling streams, dreamy rivers, old orchards, quaint cottages.

“Oh, that I had never to go back to London,” I thought, for I am one of the few people left on earth who love the country and hate cities. I walked on, I walked a long way, and being uncertain as to my road, asked a gentleman who was slowly riding a powerful roan horse under arching trees – a gentleman accompanied by a young lady mounted on a stiff white pony – my way to Ladlow Hall.

“That is Ladlow Hall,” he answered, pointing with his whip over the fence to my left hand. I thanked him and was going on, when he said:

“No one is living there now.”

“I am aware of that,” I answered.

He did not say anything more, only courteously bade me good-day, and rode off. The young lady inclined her head in acknowledgement of my uplifted cap, and smiled kindly. Altogether I felt pleased, little things always did please me. It was a good beginning – half-way to a good ending!

When I got to the Lodge I showed Mr. Carrison’s letter to the woman, and received the key.

“You are not going to stop up at the Hall alone, are you, sir?” she asked.

“Yes, I am,” I answered, uncompromisingly, so uncompromisingly that she said no more. The avenue led straight to the house; it was uphill all the way, and bordered by rows of the most magnificent limes I ever beheld. A light iron fence divided the avenue from the park, and between the trunks of the trees I could see the deer browsing and cattle grazing. Ever and anon there came likewise to my ear the sound of a sheep-bell.

It was a long avenue, but at length I stood in front of the Hall – a square, solid-looking, old-fashioned house, three stories high, with no basement; a flight of steps up to the principal entrance; four windows to the right of the door, four windows to the left; the whole building flanked and backed with trees; all the blinds pulled down, a dead silence brooding over the place: the sun westering behind the great trees studding the park. I took all this in as I approached, and afterwards as I stood for a moment under the ample porch; then, remembering the business which had brought me so far, I fitted the great key in the lock, turned the handle, and entered Ladlow Hall.

For a minute – stepping out of the bright sunlight – the place looked to me so dark that I could scarcely distinguish the objects by which I was surrounded; but my eyes soon grew accustomed to the comparative darkness, and I found I was in an immense hall, lighted from the roof, a magnificent old oak staircase conducted to the upper rooms.

The floor was of black and white marble. There were two fireplaces, fitted with dogs for burning wood; around the walls hung pictures, antlers, and horns, and in odd niches and corners stood groups of statues, and the figures of men in complete suits of armour.

To look at the place outside, no one would have expected to find such a hall. I stood lost in amazement and admiration, and then I began to glance more particularly around.

Mr. Carrison had not given me any instructions by which to identify the ghostly chamber – which I concluded would most probably be found on the first floor.

I knew nothing of the story connected with it – if there were a story. On that point I had left London as badly provided with mental as with actual luggage – worse provided, indeed, for a hamper, packed by Patty, and a small bag were coming over from the station; but regarding the mystery I was perfectly unencumbered. I had not the faintest idea in which apartment it resided. Well, I should discover that, no doubt, for myself ere long.

I looked around me – doors – doors – doors I had never before seen so many doors together all at once. Two of them stood open – one wide, the other slightly ajar.

“I’ll just shut them as a beginning,” I thought, “before I go upstairs.”

The doors were of oak, heavy, well-fitting, furnished with good locks and sound handles. After I had closed I tried them. Yes, they were quite secure. I ascended the great staircase feeling curiously like an intruder, paced the corridors, entered the many bed-chambers – some quite bare of furniture, others containing articles of an ancient fashion, and no doubt of considerable value – chairs, antique dressing-tables, curious wardrobes, and such like. For the most part the doors were closed, and I shut those that stood open before making my way into the attics.

I was greatly delighted with the attics. The windows lighting them did not, as a rule, overlook the front of the Hall, but commanded wide views over wood, and valley, and meadow. Leaning out of one, I could see that to the right of the Hall the ground, thickly planted, shelved down to a stream, which came out into the daylight a little distance beyond the plantation, and meandered through the deer park. At the back of the Hall the windows looked out on nothing save a dense wood and a portion of the stable-yard, whilst on the side nearest the point from whence I had come there were spreading gardens surrounded by thick yew hedges, and kitchen-gardens protected by high walls; and further on a farmyard, where I could perceive cows and oxen, and, further still, luxuriant meadows, and fields glad with waving corn.

“What a beautiful place!” I said. “Carrison must have been a duffer to leave it.” And then I thought what a great ramshackle house it was for anyone to be in all alone.

Getting heated with my long walk, I suppose, made me feel chilly, for I shivered as I drew my head in from the last dormer window, and prepared to go downstairs again.

In the attics, as in the other parts of the house I had as yet explored, I closed the doors, when there were keys locking them; when there were not, trying them, and in all cases, leaving them securely fastened.

When I reached the ground floor the evening was drawing on apace, and I felt that if I wanted to explore the whole house before dusk I must hurry my proceedings.

“I’ll take the kitchens next,” I decided, and so made my way to a wilderness of domestic offices lying to the rear of the great hall. Stone passages, great kitchens, an immense servants’-hall, larders, pantries, coal-cellars, beer-cellars, laundries, brewhouses, housekeeper’s room – it was not of any use lingering over these details. The mystery that troubled Mr. Carrison could scarcely lodge amongst cinders and empty bottles, and there did not seem much else left in this part of the building.

I would go through the living-rooms, and then decide as to the apartments I should occupy myself.

The evening shadows were drawing on apace, so I hurried back into the hall, feeling it was a weird position to be there all alone with those ghostly hollow figures of men in armour, and the statues on which the moon’s beams must fall so coldly. I would just look through the lower apartments and then kindle a fire. I had seen quantities of wood in a cupboard close at hand, and felt that beside a blazing hearth, and after a good cup of tea, I should not feel the solitary sensation which was oppressing me.

The sun had sunk below the horizon by this time, for to reach Ladlow I had been obliged to travel by cross lines of railway, and wait besides for such trains as condescended to carry third-class passengers; but there was still light enough in the hail to see all objects distinctly. With my own eyes I saw that one of the doors I had shut with my own hands was standing wide!

I turned to the door on the other side of the hall. It was as I had left it – closed. This, then, was the room – this with the open door. For a second I stood appalled; I think I was fairly frightened.

That did not last long, however. There lay the work I had desired to undertake, the foe I had offered to fight; so without more ado I shut the door and tried it.

“Now I will walk to the end of the hall and see what happens,” I considered. I did so. I walked to the foot of the grand staircase and back again, and looked.

The door stood wide open.

I went into the room, after just a spasm of irresolution – went in and pulled up the blinds: a good-sized room, twenty by twenty (I knew, because I paced it afterwards), lighted by two long windows.

The floor, of polished oak, was partially covered with a Turkey carpet. There were two recesses beside the fireplace, one fitted up as a bookcase, the other with an old and elaborately caned cabinet. I was astonished also to find a bedstead in an apartment so little retired from the traffic of the house; and there were also some chairs of an obsolete make, covered, so far as I could make out, with Faded tapestry. Beside the bedstead, which stood against the wall opposite to the door, I perceived another door. It was fast locked, the only locked door I had as yet met with in the interior of the house. It was a dreary, gloomy room: the dark panelled walls; the black, shining floor; the windows high from the ground; the antique furniture; the dull four-poster bedstead, with dingy velvet curtains; the gaping chimney; the silk counterpane that looked like a pall.

“Any crime might have been committed in such a room,” I thought pettishly; and then I looked at the door critically.

Someone had been at the trouble of fitting bolts upon it, for when I passed out I not merely shut the door securely, but bolted it as well.

“I will go and get some wood, and then look at it again,” I soliloquised. When I came back it stood wide open once more.

“Stay open, then!” I cried in a fury. “I won’t trouble myself any more with you tonight!”

Almost as I spoke the words, there came a ring at the front door. Echoing through the desolate house, the peal in the then state of my nerves startled me beyond expression.

It was only the man who had agreed to bring over my traps. I bade him lay them down in the hall, and, while looking out some small silver, asked where the nearest post-office was to be found. Not far from the park gates, he said; if I wanted any letter sent, he would drop it in the box for me; the mail-cart picked up the bag at ten o’clock.

I had nothing ready to post then, and told him so. Perhaps the money I gave was more than he expected, or perhaps the dreariness of my position impressed him as it had impressed me, for he paused with his hand on the lock, and asked:

“Are you going to stop here all alone, master?”

“All alone,” I answered, with such cheerfulness as was possible under the circumstances.

“That’s the room, you know,” he said, nodding in the direction of the open door, and dropping his voice to a whisper.

“Yes, I know,” I replied.

“What, you’ve been trying to shut it already, have you? Well, you are a game one!” And with this complementary if not very respectful comment he hastened out of the house. Evidently he had no intention of proffering his services towards the solution of the mystery.

I cast one glance at the door – it stood wide open. Through the windows I had left bare to the night, moonlight was beginning to stream cold and silvery. Before I did aught else I felt I must write to Mr. Carrison and Patty, so straightway I hurried to one of the great tables in the hall, and lighting a candle my thoughtful link girl had provided, with many other things, sat down and dashed off the two epistles.

Then down the long avenue, with its mysterious lights and shades, with the moonbeams glinting here and there, playing at hide-and-seek round the boles of the trees and through the tracery of quivering leaf and stem, I walked as fast as if I were doing a match against time.

It was delicious, the scent of the summer odours, the smell of the earth; if it had not been for the door I should have felt too happy. As it was—

“Look here, Phil,” I said, all of a sudden; “life’s not child’s play, as uncle truly remarks. That door is just the trouble you have now to face, and you must face it! But for that door you would never have been here. I hope you are not going to turn coward the very first night. Courage! – that is your enemy – conquer it.”

“I will try,” my other self answered back. “I can but try. I can but fail.”

The post-office was at Ladlow Hollow, a little hamlet through which the stream I had remarked dawdling on its way across the park flowed swiftly, spanned by an ancient bridge.

As I stood by the door of the little shop, asking some questions of the postmistress, the same gentleman I had met in the afternoon mounted on his roan horse, passed on foot. He wished me goodnight as he went by, and nodded familiarly to my companion, who curtseyed her acknowledgements.

“His lordship ages fast,” she remarked, following the retreating figure with her eyes.

“His lordship,” I repeated. “Of whom are you speaking?”

“Of Lord Ladlow,” she said.

“Oh! I have never seen him,” I answered, puzzled. “Why, that was Lord Ladlow!” she exclaimed.

You may be sure I had something to think about as I walked back to the Hall – something beside the moonlight and the sweet night-scents, and the rustle of beast and bird and leaf, that make silence seem more eloquent than noise away down in the heart of the country.

Lord Ladlow! my word, I thought he was hundreds, thousands of miles away; and here I find him – he walking in the opposite direction from his own home – I an inmate of his desolate abode. Hi! – what was that? I heard a noise in a shrubbery close at hand, and in an instant I was in the thick of the underwood. Something shot out and darted into the cover of the further plantation. I followed, but I could catch never a glimpse of it. I did not know the lie of the ground sufficiently to course with success, and I had at length to give up the hunt – heated, baffled, and annoyed.

When I got into the house the moon’s beams were streaming down upon the hall; I could see every statue, every square of marble, every piece of armour. For all the world it seemed to me like something in a dream; but I was tired and sleepy, and decided I would not trouble about fire or food, or the open door, till the next morning: I would go to sleep.

With this intention I picked up some of my traps and carried them to a room on the first floor I had selected as small and habitable. I went down for the rest, and this time chanced to lay my hand on my rifle.

It was wet. I touched the floor – it was wet likewise.

I never felt anything like the thrill of delight which shot through me. I had to deal with flesh and blood, and I would deal with it, heaven helping me.

The next morning broke clear and bright. I was up with the lark – had washed, dressed, breakfasted, explored the house before the postman came with my letters.

One from Mr. Carrison, one from Patty, and one from my uncle: I gave the man half a crown, I was so delighted, and said I was afraid my being at the Hall would cause him some additional trouble.

“No, sir,” he answered, profuse in his expressions of gratitude; “I pass here every morning on my way to her ladyship’s.”

“Who is her ladyship?” I asked.

“The Dowager Lady Ladlow,” he answered – “the old lord’s widow.”

“And where is her place?” I persisted.

“If you keep on through the shrubbery and across the waterfall, you come to the house about a quarter of a mile further up the stream.”

He departed, after telling me there was only one post a day; and I hurried back to the room in which I had breakfasted, carrying my letters with me.

I opened Mr. Carrison’s first. The gist of it was, “Spare no expense; if you run short of money telegraph for it.”

I opened my uncle’s next. He implored me to return; he had always thought me hare-brained, but he felt a deep interest in and affection for me, and thought he could get me a good berth if I would only try to settle down and promise to stick to my work. The last was from Patty. O Patty, God bless you! Such women, I fancy, the men who fight best in battle, who stick last to a sinking ship, who are firm in life’s struggles, who are brave to resist temptation, must have known and loved. I can’t tell you more about the letter, except that it gave me strength to go on to the end.

I spent the forenoon considering that door. I looked at it from within and from without. I eyed it critically. I tried whether there was any reason why it should fly open, and I found that so long as I remained on the threshold it remained closed; if I walked even so far away as the opposite side of the hall, it swung wide.

Do what I would, it burst from latch and bolt. I could not lock it because there was no key. Well, before two o’clock I confess I was baffled.

At two there came a visitor – none other than Lord Ladlow himself. Sorely I wanted to take his horse round to the stables, but he would not hear of it.

“Walk beside me across the park, if you will be so kind,” he said; “I want to speak to you.”

We went together across the park, and before we parted I felt I could have gone through fire and water for this simple-spoken nobleman.

“You must not stay here ignorant of the rumours which are afloat,” he said. “Of course, when I let the place to Mr. Carrison I knew nothing of the open door.”

“Did you not, sir? – my lord, I mean,” I stammered.

He smiled. “Do not trouble yourself about my title, which, indeed, carries a very empty state with it, but talk to me as you might to a friend. I had no idea there was any ghost story connected with the Hall, or I should have kept the place empty.”

I did not exactly know what to answer, so I remained silent.

“How did you chance to be sent here?” he asked, after a pause.

I told him. When the first shock was over, a lord did not seem very different from anybody else. If an emperor had taken a morning canter across the park, I might, supposing him equally affable, have spoken as familiarly to him as to Lord Ladlow. My mother always said I entirely lacked the bump of veneration!

Beginning at the beginning, I repeated the whole story, from Parton’s remark about the sovereign to Mr. Carrison’s conversation with my uncle. When I had left London behind in the narrative, however, and arrived at the Hall, I became somewhat more reticent. After all, it was his Hall people could not live in – his door that would not keep shut; and it seemed to me these were facts he might dislike being forced upon his attention.

But he would have it. What had I seen? What did I think of the matter? Very honestly I told him I did not know what to say. The door certainly would not remain shut, and there seemed no human agency to account for its persistent opening; but then, on the other hand, ghosts generally did not tamper with firearms, and my rifle, though not loaded, had been tampered with – I was sure of that.

My companion listened attentively. “You are not frightened, are you?” he enquired at length.

“Not now,” I answered. “The door did give me a start last evening, but I am not afraid of that since I find someone else is afraid of a bullet.”

He did not answer for a minute; then he said: “The theory people have set up about the open door is this: as in that room my uncle was murdered, they say the door will never remain shut till the murderer is discovered.”

“Murdered!” I did not like the word at all; it made me feel chill and uncomfortable.

“Yes – he was murdered sitting in his chair, and the assassin has never been discovered. At first many persons inclined to the belief that I killed him; indeed, many are of that opinion still.”

“But you did not, sir – there is not a word of truth in that story, is there?”

He laid his hand on my shoulder as he said: “No, my lad; not a word. I loved the old man tenderly. Even when he disinherited me for the sake of his young wife, I was sorry, but not angry; and when he sent for me and assured me he had resolved to repair that wrong, I tried to induce him to leave the lady a handsome sum in addition to her jointure. ‘If you do not, people may think she has not been the source of happiness you expected,’ I added.

“‘Thank you, Hal,’ he said. ‘You are a good fellow; we will talk further about this tomorrow.’ And then he bade me goodnight.

“Before morning broke – it was in the summer two years ago – the household was aroused by a fearful scream. It was his death-cry. He had been stabbed from behind in the neck. He was seated in his chair writing – writing a letter to me. But for that I might have found it harder to clear myself than was in the case; for his solicitors came forward and said he had signed a will leaving all his personalty to me – he was very rich – unconditionally, only three days previously. That, of course, supplied the motive, as my lady’s lawyer put it. She was very vindictive, spared no expense in trying to prove my guilt, and said openly she would never rest till she saw justice done, if it cost her the whole of her fortune. The letter lying before the dead man, over which blood had spurted, she declared must have been placed on his table by me; but the coroner saw there was an animus in this, for the few opening lines stated my uncle’s desire to confide in me his reasons for changing his will – reasons, he said, that involved his honour, as they had destroyed his peace. ‘In the statement you will find sealed up with my will in – ’ At that point he was dealt his death-blow. The papers were never found, and the will was never proved. My lady put in the former will, leaving her everything. Ill as I could afford to go to law, I was obliged to dispute the matter, and the lawyers are at it still, and very likely will continue at it for years. When I lost my good name, I lost my good health, and had to go abroad; and while I was away Mr. Carrison took the Hall. Till I returned, I never heard a word about the open door. My solicitor said Mr. Carrison was behaving badly; but I think now I must see them or him, and consider what can be done in the affair. As for yourself, it is of vital importance to me that this mystery should be cleared up, and if you are really not timid, stay on. I am too poor to make rash promises, but you won’t find me ungrateful.”

“Oh, my lord!” I cried – the address slipped quite easily and naturally off my tongue – “I don’t want any more money or anything, if I can only show Patty’s father I am good for something—”

“Who is Patty?” he asked.

He read the answer in my face, for he said no more.

“Should you like to have a good dog for company?” he enquired after a pause.

I hesitated; then I said: “No, thank you. I would rather watch and hunt for myself.”

And as I spoke, the remembrance of that “something” in the shrubbery recurred to me, and I told him I thought there had been someone about the place the previous evening.

“Poachers,” he suggested; but I shook my head.

“A girl or a woman, I imagine. However, I think a dog might hamper me.”

He went away, and I returned to the house. I never left it all day. I did not go into the garden, or the stable-yard, or the shrubbery, or anywhere; I devoted myself solely and exclusively to that door.

If I shut it once, I shut it a hundred times, and always with the same result. Do what I would, it swung wide. Never, however, when I was looking at it. So long as I could endure to remain, it stayed shut – the instant I turned my back, it stood open.

About four o’clock I had another visitor; no other than Lord Ladlow’s daughter – the Honourable Beatrice, riding her funny little white pony.

She was a beautiful girl of fifteen or thereabouts, and she had the sweetest smile you ever saw.

“Papa sent me with this,” she said; “he would not trust any other messenger,” and she put a piece of paper in my hand.

Keep your food under lock and key; buy what you require yourself. Get your water from the pump in the stable-yard. I am going from home; but if you want anything, go or send to my daughter.

“Any answer?” she asked, patting her pony’s neck.

“Tell his lordship, if you please, I will ‘keep my powder dry’ !” I replied.

“You have made papa look so happy,” she said, still patting that fortunate pony.

“If it is in my power, I will make him look happier still, Miss—” and I hesitated, not knowing how to address her.

“Call me Beatrice,” she said, with an enchanting grace; then added, slyly, “Papa promises me I shall be introduced to Patty ere long,” and before I could recover from my astonishment, she had tightened the bit and was turning across the park.

“One moment, please,” I cried. “You can do something for me.”

“What is it?” and she came back, trotting over the great sweep in front of the house.

“Lend me your pony for a minute.”

She was off before I could even offer to help her alight – off, and gathering up her habit dexterously with one hand, led the docile old sheep forward with the other.

I took the bridle – when I was with horses I felt amongst my own kind – stroked the pony, pulled his ears, and let him thrust his nose into my hand.

Miss Beatrice is a countess now, and a happy wife and mother; but I sometimes see her, and the other night she took me carefully into a conservatory and asked:

“Do you remember Toddy, Mr. Edlyd?”

“Remember him!” I exclaimed; “I can never forget him!”

“He is dead!” she told me, and there were tears in her beautiful eyes as she spoke the words. “Mr. Edlyd, I loved Toddy!”

Well, I took Toddy up to the house, and under the third window to the right hand. He was a docile creature, and let me stand on the saddle while I looked into the only room in Ladlow Hall I had been unable to enter.

It was perfectly bare of furniture, there was not a thing in it – not a chair or table, not a picture on the walls, or ornament on the chimney-piece.

“That is where my grand-uncle’s valet slept,” said Miss Beatrice. “It was he who first ran in to help him the night he was murdered.”

“Where is the valet?” I asked.

“Dead,” she answered. “The shock killed him. He loved his master more than he loved himself.” I had seen all I wished, so I jumped off the saddle, which I had carefully dusted with a branch plucked from a lilac tree; between jest and earnest pressed the hem of Miss Beatrice’s habit to my lips as I arranged its folds; saw her wave her hand as she went at a hard gallop across the park; and then turned back once again into the lonely house, with the determination to solve the mystery attached to it or die in the attempt.

Why, I cannot explain, but before I went to bed that night I drove a gimlet I found in the stables hard into the floor, and said to the door:

“Now I am keeping you open.”

When I went down in the morning the door was close shut, and the handle of the gimlet, broken off short, lying in the hall.

I put my hand to wipe my forehead; it was dripping with perspiration. I did not know what to make of the place at all! I went out into the open air for a few minutes; when I returned the door again stood wide.

If I were to pursue in detail the days and nights that followed, I should weary my readers. I can only say they changed my life. The solitude, the solemnity, the mystery, produced an effect I do not profess to understand, but that I cannot regret.

I have hesitated about writing of the end, but it must come, so let me hasten to it. Though feeling convinced that no human agency did or could keep the door open, I was certain that some living person had means of access to the house which I could not discover, This was made apparent in trifles which might well have escaped unnoticed had several, or even two people occupied the mansion, but that in my solitary position it was impossible to overlook. A chair would be misplaced, for instance; a path would be visible over a dusty floor; my papers I found were moved; my clothes touched – letters I carried about with me, and kept under my pillow at night; still, the fact remained that when I went to the post-office, and while I was asleep, someone did wander over the house. On Lord Ladlow’s return I meant to ask him for some further particulars of his uncle’s death, and I was about to write to Mr. Carrison and beg permission to have the door where the valet had slept broken open, when one morning, very early indeed, I spied a hairpin lying close beside it.

What an idiot I had been! If I wanted to solve the mystery of the open door, of course I must keep watch in the room itself. The door would not stay wide unless there was a reason for it, and most certainly a hairpin could not have got into the house without assistance.

I made up my mind what I should do – that I would go to the post early, and take up my position about the hour I had hitherto started for Ladlow Hollow. I felt on the eve of a discovery, and longed for the day to pass, that the night might come.

It was a lovely morning; the weather had been exquisite during the whole week, and I flung the hall door wide to let in the sunshine and the breeze. As I did so, I saw there was a basket on the top step – a basket filled with rare and beautiful fruit and flowers.

Mr. Carrison had let off the gardens attached to Ladlow Hall for the season – he thought he might as well save something out of the fire, he said, so my fare had not been varied with delicacies of that kind. I was very fond of fruit in those days, and seeing a card addressed to me, I instantly selected a tempting peach, and ate it – a little greedily perhaps.

I might say I had barely swallowed the last morsel, when Lord Ladlow’s caution recurred to me. The fruit had a curious flavour – there was a strange taste hanging about my palate. For a moment, sky, trees and park swam before my eyes; then I made up my mind what to do.

I smelt the fruit – it had all the same faint odour; then I put some in my pocket – took the basket and locked it away – walked round to the farmyard – asked for the loan of a horse that was generally driven in a light cart, and in less than half an hour was asking in Ladlow to be directed to a doctor.

Rather cross at being disturbed so early, he was at first inclined to pooh-pooh my idea; but I made him cut open a pear and satisfy himself the fruit had been tampered with.

“It is fortunate you stopped at the first peach,” he remarked, after giving me a draught, and some medicine to take back, and advising me to keep in the open air as much as possible. “I should like to retain this fruit and see you again tomorrow.”

We did not think then on how many morrows we should see each other! Riding across to Ladlow, the postman had given me three letters, but I did not read them till I was seated under a great tree in the park, with a basin of milk and a piece of bread beside me.

Hitherto, there had been nothing exciting in my correspondence. Patty’s epistles were always delightful, but they could not be regarded as sensational; and about Mr. Carrison’s there was a monotony I had begun to find tedious. On this occasion, however, no fault could be found on that score. The contents of his letter greatly surprised me. He said Lord Ladlow had released him from his bargain – that I could, therefore, leave the Hall at once. He enclosed me ten pounds, and said he would consider how he could best advance my interests; and that I had better call upon him at his private house when I returned to London.

“I do not think I shall leave Ladlow yet awhile,” I considered, as I replaced his letter in its envelope. “Before I go I should like to make it hot for whoever sent me that fruit; so unless Lord Ladlow turns me out I’ll stay a little longer.”

Lord Ladlow did not wish me to leave. The third letter was from him.

I shall return home tomorrow night (he wrote), and see you on Wednesday. I have arranged satisfactorily with Mr. Carrison, and as the Hall is my own again, I mean to try to solve the mystery it contains myself. If you choose to stop and help me to do so, you would confer a favour, and I will try to make it worth your while.

“I will keep watch tonight, and see if I cannot give you some news tomorrow,” I thought. And then I opened Patty’s letter – the best, dearest, sweetest letter any postman in all the world could have brought me.

If it had not been for what Lord Ladlow said about his sharing my undertaking, I should not have chosen that night for my vigil. I felt ill and languid – fancy, no doubt, to a great degree inducing these sensations. I had lost energy in a most unaccountable manner. The long, lonely days had told upon my spirits – the fidgety feeling which took me a hundred times in the twelve hours to look upon the open door, to close it, and to count how many steps I could take before it opened again, had tried my mental strength as a perpetual blister might have worn away my physical. In no sense was I fit for the task I had set myself, and yet I determined to go through with it. Why had I never before decided to watch in that mysterious chamber? Had I been at the bottom of my heart afraid? In the bravest of us there are depths of cowardice that lurk unsuspected till they engulf our courage.

The day wore on – the long, dreary day; evening approached – the night shadows closed over the Hall. The moon would not rise for a couple of hours more. Everything was still as death. The house had never before seemed to me so silent and so deserted.

I took a light, and went up to my accustomed room, moving about for a time as though preparing for bed; then I extinguished the candle, softly opened the door, turned the key, and put it in my pocket, slipped softly downstairs, across the hall, through the open door. Then I knew I had been afraid, for I felt a thrill of terror as in the dark I stepped over the threshold. I paused and listened – there was not a sound – the night was still and sultry, as though a storm were brewing. Not a leaf seemed moving – the very mice remained in their holes! Noiselessly I made my way to the other side of the room. There was an old-fashioned easy-chair between the bookshelves and the bed; I sat down in it, shrouded by the heavy curtain.

