A Book of Ghosts: 25
Author: Various authors
Date: 1843-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: A collection of thirteen 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.

A BOOK OF GHOSTS
– 25 –

THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT

MobileRead Edition
2022

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

Contents were originally published 1844 ~ 1928. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

CONTENTS:

- The Oblong Box
– 1844
by Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849)

- To Be Read at Dusk
– 1852
by Charles Dickens
(1812–1870)

- The Haunted Automaton
– 1885
by W. C. Morrow
(1854–1923)

- The Bundle of Letters
– 1891
by Mor Jókai
(1825–1904)

- A Strange Reunion
– 1893
by T. G. Atkinson
(?–?)

- The Vengeance of the Dead
– 1894
by Robert Barr
(1850–1912)

- A Tragic Honeymoon
– 1894
by George R. Sims
(1847–1922)

- The Dream-Gown
of the Japanese Ambassador
– 1896
by Brander Matthews
(1852–1929)

- The Ghost at Point of Rocks
– 1907
by Frank H. Spearman
(1859–1937)

- The Terror by Night
– 1915
by Lewis Lister
(?–?)

- The Strange Story
of Northavon Priory
– 1919
by Frank Frankfort Moore
(1855–1931)

- The Red Bungalow
– 1919
by B. M. Croker
(1847–1920)

- The Face
– 1928
by E. F. Benson
(1867–1940)

THE OBLONG BOX

Edgar Allan Poe

1844

Some years ago, I engaged passage from Charleston, S. C, to the city of New York, in the fine packet-ship Independence, Captain Hardy. We were to sail on the fifteenth of the month (June), weather permitting; and on the fourteenth, I went on board to arrange some matters in my stateroom.

I found that we were to have a great many passengers, including a more than usual number of ladies. On the list were several of my acquaintances, and among other names, I was rejoiced to see that of Mr. Cornelius Wyatt, a young artist, for whom I entertained feelings of warm friendship. He had been with me a fellow-student at C — University, where we were very much together. He had the ordinary temperament of genius, and was a compound of misanthropy, sensibility, and enthusiasm. To these qualities he united the warmest and truest heart which ever beat in a human bosom.

I observed that his name was carded upon three staterooms; and, upon again referring to the list of passengers, I found that he had engaged passage for himself, wife, and two sisters — his own. The staterooms were sufficiently roomy, and each had two berths, one above the other. These berths, to be sure, were so exceedingly narrow as to be insufficient for more than one person; still, I could not comprehend why there were three staterooms for these four persons. I was, just at that epoch, in one of those moody frames of mind which make a man abnormally inquisitive about trifles: and I confess, with shame, that I busied myself in a variety of ill-bred and preposterous conjectures about this matter of the supernumerary stateroom. It was no business of mine, to be sure, but with none the less pertinacity did I occupy myself in attempts to resolve the enigma. At last I reached a conclusion which wrought in me great wonder why I had not arrived at it before. “It is a servant of course,” I said; “what a fool I am, not sooner to have thought of so obvious a solution!” And then I again repaired to the list — but here I saw distinctly that no servant was to come with the party, although, in fact, it had been the original design to bring one — for the words “and servant” had been first written and then overscored. “Oh, extra baggage, to be sure,” I now said to myself — “something he wishes not to be put in the hold — something to be kept under his own eye — ah, I have it — a painting or so — and this is what he has been bargaining about with Nicolino, the Italian Jew.” This idea satisfied me, and I dismissed my curiosity for the nonce.

Wyatt’s two sisters I knew very well, and most amiable and clever girls they were. His wife he had newly married, and I had never yet seen her. He had often talked about her in my presence, however, and in his usual style of enthusiasm. He described her as of surpassing beauty, wit, and accomplishment. I was, therefore, quite anxious to make her acquaintance.

On the day in which I visited the ship (the fourteenth), Wyatt and party were also to visit it — so the captain informed me — and I waited on board an hour longer than I had designed, in hope of being presented to the bride, but then an apology came. “Mrs. W. was a little indisposed, and would decline coming on board until tomorrow, at the hour of sailing.”