The hours passed – were ever hours so long? The moon rose, came and looked in at the windows, and then sailed away to the west; but not a sound, no, not even the cry of a bird. I seemed to myself a mere collection of nerves. Every part of my body appeared twitching. It was agony to remain still; the desire to move became a form of torture. Ah! a streak in the sky; morning at last, Heaven be praised! Had ever anyone before so welcomed the dawn? A thrush began to sing – was there ever heard such delightful music? It was the morning twilight, soon the sun would rise; soon that awful vigil would be over, and yet I was no nearer the mystery than before. Hush! what was that? It had come. After the hours of watching and waiting; after the long night and the long suspense, it came in a moment.

The locked door opened – so suddenly, so silently, that I had barely time to draw back behind the curtain, before I saw a woman in the room. She went straight across to the other door and closed it, securing it as I saw with bolt and lock. Then just glancing around, she made her way to the cabinet, and with a key she produced shot back the wards. I did not stir, I scarcely breathed, and yet she seemed uneasy. Whatever she wanted to do she evidently was in haste to finish, for she took out the drawers one by one, and placed them on the floor; then, as the light grew better, I saw her first kneel on the floor, and peer into every aperture, and subsequently repeat the same process, standing on a chair she drew forward for the purpose. A slight, lithe woman, not a lady, clad all in black – not a bit of white about her. What on earth could she want? In a moment it flashed upon me – THE WILL AND THE LETTER! SHE IS SEARCHING FOR THEM.

I sprang from my concealment – I had her in my grasp; but she tore herself out of my hands, fighting like a wildcat: she hit, scratched, kicked, shifting her body as though she had not a bone in it, and at last slipped herself free, and ran wildly towards the door by which she had entered.

If she reached it, she would escape me. I rushed across the room and just caught her dress as she was on the threshold. My blood was up, and I dragged her back: she had the strength of twenty devils, I think, and struggled as surely no woman ever did before.

“I do not want to kill you,” I managed to say in gasps, “but I will if you do not keep quiet.”

“Bah!” she cried; and before I knew what she was doing she had the revolver out of my pocket and fired.

She missed: the ball just glanced off my sleeve. I fell upon her – I can use no other expression, for it had become a fight for life, and no man can tell the ferocity there is in him till he is placed as I was then – fell upon her, and seized the weapon. She would not let it go, but I held her so tight she could not use it. She bit my face; with her disengaged hand she tore my hair. She turned and twisted and slipped about like a snake, but I did not feel pain or anything except a deadly horror lest my strength should give out.

Could I hold out much longer? She made one desperate plunge, I felt the grasp with which I held her slackening; she felt it too, and seizing her advantage tore herself free, and at the same instant fired again blindly, and again missed.

Suddenly there came a look of horror into her eyes – a frozen expression of fear.

“See!” she cried; and flinging the revolver at me, fled.

I saw, as in a momentary flash, that the door I had beheld locked stood wide – that there stood beside the table an awful figure, with uplifted hand – and then I saw no more. I was struck at last; as she threw the revolver at me she must have pulled the trigger, for I felt something like red-hot iron enter my shoulder, and I could but rush from the room before I fell senseless on the marble pavement of the hall.

When the postman came that morning, finding no one stirring, be looked through one of the long windows that flanked the door; then he ran to the farmyard and called for help.

“There is something wrong inside,” he cried. “That young gentleman is lying on the floor in a pool of blood.”

As they rushed round to the front of the house they saw Lord Ladlow riding up the avenue, and breathlessly told him what had happened.

“Smash in one of the windows,” be said; “and go instantly for a doctor.”

They laid me on the bed in that terrible room, and telegraphed for my father. For long I hovered between life and death, but at length I recovered sufficiently to be removed to the house Lord Ladlow owned on the other side of the Hollow.

Before that time I had told him all I knew, and begged him to make instant search for the will.

“Break up the cabinet if necessary,” I entreated, “I am sure the papers are there.”

And they were. His lordship got his own, and as to the scandal and the crime, one was hushed up and the other remained unpunished. The dowager and her maid went abroad the very morning I lay on the marble pavement at Ladlow Hall – they never returned.

My lord made that one condition of his silence.

Not in Meadowshire, but in a fairer county still, I have a farm which I manage, and make both ends meet comfortably.

Patty is the best wife any man ever possessed – and I – well, I am just as happy if a trifle more serious than of old; but there are times when a great horror of darkness seems to fall upon me, and at such periods I cannot endure to be left alone.

JOHN CHARRINGTON’S
WEDDING

Edith Nesbit

1891

No one ever thought that May Forster would marry John Charrington; but he thought differently, and things which John Charrington intended had a queer way of coming to pass. He asked her to marry him before he went up to Oxford. She laughed and refused him. He asked her again next time he came home. Again she laughed, tossed her dainty blonde head, and again refused. A third time he asked her; she said it was becoming a confirmed bad habit, and laughed at him more than ever.

John was not the only man who wanted to marry her: she was the belle of our village coterie, and we were all in love with her, more or less; it was a sort of fashion, like heliotrope ties or Inverness capes. Therefore we were as much annoyed as surprised when John Charrington walked into our little local Club – we held it in a loft over the saddler’s, I remember – and invited us all to his wedding.

“Your wedding?”

“You don’t mean it?”

“Who’s the happy pair? When’s it to be?”

John Charrington filled his pipe and lighted it before he replied. Then he said –

“I’m sorry to deprive you fellows of your only joke – but Miss Forster and I are to be married in September.”

“You don’t mean it?”

“He’s got the mitten again, and it’s turned his head.”

“No,” I said, rising, “I see it’s true. Lend me a pistol someone – or a first-class fare to the other end of Nowhere. Charrington has bewitched the only pretty girl in our twenty-mile radius. Was it mesmerism, or a love-potion, Jack?”

“Neither, sir, but a gift you’ll never have – perseverance – and the best luck a man ever had in this world.”

There was something in his voice that silenced me, and all chaff of the other fellows failed to draw him further.

The queer thing about it was that when we congratulated Miss Forster, she blushed and smiled and dimpled, for all the world as though she were in love with him, and had been in love with him all the time. Upon my word, I think she had. Women are strange creatures.

We were all asked to the wedding. In Brixham everyone who was anybody knew everybody else who was anyone. My sisters were, I truly believe, more interested in the trousseau than the bride herself, and I was to be best man. The coming marriage was much canvassed at afternoon tea-tables, and at our little Club over the saddler’s, and the question was always asked: “Does she care for him?”

I used to ask that question myself in the early days of their engagement, but after a certain evening in August I never asked it again. I was coming home from the Club through the churchyard. Our church is on a thyme-grown hill, and the turf about it is so thick and soft that one’s footsteps are noiseless.

I made no sound as I vaulted the low lichened wall, and threaded my way between the tombstones. It was at the same instant that I heard John Charrington’s voice, and saw Her. May was sitting on a low flat gravestone, her face turned towards the full splendour of the western sun. Its expression ended, at once and for ever, any question of love for him; it was transfigured to a beauty I should not have believed possible, even to that beautiful little face.

John lay at her feet, and it was his voice that broke the stillness of the golden August evening.

“My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the dead if you wanted me!”

I coughed at once to indicate my presence, and passed on into the shadow fully enlightened.

The wedding was to be early in September. Two days before I had to run up to town on business. The train was late, of course, for we are on the South-Eastern, and as I stood grumbling with my watch in my hand, whom should I see but John Charrington and May Forster. They were walking up and down the unfrequented end of the platform, arm in arm, looking into each other’s eyes, careless of the sympathetic interest of the porters.

Of course I knew better than to hesitate a moment before burying myself in the booking-office, and it was not till the train drew up at the platform, that I obtrusively passed the pair with my Gladstone, and took the corner in a first-class smoking-carriage. I did this with as good an air of not seeing them as I could assume. I pride myself on my discretion, but if John were travelling alone I wanted his company. I had it.

“Hullo, old man,” came his cheery voice as he swung his bag into my carriage; “here’s luck; I was expecting a dull journey!”

“Where are you off to?” I asked, discretion still bidding me turn my eyes away, though I saw, without looking, that hers were red-rimmed.

“To old Branbridge’s,” he answered, shutting the door and leaning out for a last word with his sweetheart.

“Oh, I wish you wouldn’t go, John,” she was saying in a low, earnest voice. “I feel certain something will happen.”

“Do you think I should let anything happen to keep me, and the day after tomorrow our wedding-day?”

“Don’t go,” she answered, with a pleading intensity which would have sent my Gladstone on to the platform and me after it. But she wasn’t speaking to me. John Charrington was made differently; he rarely changed his opinions, never his resolutions.

He only stroked the little ungloved hands that lay on the carriage door.

“I must, May. The old boy’s been awfully good to me, and now he’s dying I must go and see him, but I shall come home in time for—” the rest of the parting was lost in a whisper and in the rattling lurch of the starting train.

“You’re sure to come?” she spoke as the train moved.

“Nothing shall keep me,” he answered; and we steamed out. After he had seen the last of the little figure on the platform he leaned back in his corner and kept silence for a minute.

When he spoke it was to explain to me that his godfather, whose heir he was, lay dying at Peasmarsh Place, some fifty miles away, and had sent for John, and John had felt bound to go.

“I shall be surely back tomorrow,” he said, “or, if not, the day after, in heaps of time. Thank Heaven, one hasn’t to get up in the middle of the night to get married nowadays!”

“And suppose Mr. Branbridge dies?”

“Alive or dead I mean to be married on Thursday!” John answered, lighting a cigar and unfolding the Times.

At Peasmarsh station we said “good-bye,” and he got out, and I saw him ride off; I went on to London, where I stayed the night.

When I got home the next afternoon, a very wet one, by the way, my sister greeted me with –

“Where’s Mr. Charrington?”

“Goodness knows,” I answered testily. Every man, since Cain, has resented that kind of question.

“I thought you might have heard from him,” she went on, “as you’re to give him away tomorrow.”

“Isn’t he back?” I asked, for I had confidently expected to find him at home.

“No, Geoffrey,” – my sister Fanny always had a way of jumping to conclusions, especially such conclusions as were least favourable to her fellow-creatures – “he has not returned, and, what is more, you may depend upon it he won’t. You mark my words, there’ll be no wedding tomorrow.”

My sister Fanny has a power of annoying me which no other human being possesses.

“You mark my words,” I retorted with asperity, “you had better give up making such a thundering idiot of yourself. There’ll be more wedding tomorrow than ever you’ll take the first part in.” A prophecy which, by the way, came true.

But though I could snarl confidently to my sister, I did not feel so comfortable when, late that night, I, standing on the doorstep of John’s house, heard that he had not returned. I went home gloomily through the rain. Next morning brought a brilliant blue sky, gold sun, and all such softness of air and beauty of cloud as go to make up a perfect day. I woke with a vague feeling of having gone to bed anxious, and of being rather averse to facing that anxiety in the light of full wakefulness.

But with my shaving-water came a note from John which relieved my mind and sent me up to the Forsters’ with a light heart.

May was in the garden. I saw her blue gown through the hollyhocks as the lodge gates swung to behind me. So I did not go up to the house, but turned aside down the turfed path.

“He’s written to you too,” she said, without preliminary greeting, when I reached her side.

“Yes, I’m to meet him at the station at three, and come straight on to the church.”

Her face looked pale, but there was a brightness in her eyes, and a tender quiver about the mouth that spoke of renewed happiness.

“Mr. Branbridge begged him so to stay another night that he had not the heart to refuse,” she went on. “He is so kind, but I wish he hadn’t stayed.”

I was at the station at half-past two. I felt rather annoyed with John. It seemed a sort of slight to the beautiful girl who loved him, that he should come as it were out of breath, and with the dust of travel upon him, to take her hand, which some of us would have given the best years of our lives to take.

But when the three o’clock train glided in, and glided out again having brought no passengers to our little station, I was more than annoyed. There was no other train for thirty-five minutes; I calculated that, with much hurry, we might just get to the church in time for the ceremony; but, oh, what a fool to miss that first train! What other man could have done it?

That thirty-five minutes seemed a year, as I wandered round the station reading the advertisements and the time-tables, and the company’s by-laws, and getting more and more angry with John Charrington. This confidence in his own power of getting everything he wanted the minute he wanted it was leading him too far. I hate waiting. Everyone does, but I believe I hate it more than anyone else. The three thirty-five was late, of course.

I ground my pipe between my teeth and stamped with impatience as I watched the signals. Click. The signal went down. Five minutes later I flung myself into the carriage that I had brought for John.

“Drive to the church!” I said, as someone shut the door. “Mr. Charrington hasn’t come by this train.”

Anxiety now replaced anger. What had become of the man? Could he have been taken suddenly ill? I had never known him have a day’s illness in his life. And even so he might have telegraphed. Some awful accident must have happened to him. The thought that he had played her false never – no, not for a moment – entered my head. Yes, something terrible had happened to him, and on me lay the task of telling his bride. I almost wished the carriage would upset and break my head so that someone else might tell her, not I, who – but that’s nothing to do with his story.

It was five minutes to four as we drew up at the churchyard gate. A double row of eager onlookers lined the path from lychgate to porch. I sprang from the carriage and passed up between them. Our gardener had a good front place near the door. I stopped.

“Are they waiting still, Byles?” I asked, simply to gain time, for of course I knew they were by the waiting crowd’s attentive attitude.

“Waiting, sir? No, no, sir; why, it must be over by now.”

“Over! Then Mr. Charrington’s come?”

“To the minute, sir; must have missed you somehow, and, I say, sir,” lowering his voice, “I never see Mr. John the least bit so afore, but my opinion is he’s been drinking pretty free. His clothes was all dusty and his face like a sheet. I tell you I didn’t like the looks of him at all, and the folks inside are saying all sorts of things. You’ll see, something’s gone very wrong with Mr. John, and he’s tried liquor. He looked like a ghost, and in he went with his eyes straight before him, with never a look or a word for none of us; him that was always such a gentleman!”

I had never heard Byles make so long a speech. The crowd in the churchyard were talking in whispers and getting ready rice and slippers to throw at the bride and bridegroom. The ringers were ready with their hands on the ropes to ring out the merry peal as the bride and bridegroom should come out.

A murmur from the church announced them; out they came. Byles was right. John Charrington did not look himself. There was dust on his coat, his hair was disarranged. He seemed to have been in some row, for there was a black mark above his eyebrow. He was deathly pale. But his pallor was not greater than that of the bride, who might have been carved in ivory – dress, veil, orange blossoms, face and all.

As they passed out the ringers stooped – there were six of them – and then, on the ears expecting the gay wedding peal, came the slow tolling of the passing bell.

A thrill of horror at so foolish a jest from the ringers passed through us all. But the ringers themselves dropped the ropes and fled like rabbits out into the sunlight. The bride shuddered, and grey shadows came about her mouth, but the bridegroom led her on down the path where the people stood with the handfuls of rice; but the handfuls were never thrown, and the wedding-bells never rang. In vain the ringers were urged to remedy their mistake: they protested with many whispered expletives that they would see themselves further first.

In a hush like the hush in the chamber of death the bridal pair passed into their carriage and its door slammed behind them.

Then the tongues were loosed. A babel of anger, wonder, conjecture from the guests and the spectators.

“If I’d seen his condition, sir,” said old Forster to me as we drove off, “I would have stretched him on the floor of the church, sir, by Heaven I would, before I’d have let him marry my daughter!”

Then he put his head out of the window.

“Drive like hell,” he cried to the coachman; “don’t spare the horses.”

He was obeyed. We passed the bride’s carriage. I forebore to look at it, and old Forster turned his head away and swore. We reached home before it.

We stood in the hall doorway, in the blazing afternoon sun, and in about half a minute we heard wheels crunching the gravel. When the carriage stopped in front of the steps old Forster and I ran down.

“Great Heaven, the carriage is empty! And yet—”

I had the door open in a minute, and this is what I saw—

No sign of John Charrington; and of May, his wife, only a huddled heap of white satin lying half on the floor of the carriage and half on the seat.

“I drove straight here, sir,” said the coachman, as the bride’s father lifted her out; “and I’ll swear no one got out of the carriage.”

We carried her into the house in her bridal dress and drew back her veil. I saw her face. Shall I ever forget it? White, white and drawn with agony and horror, bearing such a look of terror as I have never seen since except in dreams. And her hair, her radiant blonde hair, I tell you it was white like snow.

As we stood, her father and I, half mad with the horror and mystery of it, a boy came up the avenue – a telegraph boy. They brought the orange envelope to me. I tore it open.

“MR. CHARRINGTON WAS THROWN FROM THE DOGCART ON HIS WAY TO THE STATION AT HALF-PAST ONE. KILLED ON THE SPOT!”

And he was married to May Forster in our parish church at half-past three, in presence of half the parish.

“I shall be married, dead or alive!”

What had passed in that carriage on the homeward drive? No one knows – no one will ever know. Oh, May! oh, my dear!

Before a week was over they laid her beside her husband in our little churchyard on the thyme-covered hill – the churchyard where they had kept their love-trysts.

Thus was accomplished John Charrington’s wedding.

THE RETURN

R. Murray Gilchrist

1892

Five minutes ago I drew the window curtain aside and let the mellow sunset light contend with the glare from the girandoles. Below lay the orchard of Vernon Garth, rich in heavily flowered fruit-trees – yonder a medlar, here a pear, next a quince. As my eyes, unaccustomed to the day, blinked rapidly, the recollection came of a scene forty-five years past; and once more beneath the oldest tree stood the girl I loved, mischievously plucking yarrow, and, despite its evil omen, twining the snowy clusters in her black hair. Again her coquettish words rang in my ears: “Make me thy lady! Make me the richest woman in England, and I promise thee, Brian, we shall be the happiest of God’s creatures.” And I remembered how the mad thirst for gold filled me: how I trusted in her fidelity, and without reasoning or even telling her that I would conquer fortune for her sake, I kissed her sadly and passed into the world. Then followed a complete silence until the Star of Europe, the greatest diamond discovered in modern times, lay in my hand – a rough unpolished stone not unlike the lumps of spar I had often seen lying on the sandy lanes of my native county. This should be Rose’s own, and all the others that clanked so melodiously in their leather bulse should go towards fulfilling her ambition. Rich and happy I should be soon, and should I not marry an untitled gentlewoman, sweet in her prime? The twenty years’ interval of work and sleep was like a fading dream, for I was going home. The knowledge thrilled me so that my nerves were strung tight as iron ropes and I laughed like a young boy. And it was all because my home was to be in Rose Pascal’s arms.

I crossed the sea and posted straight for Halkton village. The old hostelry was crowded. Jane Hopgarth, whom I remembered a ruddy-faced child, stood on the box-edged terrace, courtesying in matronly fashion to the departing mail-coach. A change in the sign-board drew my eye: the white lilies had been painted over with a mitre, and the name changed from the Pascal Arms to the Lord Bishop. Angrily aghast at this disloyalty, I cross-questioned the ostlers, who hurried to and fro, but failing to obtain any coherent reply I was fain to content myself with a mental denunciation of the times.

At last I saw Bow-Legged Jeffries, now bent double with age, sunning himself at his favourite place, the side of the horse-trough. As of old he was chewing a straw. No sign of recognition came over his face as he gazed at me, and I was shocked, because I wished to impart some of my gladness to a fellow-creature. I went to him, and after trying in vain to make him speak, held forth a gold coin. He rose instantly, grasped it with palsied fingers, and, muttering that the hounds were starting, hurried from my presence. Feeling half sad I crossed to the churchyard and gazed through the grated window of the Pascal burial chapel at the recumbent and undisturbed effigies of Geoffrey Pascal, gentleman, of Bretton Hall; and Margot Maltrevor his wife, with their quaint epitaph about a perfect marriage enduring for ever. Then, after noting the rankness of the docks and nettles, I crossed the worn stile and with footsteps surprising fleet passed towards the stretch of moorland at whose further end stands Bretton Hall.

Twilight had fallen ere I reached the cottage at the entrance of the park. This was in a ruinous condition: here and there sheaves in the thatched roof had parted and formed crevices through which smoke filtered. Some of the tiny windows had been walled up, and even where the glass remained snakelike ivy hindered any light from falling into their thick recesses.

The door stood open, although the evening was chill. As I approached, the heavy autumnal dew shook down from the firs and fell upon my shoulders. A bat, swooping in an undulation, struck between my eyes and fell to the grass, moaning querulously. I entered. A withered woman sat beside the peat fire. She held a pair of steel knitting-needles which she moved without cessation. There was no thread upon them, and when they clicked her lips twitched as if she had counted. Some time passed before I recognised Rose’s foster-mother, Elizabeth Carless. The russet colour of her cheeks had faded and left a sickly grey; those sunken, dimmed eyes were utterly unlike the bright black orbs that had danced so mirthfully. Her stature, too, had shrunk. I was struck with wonder. Elizabeth could not be more than fifty-six years old. I had been away twenty years; Rose was fifteen when I left her, and I had heard Elizabeth say that she was only twenty-one at the time of her darling’s weaning. But what a change! She had such an air of weary grief that my heart grew sick.

Advancing to her side I touched her arm. She turned, but neither spoke nor seemed aware of my presence. Soon, however, she rose, and helping herself along by grasping the scanty furniture, tottered to a window and peered out. Her right hand crept to her throat; she untied the string of her gown and took from her bosom a pomander set in a battered silver case. I cried out; Rose had loved that toy in her childhood; thousands of times we played ball with it… Elizabeth held it to her mouth and mumbled it, as if it were a baby’s hand. Maddened with impatience, I caught her shoulder and roughly bade her say where I should find Rose. But something awoke in her eyes, and she shrank away to the other side of the house-place: I followed; she cowered on the floor, looking at me with a strange horror. Her lips began to move, but they made no sound. Only when I crossed to the threshold did she rise; and then her head moved wildly from side to side, and her hands pressed close to her breast, as if the pain there were too great to endure.

I ran from the place, not daring to look back. In a few minutes I reached the balustraded wall of the Hall garden. The vegetation there was wonderfully luxuriant. As of old, the great blue and white Canterbury bells grew thickly, and those curious flowers to which tradition has given the name of “Marie’s Heart” still spread their creamy tendrils and blood-coloured bloom on every hand. But “Pascal’s Dribble”, the tiny spring whose water pulsed so fiercely as it emerged from the earth, had long since burst its bounds, and converted the winter garden into a swamp, where a miniature forest of queen-of-the-meadow filled the air with melancholy sweetness. The house looked as if no careful hand had touched it for years. The elements had played havoc with its oriels, and many of the latticed frames hung on single hinges. The curtain of the blue parlour hung outside, draggled and faded, and half hidden by a thick growth of bindweed.

With an almost savage force I raised my arm high above my head and brought my fist down upon the central panel of the door. There was no need for such violence, for the decayed fastenings made no resistance, and some of the rotten boards fell to the ground. As I entered the hall and saw the ancient furniture, once so fondly kept, now mildewed and crumbling to dust, quick sobs burst from my throat. Rose’s spinet stood beside the door of the withdrawing-room. How many carols had we sung to its music! As I passed my foot struck one of the legs and the rickety structure groaned as if it were coming to pieces. I thrust out my hand to steady it, but at my touch the velvet covering of the lid came off and the tiny gilt ornaments rattled downwards. The moon was just rising and only half her disc was visible over the distant edge of the Hell Garden. The light in the room was very uncertain, yet I could see the keys of the instrument were stained brown, and bound together with thick cobwebs.

Whilst I stood beside it I felt an overpowering desire to play a country ballad with an over-word of “Willow browbound”. The words in strict accordance with the melody are merry and sad by turns: at one time filled with light happiness, at another bitter as the voice of one bereaved forever of joy. So I cleared off the spiders and began to strike the keys with my forefinger. Many were dumb, and when I struck them gave forth no sound save a peculiar sigh; but still the melody rhythmed as distinctly as if a low voice crooned it out of the darkness. Wearied with the bitterness, I turned away.

By now the full moonlight pierced the window and quivered on the floor. As I gazed on the tremulous pattern it changed into quaint devices of hearts, daggers, rings, and a thousand tokens more. All suddenly another object glided amongst them so quickly that I wondered whether my eyes had been at fault – a tiny satin shoe, stained crimson across the lappets. A revulsion of feeling came to my soul and drove away all my fear. I had seen that selfsame shoe white and unsoiled twenty years before, when vain, vain Rose danced amongst her reapers at the harvest-home. And my voice cried out in ecstasy, “Rose, heart of mine! Delight of all the world’s delights!”

She stood before me, wondering, amazed. Alas, so changed! The red-and-yellow silk shawl still covered her shoulders; her hair still hung in those eldritch curls. But the beautiful face had grown wan and tired, and across the forehead lines were drawn like silver threads. She threw her arms round my neck and, pressing her bosom heavily on mine, sobbed so piteously that I grew afraid for her, and drew back the long masses of hair which had fallen forward, and kissed again and again those lips that were too lovely for simile. Never came a word of chiding from them. “Love,” she said, when she had regained her breath, “the past struggle was sharp and torturing – the future struggle will be crueller still. What a great love yours was, to wait and trust for so long! Would that mine had been as powerful! Poor, weak heart that could not endure!”

The tones of a wild fear throbbed through all her speech, strongly, yet with insufficient power to prevent her feeling the tenderness of those moments. Often, timorously raising her head from my shoulder, she looked about and then turned with a soft, inarticulate, and glad murmur to hide her face on my bosom. I spoke fervently; told of the years spent away from her; how, when working in the diamond-fields she had ever been present in my fancy; how at night her name had fallen from my lips in my only prayer; how I had dreamed of her amongst the greatest in the land – the richest, and, I dare swear, the loveliest woman in the world. I grew warmer still: all the gladness which had been constrained for so long now burst wildly from my lips: a myriad of rich ideas resolved into words, which, being spoken, wove one long and delicious fit of passion. As we stood together, the moon brightened and filled the chamber with a light like the day’s. The ridges of the surrounding moorland stood out in sharp relief.

Rose drank in my declarations thirstily, but soon interrupted me with a heavy sigh. “Come away,” she said softly. “I no longer live in this house. You must stay with me tonight. This place is so wretched now; for time, that in you and me has only strengthened love, has wrought much ruin here.”

Half leaning on me, she led me from the precincts of Bretton Hall. We walked in silence over the waste that crowns the valley of the Whitelands and, being near the verge of the rocks, saw the great pinewood sloping downwards, lighted near us by the moon, but soon lost in density. Along the mysterious line where the light changed into gloom, intricate shadows of withered summer bracken struck and receded in a mimic battle. Before us lay the Priests’ Cliff. The moon was veiled by a grove of elms, whose ever-swaying branches alternately increased and lessened her brightness. This was a place of notoriety – a veritable Golgotha – a haunt fit only for demons. Murder and theft had been punished here; and to this day fireside stories are told of evil women dancing round that Druids’ circle, carrying hearts plucked from gibbeted bodies.

“Rose,” I whispered, “why have you brought me here?”

She made no reply, but pressed her head more closely to my shoulder. Scarce had my lips closed ere a sound like the hiss of a half-strangled snake vibrated amongst the trees. It grew louder and louder. A monstrous shadow hovered above.

Rose from my bosom murmured. “Love is strong as Death! Love is strong as Death!”

I locked her in my arms, so tightly that she grew breathless. “Hold me,” she panted. “You are strong.”

A cold hand touched our foreheads so that, benumbed, we sank together to the ground, to fall instantly into a dreamless slumber.