The morrow having arrived, I was going from my hotel to the wharf, when Captain Hardy met me and said that, “owing to circumstances” (a stupid but convenient phrase), “he rather thought the Independence would not sail for a day or two, and that when all was ready, he would send up and let me know.” This I thought strange, for there was a stiff southerly breeze; but as “the circumstances” were not forthcoming, although I pumped for them with much perseverance, I had nothing to do but to return home and digest my impatience at leisure.

I did not receive the expected message from the captain for nearly a week. It came at length, however, and I immediately went on board. The ship was crowded with passengers, and every thing was in the bustle attendant upon making sail. Wyatt’s party arrived in about ten minutes after myself. There were the two sisters, the bride, and the artist — the latter in one of his customary fits of moody misanthropy. I was too well used to these, however, to pay them any special attention. He did not even introduce me to his wife — this courtesy devolving, per force, upon his sister Marian — a very sweet and intelligent girl, who, in a few hurried words, made us acquainted.

Mrs. Wyatt had been closely veiled; and when she raised her veil, in acknowledging my bow, I confess that I was very profoundly astonished. I should have been much more so, however, had not long experience advised me not to trust, with too implicit a reliance, the enthusiastic descriptions of my friend, the artist, when indulging in comments upon the loveliness of woman. When beauty was the theme, I well knew with what facility he soared into the regions of the purely ideal.

The truth is, I could not help regarding Mrs. Wyatt as a decidedly plain-looking woman. If not positively ugly, she was not, I think, very far from it. She was dressed, however, in exquisite taste — and then I had no doubt that she had captivated my friend’s heart by the more enduring graces of the intellect and soul. She said very few words, and passed at once into her stateroom with Mr. W.

My old inquisitiveness now returned. There was no servant — that was a settled point. I looked, therefore, for the extra baggage. After some delay, a cart arrived at the wharf, with an oblong pine box, which was every thing that seemed to be expected. Immediately upon its arrival we made sail, and in a short time were safely over the bar and standing out to sea.

The box in question was, as I say, oblong. It was about six feet in length by two and a half in breadth; I observed it attentively, and like to be precise. Now this shape was peculiar; and no sooner had I seen it, than I took credit to myself for the accuracy of my guessing. I had reached the conclusion, it will be remembered, that the extra baggage of my friend, the artist, would prove to be pictures, or at least a picture; for I knew he had been for several weeks in conference with Nicolino: — and now here was a box, which, from its shape, could possibly contain nothing in the world but a copy of Leonardo’s “Last Supper;” and a copy of this very “Last Supper,” done by Rubini the younger, at Florence, I had known, for some time, to be in the possession of Nicolino. This point, therefore, I considered as sufficiently settled. I chuckled excessively when I thought of my acumen. It was the first time I had ever known Wyatt to keep from me any of his artistical secrets; but here he evidently intended to steal a march upon me, and smuggle a fine picture to New York, under my very nose; expecting me to know nothing of the matter. I resolved to quiz him well, now and hereafter.

One thing, however, annoyed me not a little. The box did not go into the extra stateroom. It was deposited in Wyatt’s own; and there, too, it remained, occupying very nearly the whole of the floor — no doubt to the exceeding discomfort of the artist and his wife; — this the more especially as the tar or paint with which it was lettered in sprawling capitals, emitted a strong, disagreeable, and, to my fancy, a peculiarly disgusting odour. On the lid were painted the words — “Mrs. Adelaide Curtis, Albany, New York. Charge of Cornelius Wyatt, Esq. This side up. To be handled with care.”

Now, I was aware that Mrs. Adelaide Curtis, of Albany, was the artist’s wife’s mother, — but then I looked upon the whole address as a mystification, intended especially for myself. I made up my mind, of course, that the box and contents would never get farther north than the studio of my misanthropic friend, in Chambers Street, New York.