When I awoke the clear grey light of the early morning had spread over the country. Beyond the Hell Garden the sun was just bursting through the clouds, and had already spread a long golden haze along the horizon. The babbling of the streamlet that runs down to Halkton was so distinct that it seemed almost at my side. How sweetly the wild thyme smelt! Filled with the tender recollections of the night, without turning, I called Rose Pascal from her sleep.

“Sweetheart, sweetheart, waken! waken! waken! See how glad the world looks – see the omens of a happy future.”

No answer came. I sat up, and looking round me saw that I was alone. A square stone lay near. When the sun was high I crept to read the inscription carved thereon: “Here, at four cross-paths, lieth, with a stake through the bosom, the body of Rose Pascal, who in her sixteenth year wilfully cast away the life God gave.”

HERSELF

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

1894

I

“And you intend to keep the Orange Grove for your own occupation, Madam,” interrogates the lawyer gravely, with his downward-looking eyes completely hidden under bushy brows.

“Decidedly,” answered my friend. “Why, the Orange Grove is the very best part of my fortune. It seems almost a special Providence, don’t you know, Helen,” pursued Lota, turning to me, “that my dear old grandfather should have made himself a winter home in the south. There are the doctors always teasing me about my weak chest, and there is a lonely house and gardens and orange groves waiting for me in a climate invented on purpose for weak chests. I shall live there every winter of my life, Mr Dean.”

The eminently respectable solicitor allowed a lapse of silence before he replied.

“It is not a lucky house, Miss Hammond.”

“How not lucky?”

“Your grandfather only lived to spend one winter in it. He was in very good health when he went there in December – a strong, sturdy old man – and when he sent for me in February to prepare the will which made you his sole heiress, I was shocked at the change in him – broken – wasted – nerves shattered – a mere wreck.

“It was not merely that he was aged – he was mentally changed – nervous, restless, to all appearance unhappy.”

“Well, didn’t you ask him why?” demanded Lota, whose impetuous temper was beginning to revolt against the lawyer’s solemnity.

“My position hardly warranted my questioning Mr Hammond on a matter so purely personal. I saw the change, and regretted it. Six weeks later he was gone.”

“Poor old gran’pa. We were such friends when I was a little thing. And then they sent me to Germany with a governess – poor little motherless mite – and then they packed me off to Pekin where father was Consul and there he died, and then they sent me home again – and I was taken up by the smartest of all my aunts, and had my little plunge in society, and always exceeded my allowance; was up to my eyes in debt – for a girl. I suppose a man would hardly count such bills as I used to owe. And then Gran’pa took it into his head to be pleased with me; and here I am – residuary legatee. I think that’s what you call me?” with an interrogative glance at the lawyer, who nodded a grave assent, “and I am going to spend the winter months in my villa near Taggia. Only think of that, Helen, Taggia – Tag-gi-a!”

She syllabled the word slowly, ending with a little smack of her pretty lips as if it were something nice to eat, and she looked at me for sympathy.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean by Tag-gi-a,” said I. “It sounds like an African word.”

“Surely you have read Dr Antonio.”

“Surely I have not.”

“Then I have done with you. There is a gulf between us. All that I know of the Liguria comes out of that delightful book. It taught me to pine for the shores of the Mediterranean when I was quite a little thing. And they show you Dr Ruffini’s house at Taggia. His actual house, where he actually lived.”

“You ought to consider, Miss Hammond, that the Riviera has changed a good deal since Ruffini’s time,” said the lawyer. “Not that I have anything to say against the Riviera per se. All I would advise is that you should winter in a more convenient locality than a romantic gorge between San Remo and Alassio. I would suggest Nice, for instance.”

“Nice. Why, someone was saying only the other day that Nice is the chosen rendezvous of all the worst characters in Europe and America.”

“Perhaps that’s what makes it such an agreeable place,” said the lawyer. “There are circles and circles in Nice. You need never breathe the same atmosphere as the bad characters.”

“A huge towny place,” exclaimed Lota. “Gran’pa said it was not better than Brighton.”

“Could anything be better than Brighton?” asked I.

“Helen, you were always a Philistine. It was because of the horridness of Nice and Cannes that gran’pa bought a villa – four times too big for him – in this romantic spot.”

She kissed the white house in the photograph. She gloated over the wildness of the landscape, in which the villa stood out, solitary, majestic. Palms, olives, cypress – a deep gorge cutting through the heart of the picture – mountains romantically remote – one white crest in the furthest distance – a foreground of tumbled crags and threads of running water.

“Is it really real?” she asked suddenly, “not a photographer’s painted background? They have such odious tricks, those photographers. One sits for one’s picture in a tidy South Kensington studio, and they send one home smirking out of a primeval forest, or in front of a stormy ocean. Is it real?”

“Absolutely real.”

“Very well, Mr Dean. Then I am going to establish myself there in the first week of December, and if you want to be very careful of me for gran’pa’s sake all you have to do is to find me a thoroughly respectable major-domo, who won’t drink my wine or run away with my plate. My aunt will engage the rest of my people.”

“My dear young lady, you may command any poor services of mine; but really now, is it not sheer perversity to choose a rambling house in a wild part of the country when your ample means would allow you to hire the prettiest bijou-villa on the Riviera?”

“I hate bijou houses, always too small for anybody except some sour old maid who wants to overhear all her servants say about her. The spacious rambling house – the wild solitary landscape – those are what I want, Mr Dean. Get me a butler who won’t cut my throat, and I ask no more.”

“Then madam, I have done. A wilful woman must have her way, even when it is a foolish way.”

“Everything in life is foolish,” Lota answered, lightly. “The people who live haphazard come out just as well at the end as your ineffable wiseacres. And now that you know I am fixed as Fate, that nothing you can say will unbend my iron will, do, like a darling old family lawyer whom I have known ever since I began to know one face from another, do tell me why you object to the Orange Grove. Is it the drainage?”

“There is no drainage.”

“Then that’s all right,” checking it off on her forefinger. “Is it the neighbours?”

“Need I say there are no neighbours?” pointing to the photograph.

“Number two satisfactory.”

“Is it the atmosphere? Low the villa is not; damp it can hardly be, perched on the side of a hill.”

“I believe the back rooms are damp. The hill side comes too near the windows. The back rooms are decidedly gloomy, and I believe damp.”

“And how many rooms are there in all?”

“Nearer thirty than twenty. I repeat it is a great rambling house, ever so much too large for you or any sensible young lady.”

“For the sensible young lady, no doubt,” said Lota, nodding impertinently at me. “She likes a first floor in Regency Square, Brighton, with a little room under the tiles for her maid. I am not sensible, and I like lots of rooms; rooms to roam about in, to furnish and unfurnish, and arrange and rearrange; rooms to see ghosts in. And now, dearest Mr Dean, I am going to pluck out the heart of your mystery. What kind of ghost is it that haunts the Orange Grove? I know there is a ghost.”

“Who told you so?”

“You. You have been telling me so for the last half-hour. It is because of the ghost you don’t want me to go to the Orange Grove. You might just as well be candid and tell me the whole story. I am not afraid of ghosts. In fact, I rather like the idea of having a ghost on my property. Wouldn’t you, Helen, if you had property?”

“No,” I answered, decisively. “I hate ghosts. They are always associated with damp houses and bad drainage. I don’t believe you would find a ghost in Brighton, not even if you advertised for one.”

“Tell me all about the ghost,” urged Lota.

“There is nothing to tell. Neither the people in the neighbourhood nor the servants of the house went so far as to say the Orange Grove was haunted. The utmost assertion was that time out of mind the master or the mistress of that house had been miserable.”

“Time out of mind. Why, I thought gran’pa built the house twenty years ago.”

“He only added the front which you see in the photograph. The back part of the house, the larger part, is three hundred years old. The place was a monkish hospital, the infirmary belonging to a Benedictine monastery in the neighbourhood, and to which the sick from other Benedictine houses were sent.”

“Oh, that was ages and ages ago. You don’t suppose that the ghosts of all the sick monks, who were so inconsiderate as to die in my house, haunt the rooms at the back?”

“I say again, Miss Hammond, nobody has ever to my knowledge asserted that the house was haunted.”

“Then it can’t be haunted. If it were the servants would have seen something. They are champion ghost-seers.”

“I am not a believer in ghosts, Miss Hammond,” said the friendly old lawyer, “but I own to a grain of superstition on one point. I can’t help thinking there is such a thing as ‘luck.’ I have seen such marked distinctions between the lucky and unlucky people I have met in my professional career. Now, the Orange Grove has been an unlucky house for the last hundred years. Its bad luck is as old as its history. And why, in the name of all that’s reasonable, should a beautiful young lady with all the world to choose from insist upon living at the Orange Grove?”

“First, because it is my own house; next, because I conceived a passion for it the moment I saw this photograph; and thirdly, perhaps because your opposition has given a zest to the whole thing. I shall establish myself there next December, and you must come out to me after Christmas, Helen. Your beloved Brighton is odious in February and March.”

“Brighton is always delightful,” answered I, “but of course I shall be charmed to go to you.”

CHAPTER II

AN EARTHLY PARADISE

I was Lota’s dearest friend, and she was mine. I had never seen anyone quite so pretty, or quite so fascinating then: I have never seen anyone as pretty or as fascinating since. She was no Helen, no Cleopatra, no superbly modelled specimen of typical loveliness. She was only herself. Like no one else, and to my mind better than everybody else – a delicately wrought ethereal creature, all spirit and fire and impulse and affection, flinging herself with ardour into every pursuit, living intensely in the present, curiously reckless of the future, curiously forgetful of the past.

When I parted with her at Charing Cross Station on the first of December it was understood that I was to join her about the middle of January. One of my uncles was going to Italy at that time, and was to escort me to Taggia, where I was to be met by my hostess. I was surprised, therefore, when a telegram arrived before Christmas, entreating me to go to her at once.

I telegraphed back: “Are you ill?”

Answer: “Not ill; but I want you.”

My reply: “Impossible. Will go as arranged.”

I would have given much, as I told Lota in the letter that followed my last message, to have done what she wished; but family claims were too strong. A brother was to marry at the beginning of the year, and I should have been thought heartless had I shirked the ceremony. And there was the old idea of Christmas as a time for family gatherings. Had she been ill, or unhappy, I would have cancelled every other claim, and gone to her without one hour’s delay, I told her; but I knew her a creature of caprices, and this was doubtless only one caprice among many.

I knew that she was well cared for. She had a maiden aunt with her, the mildest and sweetest of spinsters, who absolutely adored her. She had her old nurse and slave, a West Indian half-caste, who had accompanied her from Pekin, and she had –

“Another, and a dearer one still.”

Captain Holbrook, of the Stonyshere Regiment, was at San Remo. I had seen his name in a travelling note in the World, and I smiled as I read the announcement, and thought how few of his acquaintance would know as well as I knew the magnet which attracted him to quit San Remo rather than go to Monte Carlo or Nice. I knew that he loved Violetta Hammond devotedly, and that she had played fast and loose with him, amused at his worship, accepting all his attentions in her light happy manner, and giving no heed to the future.

Yes, my pretty, insouciante Lota was well cared for, ringed round with exceeding love, guarded as faithfully as a god in an Indian temple. I had no uneasiness about her, and I alighted in a very happy frame of mind at the quiet little station at Taggia, beside the tideless sea, in the dusk of a January evening.

Lota was on the platform to welcome me, with Miss Elderson, her maternal aunt, in attendance upon her, the younger lady muffled in sealskin from head to foot.

“Why Lota,” said I, when we had kissed, and laughed a little with eyes full of tears, “you are wrapped up as if this were Russia, and to me the air feels balmier than an English April.”

“Oh, when one has a hundred guinea coat one may as well wear it,” she answered carelessly. “I bought this sealskin among my mourning.”

“Lota is chillier than she used to be,” said Miss Elderson, in her plaintive voice.

There was a landau with a pair of fine strong horses waiting to carry us up to the villa. The road wound gently upward, past orange and lemon groves, and silvery streamlets, and hanging woods, where velvet dark cypresses rose tower-like amidst the silvery grey of the olives, and so to about midway between the valley, where Taggia’s antique palaces and church towers gleamed pale in the dusk, and the crest of the hill along which straggled the white houses of a village. The after-glow was rosy in the sky when a turn of the road brought our faces towards the summer-like sea, and in that lovely light every line in Lota’s face was but too distinctly visible. Too distinctly, for I saw the cruel change which three months had made in her fresh young beauty. She had left me in all the bloom of girlhood, gay, careless, brimming over with the joy of life and the new delight of that freedom of choice which wealth gives to a fatherless and motherless girl. To go where she liked, do as she liked, roam the world over, choosing always the companions she loved – that had been Lota’s dream of happiness, and if there had been some touch of self-love in her idea of bliss there had been also a generous and affectionate heart, and unfailing kindness to those whom Fate had not used so kindly.

I saw her now a haggard, anxious-looking woman, the signs of worry written too plainly on the wan pinched face, the lovely eyes larger but paler than of old, and the markings of nervous depression visible in the droop of the lips that had once been like Cupid’s bow.

I remembered Mr Dean’s endeavour to dissuade her from occupying her grandfather’s villa on this lovely hill, and I began to detest the Orange Grove before I had seen it. I was prepared to find an abode of gloom – a house where the foul miasma from some neighbouring swamp crept in at every open window, and hung grey and chill in every passage; a house whose too obvious unwholesomeness had conjured up images of terror, the spectral forms engendered of slackened nerves, and sleepless nights. I made up my mind that if it were possible for a bold and energetic woman to influence Lota Hammond I would be that woman, and whisk her off to Nice or Monte Carlo before she had time to consider what I was doing.

There would be a capital pretext in the Carnival. I would declare that I had set my heart upon seeing a Carnival at Nice; and once there I would take care she never returned to the place that was killing her. I looked, with a thrill of anger, at the mild sheep-faced aunt. How could she have been so blind as not to perceive the change in her niece? And Captain Holbrook! What a poor creature, to call himself a lover, and let the girl he loved perish before his eyes.

I had time to think while the horses walked slowly up the hill-road, for neither the aunt nor the niece had much to say. Each in her turn pointed out some feature in the view. Lota told me that she adored Taggia, and doted on her villa and garden; and that was the utmost extent of our conversation in the journey of more than an hour.

At last we drove round a sharpish curve, and on the hillside above us, looking down at us from a marble terrace, I saw the prettiest house I had ever seen in my life; a fairy palace, with lighted windows, shining against a background of wooded hills. I could not see the colours of the flowers in the thickening gloom of night, but I could smell the scent of the roses and the fragrant-leaved geraniums that filled the vases on the terrace.

Within and without all was alike sparkling and lightsome; and so far as I could see on the night of my arrival there was not a corner which could have accommodated a ghost. Lota told me that one of her first improvements had been to install the electric light.

“I love to think that this house is shining like a star when the people of Taggia look across the valley,” she said.

I told her that I had seen Captain Holbrook’s name among the visitors at San Remo.

“He is staying at Taggia now,” she said. “He grew rather tired of San Remo.”

“The desire to be nearer you had nothing to do with the change?”

“You can ask him if you like,” she answered, with something of her old insouciance. “He is coming to dinner tonight.”

“Does he spend his days and nights going up and down the hill?” I asked.

“You will be able to see for yourself as to that. There is not much for anyone to do in Taggia.”

•   •   •   •   •

Captain Holbrook found me alone in the salon when he came; for, in spite of the disadvantages of arrival after a long journey, I was dressed before Lota. He was very friendly, and seemed really glad to see me; indeed, he lost no time in saying as much with a plainness of speech which was more friendly than flattering.

“I am heartily glad you have come,” he said, “for now I hope we shall be able to get Miss Hammond away from this depressing hole.”

Remembering that the house was perched upon the shoulders of a romantic hill, with an outlook of surpassing loveliness, and looking round at the brilliant colouring of an Italian drawing-room steeped in soft clear light, and redolent of roses and carnations, it seemed rather hard measure to hear of Lota’s inheritance talked of as “a depressing hole”; but the cruel change in Lota herself was enough to justify the most unqualified dislike of the house in which the change had come to pass.

Miss Elderson and her niece appeared before I could reply, and we went to dinner. The dining-room was as bright and gracious of aspect as all the other rooms which I had seen, everything having been altered and improved to suit Lota’s somewhat expensive tastes.

“The villa ought to be pretty,” Miss Elderson murmured plaintively, “for Lota’s improvements have cost a fortune.”

“Life is so short. We ought to make the best of it,” said Lota gaily.

We were full of gaiety, and there was the sound of talk and light laughter all through the dinner; but I felt that there was a forced note in our mirth, and my own heart was like lead. We all went back to the drawing-room together. The windows were open to the moonlight, and the faint sighing of the night wind among the olive woods. Lota and her lover established themselves in front of the blazing pine logs, and Miss Elderson asked me if I would like a stroll on the terrace. There were fleecy white shawls lying about ready for casual excursions of this kind, and the good old lady wrapped one about my shoulders with motherly care. I followed her promptly, foreseeing that she was as anxious to talk confidentially with me as I was to talk with her.

My eagerness anticipated her measured speech. “You are unhappy about Lota,” I asked.

“Very, very unhappy.”

“But why haven’t you taken her away from here? You must see that the place is killing her. Or perhaps the dreadful change in her may not strike you, who have been seeing her every day—?”

“It does strike me; the change is too palpable. I see it every morning, see her looking a little worse, a little worse every day, as if some dreadful disease were eating away her life. And yet our good English doctor from San Remo says there is nothing the matter except a slight lung trouble, and that this air is the very finest, the position of this house faultless, for such a case as hers, high enough to be bracing, yet sheltered from all cold winds. He told me that we could take her no better place between Genoa and Marseilles.”

“But is she to stop here, and fade, and die? There is some evil influence in this house. Mr Dean said as much; something horrible, uncanny, mysterious.”

“My dear, my dear!” ejaculated the amiable invertebrate creature, shaking her head in solemn reproachfulness, “can you, a good Churchwoman, believe in any nonsense of that sort?”

“I don’t know what to believe; but I can see that my dearest friend is perishing bodily and mentally. The three months in which we have been parted have done the work of years of declining health. And she was warned against the house; she was warned.”

“There is nothing the matter with the house,” that weak-brained spinster answered pettishly. “The sanitary engineer from Cannes has examined everything. The drainage is simply perfect – ”

“And your niece is dying!” I said, savagely, and turned my back upon Miss Elderson.

I gazed across the pale grey woods to the sapphire sea, with eyes that scarcely saw the loveliness they looked upon. My heart was swelling with indignation against this feeble affection which would see the thing it loved vanishing off the earth, and yet could not be moved to energetic action.

III
SOMETIMES THEY FADE
AND DIE

I tested the strength of my own influence the next day, and I was inclined to be less severe in my judgment of the meek spinster, after a long morning in the woods with Lota and Captain Holbrook, in which all my arguments and entreaties, backed most fervently by an adoring lover, had proved useless.

“I am assured that no place could suit my health better,” Lota said, decisively, “and I mean to stay here till my doctor orders me to Varese or home to England. Do you suppose I spent a year’s income on the villa with the idea of running away from it? I am tired to death of being teased about the place. First it is auntie, and then it is Captain Holbrook, and now it is young Helen. Villa, gardens, and woods are utterly lovely, and I mean to stay.”

“But if you are not happy here?”

“Who says I am not happy?”

“Your face says it, Lota.”

“I am just as happy here as I should be anywhere else,” she answered, doggedly, “and I mean to stay.”

She set her teeth as she finished the sentence, and her face had a look of angry resolve that I had never seen in it before. It seemed as if she were fighting against something, defying something. She rose abruptly from the bank upon which she had been sitting, in a sheltered hollow, near the rocky cleft where a ruined oil mill hung mouldering on the brink of a waterfall; and she began to walk up and down very fast, muttering to herself with frowning brows:

“I shall stay! I shall stay!” I heard her repeating, as she passed me.

•   •   •   •   •

After that miserable morning – miserable in a climate and a scene of loveliness where bare existence should have been bliss – I had many serious conversations with Captain Holbrook, who was at the villa every day, the most wonderful and devoted of lovers. From him I learnt all that was known of the house in which I was living. He had taken infinite pains to discover any reason, in the house or the neighbourhood, for the lamentable change in Lota, but with the slightest results. No legend of the supernatural was associated with the Orange Grove; but on being questioned searchingly an old Italian physician who had spent his life at Taggia, and who had known Ruffini, confessed that there was a something, a mysterious something, about the villa which seemed to have affected everybody who lived in it, as owner or master, within the memory of the oldest inhabitant.

“People are not happy there. No, they are not happy, and sometimes they fade and die.”

“Invalids who come to the South to die?”

“Not always. The Signorina’s grandfather was an elderly man; but he appeared in robust health when he came. However, at that age, a sudden break up is by no means wonderful. There were previous instances of decay and death far more appalling, and in some ways mysterious. I am sorry the pretty young lady has spent so much money on the villa.”

“What does money matter if she would only go elsewhere?”

She would not. That was the difficulty. No argument of her lover’s could move her. She would go in April, she told him, at the season for departure; but not even his persuasion, his urgent prayers, would induce her to leave one week or one day sooner than the doctor ordered.

“I should hate myself if I were weak enough to run away from this place,” she said; and it seemed to me that those words were the clue to her conduct, and that she was making a martyr of herself rather than succumb to something of horror which was haunting and killing her.

Her marriage had been fixed for the following June, and George Holbrook was strong in the rights of a future husband; but submissive as she was in all other respects, upon this point she was stubborn, and her lover’s fervent pleading moved her no more than the piteous entreaties of her spinster aunt.

I began to understand that the case was hopeless, so far as Lota’s well-being depended upon her speedy removal from the Orange Grove. We could only wait as hopefully as we could for April, and the time she had fixed for departure. I took the earliest opportunity of confiding my fears to the English physician; but clever and amiable as he was, he laughed all ideas of occult influence to scorn.

“From the moment the sanitary engineer – a really scientific man – certified this house as a healthy house, the last word was said as to its suitableness for Miss Hammond. The situation is perfect, the climate all that one could desire. It would be folly to move her till the spring is advanced enough for Varese or England.”

What could I say against this verdict of local experience? Lota was not one of those interesting and profitable cases which a doctor likes to keep under his own eye. As a patient, her doctor only saw her once in a way; but he dropped in at the villa often as a friend, and he had been useful in bringing nice people about her.

I pressed the question so far as to ask him about the rooms at the back of the house, the old monkish rooms which had served as an infirmary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “Surely those rooms must be cold and damp?”

“Damp, no. Cold, yes. All north rooms are cold on the Riviera – and the change from south to north is perilous – but as no one uses the old monkish rooms their aspect can make little difference.”

“Does not Miss Hammond use those rooms sometimes?”

“Never, I believe. Indeed, I understood Miss Elderson to say that the corridor leading to the old part of the house is kept locked, and that she has the key. I take it the good lady thinks that if the rooms are haunted it is her business to keep the ghosts in safe custody – as she does the groceries.”

“Has nobody ever used these rooms since the new villa was built?” I asked.

“Mr Hammond used them, and was rather attached to that part of the house. His library is still there, I believe, in what was once a refectory.”

“I should love to see it.”

“You have only to ask Miss Elderson.”

I did ask Miss Elderson without an hour’s delay, the first time I found myself alone with her. She blushed, hesitated, assured me that the rooms contained nothing worth looking at, and fully confessed that the key was not come-atable.

“I have not lost it,” she said. “It is only mislaid. It is sure to turn up when I am looking for something else. I put it in a safe place.”

Miss Elderson’s places of safety had been one of our stock jokes ever since I had known Lota and her aunt; so I was inclined to despair of ever seeing those mysterious rooms in which the monks had lived. Yet after meditating upon the subject in a long ramble on the hill above the villa I was inclined to think that Lota might know more about that key than the good simple soul who had mislaid it. There were hours in every day during which my friend disappeared from the family circle, hours in which she was supposed to be resting inside the mosquito curtains in her own room. I had knocked at her door once or twice during this period of supposed rest; and there had been no answer. I had tried the door softly, and had found it locked, and had gone away believing my friend fast asleep; but now I began to wonder whether Lota might not possess the key of those uninhabited rooms, and for some strange capricious motive spend some of her lonely hours within those walls. I made an investigation at the back of the villa the following day, before the early coffee and the rolls, which we three spinsters generally took in the verandah on warm sunny mornings, and most of our mornings were warm. I found the massive Venetian shutters firmly secured inside, and affording not a glimpse of the rooms within. The windows looked straight upon the precipitous hill, and these northward-facing rooms must needs be dark and chilly at the best of times. My curiosity was completely baffled. Even if I had been disposed to do a little house-breaking there was no possibility of opening those too solid-looking shutters. I tugged at the fastenings savagely, but made no more impression than if I had been a fly.

IV
SUNSHINE OUTSIDE,
BUT ICE AT THE CORE

For the next four days I watched Lota’s movements.

After our morning saunter – she was far too weak now to go further than the terraced paths near the villa, and our sauntering was of the slowest – my poor friend would retire to her room for what she called her afternoon rest, while the carriage, rarely used by herself, conveyed her aunt and me for a drive, which our low spirits made ineffably dreary. Vainly was that panorama of loveliness spread before my eyes – I could enjoy nothing; for between me and that romantic scene there was the image of my perishing friend, dying by inches, and obstinately determined to die.

I questioned Lota’s maid about those long afternoons which her mistress spent in her darkened room, and the young woman’s answers confirmed my suspicions.

Miss Hammond did not like to be disturbed. She was a very heavy sleeper.

“She likes me to go to her at four o’clock every afternoon to do her hair, and put on her teagown. She is generally fast asleep when I go to her.”

“And her door locked?”

“No, the door is very seldom locked at four. I went an hour earlier once with a telegram, and then the door was locked, and Miss Hammond was so fast asleep that she couldn’t hear me knocking. I had to wait till the usual time.”

On the fourth day after my inspection of the shutters, I started for the daily drive at the accustomed hour; but when we had gone a little way down the hill, I pretended to remember an important letter that had to be written, and asked Miss Elderson to stop the carriage, and let me go back to the villa, excusing my desertion for this afternoon. The poor lady, who was as low-spirited as myself, declared she would miss me sadly, and the carriage crept on, while I climbed the hill by those straight steep paths which shortened the journey to a five minutes’ walk.

The silence of the villa as I went softly in at the open hall door suggested a general siesta. There was an awning in front of the door, and the hall was wrapped in shadow, the corridor beyond darker still, and at the end of this corridor I saw a flitting figure in pale grey – the pale Indian cashmere of Lota’s neat morning frock. I heard a key turn, then the creaking of a heavy door, and the darkness had swallowed that pale grey figure.

I waited a few moments, and then stole softly along the passage. The door was half open, and I peered into the room beyond. It was empty, but an open door facing the fireplace showed me another room – a room lined with bookshelves, and in this room I could hear footsteps pacing slowly to and fro, very slowly, with the feeble tread I knew too well.

Presently she turned, put her hand to her brow as if remembering something, and hurried to the door where I was standing.

“It is I, Lota!” I called out, as she approached me, lest she should be startled by my unexpected presence.

I had been mean enough to steal a march upon her, but I was not mean enough to conceal myself.

“You here!” she exclaimed.

I told her how I had suspected her visits to these deserted rooms, and how I had dreaded the melancholy effect which their dreariness must needs exercise upon her mind and health.