For the first three or four days we had fine weather, although the wind was dead ahead; having chopped round to the northward, immediately upon our losing sight of the coast. The passengers were, consequently, in high spirits and disposed to be social. I must except, however, Wyatt and his sisters, who behaved stiffly, and, I could not help thinking, uncourteously to the rest of the party. Wyatt’s conduct I did not so much regard. He was gloomy, even beyond his usual habit — in fact he was morose — but in him I was prepared for eccentricity. For the sisters, however, I could make no excuse. They secluded themselves in their staterooms during the greater part of the passage, and absolutely refused, although I repeatedly urged them, to hold communication with any person on board.

Mrs. Wyatt herself was far more agreeable. That is to say, she was chatty; and to be chatty is no slight recommendation at sea. She became excessively intimate with most of the ladies; and, to my profound astonishment, evinced no equivocal disposition to coquet with the men. She amused us all very much. I say “amused” — and scarcely know how to explain myself. The truth is, I soon found that Mrs. W. was far oftener laughed at than with. The gentlemen said little about her; but the ladies, in a little while, pronounced her “a good-hearted thing, rather indifferent looking, totally uneducated, and decidedly vulgar.” The great wonder was, how Wyatt had been entrapped into such a match. Wealth was the general solution — but this I knew to be no solution at all; for Wyatt had told me that she neither brought him a dollar nor had any expectations from any source whatever. “He had married,” he said, “for love, and for love only; and his bride was far more than worthy of his love.” When I thought of these expressions, on the part of my friend, I confess that I felt indescribably puzzled. Could it be possible that he was taking leave of his senses? What else could I think? He, so refined, so intellectual, so fastidious, with so exquisite a perception of the faulty, and so keen an appreciation of the beautiful! To be sure, the lady seemed especially fond of him — particularly so in his absence — when she made herself ridiculous by frequent quotations of what had been said by her “beloved husband, Mr. Wyatt.” The word “husband” seemed forever — to use one of her own delicate expressions — forever “on the tip of her tongue.” In the meantime, it was observed by all on board, that he avoided her in the most pointed manner, and, for the most part, shut himself up alone in his stateroom, where, in fact, he might have been said to live altogether, leaving his wife at full liberty to amuse herself as she thought best, in the public society of the main cabin.

My conclusion, from what I saw and heard, was, that, the artist, by some unaccountable freak of fate, or perhaps in some fit of enthusiastic and fanciful passion, had been induced to unite himself with a person altogether beneath him, and that the natural result, entire and speedy disgust, had ensued. I pitied him from the bottom of my heart — but could not, for that reason, quite forgive his incommunicativeness in the matter of the “Last Supper.” For this I resolved to have my revenge.

One day he came upon deck, and, taking his arm as had been my wont, I sauntered with him backward and forward. His gloom, however (which I considered quite natural under the circumstances), seemed entirely unabated. He said little, and that moodily, and with evident effort. I ventured a jest or two, and he made a sickening attempt at a smile. Poor fellow! — as I thought of his wife, I wondered that he could have heart to put on even the semblance of mirth. I determined to commence a series of covert insinuations, or innuendoes, about the oblong box — just to let him perceive, gradually, that I was not altogether the butt, or victim, of his little bit of pleasant mystification. My first observation was by way of opening a masked battery. I said something about the “peculiar shape of that box-,” and, as I spoke the words, I smiled knowingly, winked, and touched him gently with my forefinger in the ribs.

The manner in which Wyatt received this harmless pleasantry convinced me, at once, that he was mad. At first he stared at me as if he found it impossible to comprehend the witticism of my remark; but as its point seemed slowly to make its way into his brain, his eyes, in the same proportion, seemed protruding from their sockets. Then he grew very red — then hideously pale — then, as if highly amused with what I had insinuated, he began a loud and boisterous laugh, which, to my astonishment, he kept up, with gradually increasing vigour, for ten minutes or more. In conclusion, he fell flat and heavily upon the deck. When I ran to uplift him, to all appearance he was dead.