“Do you call them dreary?” she asked, with a curious little laugh. “I call them charming. They are the only rooms in the house that interest me. And it was just the same with my grandfather. He spent his declining days in these queer old rooms, surrounded by these queer old things.”

She looked round her, with furtive, wandering glances, at the heavy old bookshelves, the black and white cabinets, the dismal old Italian tapestry, and at a Venetian glass which occupied a narrow recess at the end of the inner room, a glass that reached from floor to ceiling, and in a florid carved frame, from which the gilding had mostly worn away.

Her glance lingered on this Venetian glass, which to my uneducated eye looked the oldest piece of furniture in the room. The surface was so clouded and tarnished that although Lota and I were standing opposite it at a little distance, I could see no reflection of ourselves or of the room.

“You cannot find that curious old glass very flattering to your vanity,” I said, trying to be sprightly and careless in my remarks, while my eyes were watching that wasted countenance with its hectic bloom, and those too brilliant eyes.

“No, it doesn’t flatter, but I like it,” she said, going a little nearer the glass, and then suddenly drawing a dark velvet curtain across the narrow space between the two projecting bookcases.

I had not noticed the curtain till she touched it, for this end of the long room was in shadow. The heavy shutters which I had seen outside were closed over two of the windows, but the shutters had been pushed back from the third window, and the casements were open to the still, soft air.

There was a sofa opposite the curtained recess. Lota sank down upon it, folded her arms, and looked at me with a defiant smile.

“Well, what do you think of my den?” she asked.

“I think you could not have chosen a worse.”

“And yet my grandfather liked these rooms better than all the rest of the house. He almost lived in them. His old servant told me so.”

“An elderly fancy, which no doubt injured his health.”

“People choose to say so, because he died sooner than they expected. His death would have come at the appointed time. The day and hour were written in the Book of Fate before he came here. The house had nothing to do with it – only in this quiet old room he had time to think of what was coming.”

“He was old, and had lived his life; you are young, and life is all before you.”

“All!” she echoed, with a laugh that chilled my heart.

I tried to be cheerful, matter of fact, practical. I urged her to abandon this dismal library, with its dry old books, airless gloom, and northern aspect. I told her she had been guilty of an unworthy deceit in spending long hours in rooms that had been especially forbidden her. She made an end of my pleading with cruel abruptness.

“You are talking nonsense, Helen. You know that I am doomed to die before the summer is over, and I know that you know it.”

“You were well when you came here; you have been growing worse day by day.”

“My good health was only seeming. The seeds of disease were here,” touching her contracted chest. “They have only developed. Don’t talk to me, Helen; I shall spend my quiet hours in these rooms till the end, like my poor old grandfather. There need be no more concealment or double dealing. This house is mine, and I shall occupy the rooms I like.”

She drew herself up haughtily as she rose from the sofa, but the poor little attempt at dignity was spoilt by a paroxysm of coughing that made her glad to rest in my arms, while I laid her gently down upon the sofa.

The darkness came upon us while she lay there, prostrate, exhausted, and that afternoon in the shadow of the steep hill was the first of many such afternoons.

From that day she allowed me to share her solitude, so long as I did not disturb her reveries, her long silences, or brief snatches of slumber. I sat by the open window and worked or read, while she lay on the sofa, or moved softly about the room, looking at the books on the shelves, or often stopping before that dark Venetian glass to contemplate her own shadowy image.

I wondered exceedingly in those days what pleasure or interest she could find in surveying that blurred shadow of her faded beauty. Was it in bitterness she looked at the altered form, the shrunken features – or only in philosophical wonder such as Marlborough felt, when he pointed to the withered old form in the glass – the poor remains of peerless manhood and exclaimed: “That was once a man.”

I had no power to withdraw her from that gloomy solitude. I was thankful for the privilege of being with her, able to comfort her in moments of physical misery.

Captain Holbrook left within a few days of my discovery, his leave having so nearly expired that he had only just time enough to get back to Portsmouth, where his regiment was stationed. He went regretfully, full of fear, and his last anxious words were spoken to me at the little station on the sea shore.

“Do all you can to bring her home as soon as the doctor will let her come,” he said. “I leave her with a heavy heart, but I can do no good by remaining. I shall count every hour between now and April. She has promised to stay at Southsea till we are married, so that we may be near each other. I am to find a pretty villa for her and her aunt. It will be something for me to do.”

My heart ached for him in his forlornness, glad of any little duty that made a link between him and his sweetheart. I knew that he dearly loved his profession, and I knew also that he had offered to leave the army if Lota liked – to alter the whole plan of his life rather than be parted from her, even for a few weeks. She had forbidden such a sacrifice; and she had stubbornly refused to advance the date of her marriage, and marry him at San Remo, as he had entreated her to do, so that he might take her back to England, and establish her at Ventnor, where he believed she would be better than in her Italian paradise.

He was gone, and I felt miserably helpless and lonely without him – lonely even in Lota’s company, for between her and me there were shadows and mysteries that filled my heart with dread. Sitting in the same room with her – admitted now to constant companionship – I felt not the less that there were secrets in her life which I knew not. Her eloquent face told some sad story which I could not read; and sometimes it seemed to me that between her and me there was a third presence, and that the name of the third was Death.

She let me share her quiet afternoons in the old rooms, but though her occupation of these rooms was no longer concealed from the household, she kept the privilege of solitude with jealous care. Her aunt still believed in the siesta between lunch and dinner, and went for her solitary drives with a placid submission to Lota’s desire that the carriage and horses should be used by somebody. The poor thing was quite as unhappy as I, and quite as fond as Lota; but her feeble spirit had no power to struggle against her niece’s strong will. Of these two the younger had always ruled the elder. After Captain Holbrook’s departure the doctor took his patient seriously in hand, and I soon perceived a marked change in his manner of questioning her, while the stethoscope came now into frequent use. The casual weekly visits became daily visits; and in answer to my anxious questions I was told that the case had suddenly assumed a serious character.

“We have something to fight against now,” said the doctor; “until now we have had nothing but nerves and fancies.”

“And now?”

“The lungs are affected.”

This was the beginning of a new sadness. Instead of vague fears, we had now the certainty of evil; and I think in the dreary days and weeks that followed, the poor old aunt and I had not one thought or desire, or fear, which was not centred in the fair young creature whose fading life we watched. Two English nurses, summoned from Cannes, aided in the actual nursing, for which trained skill was needed; but in all the little services which love can perform Miss Elderson and I were Lota’s faithful slaves.

I told the doctor of her afternoons spent in her grandfather’s library; and I told him also that I doubted my power, or his, to induce her to abandon that room.

“She has a fancy for it, and you know how difficult fancies are to fight with when anyone is out of health.”

“It is a curious fact,” said the doctor, “that in every bad case I have attended in this house my patient has had an obstinate preference for that dull, cold, room.”

“When you say every bad case, I think you must mean every fatal case,” I said.

“Yes. Unhappily the three or four cases I am thinking of ended fatally; but that fact need not make you unhappy. Feeble, elderly people come to this southern shore to spin out the frail thread of life that is at breaking point when they leave England. In your young friend’s case sunshine and balmy air may do much. She ought to live on the sunny side of the house; but her fancy for her grandfather’s library may be indulged all the same. She can spend her evenings in that room, which can be made thoroughly warm and comfortable before she enters it. The room is well built and dry. When the shutters are shut and the curtains drawn, and the temperature carefully regulated, it will be as good a room as any other for the lamplight hours; but for the day let her have all the sunshine she can.”

I repeated this little lecture to Lota, who promised to obey.

“I like the queer, old room,” she said, “and, Helen, don’t think me a bear if I say that I should like to be alone there sometimes, as I used to be before you hunted me down. Society is very nice for people who are well enough to enjoy it, but I’m not up to society, not even your’s and auntie’s. Yes, I know what you are going to say. You sit like a mouse, and don’t speak till you are spoken to; but the very knowledge that you are there, watching me and thinking about me, worries me. And as for the auntie, with her little anxious fidgettings, wanting to settle my footstool, and shake up my pillows, and turn the leaves of my books, and always making me uncomfortable in the kindest way, dear soul – well, I don’t mind confessing that she gets on my nerves, and makes me feel as if I should like to scream. Let me have one hour or two of perfect solitude sometimes, Helen. The nurse doesn’t count. She can sit in the room, and you will know that I am not going to die suddenly without anybody to look on at my poor little tragedy.”

She had talked longer and more earnestly than usual, and the talking ended in a fit of coughing which shook the wasted frame. I promised that all should be as she wished. If solitude were more restful than even our quiet companionship, she should be sometimes alone. I would answer for her aunt, as for myself.

The nurses were two bright, capable young women, and were used to the caprices of the sick. I told them exactly what was wanted: a silent unobtrusive presence, a watchful care of the patient’s physical comfort by day and night. And henceforth Lota’s evenings were spent for the most part in solitude. She had her books, and her drawing-board, on which with light, weak hand she would sketch faint remembrances of the spots that had charmed us most in our drives or rambles. She had her basket overflowing with scraps of fancy work, beginnings of things that were to have no end.

“She doesn’t read very long, or work for more than ten minutes at a time,” the nurse told me. “She just dozes away most of the evening, or walks about the room now and then, and stands to look at herself in that gloomy old glass. It’s strange that she should be so fond of looking in the glass, poor dear, when she can scarcely fail to see the change in herself.”

“No, no, she must see, and it is breaking her heart. I wish we could do away with every looking-glass in the house,” said I, remembering how pretty she had been in the fresh bloom of her happy girlhood only six months before that dreary time.

“She is very fond of going over her grandfather’s papers,” the nurse told me. “There is a book I see her reading very often – a manuscript book.”

“His diary, perhaps,” said I.

“It might be that; but it’s strange that she should care to pore over an old gentleman’s diary.”

Strange, yes; but all her fancies and likings were strange ever since I had entered that unlucky house. In her thought of her lover she was not as other girls. She was angry when I suggested that we should tell him of her illness, in order that he might get leave to come to her, if it were only for a few days.

“No, no, let him never look upon my face again,” she said. “It is bad enough for him to remember me as I was when we parted at the station. It is ever so much worse now – and it will be – oh, Helen, to think of what must come – at last!”

She hid her face in her hands, and the frail frame was convulsed with the vehemence of her sobbing. It was long before I could soothe her; and this violent grief seemed the more terrible because of the forced cheerfulness of her usual manner.

V
SEEK NOT TO KNOW

We kept early hours at the villa. We dined at seven, and at eight Lota withdrew to the room which she was pleased to call her den. At ten there was a procession of invalid, nurse, aunt, and friend to Lota’s bedroom, where the night nurse, in her neat print gown and pretty white cap, was waiting to receive her. There were many kisses and tender good-nights, and a great show of cheerfulness on all sides, and then Miss Elderson and I crept slowly to our rooms – exchanging a few sad words, a few sympathetic sighs, to cry ourselves to sleep, and to awake in the morning with the thought of the doom hanging over us.

I used to drop in upon Lota’s solitude a little before bedtime, sometimes with her aunt, sometimes alone. She would look up from her book with a surprised air, or start out of her sleep.

“Bedtime already?”

Sometimes when I found her sleeping, I would seat myself beside her sofa, and wait in silence for her waking. How picturesque, how luxurious, the old room looked in the glaring light of the wood, which brightened even the grim tapestry, and glorified the bowls of red and purple anemones and other scentless flowers, and the long wall of books, and the velvet curtained windows, and shining brown floor. It was a room that I too could have loved were it not for the shadow of fear that hung over all things at the Orange Grove.

I went to the library earlier than usual one evening. The clock had not long struck nine when I left the drawing room. I had seen a change for the worse in Lota at dinner, though she had kept up her pretence of gaiety, and had refused to be treated as an invalid, insisting upon dining as we dined, scarcely touching some things, eating ravenously of other dishes, the least wholesome, laughing to scorn all her doctor’s advice about dietary. I endured the interval between eight and nine, stifling my anxieties, and indulging the mild old lady with a game of bezique, which my wretched play allowed her to win easily. Like most old people her sorrow was of a mild and modified quality, and she had, I believe, resigned herself to the inevitable. The careful doctor, the admirable nurses, had set her mind at ease about dear Lota, she told me. She felt that all was being done that love and care could do, and for the rest, well, she had her church services, her prayers, her morning and evening readings in the well-worn New Testament. I believe she was almost happy.

“We must all die, my dear Helen,” she said, plaintively.

Die, yes. Die when one had reached that humdrum stage on the road of life where this poor old thing was plodding, past barren fields and flowerless hedges – the stage of grey hairs, and toothless gums, and failing sight, and dull hearing – and an old-fashioned, one-idea’d intellect. But to die like Lota, in the pride of youth, with beauty and wealth and love all one’s own! To lay all this down in the grave! That seemed hard, too hard for my understanding or my patience.

•   •   •   •   •

I found her asleep on the sofa by the hearth, the nurse sitting quietly on guard in her armchair, knitting the stocking which was never out of her hands unless they were occupied in the patient’s service. Tonight’s sleep was sounder than usual, for the sleeper did not stir at my approach, and I seated myself in the low chair by the foot of the sofa without waking her.

A book had slipped from her hand, and lay on the silken coverlet open. The pages caught my eye, for they were in manuscript, and I remembered what the nurse had said about Lota’s fancy for this volume. I stole my hand across the coverlet, and possessed myself of the book, so softly that the sleeper’s sensitive frame had no consciousness of my touch.

A manuscript volume of about two hundred pages in a neat firm hand, very small, yet easy to read, so perfectly were the letters formed and so evenly were the lines spaced.

I turned the leaves eagerly. A diary, a business man’s diary, recording in commonplace phraseology the transactions of each day, Stock Exchange, Stock Exchange – railways – mines – loans – banks – money, money, money, made or lost. That was all the neat penmanship told me, as I turned leaf after leaf, and ran my eye over page after page.

The social life of the writer was indicated in a few brief sentences. “Dined with the Parkers: dinner execrable; company stupid; talked to Lendon, who has made half a million in Mexican copper; a dull man.”

“Came to Brighton for Easter; clear turtle at the Ship good; they have given me my old rooms; asked Smith (Suez Smith, not Turkish Smith) to dinner.”

What interest could Lota possibly find in such a journal – a prosy commonplace record of losses and gains, bristling with figures?

This was what I asked myself as I turned leaf after leaf, and saw only the everlasting repetition of financial notes, strange names of loans and mines and railways, with contractions that reduced them to a cypher. Slowly, my hand softly turning the pages of the thick volume, I had gone through about three-fourths of the book when I came to the heading, “Orange Grove”, and the brief entries of the financier gave place to the detailed ideas and experiences of the man of leisure, an exile from familiar scenes and old faces, driven back upon self-commune for the amusement of his lonely hours.

This doubtless was where Lota’s interest in the book began, and here I too began to read every word of the diary with closest attention. I did not stop to think whether I was justified in reading the pages which the dead man had penned in his retirement, whether a licence which his grand-daughter allowed herself might be taken by me. My one thought was to discover the reason of Lota’s interest in the book, and whether its influence upon her mind and spirits was as harmful as I feared.

I slipped from the chair to the rug beside the sofa, and, sitting there on the ground, with the full light of the shaded reading-lamp upon the book, I forgot everything but the pages before me.

The first few pages after the old man’s installation in his villa were full of cheerfulness. He wrote of this land of the South, new to his narrow experience, as an earthly paradise. He was almost as sentimental in his enthusiasms as a girl, as if it had not been for the old-fashioned style in which his raptures expressed themselves these pages might have been written by a youthful pen.

He was particularly interested in the old monkish rooms at the back of the villa, but he fully recognised the danger of occupying them.

I have put my books in the long room which was used as a refectory, (he wrote) but as I now rarely look at them there is no fear of my being tempted to spend more than an occasional hour in the room.

Then after an interval of nearly a month:

I have arranged my books, as I find the library the most interesting room in the house. My doctor objects to the gloomy aspect, but I find a pleasing melancholy in the shadow of the steep olive-clad hill. I begin to think that this life of retirement, with no companions but my books, suits me better than the pursuit of money making, which has occupied so large a portion of my later years.

Then followed pages of criticism upon the books he read – history, travels, poetry – books which he had been collecting for many years, but which he was now only beginning to enjoy.

I see before me a studious old age, he wrote, and I hope I may live as long as the head of my old college, Martin Routh. I have made more than enough money to satisfy myself, and to provide ample wealth for the dear girl who will inherit the greater part of my fortune. I can afford to fold my hands, and enjoy the long quiet years of old age in the companionship of the master spirits who have gone before. How near, how living they seem as I steep myself in their thoughts, dream their dreams, see life as they saw it! Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and all those later lights that have shone upon the dullest lives and made them beautiful – how they live with us, and fill our thoughts, and make up the brightest part of our daily existence.

I read many pages of comment and reverie in the neat, clear penmanship of a man who wrote for his own pleasure, in the restful solitude of his own fire-side.

Suddenly there came a change – the shadow of the cloud that hung over that house:

I am living too much alone. I did not think I was of the stuff which is subject to delusions and morbid fancies – but I was wrong. I suppose no man’s mind can retain its strength of fibre without the friction of intercourse with other minds of its own calibre. I have been living alone with the minds of the dead, and waited upon by foreign servants, with whom I hardly exchange half a dozen sentences in a day. And the result is what no doubt any brain-doctor would have foretold.

I have begun to see ghosts.

The thing I have seen is so evidently an emanation of my own mind – so palpably a materialisation of my own self-consciousness, brooding upon myself and my chances of long life – that it is a weakness even to record the appearance that has haunted me during the last few evenings. No shadow of dying monk has stolen between me and the lamplight; no presence from the vanished years, revisiting places. The thing which I have seen is myself – not myself as I am – but myself as I am to be in the coming years, many or few.

The vision – purely self-induced as I know it to be – has not the less given a shock to the placid contentment of my mind, and the long hopes which, in spite of the Venusian’s warning, I had of late been cherishing.

Looking up from my book in yesterday’s twilight my casual glance rested on the old Venetian mirror in front of my desk; and gradually, out of the blurred darkness, I saw a face looking at me.

My own face as it might be after the wasting of disease, or the slow decay of advancing years – a face at least ten years older than the face I had seen in my glass a few hours before – hollow cheeks, haggard eyes, the loose under-lip drooping weakly – a bent figure in an invalid chair, an aspect of utter helplessness. And it was myself. Of that fact I had no shadow of doubt.

Hypochondria, of course – a common form of the malady, – perhaps this shaping of the imagination into visions. Yet, the thing was strange – for I had been troubled by no apprehensions of illness or premature old age. I had never even thought of myself as an old man. In the pride bred of long immunity from illness I had considered myself exempt from the ailments that are wont to attend declining years. I had pictured myself living to the extremity of human life, and dropping peacefully into the centenarian’s grave.

I was angry with myself for being affected by the vision, and I locked the door of the library when I went to dress for dinner, determined not to re-enter the room till I had done something – by outdoor exercise and change of scene – to restore the balance of my brain. Yet when I had dined there came upon me so feverish a desire to know whether the glass would again show me the same figure and face that I gave the key to my major-domo, and told him to light the lamps and make up the fire in the library.

Yes, the thing lived in the blotched and blurred old glass. The dusky surface, which was too dull to reflect the realities of life, gave back that vision of age and decay with unalterable fidelity. The face and figure came and went, and the glass was often black – but whenever the thing appeared it was the same – the same in every dismal particular, in all the signs of senility and fading life.

“This is what I am to be twenty years hence,” I told myself, “A man of eighty might look like that.”

Yet I had hoped to escape that bitter lot of gradual decay which I had seen and pitied in other men. I had promised myself that the reward of a temperate life – a life free from all consuming fires of dissipation, all tempestuous passions – would be a vigorous and prolonged old age. So surely as I had toiled to amass fortune so surely also had I striven to lay up for myself long years of health and activity, a life prolonged to the utmost span.

•   •   •   •   •

There was a break of ten days in the journal, and when the record was resumed the change in the writing shocked me. The neat firm penmanship gave place to weak and straggling characters, which, but for marked peculiarities in the formation of certain letters, I should have taken for the writing of a stranger.

The thing is always there in the black depths of that damnable glass – and I spend the greater part of my life watching for it. I have struggled in vain against the bitter curiosity to know the worst which the vision of the future can show me. Three days ago I flung the key of this detestable room into the deepest well on the premises; but an hour afterwards I sent to Taggia for a blacksmith, and had the lock picked, and ordered a new key, and a duplicate, lest in some future fit of spleen I should throw away a second key, and suffer agonies before the door could be opened.

“Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas—”

Vainly the poet’s warning buzzes and booms in my vexed ear – repeating itself perpetually, like the beating of a pulse in my brain, or like the ticking of a clock that will not let a man sleep.

“Scire nefas – scire nefas.”

The desire to know more is no stranger than reason.

Well, I am at least prepared for what is to come. I live no longer in a fool’s paradise. The thing which I see daily and hourly is no hallucination, no materialisation of my self-consciousness, as I thought in the beginning. It is a warning and a prophesy. So shalt thou be. Soon, soon, shalt thou resemble this form which it shocks thee now to look upon.

Since first the shadow of myself looked at me from the darker shadows of the glass I have felt every indication of approaching doom. The doctor tries to laugh away my fears, but he owns that I am below par – meaningless phrase – talks of nervine decay, and suggests my going to St Moritz. He doubts if this place suits me, and confesses that I have changed for the worse since I came here.

Again an interval, and then in writing that was only just legible.

It is a month since I wrote in this book – a month which has realised all that the Venetian glass showed me when first I began to read its secret.

I am a helpless old man, carried about in an invalid chair. Gone my pleasant prospect of long tranquil years; gone my selfish scheme of enjoyment, the fruition of a life of money-getting. The old Eastern fable has been realised once again. My gold has turned to withered leaves, so far as any pleasure that it can buy for me. I hope that my grand-daughter may get some good out of the wealth I have toiled to win.

Again a break, longer this time, and again the handwriting showed signs of increasing weakness. I had to pore over it closely in order to decipher the broken, crooked lines pencilled casually over the pages.

The weather is insufferably hot; but too ill to be moved. In library – coolest room – doctor no objection. I have seen the last picture in the glass – Death – corruption – the cavern of Lazarus, and no Redeemer’s hand to raise the dead. Horrible! Horrible! Myself as I must be – soon, soon! How soon?

And then, scrawled in a corner of the page, I found the date – June 24, 1889.

I knew that Mr Hammond died early in the July of that year.

•   •   •   •   •

Seated on the floor, with my head bent over the pages, and reading more by the light of the blazing logs than by the lamp on the table above me, I was unaware that Lota had awoke, and had raised herself from her reclining position on the sofa. I was still absorbed in my study of those last horrible lines when a pale hand came suddenly down upon the open book, and a laugh which was almost a shriek ran through the silent spaces around us. The nurse started up and ran to her patient, who was struggling to her feet and staring wildly into the long narrow glass in the recess opposite her sofa.

“Look, look!” she shrieked. “It has come – the vision of Death! The dreadful face – the shroud – the coffin. Look, Helen, look!”

My gaze followed the direction of those wild eyes, and I know not whether my excited brain conjured up the image that appalled me. This alone I know, that in the depths of that dark glass, indistinct as a form seen through turbid water, a ghastly face, a shrouded figure, looked out at me—

“As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.”

A sudden cry from the nurse called me from the horror of that vision to stern reality, to see the life-blood ebbing from the lips I had kissed so often with all a sister’s love. My poor friend never spoke again. A severe attack of haemorrhage hastened the inevitable end; and before her heartbroken lover could come to clasp the hand and gaze into her fading eyes, Violetta Hammond passed away.

THE MYSTERY
OF THE FELWYN TUNNEL

Mrs. L.T. Meade

Robert Eustace

1897

I was making experiments of some interest in South Kensington, and hoped that I had perfected a small but not unimportant discovery, when, on returning home one evening in late October in the year 1893, I found a visiting card on my table. On it were inscribed the words, “Mr. Geoffrey Bainbridge.” This name was quite unknown to me, so I rang the bell and inquired of my servant who the visitor had been. He described him as a gentleman who wished to see me on most urgent business, and said further that Mr. Bainbridge intended to call again later in the evening. It was with both curiosity and vexation that I awaited the return of the stranger. Urgent business with me generally meant a hurried rush to one part of the country or the other. I did not want to leave London just then; and when at half-past nine Mr. Geoffrey Bainbridge was ushered into my room, I received him with a certain coldness which he could not fail to perceive. He was a tall, well-dressed, elderly man. He immediately plunged into the object of his visit.

“I hope you do not consider my unexpected presence an intrusion, Mr. Bell,” he said. “But I have heard of you from our mutual friends, the Greys of Uplands. You may remember once doing that family a great service.”

“I remember perfectly well,” I answered more cordially. “Pray tell me what you want; I shall listen with attention.”

“I believe you are the one man in London who can help me,” he continued. “I refer to a matter especially relating to your own particular study. I need hardly say that whatever you do will not be unrewarded.”

“That is neither here nor there,” I said; “but before you go any further, allow me to ask one question. Do you want me to leave London at present?”

He raised his eyebrows in dismay.

“I certainly do,” he answered.

“Very well; pray proceed with your story.”

He looked at me with anxiety.

“In the first place,” he began, “I must tell you that I am chairman of the Lytton Vale Railway Company in Wales, and that it is on an important matter connected with our line that I have come to consult you. When I explain to you the nature of the mystery, you will not wonder, I think, at my soliciting your aid.”

“I will give you my closest attention,” I answered; and then I added, impelled to say the latter words by a certain expression on his face, “if I can see my way to assisting you I shall be ready to do so.”

“Pray accept my cordial thanks,” he replied. “I have come up from my place at Felwyn today on purpose to consult you. It is in that neighbourhood that the affair has occurred. As it is essential that you should be in possession of the facts of the whole matter, I will go over things just as they happened.”

I bent forward and listened attentively.

“This day fortnight,” continued Mr. Bainbridge, “our quiet little village was horrified by the news that the signalman on duty at the mouth of the Felwyn Tunnel had been found dead under the most mysterious circumstances. The tunnel is at the end of a long cutting between Llanlys and Felwyn stations. It is about a mile long, and the signal-box is on the Felwyn side. The place is extremely lonely, being six miles from the village across the mountains. The name of the poor fellow who met his death in this mysterious fashion was David Pritchard. I have known him from a boy, and he was quite one of the steadiest and most trustworthy men on the line. On Tuesday evening he went on duty at six o’clock; on Wednesday morning the day-man who had come to relieve him was surprised not to find him in the box. It was just getting daylight, and the 6:30 local was coming down, so he pulled the signals and let her through. Then he went out, and looking up the line towards the tunnel, saw Pritchard lying beside the line close to the mouth of the tunnel. Roberts, the day-man, ran up to him and found, to his horror, that he was quite dead. At first Roberts naturally supposed that he had been cut down by a train, as there was a wound at the back of his head; but he was not lying on the metals. Roberts ran back to the box and telegraphed through the Felwyn Station. The message was sent on to the village, and at half-past seven o’clock the police inspector came up to my house with the news. He and I, with the local doctor, went off at once to the tunnel. We found the dead man laying beside the metals a few yards away from the mouth of the tunnel, and the doctor immediately gave him a careful examination. There was a depressed fracture at the back of the skull, which must have caused his death; but how he came by it was not so clear. On examining the whole place most carefully, we saw, further, that there were marks on the rocks at the steep side of the embankment as if someone had tried to scramble up them. Why the poor fellow had attempted such a climb, God only knows. In doing so he must have slipped and fallen back on to the line, thus causing the fracture of the skull. In no case could he have gone up more than eight or ten feet, as the banks of the cutting run sheer up, almost perpendicularly, beyond that point for more than a hundred and fifty feet. There are some sharp boulders beside the line, and it was possible that he might have fallen on one of these and so sustained the injury. The affair must have occurred some time between 11:45 p.m. and 6 a.m., as the engine-driver of the express at 11:45 p.m. states that the line was signalled clear, and he also caught sight of Pritchard in his box as he passed.”

“This is deeply interesting,” I said; “pray proceed.”

Bainbridge looked at me earnestly; he then continued:

“The whole thing is shrouded in mystery. Why should Pritchard have left his box and gone down to the tunnel? Why, having done so, should he have made a wild attempt to scale the side of the cutting, an impossible feat at any time? Had danger threatened, the ordinary course of things would have been to run up the line towards the signal-box. These points are quite unexplained. Another curious fact is that death appears to have taken place just before the day-man came on duty, as the light at the mouth of the tunnel had been put out, and it was one of the night signalman’s duties to do this as soon as daylight appeared; it is possible, therefore, that Pritchard went down to the tunnel for that purpose. Against this theory, however, and an objection that seems to nullify it, is the evidence of Dr. Williams, who states that when he examined the body his opinion was that death had taken place some hours before. An inquest was held on the following day, but before it took place there was a new and most important development. I now come to what I consider the crucial point in the whole story.

“For a long time there had been a feud between Pritchard and another man of the name of Wynne, a platelayer on the line. The object of their quarrel was the blacksmith’s daughter in the neighbouring village – a remarkably pretty girl and an arrant flirt. Both men were madly in love with her, and she played them off one against the other. The night but one before his death Pritchard and Wynne had met at the village inn, had quarrelled in the bar – Lucy, of course, being the subject of their difference. Wynne was heard to say (he was a man of powerful build and subject to fits of ungovernable rage) that he would have Pritchard’s life. Pritchard swore a great oath that he would get Lucy on the following day to promise to marry him. This oath, it appears, he kept, and on his way to the signal-box on Tuesday evening met Wynne, and triumphantly told him that Lucy had promised to be his wife. The men had a hand-to-hand fight on the spot, several people from the village being witnesses of it. They were separated with difficulty, each vowing vengeance on the other. Pritchard went off to his duty at the signal-box and Wynne returned to the village to drown his sorrows at the public-house.

“Very late that same night Wynne was seen by a villager going in the direction of the tunnel. The man stopped him and questioned him. He explained that he had left some of his tools on the line, and was on his way to fetch them. The villager noticed that he looked queer and excited, but not wishing to pick a quarrel thought it best not to question him further. It has been proved that Wynne never returned home that night, but came back at an early hour on the following morning, looking dazed and stupid. He was arrested on suspicion, and at the inquest the verdict was against him.”

“Has he given any explanation of his own movements?” I asked.

“Yes; but nothing that can clear him. As a matter of fact, his tools were nowhere to be seen on the line, nor did he bring them home with him. His own story is that being considerably the worse for drink, he had fallen down in one of the fields and slept there till morning.”

“Things look black against him,” I said.

“They do; but listen, I have something more to add. Here comes a very queer feature in the affair. Lucy Ray, the girl who had caused the feud between Pritchard and Wynne, after hearing the news of Pritchard’s death, completely lost her head, and ran frantically about the village declaring that Wynne was the man she really loved, and that she had only accepted Pritchard in a fit of rage with Wynne for not himself bringing matters to the point. The case looks very bad against Wynne, and yesterday the magistrate committed him for trial at the coming assizes. The unhappy Lucy Ray and the young man’s parents are in a state bordering on distraction.”

“What is your own opinion with regard to Wynn’s guilt?” I asked.

“Before God, Mr. Bell, I believe the poor fellow is innocent, but the evidence against him is very strong. One of the favourite theories is that he went down to the tunnel and extinguished the light, knowing that this would bring Pritchard out of his box to see what was the matter, and that he then attacked him, striking the blow which fractured the skull.”

“Has any weapon been found about, with which he could have given such a blow?”

“No; nor has anything of the kind been discovered on Wynne’s person; that fact is decidedly in his favour.”

“But what about the marks on the rocks?” I asked.

“It is possible that Wynne may have made them in order to divert suspicion by making people think that Pritchard must have fallen, and so killed himself. The holders of this theory base their belief on the absolute want of cause for Pritchard’s trying to scale the rock. The whole thing is the most absolute enigma. Some of the country folk have declared that the tunnel is haunted (and there certainly has been such a rumour current among them for years). That Pritchard saw some apparition, and in wild terror sought to escape from it by climbing the rocks, is another theory, but only the most imaginative hold it.”

“Well, it is a most extraordinary case,” I replied.

“Yes, Mr. Bell, and I should like to get your opinion of it. Do you see your way to elucidate the mystery?”

“Not at present; but I shall be happy to investigate the matter to my utmost ability.”

“But you do not wish to leave London at present?”

“That is so; but a matter of such importance cannot be set aside. It appears, from what you say, that Wynne’s life hangs more or less on my being able to clear away the mystery?”

“That is indeed the case. There ought not to be a single stone left unturned to get at the truth, for the sake of Wynne. Well, Mr. Bell, what do you propose to do?”

“To see the place without delay,” I answered.

“That is right; when can you come?”

“Whenever you please.”

“Will you come down to Felwyn with me tomorrow? I shall leave Paddington by the 7.10, and if you will be my guest I shall be only too pleased to put you up.”

“That arrangement will suit me admirably,” I replied. “I will meet you by the train you mention, and the affair shall have my best attention.”

“Thank you,” he said, rising. He shook hands with me and took his leave.

The next day I met Bainbridge at Paddington Station, and we were soon flying westward in the luxurious private compartment that had been reserved for him. I could see by his abstracted manner and his long lapses of silence that the mysterious affair at Felwyn Tunnel was occupying all his thoughts.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon when the train slowed down at the little station of Felwyn. The stationmaster was at the door in an instant to receive us.

“I have some terribly bad news for you, sir,” he said, turning to Bainbridge as we alighted; “and yet in one sense it is a relief, for it seems to clear Wynne.”

“What do you mean?” cried Bainbridge. “Bad news? Speak out at once!”

“Well, sir, it is this: there has been another death at Felwyn signal-box. John Davidson, who was on duty last night, was found dead at an early hour this morning in the very same place where we found poor Pritchard.”

“Good God!” cried Bainbridge, starting back, “what an awful thing! What, in the name of Heaven, does it mean. Mr. Bell? This is too fearful. Thank goodness you have come down with us.”

“It is as black a business as I ever heard of, sir,” echoed the stationmaster; “and what we are to do I don’t know. Poor Davidson was found dead this morning, and there was neither mark nor sign of what killed him – that is the extraordinary part of it. There’s a perfect panic abroad, and not a signalman on the line will take duty tonight. I was quite in despair, and was afraid at one time that the line would have to be closed, but at last it occurred to me to wire to Lytton Vale, and they are sending down an inspector. I expect him by a special every moment. I believe this is he coming now,” added the stationmaster, looking up the line.

There was the sound of a whistle down the valley, and in a few moments a single engine shot into the station, and an official in uniform stepped on to the platform.

“Good-evening, sir,” he said, touching his cap to Bainbridge; “I have just been sent down to inquire into this affair at the Felwyn Tunnel, and though it seems more of a matter for a Scotland Yard detective than one of ourselves, there was nothing for it but to come. All the same, Mr. Bainbridge, I cannot say that I look forward to spending tonight alone at the place.”

“You wish for the services of a detective, but you shall have some one better,” said Bainbridge, turning towards me. “This gentleman, Mr. John Bell, is the man of all others for our business. I have just brought him down from London for the purpose.”

An expression of relief flitted across the inspector’s face.

“I am very glad to see you, sir,” he said to me, “and I hope you will be able to spend the night with me in the signal-box. I must say I don’t much relish the idea of tackling the thing single-handed; but with your help, sir, I think we ought to get to the bottom of it somehow. I am afraid there is not a man on the line who will take duty until we do. So it is most important that the thing should be cleared, and without delay.”

I readily assented to the inspector’s proposition, and Bainbridge and I arranged that we should call for him at four o’clock at the village inn and drive him to the tunnel.

We then stepped into the wagonette which was waiting for us, and drove to Bainbridge’s house.

Mrs. Bainbridge came out to meet us, and was full of the tragedy. Two pretty girls also ran to greet their father, and to glance inquisitively to me. I could see that the entire family was in a state of much excitement.

“Lucy Ray has just left, father,” said the elder of the girls. “We had much trouble to soothe her; she is in a frantic state.”

“You have heard, Mr. Bell, all about this dreadful mystery?” said Mrs. Bainbridge as she led me towards the dining-room.

“Yes,” I answered; “your husband has been good enough to give me every particular.”

“And you have really come here to help us?”

“I hope I may be able to discover the cause,” I answered.

“It certainly seems most extraordinary,” continued Mrs. Bainbridge. “My dear,” she continued, turning to her husband, “you can easily imagine the state we were all in this morning when the news of the second death was brought to us.”

“For my part,” said Ella Bainbridge, “I am sure that Felwyn Tunnel is haunted. The villagers have thought so for a long time, and this second death seems to prove it, does it not?” Here she looked anxiously at me.

“I can offer no opinion,” I replied, “until I have sifted the matter thoroughly.”

“Come, Ella, don’t worry Mr. Bell,’ said her father; “if he is as hungry as I am, he must want his lunch.”

We then seated ourselves at the table and commenced the meal. Bainbridge, although he professed to be hungry, was in such a state of excitement that he could scarcely eat. Immediately after lunch he left me to the care of his family and went into the village.

“It is just like him,” said Mrs. Bainbridge; “he takes these sort of things to heart dreadfully. He is terribly upset about Lucy Ray, and also about the poor fellow Wynne. It is certainly a fearful tragedy from first to last.”

“Well, at any rate,” I said, “this fresh death will upset the evidence against Wynne.”

“I hope so, and there is some satisfaction in the fact. Well, Mr. Bell, I see you have finished lunch; will you come into the drawing-room?”

I followed her into a pleasant room overlooking the valley of the Lytton.

By and by Bainbridge returned, and soon afterwards the dog-cart came to the door. My host and I mounted, Bainbridge took the reins, and we started off at a brisk pace.

“Matters get worse and worse,” he said the moment we were alone. “If you don’t clear things up tonight, Bell, I say frankly that I cannot imagine what will happen.”

We entered the village, and as we rattled down the ill-paved streets I was greeted with curious glances on all sides. The people were standing about in groups, evidently talking about the tragedy and nothing else. Suddenly as our trap bumped noisily over the paving-stones, a girl darted out of one of the houses and made frantic motions to Bainbridge to stop the horse. He pulled the mare nearly up on her haunches, and the girl came up to the side of the dog-cart.

“You have heard it?” she said, speaking eagerly and in a gasping voice. “The death which occurred this morning will clear Stephen Wynne, won’t it, Mr. Bainbridge? It will, you are sure, are you not?”

“It looks like it, Lucy, my poor girl,” he answered. “But there, the whole thing is so terrible that I scarcely know what to think.”

She was a pretty girl with dark eyes, and under ordinary circumstances must have had the vivacious expression of face and the brilliant complexion which so many of her countrywomen possess. But now her eyes were swollen with weeping and her complexion more or less disfigured by the agony she had gone through. She looked piteously at Bainbridge, her lips trembling. The next moment she burst into tears.

“Come away, Lucy,” said a woman who had followed her out of the cottage; “Fie – for shame! don’t trouble the gentlemen; come back and stay quiet.”

“I can’t, mother, I can’t,” said the unfortunate girl. “If they hang him, I’ll go clean off my head. Oh, Mr. Bainbridge, do say that the second death has cleared him!”

“I have every hope that it will do so, Lucy,” said Bainbridge, “but now don’t keep us, there’s a good girl; go back into the house. This gentleman has come down from London on purpose to look into the whole matter. I may have good news for you in the morning.”

The girl raised her eyes to my face with a look of intense pleading. “Oh, I have been cruel and a fool, and I deserve everything,” she gasped; “but, sir, for the love of Heaven, try to clear him.”

I promised to do my best.

Bainbridge touched up the mare, she bounded forward, and Lucy disappeared into the cottage with her mother.

The next moment we drew up at the inn where the Inspector was waiting, and soon afterwards were bowling along between the high banks of the country lanes to the tunnel. It was a cold, still afternoon; the air was wonderfully keen, for a sharp frost had held the countryside in its grip for the last two days. The sun was just tipping the hills to westward when the trap pulled up at the top of the cutting. We hastily alighted, and the Inspector and I bade Bainbridge goodbye. He said that he only wished that he could stay with us for the night, assured us that little sleep would visit him, and that he would be back at the cutting at an early hour on the following morning; then the noise of his horse’s feet was heard fainter and fainter as he drove back over the frost-bound roads. The Inspector and I ran along the little path to the wicket-gate in the fence, stamping our feet on the hard ground to restore circulation after our cold drive. The next moment we were looking down upon the scene of the mysterious deaths, and a weird and lonely place it looked. The tunnel was at one end of the rock cutting, the sides of which ran sheer down to the line for over a hundred and fifty feet. Above the tunnel’s mouth the hills rose one upon the other. A more dreary place it would have been difficult to imagine. From a little clump of pines a delicate film of blue smoke rose straight up on the still air. This came from the chimney of the signal-box.

As we started to descend the precipitous path the Inspector sang out a cheery “Hullo!” The man on duty in the box immediately answered. His voice echoed and reverberated down the cutting, and the next moment he appeared at the door of the box. He told us that he would be with us immediately; but we called back to him to stay where he was, and the next instant the Inspector and I entered the box.

“The first thing to do,” said Henderson the Inspector, “is to send a message down the line to announce our arrival.”

This he did, and in a few moments a crawling goods train came panting up the cutting. After signalling her through we descended the wooden flight of steps which led from the box down to the line and walked along the metals towards the tunnel till we stood on the spot where poor Davidson had been found dead that morning. I examined the ground and all around it most carefully. Everything tallied exactly with the description I had received. There could be no possible way of approaching the spot except by going along the line, as the rocky sides of the cutting were inaccessible.

“It is a most extraordinary thing, sir,” said the signalman whom we had come to relieve. “Davidson had neither mark nor sign on him – there he lay stone dead and cold, and not a bruise nowhere; but Pritchard had an awful wound at the back of the head. They said he got it by climbing the rocks – here, you can see the marks for yourself, sir. But now, is it likely that Pritchard would try to climb rocks like these, so steep as they are?”

“Certainly not,” I replied.

“Then how do you account for the wound, sir?” asked the man with an anxious face.

“I cannot tell you at present,” I answered.

“And you and Inspector Henderson are going to spend the night in the signal-box?”

“Yes.”

A horrified expression crept over the signalman’s face.

“God preserve you both,” he said; “I wouldn’t do it – not for fifty pounds. It’s not the first time I have heard tell that Felwyn Tunnel is haunted. But, there, I won’t say any more about that. It’s a black business, and has given trouble enough. There’s poor Wynne, the same thing as convicted of the murder of Pritchard; but now they say that Davidson’s death will clear him. Davidson was as good a fellow as you would come across this side of the country; but for the matter of that, so was Pritchard. The whole thing is terrible – it upsets one, that it do, sir.”

“I don’t wonder at your feelings,” I answered; “but now, see here, I want to make a most careful examination of everything. One of the theories is that Wynne crept down this rocky side and fractured Pritchard’s skull. I believe such a feat to be impossible. On examining these rocks I see that a man might climb up the side of the tunnel as far as from eight to ten feet, utilizing the sharp projections of rock for the purpose; but it would be out of the question for any man to come down the cutting. No; the only way Wynne could have approached Pritchard was by the line itself. But, after all, the real thing to discover is this,” I continued, “what killed Davidson? Whatever caused his death is, beyond doubt, equally responsible for Pritchard’s. I am now going into the tunnel.”

Inspector Henderson went in with me. The place struck damp and chill. The walls were covered with green, evil-smelling fungi, and through the brickwork the moisture was oozing and had trickled down in long lines to the ground. Before us was nothing but dense darkness.

When we re-appeared the signalman was lighting the red lamp on the post, which stood about five feet from the ground just above the entrance to the tunnel.

“Is there plenty of oil?” asked the Inspector.

“Yes, sir, plenty,” replied the man. “Is there anything more I can do for either of you gentlemen?” he asked, pausing, and evidently dying to be off.

“Nothing,” answered Henderson; “I will wish you good-evening.”

“Good-evening to you both,” said the man. He made his way quickly up the path and was soon lost to sight.

Henderson and I then returned to the signal-box.

By this time it was nearly dark.

“How many trains pass in the night?” I asked of the Inspector.

“There’s the 10.20 down express,” he said, “it will pass here at about 10.40; then there’s the 11.45 up, and then not another train till the 6.30 local tomorrow morning. We shan’t have a very lively time,” he added.

I approached the fire and bent over it, holding out my hands to try and get some warmth into them.

“It will take a good deal to persuade me to go down to the tunnel, whatever I may see there,” said the man. “I don’t think, Mr. Bell, I am a coward in any sense of the word, but there’s something very uncanny about this place, right away from the rest of the world. I don’t wonder one often hears of signalmen going mad in some of these lonely boxes. Have you any theory to account for these deaths, sir?”

“None at present,” I replied.

“This second death puts the idea of Pritchard being murdered quite out of court,” he continued.

“I am sure of it,” I answered.

“And so am I, and that’s one comfort,” continued Henderson. “That poor girl, Lucy Ray, although she was to be blamed for her conduct, is much to be pitied now; and as to poor Wynne himself, he protests his innocence through thick and thin. He was a wild fellow, but not the sort to take the life of a fellow-creature. I saw the doctor this afternoon while I was waiting for you at the inn, Mr. Bell, and also the police sergeant. They both say they do not know what Davidson died of. There was not the least sign of violence on the body.”

“Well, I am as puzzled as the rest of you,” I said. “I have one or two theories in my mind, but none of them will quite fit the situation.”

The night was piercingly cold, and, although there was not a breath of wind, the keen and frosty air penetrated into the lonely signal-box. We spoke little, and both of us were doubtless absorbed by our own thoughts and speculations. As to Henderson, he looked distinctly uncomfortable, and I cannot say that my own feelings were too pleasant. Never had I been given a tougher problem to solve, and never had I been so utterly at my wits’ end for a solution.

Now and then the Inspector got up and went to the telegraph instrument, which intermittently clicked away in its box. As he did so he made some casual remark and then sat down again. After the 10.40 had gone through, there followed a period of silence which seemed almost oppressive. All at once the stillness was broken by the whirr of the electric bell, which sounded so sharply in our ears that we both started. Henderson rose.

“That’s the 11.45 coming,” he said, and, going over to the three long levers, he pulled two of them down with a loud clang. The next moment, with a rush and a scream, the express tore down the cutting, the carriage lights streamed past in a rapid flash, the ground trembled, a few sparks from the engine whirled up into the darkness, and the train plunged into the tunnel.

“And now,” said Henderson, as he pushed back the levers, “not another train till daylight. My word, it is cold!”

It was intensely so. I piled some more wood on the fire and, turning up the collar of my heavy ulster, sat down at one end of the bench and leant my back against the wall. Henderson did likewise; we were neither of us inclined to speak. As a rule, whenever I have any night work to do, I am never troubled with sleepiness, but on this occasion I felt unaccountably drowsy. I soon perceived that Henderson was in the same condition.

“Are you sleepy?” I asked of him.

“Dead with it, sir,” was his answer; “but there’s no fear, I won’t drop off.”

I got up and went to the window of the box. I felt certain that if I sat still any longer I should be in a sound sleep. This would never do. Already it was becoming a matter of torture to keep my eyes open. I began to pace up and down; I opened the door of the box and went out on the little platform.

“What’s the matter, sir?” inquired Henderson, jumping up with a start.

“I cannot keep awake,” I said.

“Nor can I,” he answered, “and yet I have spent nights and nights of my life in signal-boxes and never was the least bit drowsy; perhaps it’s the cold.”

“Perhaps it is,” I said; “but I have been out on as freezing nights before, and …”

The man did not reply; he had sat down again; his head was nodding.

I was just about to go up to him and shake him, when it suddenly occurred to me that I might as well let him have his sleep out. I soon heard him snoring, and he presently fell forward in a heap on the floor. By dint of walking up and down, I managed to keep from dropping off myself, and in torture which I shall never be able to describe, the night wore itself away. At last, towards morning, I awoke Henderson.

“You have had a good nap,” I said; “but never mind, I have been on guard and nothing has occurred.”

“Good God! have I been asleep?” cried the man.

“Sound,” I answered.

“Well, I never felt anything like it,” he replied. “Don’t you find the air very close, sir?”

“No,” I said; “it is as fresh as possible; it must be the cold.”

“I’ll just go and have a look at the light at the tunnel,” said the man; “it will rouse me.”

He went on to the little platform, whilst I bent over the fire and began to build it up. Presently he returned with a scared look on his face. I could see by the light of the oil lamp which hung on the wall that he was trembling.

“Mr. Bell,” he said, “I believe there is somebody or something down at the mouth of the tunnel now.” As he spoke he clutched me by the arm. “Go and look,” he said; “whoever it is, it has put out the light.”

“Put out the light?” I cried. “Why, what’s the time?”

Henderson pulled out his watch.

“Thank goodness, most of the night is gone,” he said; “I didn’t know it was so late, it is half past five.”

“Then the local is not due for an hour yet?” I said.

“No; but who should put out the light?” cried Henderson.

I went to the door, flung it open, and looked out. The dim outline of the tunnel was just visible looming through the darkness, but the red light was out.

“What the dickens does it mean, sir?” gasped the Inspector. “I know the lamp had plenty of oil in it. Can there be anyone standing in front of it, do you think?”

We waited and watched for a few moments, but nothing stirred.

“Come along,” I said, “let us go down together and see what it is.”

“I don’t believe I can do it, sir; I really don’t!”

“Nonsense!” I cried. “I shall go down alone if you won’t accompany me. Just hand me my stick, will you?”

“For God’s sake, be careful, Mr. Bell. Don’t go down, whatever you do. I expect this is what happened before, and the poor fellows went down to see what it was and died there. There’s some devilry at work, that’s my belief.”

“That is as it may be,” I answered shortly; “but we certainly shall not find out by stopping here. My business is to get to the bottom of this, and I am going to do it. That there is danger of some sort, I have very little doubt; but danger or not, I am going down.”

“If you’ll be warned by me, sir, you’ll just stay quietly here.”

“I must go down and see the matter out,” was my answer. “Now listen to me, Henderson. I see that you are alarmed, and I don’t wonder. Just stay quietly where you are and watch, but if I call come at once. Don’t delay a single instant. Remember I am putting my life into your hands. If I call ‘Come,’ just come to me as quick as you can, for I may want help. Give me that lantern.”

He unhitched it from the wall, and taking it from him. I walked cautiously down the steps on to the line. I still felt curiously, unaccountably drowsy and heavy. I wondered at this, for the moment was such a critical one as to make almost any man wide awake. Holding the lamp high above my head, I walked rapidly along the line. I hardly knew what I expected to find. Cautiously along the metals I made my way, peering right and left until I was close to the fatal spot where the bodies had been found. An uncontrollable shudder passed over me. The next moment, to my horror, without the slightest warning, the light I was carrying went out, leaving me in total darkness. I started back, and stumbling against one of the loose boulders reeled against the wall and nearly fell. What was the matter with me? I could hardly stand. I felt giddy and faint, and a horrible sensation of great tightness seized me across the chest. A loud ringing noise sounded in my ears. Struggling madly for breath, and with the fear of impending death upon me, I turned and tried to run from a danger I could neither understand nor grapple with. But before I had taken two steps my legs gave way from under me, and uttering a loud cry I fell insensible to the ground.

•   •   •   •   •

Out of an oblivion which, for all I knew, might have lasted for moments or centuries, a dawning consciousness came to me. I knew that I was lying on hard ground; that I was absolutely incapable of realizing, nor had I the slightest inclination to discover, where I was. All I wanted was to lie quite still and undisturbed. Presently I opened my eyes.

Some one was bending over me and looking into my face.

“Thank God, he is not dead,” I heard in whispered tones. Then, with a flash, memory returned to me.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“You may well ask that, sir,” said the Inspector gravely. “It has been touch and go with you for the last quarter of an hour, and a near thing for me too.”

I sat up and looked around me. Daylight was just beginning to break, and I saw that we were at the bottom of the steps that led up to the signal-box. My teeth were chattering with the cold and I was shivering like a man with ague.

“I am better now,” I said; “just give me your hand.”

I took his arm, and holding the rail with the other hand staggered up into the box and sat down on the bench.

“Yes, it has been a near shave,” I said; “and a big price to pay for solving a mystery.”

“Do you mean to say you know what it is?” asked Henderson eagerly.

“Yes,” I answered, “I think I know now; but first tell me how long was I unconscious?”

“A good bit over half an hour, sir, I should think. As soon as I heard you call out I ran down as you told me, but before I got to you I nearly fainted. I never had such a horrible sensation in my life. I felt as weak as a baby, but I just managed to seize you by the arms and drag you along the line to the steps, and that was about all I could do.”

“Well, I owe you my life,” I said; “just hand me that brandy flask, I shall be the better for some of its contents.”

I took a long pull. Just as I was laying the flask down Henderson started from my side.

“There,” he cried, “the 6.30 is coming.” The electric bell at the instrument suddenly began to ring. “Ought I to let her go through, sir?” he inquired.

“Certainly,” I answered. “That is exactly what we want. Oh, she will be all right.”

“No danger to her, sir?”

“None, none; let her go through.”

He pulled the lever and the next moment the train tore through the cutting.

“Now I think it will be safe to go down again,” I said. “I believe I shall be able to get to the bottom of this business.”

Henderson stared at me aghast.

“Do you mean that you are going down again to the tunnel?” he gasped.

“Yes,” I said; “give me those matches. You had better come too. I don’t think there will be much danger now; and there is daylight, so we can see what we are about.”

The man was very loth to obey me, but at last I managed to persuade him. We went down the line, walking slowly, and at this moment we both felt our courage revived by a broad and cheerful ray of sunshine.

“We must advance cautiously,” I said, “and be ready to run back at a moment’s notice.”

“God knows, sir, I think we are running a great risk,” panted poor Henderson; “and if that devil or whatever else it is should happen to be about – why, daylight or no daylight—”

“Nonsense, man!” I interrupted; “if we are careful, no harm will happen to us now. Ah! and here we are!” We had reached the spot where I had fallen. “Just give me a match, Henderson.”

He did so, and I immediately lit the lamp. Opening the glass of the lamp, I held it close to the ground and passed it to and fro. Suddenly the flame went out.

“Don’t you understand now?” I said, looking up at the Inspector.

“No, I don’t, sir,” he replied with a bewildered expression.

Suddenly, before I could make an explanation, we both heard shouts from the top of the cutting, and looking up I saw Bainbridge hurrying down the path. He had come in the dog-cart to fetch us.