I called assistance, and, with much difficulty, we brought him to himself. Upon reviving he spoke incoherently for some time. At length we bled him and put him to bed. The next morning he was quite recovered, so far as regarded his mere bodily health. Of his mind I say nothing, of course. I avoided him during the rest of the passage, by advice of the captain, who seemed to coincide with me altogether in my views of his insanity, but cautioned me to say nothing on this head to any person on board.

Several circumstances occurred immediately after this fit of Wyatt which contributed to heighten the curiosity with which I was already possessed. Among other things, this: I had been nervous — drank too much strong green tea, and slept ill at night — in fact, for two nights I could not be properly said to sleep at all. Now, my stateroom opened into the main cabin, or dining-room, as did those of all the single men on board. Wyatt’s three rooms were in the after-cabin, which was separated from the main one by a slight sliding door, never locked even at night. As we were almost constantly on a wind, and the breeze was not a little stiff, the ship heeled to leeward very considerably; and whenever her starboard side was to leeward, the sliding door between the cabins slid open, and so remained, nobody taking the trouble to get up and shut it. But my berth was in such a position, that when my own stateroom door was open, as well as the sliding door in question (and my own door was always open on account of the heat,) I could see into the after-cabin quite distinctly, and just at that portion of it, too, where were situated the staterooms of Mr. Wyatt. Well, during two nights (not consecutive) while I lay awake, I clearly saw Mrs. W., about eleven o’clock upon each night, steal cautiously from the stateroom of Mr. W., and enter the extra room, where she remained until daybreak, when she was called by her husband and went back. That they were virtually separated was clear. They had separate apartments — no doubt in contemplation of a more permanent divorce; and here, after all I thought was the mystery of the extra stateroom.

There was another circumstance, too, which interested me much. During the two wakeful nights in question, and immediately after the disappearance of Mrs. Wyatt into the extra stateroom, I was attracted by certain singular cautious, subdued noises in that of her husband. After listening to them for some time, with thoughtful attention, I at length succeeded perfectly in translating their import. They were sounds occasioned by the artist in prying open the oblong box, by means of a chisel and mallet — the latter being apparently muffled, or deadened, by some soft woollen or cotton substance in which its head was enveloped.

In this manner I fancied I could distinguish the precise moment when he fairly disengaged the lid — also, that I could determine when he removed it altogether, and when he deposited it upon the lower berth in his room; this latter point I knew, for example, by certain slight taps which the lid made in striking against the wooden edges of the berth, as he endeavoured to lay it down very gently — there being no room for it on the floor. After this there was a dead stillness, and I heard nothing more, upon either occasion, until nearly daybreak; unless, perhaps, I may mention a low sobbing, or murmuring sound, so very much suppressed as to be nearly inaudible — if, indeed, the whole of this latter noise were not rather produced by my own imagination. I say it seemed to resemble sobbing or sighing — but, of course, it could not have been either. I rather think it was a ringing in my own ears. Mr. Wyatt, no doubt, according to custom, was merely giving the rein to one of his hobbies — indulging in one of his fits of artistic enthusiasm. He had opened his oblong box, in order to feast his eyes on the pictorial treasure within. There was nothing in this, however, to make him sob. I repeat, therefore, that it must have been simply a freak of my own fancy, distempered by good Captain Hardy’s green tea. Just before dawn, on each of the two nights of which I speak, I distinctly heard Mr. Wyatt replace the lid upon the oblong box, and force the nails into their old places by means of the muffled mallet. Having done this, he issued from his stateroom, fully dressed, and proceeded to call Mrs. W. from hers.

We had been at sea seven days, and were now off Cape Hatteras, when there came a tremendously heavy blow from the southwest. We were, in a measure, prepared for it, however, as the weather had been holding out threats for some time. Every thing was made snug, alow and aloft; and as the wind steadily freshened, we lay to, at length, under spanker and foretopsail, both double-reefed.