“Here’s the mystery,” I cried as he rushed up to us, “and a deadlier scheme of Dame Nature’s to frighten and murder poor humanity I have never seen.”

As I spoke I lit the lamp again and held it just above a tiny fissure in the rock. It was at once extinguished.

“What is it?” said Bainbridge, panting with excitement.

“Something that nearly finished me,” I replied. “Why, this is a natural escape of choke damp. Carbonic acid gas – the deadliest gas imaginable, because it gives no warning of its presence, and it has no smell. It must have collected here during the hours of the night when no train was passing, and gradually rising put out the signal light. The constant rushing of the trains through the cutting all day would temporarily disperse it.”

As I made this explanation Bainbridge stood like one electrified, while a curious expression of mingled relief and horror swept over Henderson’s face.

“An escape of carbonic acid gas is not an uncommon phenomenon in volcanic districts,” I continued, “as I take this to be; but it is odd what should have started it. It has sometimes been known to follow earthquake shocks, when there is a profound disturbance of the deep strata.”

“It is strange that you should have said that,” said Bainbridge, when he could find his voice.

“What do you mean?”

“Why, that about the earthquake. Don’t you remember, Henderson,” he added, turning to the Inspector, “we had felt a slight shock all over South Wales about three weeks back?”

“Then that, I think, explains it,” I said. “It is evident that Pritchard really did climb the rocks in a frantic attempt to escape from the gas and fell back on to these boulders. The other man was cut down at once, before he had time to fly.”

“But what is to happen now?” asked Bainbridge. “Will it go on for ever? How are we to stop it?”

“The fissure ought to be drenched with lime water, and then filled up; but all really depends on what is the size of the supply and also the depth. It is an extremely heavy gas, and would lie at the bottom of a cutting like water. I think there is more here just now than is good for us,” I added.

“But how,” continued Bainbridge, as we moved a few steps from the fatal spot, “do you account for the interval between the first death and the second?”

“The escape must have been intermittent. If wind blew down the cutting, as probably was the case before this frost set in, it would keep the gas so diluted that its effects would not be noticed. There was enough down here this morning, before that train came through, to poison an army. Indeed, if it had not been for Henderson’s promptitude, there would have been another inquest – on myself.”

I then related my own experience.

“Well, this clears Wynne, without doubt,” said Bainbridge; “but alas! for the two poor fellows who were victims. Bell, the Lytton Vale Railway Company owe you unlimited thanks; you have doubtless saved many lives, and also the Company, for the line must have been closed if you had not made your valuable discovery. But now come home with me to breakfast. We can discuss all those matters later on.”

THE STORY
OF BAELBROW

E. and H. Heron

1898

It is a matter for regret that so many of Mr Flaxman Low’s reminiscences should deal with the darker episodes of his experiences. Yet this is almost unavoidable, as the more purely scientific and less strongly marked cases would not, perhaps, contain the same elements of interest for the general public, however valuable and instructive they might be to the expert student. It has also been considered better to choose the completer cases, those that ended in something like satisfactory proof, rather than the many instances where the thread broke off abruptly amongst surmisings, which it was never possible to subject to convincing tests.

North of a low-lying strip of country on the East Anglian coast, the promontory of Bael Ness thrusts out a blunt nose into the sea. On the Ness, backed by pinewoods, stands a square, comfortable stone mansion, known to the countryside as Baelbrow. It has faced the east winds for close upon three hundred years, and during the whole period has been the home of the Swaffam family, who were never in anywise put out of conceit of their ancestral dwelling by the fact that it had always been haunted. Indeed, the Swaffams were proud of the Baelbrow Ghost, which enjoyed a wide notoriety, and no one dreamt of complaining of its behaviour until Professor Van der Voort of Louvain laid information against it, and sent an urgent appeal for help to Mr Flaxman Low.

The Professor, who was well acquainted with Mr Low, detailed the circumstances of his tenancy of Baelbrow, and the unpleasant events that had followed thereupon.

It appeared that Mr Swaffam, senior, who spent a large portion of his time abroad, had offered to lend his house to the Professor for the summer season. When the Van der Voorts arrived at Baelbrow, they were charmed with the place. The prospect, though not very varied, was at least extensive, and the air exhilarating. Also the Professor’s daughter enjoyed frequent visits from her betrothed – Harold Swaffam – and the Professor was delightfully employed in overhauling the Swaffam library.

The Van der Voorts had been duly told of the ghost, which lent distinction to the old house, but never in any way interfered with the comfort of the inmates. For some time they found this description to be strictly true, but with the beginning of October came a change. Up to this time and as far back as the Swaffam annals reached, the ghost had been a shadow, a rustle, a passing sigh – nothing definite or troublesome. But early in October strange things began to occur, and the terror culminated when a housemaid was found dead in a corridor three weeks later. Upon this the Professor felt that it was time to send for Flaxman Low.

Mr Low arrived upon a chilly evening when the house was already beginning to blur in the purple twilight, and the resinous scent of the pines came sweetly on the land breeze. Van der Voort welcomed him in the spacious, fire-lit hall. He was a stout man with a quantity of white hair, round eyes emphasised by spectacles, and a kindly, dreamy face. His life-study was philology, and his two relaxations chess and the smoking of a big bowled meerschaum.

“Now, Professor,” said Mr Low when they had settled themselves in the smoking-room, “how did it all begin?”

“I will tell you,” replied Van der Voort, thrusting out his chin, and tapping his broad chest, and speaking as if an unwarrantable liberty had been taken with him. “First of all, it has shown itself to me!”

Mr Flaxman Low smiled and assured him that nothing could be more satisfactory.

“But not at all satisfactory!” exclaimed the Professor. “I was sitting here alone, it might have been midnight – when I hear something come creeping like a little dog with its nails, tick-tick, upon the oak flooring of the hall. I whistle, for I think it is the little ‘Rags’ of my daughter, and afterwards opened the door, and I saw” – he hesitated and looked hard at Low through his spectacles, “something that was just disappearing into the passage which connects the two wings of the house. It was a figure, not unlike the human figure, but narrow and straight. I fancied I saw a bunch of black hair, and a flutter of something detached, which may have been a handkerchief. I was overcome by a feeling of repulsion. I heard a few clicking steps, then it stopped, as I thought, at the museum door. Come, I will show you the spot.”

The Professor conducted Mr Low into the hall. The main staircase, dark and massive, yawned above them, and directly behind it ran the passage referred to by the Professor. It was over twenty feet long, and about midway led past a deep arch containing a door reached by two steps. Van der Voort explained that this door formed the entrance to a large room called the Museum, in which Mr Swaffam, senior, who was something of a dilettante, stored the various curios he picked up during his excursions abroad. The Professor went on to say that he immediately followed the figure, which he believed had gone into the museum, but he found nothing there except the cases containing Swaffam’s treasures.

“I mentioned my experience to no one. I concluded that I had seen the ghost. But two days after, one of the female servants coming through the passage, in the dark, declared that a man leapt out at her from the embrasure of the Museum door, but she released herself and ran screaming into the servants’ hall. We at once made a search but found nothing to substantiate her story.

“I took no notice of this, though it coincided pretty well with my own experience. The week after, my daughter Lena came down late one night for a book. As she was about to cross the hall, something leapt upon her from behind. Women are of little use in serious investigations – she fainted! Since then she has been ill and the doctor says ‘Run down’.” Here the Professor spread out his hands. “So she leaves for a change tomorrow. Since then other members of the household have been attacked in much the same manner, with always the same result, they faint and are weak and useless when they recover.

“But, last Wednesday, the affair became a tragedy. By that time the servants had refused to come through the passage except in a crowd of three or four – most of them preferring to go round by the terrace to reach this part of the house. But one maid, named Eliza Freeman, said she was not afraid of the Baelbrow Ghost, and undertook to put out the lights in the hall one night. When she had done so, and was returning through the passage past the Museum door, she appears to have been attacked, or at any rate frightened. In the grey of the morning they found her lying beside the steps dead. There was a little blood upon her sleeve but no mark upon her body except a small raised pustule under the ear. The doctor said the girl was extraordinarily anaemic, and that she probably died from fright, her heart being weak. I was surprised at this, for she had always seemed to be a particularly strong and active young woman.”

“Can I see Miss Van der Voort tomorrow before she goes?” asked Low, as the Professor signified he had nothing more to tell.

The Professor was rather unwilling that his daughter should be questioned, but he at last gave his permission, and next morning Low had a short talk with the girl before she left the house. He found her a very pretty girl, though listless and startlingly pale, and with a frightened stare in her light brown eyes. Mr Low asked if she could describe her assailant.

“No,” she answered. “I could not see him for he was behind me. I only saw a dark, bony hand, with shining nails, and a bandaged arm pass just under my eyes before I fainted.”

“Bandaged arm? I have heard nothing of this.”

“Tut – tut, mere fancy!” put in the Professor impatiently.

“I saw the bandages on the arm,” repeated the girl, turning her head wearily away, “and I smelt the antiseptics it was dressed with.”

“You have hurt your neck,” remarked Mr Low, who noticed a small circular patch of pink under her ear.

She flushed and paled, raising her hand to her neck with a nervous jerk, as she said in a low voice:

“It has almost killed me. Before he touched me, I knew he was there! I felt it!”

When they left her the Professor apologised for the unreliability of her evidence, and pointed out the discrepancy between her statement and his own.

“She says she sees nothing but an arm, yet I tell you it had no arms! Preposterous! Conceive a wounded man entering this house to frighten the young women! I do not know what to make of it! Is it a man, or is it the Baelbrow Ghost?”

During the afternoon when Mr Low and the Professor returned from a stroll on the shore, they found a dark-browed young man with a bull neck, and strongly marked features, standing sullenly before the hall fire. The Professor presented him to Mr Low as Harold Swaffam.

Swaffam seemed to be about thirty, but was already known as a far-seeing and successful member of the Stock Exchange.

“I am pleased to meet you, Mr Low,” he began, with a keen glance, “though you don’t look sufficiently high-strung for one of your profession.”

Mr Low merely bowed.

“Come, you don’t defend your craft against my insinuations?” went on Swaffam. “And so you have come to rout out our poor old ghost from Baelbrow? You forget that he is an heirloom, a family possession! What’s this about his having turned rabid, eh, Professor?” he ended, wheeling round upon Van der Voort in his brusque way.

The Professor told the story over again. It was plain that he stood rather in awe of his prospective son in-law.

“I heard much the same from Lena, whom I met at the station,” said Swaffam. “It is my opinion that the women in this house are suffering from an epidemic of hysteria. You agree with me, Mr Low?”

“Possibly. Though hysteria could hardly account for Freeman’s death.”

“I can’t say as to that until I have looked further into the particulars. I have not been idle since I arrived. I have examined the Museum. No one has entered it from the outside, and there is no other way of entrance except through the passage. The flooring is laid, I happen to know, on a thick layer of concrete. And there the case for the ghost stands at present.” After a few moments of dogged reflection, he swung round on Mr Low, in a manner that seemed peculiar to him when about to address any person. “What do you say to this plan, Mr Low? I propose to drive the Professor over to Ferryvale, to stop there for a day or two at the hotel, and I will also dispose of the servants who still remain in the house for say, forty-eight hours. Meanwhile you and I can try to go further into the secret of the ghost’s new pranks?” Flaxman Low replied that this scheme exactly met his views, but the Professor protested against being sent away. Harold Swaffam, however, was a man who liked to arrange things in his own fashion, and within forty-five minutes he and Van der Voort departed in the dogcart.

The evening was lowering, and Baelbrow, like all houses built in exposed situations, was extremely susceptible to the changes of the weather. Therefore, before many hours were over, the place was full of creaking noises as the screaming gale battered at the shuttered windows, and the tree-branches tapped and groaned against the walls.

Harold Swaffam on his way back, was caught in the storm and drenched to the skin. It was, therefore, settled that after he had changed his clothes he should have a couple of hours’ rest on the smoking–room sofa, while Mr Low kept watch in the hall.

The early part of the night passed over uneventfully. A light burned faintly in the great wainscotted hall, but the passage was dark. There was nothing to be heard but the wild moan and whistle of the wind coming in from the sea, and the squalls of rain dashing against the windows. As the hours advanced, Mr Low lit a lantern that lay at hand, and, carrying it along the passage tried the Museum door. It yielded, and the wind came muttering through to meet him. He looked round at the shutters and behind the big cases which held Mr Swaffam’s treasures, to make sure that the room contained no living occupant but himself.

Suddenly he fancied he heard a scraping noise behind him, and turned round, but discovered nothing to account for it. Finally, he laid the lantern on a bench so that its light should fall through the door into the passage, and returned again to the hall, where he put out the lamp, and then once more took up his station by the closed door of the smoking-room.

A long hour passed, during which the wind continued to roar down the wide hall chimney, and the old boards creaked as if furtive footsteps were gathering from every corner of the house. But Flaxman Low heeded none of these; he was awaiting for a certain sound.

After a while, he heard it – the cautious scraping of wood on wood. He leant forward to watch the Museum door. Click, click, came the curious dog-like tread upon the tiled floor of the Museum, till the thing, whatever it was, paused and listened behind the open door. The wind lulled at the moment, and Low listened also, but no further sound was to be heard, only slowly across the broad ray of light falling through the door grew a stealthy shadow.

Again the wind rose, and blew in heavy gusts about the house, till even the flame in the lantern flickered; but when it steadied once more, Flaxman Low saw that the silent form had passed through the door, and was now on the steps outside. He could just make out a dim shadow in the dark angle of the embrasure.

Presently, from the shapeless shadow came a sound Mr Low was not prepared to hear. The thing sniffed the air with the strong, audible inspiration of a bear, or some large animal. At the same moment, carried on the draughts of the hall, a faint, unfamiliar odour reached his nostrils. Lena Van der Voort’s words flashed back upon him – this, then, was the creature with the bandaged arm!

Again, as the storm shrieked and shook the windows, a darkness passed across the light. The thing had sprung out from the angle of the door, and Flaxman Low knew that it was making its way towards him through the illusive blackness of the hall. He hesitated for a second; then he opened the smoking–room door.

Harold Swaffam sat up on the sofa, dazed with sleep.

“What has happened? Has it come?”

Low told him what he had just seen. Swaffam listened half–smilingly.

“What do you make of it now?” he said.

“I must ask you to defer that question for a little,” replied Low.

“Then you mean me to suppose that you have a theory to fit all these incongruous items?”

“I have a theory, which may be modified by further knowledge,” said Low. “Meantime, am I right in concluding from the name of this house that it was built on a barrow or burying-place?”

“You are right, though that has nothing to do with the latest freaks of our ghost,” returned Swaffam decidedly.

“I also gather that Mr Swaffam has lately sent home one of the many cases now lying in the Museum?” went on Mr Low.

“He sent one, certainly, last September.”

“And you have opened it,” asserted Low.

“Yes; though I flattered myself I had left no trace of my handiwork.”

“I have not examined the cases,” said Low. “I inferred that you had done so from other facts.”

“Now, one thing more,” went on Swaffam, still smiling. “Do you imagine there is any danger – I mean to men like ourselves? Hysterical women cannot be taken into serious account.”

“Certainly; the gravest danger to any person who moves about this part of the house alone after dark,” replied Low.

Harold Swaffam leant back and crossed his legs.

“To go back to the beginning of our conversation, Mr Low, may I remind you of the various conflicting particulars you will have to reconcile before you can present any decent theory to the world?”

“I am quite aware of that.”

“First of all, our original ghost was a mere misty presence, rather guessed at from vague sounds and shadows – now we have a something that is tangible, and that can, as we have proof, kill with fright. Next Van der Voort declares the thing was a narrow, long and distinctly armless object, while Miss Van der Voort has not only seen the arm and hand of a human being, but saw them clearly enough to tell us that the nails were gleaming and the arm bandaged. She also felt its strength. Van der Voort, on the other hand, maintained that it clicked along like a dog – you bear out this description with the additional information that it sniffs like a wild beast. Now what can this thing be? It is capable of being seen, smelt, and felt, yet it hides itself, successfully in a room where there is no cavity or space sufficient to afford covert to a cat! You still tell me that you believe that you can explain?”

“Most certainly,” replied Flaxman Low with conviction.

“I have not the slightest intention or desire to be rude, but as a mere matter of common sense, I must express my opinion plainly. I believe the whole thing to be the result of excited imaginations, and I am about to prove it. Do you think there is any further danger to–night?”

“Very great danger to–night,” replied Low.

“Very well; as I said, I am going to prove it. I will ask you to allow me to lock you up in one of the distant rooms, where I can get no help from you, and I will pass the remainder of the night walking about the passage and hall in the dark. That should give proof one way or the other.”

“You can do so if you wish, but I must at least beg to be allowed to look on. I will leave the house and watch what goes on from the window in the passage, which I saw opposite the Museum door. You cannot, in any fairness, refuse to let me be a witness.”

“I cannot, of course,” returned Swaffam.

“Still, the night is too bad to turn a dog out into, and I warn you that I shall lock you out.”

“That will not matter. Lend me a macintosh, and leave the lantern lit in the Museum, where I placed it.”

Swaffam agreed to this. Mr Low gives a graphic account of what followed. He left the house and was duly locked out, and, after groping his way round the house, found himself at length outside the window of the passage, which was almost opposite to the door of the Museum. The door was still ajar and a thin band of light cut out into the gloom. Further down the hall gaped black and void. Low, sheltering himself as well as he could from the rain, waited for Swaffam’s appearance. Was the terrible yellow watcher balancing itself upon its lean legs in the dim corner opposite, ready to spring out with its deadly strength upon the passer-by?

Presently Low heard a door bang inside the house, and the next moment Swaffam appeared with a candle in his hand, an isolated spread of weak rays against the vast darkness behind. He advanced steadily down the passage, his dark face grim and set, and as he came Mr Low experienced that tingling sensation, which is so often the forerunner of some strange experience. Swaffam passed on towards the other end of the passage. There was a quick vibration of the Museum door as a lean shape with a shrunken head leapt out into the passage after him. Then all together came a hoarse shout, the noise of a fall and utter darkness.

In an instant, Mr Low had broken the glass, opened the window, and swung himself into the passage. There he lit a match and as it flared he saw by its dim light a picture painted for a second upon the obscurity beyond.

Swaffam’s big figure lay with outstretched arms, face downwards and as Low looked a crouching shape extricated itself from the fallen man, raising a narrow vicious head from his shoulder.

The match spluttered feebly and went out, and Low heard a flying step click on the boards, before he could find the candle Swaffam had dropped. Lighting it, he stooped over Swaffam and turned him on his back. The man’s strong colour had gone, and the wax–white face looked whiter still against the blackness of hair and brows, and upon his neck under the ear was a little raised pustule, from which a thin line of blood was streaked up to the angle of his cheek–bone.

Some instinctive feeling prompted Low to glance up at this moment. Half extended from the Museum doorway were a face and bony neck – a high–nosed, dull-eyed, malignant face, the eye-sockets hollow, and the darkened teeth showing. Low plunged his hand into his pocket, and a shot rang out in the echoing passageway and hall. The wind sighed through the broken panes, a ribbon of stuff fluttered along the polished flooring, and that was all, as Flaxman Low half dragged, half carried Swaffam into the smoking–room.

It was some time before Swaffam recovered consciousness. He listened to Low’s story of how he had found him with a red angry gleam in his sombre eyes.

“The ghost has scored off me,” he said, with an odd, sullen laugh, “but now I fancy it’s my turn! But before we adjourn to the Museum to examine the place, I will ask you to let me hear your notion of things. You have been right in saying there was real danger. For myself I can only tell you that I felt something spring upon me, and I knew no more. Had this not happened I am afraid I should never have asked you a second time what your idea of the matter might be,” he added with a sort of sulky frankness.

“There are two main indications,” replied Low. “This strip of yellow bandage, which I have just now picked up from the passage floor, and the mark on your neck.”

“What’s that you say? Swaffam rose quickly and examined his neck in a small glass beside the mantelshelf.

“Connect those two, and I think I can leave you to work it out for yourself,” said Low.

“Pray let us have your theory in full,” requested Swaffam shortly.

“Very well,” answered Low good–humouredly – he thought Swaffam’s annoyance natural in the circumstances – “The long, narrow figure which seemed to the Professor to be armless is developed on the next occasion. For Miss Van der Voort sees a bandaged arm and a dark hand with gleaming – which means, of course, gilded – nails. The clicking sound of the footsteps coincides with these particulars, for we know that sandals made of strips of leather are not uncommon in company with gilt nails and bandages. Old and dry leather would naturally click upon your polished floor.”

“Bravo, Mr Low! So you mean to say that this house is haunted by a mummy!”

“That is my idea, and all I have seen confirms me in my opinion.”

“To do you justice, you held this theory before tonight – before, in fact, you had seen anything for yourself. You gathered that my father had sent home a mummy, and you went on to conclude that I had opened the case?”

“Yes. I imagine you took off most of, or rather all, the outer bandages, thus leaving the limbs free, wrapped only in the inner bandages which were swathed round each separate limb. I fancy this mummy was preserved on the Theban method with aromatic spices, which left the skin olive-coloured, dry and flexible, like tanned leather, the features remaining distinct, and the hair, teeth, and eyebrows perfect.”

“So far, good,” said Swaffam. “But now, how about the intermittent vitality? The pustule on the neck of those whom it attacks? And where is our old Baelbrow ghost to come in?”

Swaffam tried to speak in a rallying tone, but his excitement and lowering temper were visible enough, in spite of the attempts he made to suppress them.

“To begin at the beginning,” said Flaxman Low, “everybody who, in a rational and honest manner, investigates the phenomena of spiritism will, sooner or later, meet in them some perplexing element, which is not to be explained by any of the ordinary theories. For reasons into which I need not now enter, this present case appears to me to be one of these. I am led to believe that the ghost which has for so many years given dim and vague manifestations of its existence in this house is a vampire.”

Swaffam threw back his head with an incredulous gesture.

“We no longer live in the middle ages, Mr Low! And besides, how could a vampire come here?” he said scoffingly.

“It is held by some authorities on these subjects that under certain conditions a vampire may be self–created. You tell me that this house is built upon an ancient barrow, in fact, on a spot where we might naturally expect to find such an elemental psychic germ. In those dead human systems were contained all the seeds for good and evil. The power which causes these psychic seeds or germs to grow is thought, and from being long dwelt on and indulged, a thought might finally gain a mysterious vitality, which could go on increasing more and more by attracting to itself suitable and appropriate elements from its environment. For a long period this germ remained a helpless intelligence, awaiting the opportunity to assume some material form, by means of which to carry out its desires. The invisible is the real; the material only subserves its manifestation. The impalpable, reality already existed, when you provided for it a physical medium for action by unwrapping the mummy’s form. Now, we can only judge of the nature of the germ by its manifestation through matter. Here we have every indication of a vampire intelligence touching into life and energy the dead human frame. Hence the mark on the neck of its victims, and their bloodless and anaemic condition. For a vampire, as you know, sucks blood.”

Swaffam rose, and took up the lamp.

“Now, for proof,” he said bluntly. “Wait a second, Mr Low. You say you fired at this appearance?” And he took up the pistol which Low had laid down on the table.

“Yes, I aimed at a small portion of its foot which I saw on the step.”

Without more words, and with the pistol still in his hand, Swaffam led the way to the Museum.

The wind howled round the house, and the darkness, which precedes the dawn, lay upon the world, when the two men looked upon one of the strangest sights it has ever been given to men to shudder at.

Half in and half out of an oblong wooden box in a corner of the great room, lay a lean shape in its rotten yellow bandages, the scraggy neck surmounted by a mop of frizzled hair. The toe strap of a sandal and a portion of the right foot had been shot away.

Swaffam, with a working face, gazed down at it, then seizing it by its tearing bandages, he flung it into the box, where it fell into a life–like posture, its wide, moist-lipped mouth gaping up at them.

For a moment Swaffam stood over the thing; then with a curse he raised the revolver and shot into the grinning face again and again with a deliberate vindictiveness. Finally he rammed the thing down into the box, and, clubbing the weapon, smashed the head into fragments with a vicious energy that coloured the whole horrible scene with a suggestion of murder done.

Then, turning to Low, he said:

“Help me to fasten the cover on it.”

“Are you going to bury it?”

“No, we must rid the earth of it,” he answered savagely. “I’ll put it into the old canoe and burn it.”

The rain had ceased when in the daybreak they carried the old canoe down to the shore. In it they placed the mummy case with its ghastly occupant, and piled faggots about it. The sail was raised and the pile lighted, and Low and Swaffam watched it creep out on the ebb-tide, at first a twinkling spark, then a flare and waving fire, until far out to sea the history of that dead thing ended 3000 years after the priests of Armen had laid it to rest in its appointed pyramid.

“TO LET”

B. M. Croker

1906

“List, list, O list!”

—Hamlet, Act I.

Some years ago, when I was a slim young spin, I came out to India to live with my brother Tom: he and I were members of a large and somewhat impecunious family, and I do not think my mother was sorry to have one of her four grown-up daughters thus taken off her hands. Tom’s wife, Aggie, had been at school with my eldest sister; we had known and liked her all our lives, and regarded her as one of ourselves; and as she and the children were at home when Tom’s letter was received, and his offer accepted, she helped me to choose my slender outfit, with judgement, zeal, and taste; endowed me with several pretty additions to my wardrobe; superintended the fitting of my gowns and the trying on of my hats, with most sympathetic interest, and finally escorted me out to Lucknow, under her own wing, and installed me in the only spare room in her comfortable bungalow in Dilkousha.

My sister-in-law is a pretty little brunette, rather pale, with dark hair, brilliant black eyes, a resolute mouth, and a bright, intelligent expression. She is orderly, trim, feverishly energetic, and seems to live every moment of her life. Her children, her wardrobe, her house, her servants, and last, not least, her husband, are all models in their way; and yet she has plenty of time for tennis, and dancing, and talking and walking. She is, undoubtedly, a remarkably talented little creature, and especially prides herself on her nerve, and her power of will, or will power. I suppose they are the same thing? and I am sure they are all the same to Tom, who worships the sole of her small slipper. Strictly between ourselves, she is the ruling member of the family, and turns her lord and master round her little finger. Tom is big and fair (of course), the opposite to his wife, quiet, rather easy-going and inclined to be indolent; but Aggie rouses him up, and pushes him to the front, and keeps him there. She knows all about his department, his prospects of promotion, his prospects of furlough, of getting acting appointments, and so on, even better than he does himself. The chief of Tom’s department – have I said that Tom is in the Irritation Office? – has placed it solemnly on record that he considers little Mrs. Shandon a surprisingly clever woman. The two children, Bob and Tor, are merry, oppressively active monkeys, aged three and five years respectively. As for myself, I am tall, fair – and I wish I could add pretty! but this is a true story. My eyes are blue, my teeth are white, my hair is red – alas, a blazing red; and I was, at this period, nineteen years of age; and now I think I have given a sufficient outline of the whole family.