In this trim we rode safely enough for forty-eight hours — the ship proving herself an excellent sea-boat in many respects, and shipping no water of any consequence. At the end of this period, however, the gale had freshened into a hurricane, and our after — sail split into ribbons, bringing us so much in the trough of the water that we shipped several prodigious seas, one immediately after the other. By this accident we lost three men overboard with the caboose, and nearly the whole of the larboard bulwarks. Scarcely had we recovered our senses, before the foretopsail went into shreds, when we got up a storm stay — sail and with this did pretty well for some hours, the ship heading the sea much more steadily than before.

The gale still held on, however, and we saw no signs of its abating. The rigging was found to be ill-fitted, and greatly strained; and on the third day of the blow, about five in the afternoon, our mizzen-mast, in a heavy lurch to windward, went by the board. For an hour or more, we tried in vain to get rid of it, on account of the prodigious rolling of the ship; and, before we had succeeded, the carpenter came aft and announced four feet of water in the hold. To add to our dilemma, we found the pumps choked and nearly useless.

All was now confusion and despair — but an effort was made to lighten the ship by throwing overboard as much of her cargo as could be reached, and by cutting away the two masts that remained. This we at last accomplished — but we were still unable to do any thing at the pumps; and, in the meantime, the leak gained on us very fast.

At sundown, the gale had sensibly diminished in violence, and as the sea went down with it, we still entertained faint hopes of saving ourselves in the boats. At eight P. M., the clouds broke away to windward, and we had the advantage of a full moon — a piece of good fortune which served wonderfully to cheer our drooping spirits.

After incredible labour we succeeded, at length, in getting the longboat over the side without material accident, and into this we crowded the whole of the crew and most of the passengers. This party made off immediately, and, after undergoing much suffering, finally arrived, in safety, at Ocracoke Inlet, on the third day after the wreck.

Fourteen passengers, with the captain, remained on board, resolving to trust their fortunes to the jolly-boat at the stern. We lowered it without difficulty, although it was only by a miracle that we prevented it from swamping as it touched the water. It contained, when afloat, the captain and his wife, Mr. Wyatt and party, a Mexican officer, wife, four children, and myself, with a negro valet.

We had no room, of course, for any thing except a few positively necessary instruments, some provisions, and the clothes upon our backs. No one had thought of even attempting to save any thing more. What must have been the astonishment of all, then, when having proceeded a few fathoms from the ship, Mr. Wyatt stood up in the stern-sheets, and coolly demanded of Captain Hardy that the boat should be put back for the purpose of taking in his oblong box!

“Sit down, Mr. Wyatt,” replied the captain, somewhat sternly, “you will capsize us if you do not sit quite still. Our gunwhale is almost in the water now.”

“The box!” vociferated Mr. Wyatt, still standing — “the box, I say! Captain Hardy, you cannot, you will not refuse me. Its weight will be but a trifle — it is nothing — mere nothing. By the mother who bore you — for the love of Heaven — by your hope of salvation, I implore you to put back for the box!”

The captain, for a moment, seemed touched by the earnest appeal of the artist, but he regained his stern composure, and merely said:

“Mr. Wyatt, you are mad. I cannot listen to you. Sit down, I say, or you will swamp the boat. Stay — hold him — seize him! — he is about to spring overboard! There — I knew it — he is over!”

As the captain said this, Mr. Wyatt, in fact, sprang from the boat, and, as we were yet in the lee of the wreck, succeeded, by almost superhuman exertion, in getting hold of a rope which hung from the fore-chains. In another moment he was on board, and rushing frantically down into the cabin.

In the meantime, we had been swept astern of the ship, and being quite out of her lee, were at the mercy of the tremendous sea which was still running. We made a determined effort to put back, but our little boat was like a feather in the breath of the tempest. We saw at a glance that the doom of the unfortunate artist was sealed.

As our distance from the wreck rapidly increased, the madman (for as such only could we regard him) was seen to emerge from the companion-way, up which by dint of strength that appeared gigantic, he dragged, bodily, the oblong box. While we gazed in the extremity of astonishment, he passed, rapidly, several turns of a three-inch rope, first around the box and then around his body. In another instant both body and box were in the sea — disappearing suddenly, at once and forever.

We lingered awhile sadly upon our oars, with our eyes riveted upon the spot. At length we pulled away. The silence remained unbroken for an hour. Finally, I hazarded a remark.

“Did you observe, captain, how suddenly they sank? Was not that an exceedingly singular thing? I confess that I entertained some feeble hope of his final deliverance, when I saw him lash himself to the box, and commit himself to the sea.”

“They sank as a matter of course,” replied the captain, “and that like a shot. They will soon rise again, however — but not till the salt melts.”

“The salt!” I ejaculated.

“Hush!” said the captain, pointing to the wife and sisters of the deceased. “We must talk of these things at some more appropriate time.”

We suffered much, and made a narrow escape, but fortune befriended us, as well as our mates in the longboat. We landed, in fine, more dead than alive, after four days of intense distress, upon the beach opposite Roanoke Island. We remained here a week, were not ill-treated by the wreckers, and at length obtained a passage to New York.

About a month after the loss of the Independence, I happened to meet Captain Hardy in Broadway. Our conversation turned, naturally, upon the disaster, and especially upon the sad fate of poor Wyatt. I thus learned the following particulars.

The artist had engaged passage for himself, wife, two sisters and a servant. His wife was, indeed, as she had been represented, a most lovely, and most accomplished woman. On the morning of the fourteenth of June (the day in which I first visited the ship), the lady suddenly sickened and died. The young husband was frantic with grief — but circumstances imperatively forbade the deferring his voyage to New York. It was necessary to take to her mother the corpse of his adored wife, and, on the other hand, the universal prejudice which would prevent his doing so openly was well known. Nine-tenths of the passengers would have abandoned the ship rather than take passage with a dead body.

In this dilemma, Captain Hardy arranged that the corpse, being first partially embalmed, and packed, with a large quantity of salt, in a box of suitable dimensions, should be conveyed on board as merchandise. Nothing was to be said of the lady’s decease; and, as it was well understood that Mr. Wyatt had engaged passage for his wife, it became necessary that some person should impersonate her during the voyage. This the deceased lady’s-maid was easily prevailed on to do. The extra stateroom, originally engaged for this girl during her mistress’ life, was now merely retained. In this stateroom the pseudo-wife, slept, of course, every night. In the daytime she performed, to the best of her ability, the part of her mistress — whose person, it had been carefully ascertained, was unknown to any of the passengers on board.

My own mistake arose, naturally enough, through too careless, too inquisitive, and too impulsive a temperament. But of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night. There is a countenance which haunts me, turn as I will. There is an hysterical laugh which will forever ring within my ears.

TO BE READ AT DUSK

Charles Dickens

1852

One, two, three, four, five. There were five of them.

Five couriers, sitting on a bench outside the convent on the summit of the Great St. Bernard in Switzerland, looking at the remote heights, stained by the setting sun as if a mighty quantity of red wine had been broached upon the mountain top, and had not yet had time to sink into the snow.

This is not my simile. It was made for the occasion by the stoutest courier, who was a German. None of the others took any more notice of it than they took of me, sitting on another bench on the other side of the convent door, smoking my cigar, like them, and — also like them — looking at the reddened snow, and at the lonely shed hard by, where the bodies of belated travellers, dug out of it, slowly wither away, knowing no corruption in that cold region.

The wine upon the mountain top soaked in as we looked; the mountain became white; the sky, a very dark blue; the wind rose; and the air turned piercing cold. The five couriers buttoned their rough coats. There being no safer man to imitate in all such proceedings than a courier, I buttoned mine.