We arrived at Lucknow in November, when the cold weather is delightful, and everything was delightful to me. The bustle and life of a great Indian station, the novelty of my surroundings, the early morning rides, picnics down the river, and dances at the “Chutter Munzil,” made me look upon Lucknow as a paradise on earth; and in this light I still regarded it, until a great change came over the temperature, and the month of April introduced me to red-hot winds, sleepless nights, and the intolerable “brain fever” bird. Aggie had made up her mind definitely on one subject: we were not to go away to the hills until the rains. Tom could only get two months’ leave (July and August), and she did not intend to leave him to grill on the plains alone. As for herself and the children – not to speak of me – we had all come out from home so recently that we did not require a change. The trip to Europe had made a vast hole in the family stocking, and she wished to economize; and who can economize with two establishments in full swing? Tell me this, ye Anglo-Indian matrons? With a large, cool bungalow, plenty of punkahs, khuskhus tatties, ice, and a thermantidote, surely we could manage to brave May and June – at any rate the attempt was made.

Gradually the hills drained Lucknow week by week; family after family packed up, warned us of our folly in remaining on the plains, offered to look for houses for us, and left by the night mail. By the middle of May, the place was figuratively empty. Nothing can be more dreary than a large station in the hot weather – unless it is an equally forsaken hill station in the depths of winter, when the mountains are covered with snow, the mall no longer resounds with gay voices and the tramp of Jampanies, but is visited by bears and panthers, and the houses are closed, and, as it were, put to bed in straw! As for Lucknow in the summer, it was a melancholy spot; the public gardens were deserted, the chairs at the Chutter Munzil stood empty, the very bands had gone to the hills! the shops were shut, the baked white roads, no longer thronged with carriages and bamboo carts, gave ample room to the humble ekka, or a Dhobie’s meagre donkey, shuffling along in the dust.

Of course we were not the only people remaining in the place, grumbling at the heat and dust and life in general; but there can be no sociability with the thermometer above 100° in the shade. Through the long, long Indian day we sat and gasped, in darkened rooms, and consumed quantities of “Nimbo pegs,” i.e. limes and soda water, and listened to the fierce hot wind roaring along the road and driving the roasted leaves before it; and in the evening, when the sun had set, we went for a melancholy drive through the Wingfield Park, or round by Martiniere College, and met our friends at the library, and compared sensations and thermometers. The season was exceptionally bad (but people say that every year), and presently Bobby and Tor began to fade: their little white faces and listless eyes appealed to Aggie as Tom’s anxious expostulations had never done. “Yes, they must go to the hills with me.” But this idea I repudiated at once; I refused to undertake the responsibility – I, who could scarcely speak a word to the servants – who had no experience! Then Bobbie had a bad go of fever – intermittent fever; the beginning of the end to his alarmed mother; the end being represented by a large gravestone! She now became as firmly determined to go, as she had previously been resolved to stay; but it was so late in the season to take a house. Alas, alas, for the beautiful tempting advertisements in the Pioneer, which we had seen and scorned! Aggie wrote to a friend in a certain hill station, called (for this occasion only) “Kantia,” and Tom wired to a house agent, who triumphantly replied by letter, that there was not one unlet bungalow on his books. This missive threw us into the depths of despair; there seemed no alternative but a hill hotel, and the usual quarters that await the last comers, and the proverbial welcome for children and dogs (we had only four); but the next day brought us good news from Aggie’s friend Mrs. Chalmers.

Dear Mrs. Shandon (she said),

I received your letter, and went at once to Curaitjee, the agent. Every hole and corner up here seems full, and he had not a single house to let. Today I had a note from him, saying that Briarwood is vacant; the people who took it are not coming up, they have gone to Naini Tal. You are in luck. I have just been out to see the house, and have secured it for you. It is a mile and a half from the club, but I know that you and your sister are capital walkers. I envy you. Such a charming place – two sitting-rooms, four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a hall, servants’ go-downs, stabling, and a splendid view from a very pretty garden, and only Rs. 800 for the season! Why, I am paying Rs. 1000 for a very inferior house, with scarcely a stick of furniture and no view. I feel so proud of myself, and I am longing to show you my treasure-trove. Telegraph when you start, and I shall have a milkman in waiting and fires in all the rooms.

Yours sincerely,

Edith Chalmers

We now looked upon Mrs. Chalmers as our best and dearest friend, and began to get under way at once. A long journey in India is a serious business, when the party comprises two ladies, two children, two ayahs, and five other servants, three fox terriers, a mongoose, and a Persian cat – all these animals going to the hills for the benefit of their health – not to speak of a ton of luggage, including crockery and lamps, a cottage piano, a goat, and a pony. Aggie and I, the children, one ayah, two terriers, the cat and mongoose, our bedding and pillows, the tiffin basket and ice basket, were all stowed into one compartment, and I must confess that the journey was truly miserable. The heat was stifling, despite the water tatties. One of the terriers had a violent dispute with the cat, and the cat had a difference with the mongoose, and Bob and Tor had a pitched battle; more than once I actually wished myself back in Lucknow.

I was most truly thankful to wake one morning, to find myself under the shadow of the Himalayas – not a mighty, snow-clad range of everlasting hills, but merely the spurs – the moderate slopes, covered with scrub, loose shale, and jungle, and deceitful little trickling watercourses. We Bent the servants on ahead, whilst we rested at the Dak bungalow near the railway station, and then followed them at our leisure. We accomplished the ascent in dandies – open kind of boxes, half box, half chair, carried on the shoulders of four men. This was an entirely novel sensation to me, and at first an agreeable one, so long as the slopes were moderate, and the paths wide; but the higher we went, the narrower became the path, the steeper the naked precipice; and as my coolies would walk at the extreme edge, with the utmost indifference to my frantic appeals to “Beetor! Beetor!” – and would change poles at the most agonizing corners – my feelings were very mixed, especially when droves of loose pack ponies came thundering downhill, with no respect for the rights of the road. Late at night we passed through Kantia, and arrived at Briarwood, far too weary to be critical. Fires were blazing, supper was prepared, and we despatched it in haste, and most thankfully went to bed and slept soundly, as anyone would do who had spent thirty-six hours in a crowded compartment, and ten in a cramped wooden case.

The next morning, rested and invigorated, we set out on a tour of inspection; and it is almost worth while to undergo a certain amount of baking in the sweltering heat of the lower regions, in order to enjoy those deep first draughts of cool hill air, instead of a stifling, dust-laden atmosphere; and to appreciate the green valleys and blue hills, by force of contrast to the far-stretching, eye-smarting, white glaring roads, that intersect the burnt-up plains – roads and plains, that even the pariah abandons, salamander though he be!

To our delight and surprise, Mrs. Chalmers had by no means overdrawn the advantages of our new abode. The bungalow was soundly built of stone, two storied, and ample in size. It stood on a kind of shelf, cut out of the hillside, and was surrounded by a pretty flower garden, full of roses, fuchsias, and carnations. The high road passed the gate, from which the avenue descended, direct to the entrance door, at the end of the house, and from whence ran a long passage. Off this passage three rooms opened to the right, all looking south, and all looking into a deep, delightful, flagged, verandah. The stairs were very steep. At the head of them, the passage and rooms were repeated. There were small nooks, and dressing-rooms, and convenient outhouses, and plenty of good water; but the glory of Briarwood was undoubtedly its verandah: it was fully twelve feet wide, roofed with zinc, and overhung a precipice of a thousand feet – not a startlingly sheer khud, but a tolerably straight descent of grey-blue shale, rocks, and low jungle. From it there was a glorious view, across a valley, far away, to the snowy range. It opened at one end into the avenue, and was not enclosed; but at the side next the precipice, there was a stout wooden railing, with netting at the bottom, for the safety of too enterprising dogs or children A charming spot, despite its rather bold situation; and as Aggie and I sat in it, surveying the scenery and inhaling the pure hill air, and watching Bob and Tor tearing up and down, playing horses, we said to one another that “the verandah alone was worth half the rent.”

“It’s absurdly cheap,” exclaimed my sister-in-law complacently. “I wish you saw the hovel I had, at Simla, for the same rent. I wonder if it is feverish, or badly drained, or what?”

“Perhaps it has a ghost,” I suggested facetiously; and at such an absurd idea we both went into peals of laughter.

At this moment Mrs. Chalmers appeared, brisk, rosy, and breathlessly benevolent, having walked over from Kantia.

“So you have found it,” she said as we shook hands. “I said nothing about this delicious verandah! I thought I would keep it as a surprise. I did not say a word too much for Briarwood, did I?”

“Not half enough,” we returned rapturously; and presently we went in a body, armed with a list from the agent, and proceeded to go over the house and take stock of its contents.

“It’s not a bit like a hill furnished house,” boasted Mrs. Chalmers, with a glow of pride, as she looked round the drawing-room; “carpets, curtains, solid, very solid chairs, and Berlin wool-worked screens, a card-table, and any quantity of pictures.”

“Yes, don’t they look like family portraits?” I suggested, as we gazed at them. There was one of an officer in faded water colours, another of his wife, two of a previous generation in oils and amply gilded frames, two sketches of an English country house, and some framed photographs – groups of grinning cricketers, or wedding guests. All the rooms were well, almost handsomely, furnished in an old-fashioned style. There was no scarcity of wardrobes, looking-glasses, or even armchairs, in the bedrooms, and the pantry was fitted out – a most singular circumstance – with a large supply of handsome glass and china, lamps, old moderators, coffee and teapots, plated side dishes, and candlesticks, cooking utensils and spoons and forks, wine coasters and a cake-basket. These articles were all let with the house (much to our amazement), provided we were responsible for the same. The china was Spode, the plate old family heirlooms, with a crest – a winged horse – on everything, down to the very mustard spoons.

“The people who own this house must be lunatics,” remarked Aggie, as she peered round the pantry; “fancy hiring out one’s best family plate, and good old china! And I saw some ancient music-books in the drawing-room, and there is a side saddle in the bottle khana.”

“My dear, the people who owned this house are dead,” explained Mrs. Chalmers. “I heard all about them last evening from Mrs. Starkey.”

“Oh, is she up there?” exclaimed Aggie, somewhat fretfully.

“Yes, her husband is cantonment magistrate. This house belonged to an old retired colonel and his wife. They and his niece lived here. These were all their belongings. They died within a short time of one another, and the old man left a queer will, to say that the house was to remain precisely as they left it for twenty years, and at the end of that time, it was to be sold and all the property dispersed. Mrs. Starkey says she is sure that he never intended it to be let, but the heir-at-law insists on that, and is furious at the terms of the will.”

“Well, it is a very good thing for us,” remarked Aggie; “we are as comfortable here, as if we were in our own house: there is a stove in the kitchen, there are nice boxes for firewood in every room, clocks, real hair mattresses – in short, it is as you said, a treasure trove.”

We set to work to modernize the drawing-room with phoolkaries, Madras muslin curtains, photograph screens and frames, and such-like portable articles. We placed the piano across a corner, arranged flowers in some handsome Dresden china vases, and entirely altered and improved the character of the room. When Aggie had despatched a most glowing description of our new quarters to Tom, and when we had had tiffin, we set off to walk into Kantia to put our names down at the library, and to inquire for letters at the post-office. Aggie met a good many acquaintances – who does not, who has lived five years in India in the same district?

Among them Mrs. Starkey, an elderly lady with a prominent nose and goggle eyes, who greeted her loudly across the reading-room table, in this agreeable fashion:

“And so you have come up after all, Mrs. Shandon. Someone told me that you meant to remain below, but I knew you never could be so wicked as to keep your poor little children in that heat.” Then coming round and dropping into a chair beside her, she said, “And I suppose this young lady is your sister-in-law?”

Mrs. Starkey eyed me critically, evidently appraising my chances in the great marriage market. She herself had settled her own two daughters most satisfactorily, and had now nothing to do, but interest herself in other people’s affairs.

“Yes,” acquiesced Aggie; “Miss Shandon – Mrs. Starkey.”

“And so you have taken Briarwood?”

“Yes, we have been most lucky to get it.”

“I hope you will think so, at the end of three months,” observed Mrs. Starkey, with a significant pursing of her lips. “Mrs. Chalmers is a stranger up here, or she would not have been in such a hurry to jump at it.”

“Why, what is the matter with it?” inquired Aggie. “It is well built, well furnished, well situated, and very cheap.”

“That’s just it – suspiciously cheap. Why, my dear Mrs. Shandon, if there was not something against it, it would let for two hundred rupees a month. Common sense would tell you that!”

“And what is against it?”

“It’s haunted! There you have the reason in two words.”

“Is that all? I was afraid it was the drains. I don’t believe in ghosts and haunted houses. What are we supposed to see?”

“Nothing,” retorted Mrs. Starkey, who seemed a good deal nettled at our smiling incredulity.

“Nothing!” with an exasperating laugh.

“No, but you will make up for it in hearing. Not now – you are all right for the next six weeks – but after the monsoon breaks, I give you a week at Briarwood. No one would stand it longer, and indeed you might as well bespeak your rooms at Cooper’s Hotel now. There is always a rush up here in July, by the two months’ leave people, and you will be poked into some wretched go-down.”

Aggie laughed, rather a careless ironical little laugh, and said, “Thank you, Mrs. Starkey; but I think we will stay on where we are – at any rate for the present.”

“Of course it will be as you please. What do you think of the verandah?” she inquired, with a curious smile.

“I think, as I was saying to Susan, that it is worth half the rent of the house.”

“And in my opinion the house is worth double rent without it;” and with this enigmatic remark, she rose, and sailed away.

“Horrid old frump!” exclaimed Aggie, as we walked home in the starlight. “She is jealous and angry that she did not get Briarwood herself – I know her so well. She is always hinting, and repeating stories about the nicest people – always decrying your prettiest dress, or your best servant.”

We soon forgot all about Mrs. Starkey, and her dismal prophecy, being too gay, and too busy, to give her, or it, a thought. We had so many engagements – tennis-parties and tournaments, picnics, concerts, dances, and little dinners. We ourselves gave occasional afternoon teas in the verandah – using the best Spode cups and saucers, and the old silver cake-basket – and were warmly complimented on our good fortune in securing such a charming house and garden. One day the children discovered, to their great joy, that the old chowkidar belonging to the bungalow possessed an African grey parrot – a rare bird indeed in India; he had a battered Europe cage, doubtless a remnant of better days, and swung on his ring, looking up at us inquiringly, out of his impudent little black eyes.

The parrot had been the property of the former inmates of Briarwood, and as it was a long-lived creature, had survived its master and mistress, and was boarded out with the chowkidar, at one rupee per month.

The chowkidar willingly carried the cage into the verandah, where the bird seemed perfectly at home.

We got a little table for its cage, and the children were delighted with him, as he swung to and fro, with a bit of cake in his wrinkled claw.

Presently he startled us all by suddenly calling “Lucy,” in a voice that was as distinct as if it had come from a human throat. “Pretty Lucy – Lu – cy.”

“That must have been the niece,” said Aggie. “I expect she was the original of that picture over the chimney-piece in your room; she looks like a Lucy.”

It was a large, framed, half-length photograph of a very pretty girl, in a white dress, with gigantic open sleeves. The ancient parrot talked incessantly now that he had been restored to society; he whistled for the dogs, and brought them flying to his summons – to his great satisfaction, and their equally great indignation. He called “Qui hye” so naturally, in a lady’s shrill soprano, or a gruff male bellow, that I have no doubt our servants would have liked to have wrung his neck. He coughed and expectorated like an old gentleman, and whined like a puppy, and mewed like a cat, and, I am sorry to add, sometimes swore like a trooper; but his most constant cry was, “Lucy, where are you, pretty Lucy – Lucy – Lu – cy?”

•   •   •   •   •

Aggie and I went to various picnics, but to that given by the Chalmers (in honour of Mr. Chalmers’ brother Charlie, a captain in a Ghoorka regiment, just come up to Kantia on leave) Aggie was unavoidably absent. Tor had a little touch of fever, and she did not like to leave him; but I went under my hostess’s care, and expected to enjoy myself immensely. Alas! on that selfsame afternoon, the long-expected monsoon broke, and we were nearly drowned! We rode to the selected spot, five miles from Kantia, laughing and chattering, indifferent to the big blue-black clouds that came slowly, but surely, sailing up from below; it was a way they had had for days, and nothing had come of it! We spread the tablecloth, boiled the kettle, unpacked the hampers, in spite of sharp gusts of wind and warning rumbling thunder. Just as we had commenced to reap the reward of our exertions, there fell a few huge drops, followed by a vivid flash, and then a tremendous crash of thunder, like a whole park of artillery, that seemed to shake the mountains – and after this the deluge. In less than a minute we were soaked through; we hastily gathered up the tablecloth by its four ends, gave it to the coolies, and fled. It was all I could do to stand against the wind; only for Captain Chalmers I believe I would have been blown away; as it was, I lost my hat, it was whirled into space. Mrs. Chalmers lost her boa, and Mrs. Starkey, not merely her bonnet, but some portion of her hair. We were truly in a wretched plight, the water streaming down our faces, and squelching in our boots; the little trickling mountain rivulets were now like racing seas of turbid water; the lightning was almost blinding; the trees rocked dangerously, and lashed one another with their quivering branches. I had never been out in such a storm before, and sincerely hope I never may again. We reached Kantia more dead than alive, and Mrs. Chalmers sent an express to Aggie, and kept me till the next day. After raining as it only can rain in the Himalayas, the weather cleared, the sun shone, and I rode home in borrowed plumes, full of my adventures, and in the highest spirits. I found Aggie sitting over the fire in the drawing-room, looking ghastly white: that was nothing uncommon; but terribly depressed, which was most unusual.

“I am afraid you have neuralgia?” I said, as I kissed her.

She nodded, and made no reply,

“How is Tor?” I inquired, as I drew a chair up to the fire.

“Better – quite well.”

“Any news – any letter?”

“Not a word – not a line.”

“Has anything happened to Pip” – Pip was a fox-terrier, renowned for having the shortest tail and being the most impertinent dog in Lucknow – “or the mongoose?”

“No, you silly girl! Why do you ask such ridiculous questions?”

“I was afraid something was amiss; you seem rather down on your luck.”

Aggie shrugged her shoulders, and then said, “Pray, what put such an absurd idea into your head? Tell me all about the picnic,” and she began to talk rapidly, and to ask me various questions; but I observed that once she had set me going – no difficult task – her attention flagged, her eyes wandered from my face to the fire. She was not listening to half I said, and my most thrilling descriptions were utterly lost on this indifferent, abstracted little creature! I noticed from this time, that she had become strangely nervous (for her). She invited herself to the share of half my bed; she was restless, distrait, and even irritable; and when I was asked out to spend the day, dispensed with my company with an alacrity that was by no means flattering. Formerly, of an evening she used to herd the children home at sundown, and tear me away from the delights of the reading-room at seven o’clock; now she hung about the library, until almost the last moment, until it was time to put out the lamps, and kept the children with her, making transparent pretexts for their company. Often we did not arrive at home till half-past eight o’clock. I made no objections to these late hours, neither did Charlie Chalmers, who often walked back with us and remained to dinner. I was amazed to notice that Aggie seemed delighted to have his company, for she had always expressed a rooted aversion to what she called “tame young men,” and here was this new acquaintance dining with us, at least twice a week!

About a month after the picnic we had a spell of dreadful weather – thunderstorms accompanied by torrents. One pouring afternoon, Aggie and I were cowering over the drawing-room fire, whilst the rain came fizzing down among the logs, and ran in rivers off the roof, and out of the spouts. There had been no going out that day, and we were feeling rather flat and dull, as we sat in a kind of ghostly twilight, with all outdoor objects swallowed up in mist, listening to the violent battering of the rain on the zinc verandah, and the storm which was growling round the hills. “Oh, for a visitor!” I exclaimed; “but no one but a fish, or a lunatic, would be out on such an evening.”

“No one, indeed,” echoed Aggie, in a melancholy tone. “We may as well draw the curtains, and have in the lamp and tea to cheer us up.”

She had scarcely finished speaking, when I heard the brisk trot of a horse along the road. It stopped at the gate, and came rapidly down our avenue. I heard the wet gravel crunching under his hoofs, and – yes, a man’s cheery whistle. My heart jumped, and I half rose from my chair. It must be Charlie Chalmers braving the elements to see me! – such, I must confess, was my incredible vanity! He did not stop at the front door as usual, but rode straight into the verandah, which afforded ample room, and shelter for half a dozen mounted men.

“Aggie,” I said eagerly, “do you hear? It must be—”

I paused, my tongue silenced, by the awful pallor of her face, and the expression of her eyes, as she sat with her little hands clutching the arms of her chair, and her whole figure bent forward in an attitude of listening – an attitude of rigid terror.

“What is it, Aggie?” I said. “Are you ill?”

As I spoke, the horse’s hoofs made a loud clattering noise on the stone-paved verandah outside, and a man’s voice – a young man’s eager voice – called, “Lucy.”

Instantly a chair near the writing-table was pushed back, and someone went quickly to the window – a French one – and bungled for a moment with the fastening. I always had a difficulty with that window myself. Aggie and I were within the bright circle of the firelight, but the rest of the room was dim, and outside the streaming grey sky was spasmodically illuminated by occasional vivid flashes, that lit up the surrounding hills as if it were daylight. The trampling of impatient hoofs, and the rattling of a door-handle, were the only sounds that were audible for a few breathless seconds; but during those seconds Pip, bristling like a porcupine, and trembling violently in every joint, had sprung off my lap and crawled abjectly under Aggie’s chair, seemingly in a transport of fear. The door was opened audibly, and a cold, icy blast swept in, that seemed to freeze my very heart,. and made me shiver from head to foot. At this moment there came, with a sinister blue glare, the most vivid flash of lightning I ever saw. It lit up the whole room, which was empty save for ourselves, and was instantly followed by a clap of thunder, that caused my knees to knock together, and that terrified me and filled me with horror. It evidently terrified the horse too; there was a violent plunge, a clattering of hoofs on the stones, a sudden loud crash of smashing timber, a woman’s long, loud, piercing shriek, which stopped the very beating of my heart, and then a frenzied struggle in the cruel, crumbling, treacherous shale, the rattle of loose stones, and the hollow roar of something sliding down the precipice.

I rushed to the door and tore it open, with that awful despairing cry still ringing in my ears. The verandah was empty; there was not a soul to be seen, or a sound to be heard, save the rain on the roof.

“Aggie,” I screamed, “come here! Someone has gone over the verandah, and down the khud! You heard him.”

“Yes,” she said, following me out; “but come in – come in.”

“I believe it was Charlie Chalmers” – shaking her violently as I spoke. “He has been killed – killed – killed! And you stand, and do nothing. Send people! Let us go ourselves! Bearer! Ayah! Khitmatgar!” I cried, raising my voice.

“Hush! It was not Charlie Chalmers,” she said, vainly endeavouring to draw me into the drawing-room. “Come in – come in.”

“No, no!” pushing her away, and wringing my hands. “How cruel you are! How inhuman! There is a path. Let us go at once – at once!”

“You need not trouble yourself, Susan,” she interrupted; “and you need not cry and tremble; – they will bring him up. What you heard was supernatural; it was not real.”

“No – no – no! It was all real. Oh! that scream is in my ears still.”

“I will convince you,” said Aggie, taking my hand as she spoke. “Feel all along the verandah. Are the railings broken?”

I did as she bade me. No, though very wet and clammy, the railing was intact 1

“Where is the broken place?” she asked, imperatively.

Where, indeed?

“Now,” she continued, “since you will not come in, look over, and you will see something more presently.”

Shivering with fear, and the cold, drifting rain, I gazed down as she bade me, and there, far below, I saw lights moving rapidly to and fro, evidently in search of something. After a little delay they congregated in one place. There was a low, buzzing murmur – they had found him – and presently they commenced to ascend the hill, with the “hum-hum” of coolies carrying a burden. Nearer and nearer the lights and sounds came; up to the very brink of the khud, past the end of the verandah. Many steps and many torches – faint blue torches held by invisible hands – invisible but heavy-footed bearers carried their burden slowly upstairs, and along the passage, and deposited it with a dump in Aggie’s bedroom I As we stood clasped in one another’s arms, and shaking all over, the steps descended, the ghostly lights passed up the avenue, and gradually disappeared in the gathering darkness. The repetition of the tragedy was over for that day.

“Have you heard it before?” I asked with chattering teeth, as I bolted the drawing-room window.

“Yes, the evening of the picnic, and twice since. That is the reason I have always tried to stay out till late, and to keep you out. I was hoping and praying you might never hear it. It always happens just before dark: I am afraid you have thought me very queer of late. I have told no end of stories to keep you and the children from harm. I have—”

“I think you have been very kind,” I interrupted. “Oh, Aggie, shall you ever get that crash, and that awful cry out of your head?”

“Never!” hastily lighting the candles as she spoke.

“Is there anything more?” I inquired tremulously.

“Yes; sometimes at night, the most terrible weeping and sobbing in my bedroom;” and she shuddered at the mere recollection.

“Do the servants know?” I asked anxiously.

“The ayah Muma has heard it, and the khansamah says his mother is sick, and he must go, and the bearer wants to attend his brother’s wedding. They will all leave.”

“I suppose most people know too?” I suggested dejectedly.

“Yes; don’t you remember Mrs. Starkey’s warnings, and her saying that without the verandah the house was worth double rent? We understand that dark speech of hers now, and we have not come to Cooper’s Hotel yet.”

“No, not yet. I wish we had. I wonder what Tom will say? He will be here in another fortnight. Oh, I wish he was here now!”

In spite of our heart-shaking experience, we managed to eat, and drink, and sleep, yea, to play tennis – somewhat solemnly, it is true – and go to the club, where we remained to the very last moment; needless to mention, that I now entered into Aggie’s manoeuvre con amore. Mrs. Starkey evidently divined the reason of our loitering in Kantia, and said in her most truculent manner, as she squared up to us—

“You keep your children out very late, Mrs. Shandon.”

“Yes, but we like to have them with us,” rejoined Aggie, in a meek apologetic voice.

“Then why don’t you go home earlier?”

“Because it is so stupid, and lonely,” was the mendacious answer.

“Lonely is not the word I should use. I wonder if you are as wise as your neighbours now? Come now, Mrs. Shandon.”

“About what?” said Aggie, with ill-feigned innocence.

“About Briarwood. Haven’t you heard it yet? The ghastly precipice and horse affair?”

“Yes, I suppose we may as well confess that we have.”

“Humph! you are a brave couple to stay on. The Tombs tried it last year for three weeks. The Paxtons took it the year before, and then sublet it; not that they believed in ghosts – oh, dear no!” and she laughed ironically.

“And what is the story?” I inquired eagerly.

“Well, the story is this. An old retired officer and his wife, and their pretty niece, lived at Briarwood a good many years ago. The girl was engaged to be married to a fine young fellow in the Guides. The day before the wedding, what you know of happened, and has happened every monsoon ever since. The poor girl went out of her mind, and destroyed herself, and the old colonel and his wife did not long survive her. The house is uninhabitable in the monsoon, and there seems nothing for it but to auction off the furniture, and pull it down; it will always be the same as long as it stands. Take my advice, and come into Cooper’s Hotel. I believe you can have that small set of rooms at the back. The sitting-room smokes – but beggars can’t be choosers.”

“That will only be our very last resource,” said Aggie, hotly.

“It’s not very grand, I grant you; but any port in a storm.”