The mountain in the sunset had stopped the five couriers in a conversation. It is a sublime sight, likely to stop conversation. The mountain being now out of the sunset, they resumed. Not that I had heard any part of their previous discourse; for indeed, I had not then broken away from the American gentleman, in the travellers’ parlour of the convent, who, sitting with his face to the fire, had undertaken to realise to me the whole progress of events which had led to the accumulation by the Honourable Ananias Dodger of one of the largest acquisitions of dollars ever made in our country.

“My God!” said the Swiss courier, speaking in French, which I do not hold (as some authors appear to do) to be such an all-sufficient excuse for a naughty word, that I have only to write it in that language to make it innocent; “if you talk of ghosts—”

“But I don’t talk of ghosts,” said the German.

“Of what then?” asked the Swiss.

“If I knew of what then,” said the German, “I should probably know a great deal more.”

It was a good answer, I thought, and it made me curious. So, I moved my position to that corner of my bench which was nearest to them, and leaning my back against the convent wall, heard perfectly, without appearing to attend.

“Thunder and lightning!” said the German, warming, “when a certain man is coming to see you, unexpectedly; and, without his own knowledge, sends some invisible messenger, to put the idea of him into your head all day, what do you call that? When you walk along a crowded street — at Frankfort, Milan, London, Paris — and think that a passing stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and then that another passing stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and so begin to have a strange foreknowledge that presently you’ll meet your friend Heinrich — which you do, though you believed him at Trieste — what do you call that?”

“It’s not uncommon, either,” murmured the Swiss and the other three.

“Uncommon!” said the German. “It’s as common as cherries in the Black Forest. It’s as common as macaroni at Naples. And Naples reminds me! When the old Marchesa Senzanima shrieks at a card-party on the Chiaja — as I heard and saw her, for it happened in a Bavarian family of mine, and I was overlooking the service that evening — I say, when the old Marchesa starts up at the card-table, white through her rouge, and cries, $My sister in Spain is dead! I felt her cold touch on my back!% — and when that sister is dead at the moment — what do you call that?”

“Or when the blood of San Gennaro liquefies at the request of the clergy — as all the world knows that it does regularly once a-year, in my native city,” said the Neapolitan courier after a pause, with a comical look, “what do you call that?”

“That!” cried the German. “Well, I think I know a name for that.”

“Miracle?” said the Neapolitan, with the same sly face.

The German merely smoked and laughed; and they all smoked and laughed.

“Bah!” said the German, presently. “I speak of things that really do happen. When I want to see the conjurer, I pay to see a professed one, and have my money’s worth. Very strange things do happen without ghosts. Ghosts! Giovanni Baptista, tell your story of the English bride. There’s no ghost in that, but something full as strange. Will any man tell me what?”

As there was a silence among them, I glanced around. He whom I took to be Baptista was lighting a fresh cigar. He presently went on to speak. He was a Genoese, as I judged.

“The story of the English bride?” said he. “Basta! one ought not to call so slight a thing a story. Well, it’s all one. But it’s true. Observe me well, gentlemen, it’s true. That which glitters is not always gold; but what I am going to tell, is true.”

He repeated this more than once.

•   •   •

Ten years ago, I took my credentials to an English gentleman at Long’s Hotel, in Bond Street, London, who was about to travel — it might be for one year, it might be for two. He approved of them; likewise of me. He was pleased to make inquiry. The testimony that he received was favourable. He engaged me by the six months, and my entertainment was generous.

He was young, handsome, very happy. He was enamoured of a fair young English lady, with a sufficient fortune, and they were going to be married. It was the wedding-trip, in short, that we were going to take. For three months’ rest in the hot weather (it was early summer then) he had hired an old place on the Riviera, at an easy distance from my city, Genoa, on the road to Nice. Did I know that place? Yes; I told him I knew it well. It was an old palace with great gardens. It was a little bare, and it was a little dark and gloomy, being close surrounded by trees; but it was spacious, ancient, grand, and on the seashore. He said it had been so described to him exactly, and he was well pleased that I knew it. For its being a little bare of furniture, all such places were. For its being a little gloomy, he had hired it principally for the gardens, and he and my mistress would pass the summer weather in their shade.