Tom arrived, was doubly welcome, and was charmed with Briarwood, chaffed us unmercifully, and derided our fears until he himself had a similar experience, and heard the phantom horse plunging in the verandah, and that wild, unearthly and utterly appalling shriek. No, he could not laugh that away; and seeing that we had now a mortal abhorrence of the place, that the children had to be kept abroad in the damp till long after dark, that Aggie was a mere hollow-eyed spectre, and that we had scarcely a servant left, that – in short, one day, we packed up precipitately and fled in a body to Cooper’s Hotel. But we did not basely endeavour to sublet, nor advertise Briarwood as “a delightfully situated pucka-built house, containing all the requirements of a gentleman’s family.” No, no. Tom bore the loss of the rent, and – a more difficult feat – Aggie bore Mrs. Starkey’s insufferable “I told you so.”

Aggie was at Kantia again last season. She walked out early one morning to see our former abode. The chowkidar and parrot are still in possession, and are likely to remain the solo tenants on the premises. The parrot suns and dusts his ancient feathers in the empty verandah, which re-echoes with his cry of “Lucy, where are you – pretty Lucy?” The chowkidar inhabits a secluded go-down at the back, where he passes most of the day in sleeping, or smoking the soothing “huka.” The place has a forlorn, uncared-for appearance now; the flowers are nearly all gone; the paint has peeled off the doors and windows; the avenue is grass-grown. Briarwood appears to have resigned itself to emptiness, neglect, and decay, although outside the gate there still hangs a battered board, on which, if you look very closely, you can decipher the words “To Let.”

THE MAN
WITH THE ROLLER

E. G. Swain

1912

On the edge of that vast tract of East Anglia, which retains its ancient name of the Fens, there may be found, by those who know where to seek it, a certain village called Stoneground. It was once a picturesque village. Today it is not to be called either a village, or picturesque. Man dwells not in one “house of clay,” but in two, and the material of the second is drawn from the earth upon which this and the neighbouring villages stood. The unlovely signs of the industry have changed the place alike in aspect and in population. Many who have seen the fossil skeletons of great saurians brought out of the clay in which they have lain from prehistoric times, have thought that the inhabitants of the place have not since changed for the better. The chief habitations, however, have their foundations not upon clay, but upon a bed of gravel which anciently gave to the place its name, and upon the highest part of this gravel stands, and has stood for many centuries, the Parish Church, dominating the landscape for miles around.

Stoneground, however, is no longer the inaccessible village, which in the middle ages stood out above a waste of waters. Occasional floods serve to indicate what was once its ordinary outlook, but in more recent times the construction of roads and railways, and the drainage of the Fens, have given it freedom of communication with the world from which it was formerly isolated.

The Vicarage of Stoneground stands hard by the Church, and is renowned for its spacious garden, part of which, and that (as might be expected) the part nearest the house, is of ancient date. To the original plot successive Vicars have added adjacent lands, so that the garden has gradually acquired the state in which it now appears.

The Vicars have been many in number. Since Henry de Greville was instituted in the year 1140 there have been 30, all of whom have lived, and most of whom have died, in successive vicarage houses upon the present site.

The present incumbent, Mr. Batchel, is a solitary man of somewhat studious habits, but is not too much enamoured of his solitude to receive visits, from time to time, from schoolboys and such. In the summer of the year 1906 he entertained two, who are the occasion of this narrative, though still unconscious of their part in it, for one of the two, celebrating his 15th birthday during his visit to Stoneground, was presented by Mr. Batchel with a new camera, with which he proceeded to photograph, with considerable skill, the surroundings of the house.

One of these photographs Mr. Batchel thought particularly pleasing. It was a view of the house with the lawn in the foreground. A few small copies, such as the boy’s camera was capable of producing, were sent to him by his young friend, some weeks after the visit, and again Mr. Batchel was so much pleased with the picture, that he begged for the negative, with the intention of having the view enlarged.

The boy met the request with what seemed a needlessly modest plea. There were two negatives, he replied, but each of them had, in the same part of the picture, a small blur for which there was no accounting otherwise than by carelessness. His desire, therefore, was to discard these films, and to produce something more worthy of enlargement, upon a subsequent visit.

Mr. Batchel, however, persisted in his request, and upon receipt of the negative, examined it with a lens. He was just able to detect the blur alluded to; an examination under a powerful glass, in fact revealed something more than he had at first detected. The blur was like the nucleus of a comet as one sees it represented in pictures, and seemed to be connected with a faint streak which extended across the negative. It was, however, so inconsiderable a defect that Mr. Batchel resolved to disregard it. He had a neighbour whose favourite pastime was photography, one who was notably skilled in everything that pertained to the art, and to him he sent the negative, with the request for an enlargement, reminding him of a long-standing promise to do any such service, when as had now happened, his friend might see fit to ask it.

This neighbour who had acquired such skill in photography was one Mr. Groves, a young clergyman, residing in the Precincts of the Minster near at hand, which was visible from Mr. Batchel’s garden. He lodged with a Mrs. Rumney, a superannuated servant of the Palace, and a strong-minded vigorous woman still, exactly such a one as Mr. Groves needed to have about him. For he was a constant trial to Mrs. Rumney, and but for the wholesome fear she begot in him, would have converted his rooms into a mere den. Her carpets and tablecloths were continually bespattered with chemicals; her chimney-piece ornaments had been unceremoniously stowed away and replaced by labelled bottles; even the bed of Mr. Groves was, by day, strewn with drying films and mounts, and her old and favourite cat had a bald patch on his flank, the result of a mishap with the pyrogallic acid.

Mrs. Rumney’s lodger, however, was a great favourite with her, as such helpless men are apt to be with motherly women, and she took no small pride in his work. A life-size portrait of herself, originally a peace-offering, hung in her parlour, and had long excited the envy of every friend who took tea with her.

“Mr. Groves,” she was wont to say, “is a nice gentleman, AND a gentleman; and chemical though he may be, I’d rather wait on him for nothing than what I would on anyone else for twice the money.”

Every new piece of photographic work was of interest to Mrs. Rumney, and she expected to be allowed both to admire and to criticise. The view of Stoneground Vicarage, therefore, was shown to her upon its arrival. “Well may it want enlarging,” she remarked, “and it no bigger than a postage stamp; it looks more like a doll’s house than a vicarage,” and with this she went about her work, whilst Mr. Groves retired to his dark room with the film, to see what he could make of the task assigned to him.

Two days later, after repeated visits to his dark room, he had made something considerable; and when Mrs. Rumney brought him his chop for luncheon, she was lost in admiration. A large but unfinished print stood upon his easel, and such a picture of Stoneground Vicarage was in the making as was calculated to delight both the young photographer and the Vicar.

Mr. Groves spent only his mornings, as a rule, in photography. His afternoons he gave to pastoral work, and the work upon this enlargement was over for the day. It required little more than “touching up,” but it was this “touching up” which made the difference between the enlargements of Mr. Groves and those of other men. The print, therefore, was to be left upon the easel until the morrow, when it was to be finished. Mrs. Rumney and he, together, gave it an admiring inspection as she was carrying away the tray, and what they agreed in admiring most particularly was the smooth and open stretch of lawn, which made so excellent a foreground for the picture. “It looks,” said Mrs. Rumney, who had once been young, “as if it was waiting for someone to come and dance on it.”

Mr. Groves left his lodgings – we must now be particular about the hours – at half-past two, with the intention of returning, as usual, at five. “As reg’lar as a clock,” Mrs. Rumney was wont to say, “and a sight more reg’lar than some clocks I knows of.”

Upon this day he was, nevertheless, somewhat late, some visit had detained him unexpectedly, and it was a quarter-past five when he inserted his latchkey in Mrs. Rumney’s door.

Hardly had he entered, when his landlady, obviously awaiting him, appeared in the passage: her face, usually florid, was of the colour of parchment, and, breathing hurriedly and shortly, she pointed at the door of Mr. Groves’ room.

In some alarm at her condition, Mr. Groves hastily questioned her; all she could say was: “The photograph! the photograph!” Mr. Groves could only suppose that his enlargement had met with some mishap for which Mrs. Rumney was responsible. Perhaps she had allowed it to flutter into the fire. He turned towards his room in order to discover the worst, but at this Mrs. Rumney laid a trembling hand upon his arm, and held him back. “Don’t go in,” she said, “have your tea in the parlour.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Groves, “if that is gone we can easily do another.”

“Gone,” said his landlady, “I wish to Heaven it was.”

The ensuing conversation shall not detain us. It will suffice to say that after a considerable time Mr. Groves succeeded in quieting his landlady, so much so that she consented, still trembling violently, to enter the room with him. To speak truth, she was as much concerned for him as for herself, and she was not by nature a timid woman.

The room, so far from disclosing to Mr. Groves any cause for excitement, appeared wholly unchanged. In its usual place stood every article of his stained and ill-used furniture, on the easel stood the photograph, precisely where he had left it; and except that his tea was not upon the table, everything was in its usual state and place.

But Mrs. Rumney again became excited and tremulous, “It’s there,” she cried. “Look at the lawn.”

Mr. Groves stepped quickly forward and looked at the photograph. Then he turned as pale as Mrs. Rumney herself.

There was a man, a man with an indescribably horrible suffering face, rolling the lawn with a large roller.

Mr. Groves retreated in amazement to where Mrs. Rumney had remained standing. “Has anyone been in here?” he asked.

“Not a soul,” was the reply, “I came in to make up the fire, and turned to have another look at the picture, when I saw that dead-alive face at the edge. It gave me the creeps,” she said, “particularly from not having noticed it before. If that’s anyone in Stoneground, I said to myself, I wonder the Vicar has him in the garden with that awful face. It took that hold of me I thought I must come and look at it again, and at five o’clock I brought your tea in. And then I saw him moved along right in front, with a roller dragging behind him, like you see.”

Mr. Groves was greatly puzzled. Mrs. Rumney’s story, of course, was incredible, but this strange evil-faced man had appeared in the photograph somehow. That he had not been there when the print was made was quite certain.

The problem soon ceased to alarm Mr. Groves; in his mind it was investing itself with a scientific interest. He began to think of suspended chemical action, and other possible avenues of investigation. At Mrs. Rumney’s urgent entreaty, however, he turned the photograph upon the easel, and with only its white back presented to the room, he sat down and ordered tea to be brought in.

He did not look again at the picture. The face of the man had about it something unnaturally painful: he could remember, and still see, as it were, the drawn features, and the look of the man had unaccountably distressed him.

He finished his slight meal, and having lit a pipe, began to brood over the scientific possibilities of the problem. Had any other photograph upon the original film become involved in the one he had enlarged? Had the image of any other face, distorted by the enlarging lens, become a part of this picture? For the space of two hours he debated this possibility, and that, only to reject them all. His optical knowledge told him that no conceivable accident could have brought into his picture a man with a roller. No negative of his had ever contained such a man; if it had, no natural causes would suffice to leave him, as it were, hovering about the apparatus.

His repugnance to the actual thing had by this time lost its freshness, and he determined to end his scientific musings with another inspection of the object. So he approached the easel and turned the photograph round again. His horror returned, and with good cause. The man with the roller had now advanced to the middle of the lawn. The face was stricken still with the same indescribable look of suffering. The man seemed to be appealing to the spectator for some kind of help. Almost, he spoke.

Mr. Groves was naturally reduced to a condition of extreme nervous excitement. Although not by nature what is called a nervous man, he trembled from head to foot. With a sudden effort, he turned away his head, took hold of the picture with his outstretched hand, and opening a drawer in his sideboard thrust the thing underneath a folded tablecloth which was lying there. Then he closed the drawer and took up an entertaining book to distract his thoughts from the whole matter.

In this he succeeded very ill. Yet somehow the rest of the evening passed, and as it wore away, he lost something of his alarm. At ten o’clock, Mrs. Rumney, knocking and receiving answer twice, lest by any chance she should find herself alone in the room, brought in the cocoa usually taken by her lodger at that hour. A hasty glance at the easel showed her that it stood empty, and her face betrayed her relief. She made no comment, and Mr. Groves invited none.

The latter, however, could not make up his mind to go to bed. The face he had seen was taking firm hold upon his imagination, and seemed to fascinate him and repel him at the same time. Before long, he found himself wholly unable to resist the impulse to look at it once more. He took it again, with some indecision, from the drawer and laid it under the lamp.

The man with the roller had now passed completely over the lawn, and was near the left of the picture.

The shock to Mr. Groves was again considerable. He stood facing the fire, trembling with excitement which refused to be suppressed. In this state his eye lighted upon the calendar hanging before him, and it furnished him with some distraction. The next day was his mother’s birthday. Never did he omit to write a letter which should lie upon her breakfast-table, and the pre-occupation of this evening had made him wholly forgetful of the matter. There was a collection of letters, however, from the pillar-box near at hand, at a quarter before midnight, so he turned to his desk, wrote a letter which would at least serve to convey his affectionate greetings, and having written it, went out into the night and posted it.

The clocks were striking midnight as he returned to his room. We may be sure that he did not resist the desire to glance at the photograph he had left on his table. But the results of that glance, he, at any rate, had not anticipated. The man with the roller had disappeared. The lawn lay as smooth and clear as at first, “looking,” as Mrs. Rumney had said, “as if it was waiting for someone to come and dance on it.”

The photograph, after this, remained a photograph and nothing more. Mr. Groves would have liked to persuade himself that it had never undergone these changes which he had witnessed, and which we have endeavoured to describe, but his sense of their reality was too insistent. He kept the print lying for a week upon his easel. Mrs. Rumney, although she had ceased to dread it, was obviously relieved at its disappearance, when it was carried to Stoneground to be delivered to Mr. Batchel. Mr. Groves said nothing of the man with the roller, but gave the enlargement, without comment, into his friend’s hands. The work of enlargement had been skilfully done, and was deservedly praised.

Mr. Groves, making some modest disclaimer, observed that the view, with its spacious foreground of lawn, was such as could not have failed to enlarge well. And this lawn, he added, as they sat looking out of the Vicar’s study, looks as well from within your house as from without. It must give you a sense of responsibility, he added, reflectively, to be sitting where your predecessors have sat for so many centuries and to be continuing their peaceful work. The mere presence before your window, of the turf upon which good men have walked, is an inspiration.

The Vicar made no reply to these somewhat sententious remarks. For a moment he seemed as if he would speak some words of conventional assent. Then he abruptly left the room, to return in a few minutes with a parchment book.

“Your remark, Groves,” he said as he seated himself again, “recalled to me a curious bit of history: I went up to the old library to get the book. This is the journal of William Longue who was Vicar here up to the year 1602. What you said about the lawn will give you an interest in a certain portion of the journal. I will read it.”

Aug. 1, 1600. – I am now returned in haste from a journey to Brightelmstone whither I had gone with full intention to remain about the space of two months. Master Josiah Wilburton, of my dear College of Emmanuel, having consented to assume the charge of my parish of Stoneground in the meantime. But I had intelligence, after 12 days’ absence, by a messenger from the Churchwardens, that Master Wilburton had disappeared last Monday sennight, and had been no more seen. So here I am again in my study to the entire frustration of my plans, and can do nothing in my perplexity but sit and look out from my window, before which Andrew Birch rolleth the grass with much persistence. Andrew passeth so many times over the same place with his roller that I have just now stepped without to demand why he so wasteth his labour, and upon this he hath pointed out a place which is not levelled, and hath continued his rolling.

Aug. 2. – There is a change in Andrew Birch since my absence, who hath indeed the aspect of one in great depression, which is noteworthy of so chearful a man. He haply shares our common trouble in respect of Master Wilburton, of whom we remain without tidings. Having made part of a sermon upon the seventh Chapter of the former Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians and the 27th verse, I found Andrew again at his task, and bade him desist and saddle my horse, being minded to ride forth and take counsel with my good friend John Palmer at the Deanery, who bore Master Wilburton great affection.

Aug. 2 continued. – Dire news awaiteth me upon my return. The Sheriff’s men have disinterred the body of poor Master W. from beneath the grass Andrew was rolling, and have arrested him on the charge of being his cause of death.

Aug. 10 – Alas! Andrew Birch hath been hanged, the Justice having mercifully ordered that he should hang by the neck until he should be dead, and not sooner molested. May the Lord have mercy on his soul. He made full confession before me, that he had slain Master Wilburton in heat upon his threatening to make me privy to certain peculation of which I should not have suspected so old a servant. The poor man bemoaned his evil temper in great contrition, and beat his breast, saying that he knew himself doomed for ever to roll the grass in the place where he had tried to conceal his wicked act.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Groves. “Has that little negative got the date upon it?” “Yes,” replied Mr. Batchel, as he examined it with his glass. “The boy has marked it August 10.”

The Vicar seemed not to remark the coincidence with the date of Birch’s execution. Needless to say that it did not escape Mr. Groves. But he kept silence about the man with the roller, who has been no more seen to this day.

Doubtless there is more in our photography than we yet know of. The camera sees more than the eye, and chemicals in a freshly prepared and active state, have a power which they afterwards lose. Our units of time, adopted for the convenience of persons dealing with the ordinary movements of material objects, are of course conventional. Those who turn the instruments of science upon nature will always be in danger of seeing more than they looked for. There is such a disaster as that of knowing too much, and at some time or another it may overtake each of us. May we then be as wise as Mr. Groves in our reticence, if our turn should come.

THE KISS

M. E. Royce

1916

I

The quiet of the deserted building encircled the little, glowing room as the velvet encircles the jewel in its case. Occasionally faint sounds came from the distance – the movements of cleaners at work, a raised voice, the slamming of a door.

The man sat at his desk, as he had sat through the busy day, but he had turned sideways in his seat, the better to regard the other occupant of the room.

She was not beautiful – had no need to be. Her call to him had been the saner call of mind to mind. That he desired, besides, the passing benediction of her hands, the fragrance of her corn-gold hair, the sight of her slenderness: this she had guessed and gloried in. Till now, he had touched her physical self neither in word nor deed. Tonight, she knew, the barriers would be down; tonight they would kiss.

Her quiet eyes, held by his during the spell that had bound them speechless, did not flinch at the breaking of it.

“The Lord made the world and then He made this rotten old office,” the man said quietly. “Into it He put you – and me. What, before that day, has gone to the making and marring of me, and the making and perfecting of you, is not to the point. It is enough that we have realized, heart, and soul, and body, that you are mine and I am yours.”

“Yes,” she said.

He fell silent again, his eyes on her hungrily. She felt them and longed for his touch. But there came only his voice.

“I want you. The first moment I saw you I wanted you. I thought then that, whatever the cost, I would have you. That was in the early days of our talks here – before you made it so courageously clear to me that it would never be possible for you to ignore my marriage and come to me. That is still so, isn’t it?”

She moved slightly, like a dreamer in pain, as again she faced the creed she had hated through many a sleepless night.

“It is so,” she agreed. “And because it is so, you are going away tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

They looked at each other across the foot or two of intervening space. It was a look to bridge death with. But even beneath their suffering, her eyes voiced the tremulous waiting of her lips.

At last he found words.

“You are the most wonderful woman in the world – the pluckiest, the most completely understanding; you have the widest charity. I suppose I ought to thank you for it all; I can’t – that’s not my way. I have always demanded of you, demanded enormously, and received my measure pressed down and running over. Now I am going to ask this last thing of you: will you, of your goodness, go away – upstairs, anywhere – and come back in ten minutes’ time? By then I shall have cleared out.”

She looked at him almost incredulously, lips parted. Suddenly she seemed a child.

“You – I—” she stammered. Then rising to her feet, with a superb simplicity: “But, you must kiss me before you go. You must! You – simply must.”

For the space of a flaming moment it seemed that in one stride he would have crossed to her side, caught and held her.

“For God’s sake—!” he muttered, in almost ludicrous fear of himself. Then, with a big effort, he regained his self-control.

“Listen,” he said hoarsely. “I want to kiss you so much that I daren’t even get to my feet. Do you understand what that means? Think of it, just for a moment, and then realize that I am not going to kiss you. And I have kissed many women in my time, too, and shall kiss more, no doubt.”

“But it’s not because of that—?”

“That I’m holding back? No. Neither is it because I funk the torture of kissing you once and letting you go. It’s because I’m afraid – for you.”

“For me?”

“Listen. You have unfolded your beliefs to me and, though I don’t hold them – don’t attempt to live up to your lights – the realization of them has given me a reverence for you that you don’t dream of. I have put you in a shrine and knelt to you; every time you have sat in that chair and talked with me, I have worshipped you.”

“It would not alter – all that,” the girl said faintly, “if you kissed me.

“I don’t believe that; neither do you – no, you don’t! In your heart of hearts you admit that a woman like you is not kissed for the first and last time by a man like me. Suppose I kissed you now? I should awaken something in you as yet half asleep. You’re young and pulsing with life, and there are – thank Heaven! – few layers of that damnable young-girl shyness over you. The world would call you primitive, I suppose.”

“But I don’t—”

“Oh, Lord, you must see it’s all or nothing! You surely understand that after I had left you, you would not go against your morality, perhaps, but you would adjust it, in spite of yourself, to meet your desires! I cannot – safely – kiss you.”

“But you are going away for good!”

“For good! Child, do you think my going will be your safeguard? If you wanted me so much that you came to think it was right and good to want me, wouldn’t you find me, send for me, call for me? And I should come. God! I can see the look in your eyes now, when the want had been satisfied, and you could not drug your creed anymore.”

Her breath came in a long sigh. Then she tried to speak; tried again.

“It is so, isn’t it?” he asked.

She nodded. Speech was too difficult. With the movement a strand of the corn-gold hair came tumbling down the side of her face.

“Then, that being the case,” said the man, with infinite gentleness, his eyes on the little, tumbling lock, “I shall not attempt so much as to touch your hand before you leave the room.”

At the door she turned.

“Tell me once again,” she said. “You want to kiss me?”

He gripped the arms of his chair; from where she stood, she could see the veins standing out on his hands.

“I want to kiss you,” he said fiercely. “I want to kiss you. If there were any way of cutting off tomorrow – all the tomorrows – with the danger they hold for us – I would kiss you. I would kiss you, and kiss you, and kiss you!”

II

Where her feet took her during the thousand, thousand years that was his going she could never afterwards say; but she found herself at last at the top of the great building, at an open window, leaning out, with the rain beating into her eyes.

Far below her the lights wavered and later she remembered that echoes of a far-off tumult had reached her as she sat. But her ears held only the memory of a man’s footsteps – the eager tread that had never lingered so much as a second’s space on its way to her; that had often stumbled slightly on the threshold of her presence; that she had heard and welcomed in her dreams; that would not come again.

The raindrops lay like tears upon her face.

She brushed them aside, and, rising, put up her hands to feel the wet lying heavy on her hair. The coldness of her limbs surprised her faintly. Downstairs she went again, the echoes mocking every step.

She closed the door of the room behind her and idly cleared a scrap of paper from a chair. Mechanically her hands went to the litter on his desk and she had straightened it all before she realized that there was no longer any need. Tomorrow would bring a voice she did not know; would usher a stranger into her room to take her measure from behind a barrier of formality. For the rest there would be work, and food, and sleep.

These things would make life – life that had been love.

She put on her hat and coat. The room seemed smaller somehow and shabbier. The shaded lights that had invited, now merely irritated; the whimsical disorder of books and papers spoke only of an uncompleted task. Gone was the glamour and the promise and the good comradeship. He had taken them all. She faced tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow empty-handed – in her heart the memory of words that had seared and healed in a breath, and the dead dream of a kiss. Her throat ached with the pain of it. And then suddenly she heard him coming back!

She stiffened. For one instant, mind and body, she was rigid with the sheer wonder of it. Then, as the atmosphere of the room surged back, tense with vitality, her mind leapt forward in welcome. He was coming back, coming back! The words hammered themselves out to the rhythm of the eager tread that never lingered so much as a second’s space on its way to her, that stumbled slightly on the threshold of her presence.

By some queer, reflex twist of memory, her hands brushed imaginary raindrops from her face and strayed uncertainly to where the wet had lain on her hair.

The door opened and closed behind him.

“I’ve come back. I’ve come back to kiss you. Dear – dear!”

Her outflung hand checked him in his stride towards her. Words came stammering to her lips.

“Why – but – this isn’t – I don’t understand! All you said – it was true, surely? It was cruel of you to make me know it was true and then come back!”

“Let me kiss you – let me, let me!” He was overwhelming her, ignoring her resistance. “I must kiss you, I must kiss you.” He said it again and again.

“No, no, you shan’t – you can’t play with me! You said you were afraid for me, and you made me afraid, too – of my weakness – of the danger – of my longing for you—”

“Let me kiss you! Yes, you shall let me; you shall let me.” His arms held her, his face touched hers.

“Aren’t you afraid anymore? Has a miracle happened – may we kiss in spite of tomorrow?”

Inch by inch she was relaxing. All thought was slipping away into a great white light that held no tomorrows, nor any fear of them, nor of herself, nor of anything. The light crept to her feet, rose to her heart, her head. Through the radiance came his words.

“Yes, a miracle. Oh, my dear – my little child! I’ve come back to kiss you, little child.”

“Kiss me, then,” she said against his lips.

III

Hazily she was aware that he had released her; that she had raised her head; that against the rough tweed of his shoulder there lay a long, corn-gold hair.

She laughed shakily and her hand went up to remove it; but he caught her fingers and held them to his face. And with the movement and his look there came over her in a wave the shame of her surrender, a shame that was yet a glory, a diadem of pride. She turned blindly away.

“Please,” she heard herself saying, “let me go now. I want to be alone. I want to – please don’t tell me tonight. Tomorrow—”

She was at the door, groping for the handle. Behind her she heard his voice; it was very tender.

“I shall always kneel to you – in your shrine.”

Then she was outside, and the chilly passages were cooling her burning face. She had left him in the room behind her; and she knew he would wait there long enough to allow her to leave the building. Almost immediately, it seemed, she was downstairs in the hall, had reached the entrance.

She confronted a group of white-faced, silent men.

“Why, is anything the matter? What has happened? O’Dell?” The porter stood forward. He cleared his throat twice, but for all that, his words were barely audible.

“Yes, Miss Carryll. Good-night, miss. You’d best be going on, miss, if you’ll excuse—”

Behind O’Dell stood a policeman; behind him again, a grave eyed man stooped to an unusual task. It arrested her attention like the flash of red danger.

“Why is the door of your room being locked, O’Dell?” She knew her curiosity was indecent, but some powerful premonition was stirring in her, and she could not pass on. “Has there been an accident? Who is in there?”

Then, almost under her feet, she saw a dark pool lying sluggishly against the tiles; nearer the door another – on the pavement outside another – and yet another. She gasped, drew back, felt horribly sick; and, as she turned, she caught O’Dell’s muttered aside to the policeman.

“Young lady’s ’is seccereterry – must be the last that seen ’im alive. All told, ’tain’t more’n ’arf-an-’our since ’e left. ‘Good-night, O’Dell,’ sez ’e. ‘Miss Carryll’s still working – don’t lock ’er in,’ sez ’e. Would ’ave ’is joke. Must ’ave gone round the corner an’ slap inter the car. Wish to God the amberlance—”

Her cry cut into his words as she flung herself forward. Her fingers wrenched at the key of the locked door and turned it, in spite of the detaining hands that seemed light as leaves upon her shoulder, and as easily shaken off. Unhearing, unheeding, she forced her way into the glare of electric light flooding the little room – beating down on to the table and its sheeted burden. Before she reached it, knowledge had dropped upon her like a mantle.

Her face was grey as the one from which she drew the merciful coverings, but her eyes went fearlessly to that which she sought.

Against the rough tweed of the shoulder lay a long, corn-gold hair.