“So all goes well, Baptista?” said he.

“Indubitably, signore; very well.”

We had a travelling chariot for our journey, newly built for us, and in all respects complete. All we had was complete; we wanted for nothing. The marriage took place. They were happy. I was happy, seeing all so bright, being so well situated, going to my own city, teaching my language in the rumble to the maid, la bella Carolina, whose heart was gay with laughter: who was young and rosy.

The time flew. But I observed — listen to this, I pray! (and here the courier dropped his voice) — I observed my mistress sometimes brooding in a manner very strange; in a frightened manner; in an unhappy manner; with a cloudy, uncertain alarm upon her. I think that I began to notice this when I was walking up hills by the carriage side, and master had gone on in front. At any rate, I remember that it impressed itself upon my mind one evening in the South of France, when she called to me to call master back; and when he came back, and walked for a long way, talking encouragingly and affectionately to her, with his hand upon the open window, and hers in it. Now and then, he laughed in a merry way, as if he were bantering her out of something. By-and-by, she laughed, and then all went well again.

It was curious. I asked la bella Carolina, the pretty little one, Was mistress unwell? — No. — Out of spirits? — No. — Fearful of bad roads, or brigands? — No. And what made it more mysterious was, the pretty little one would not look at me in giving answer, but would look at the view.

But, one day she told me the secret.

“If you must know,” said Carolina, “I find, from what I have overheard, that mistress is haunted.”

“How haunted?”

“By a dream.”

“What dream?”

“By a dream of a face. For three nights before her marriage, she saw a face in a dream — always the same face, and only One.”

“A terrible face?”

“No. The face of a dark, remarkable-looking man, in black, with black hair and a grey moustache — a handsome man except for a reserved and secret air. Not a face she ever saw, or at all like a face she ever saw. Doing nothing in the dream but looking at her fixedly, out of darkness.”

“Does the dream come back?”

“Never. The recollection of it is all her trouble.”

“And why does it trouble her?”

Carolina shook her head.

“That’s master’s question,” said la bella. “She don’t know. She wonders why, herself. But I heard her tell him, only last night, that if she was to find a picture of that face in our Italian house (which she is afraid she will) she did not know how she could ever bear it.”

Upon my word I was fearful after this (said the Genoese courier) of our coming to the old palazzo, lest some such ill-starred picture should happen to be there. I knew there were many there; and, as we got nearer and nearer to the place, I wished the whole gallery in the crater of Vesuvius. To mend the matter, it was a stormy dismal evening when we, at last, approached that part of the Riviera. It thundered; and the thunder of my city and its environs, rolling among the high hills, is very loud. The lizards ran in and out of the chinks in the broken stone wall of the garden, as if they were frightened; the frogs bubbled and croaked their loudest; the sea-wind moaned, and the wet trees dripped; and the lightning — body of San Lorenzo, how it lightened!

We all know what an old palace in or near Genoa is — how time and the sea air have blotted it — how the drapery painted on the outer walls has peeled off in great flakes of plaster — how the lower windows are darkened with rusty bars of iron — how the courtyard is overgrown with grass — how the outer buildings are dilapidated — how the whole pile seems devoted to ruin. Our palazzo was one of the true kind. It had been shut up close for months. Months? — years! — it had an earthy smell, like a tomb. The scent of the orange trees on the broad back terrace, and of the lemons ripening on the wall, and of some shrubs that grew around a broken fountain, had got into the house somehow, and had never been able to get out again. There was, in every room, an aged smell, grown faint with confinement. It pined in all the cupboards and drawers. In the little rooms of communication between great rooms, it was stifling. If you turned a picture — to come back to the pictures — there it still was, clinging to the wall behind the frame, like a sort of bat.

The lattice-blinds were close shut, all over the house. There were two ugly, grey old women in the house, to take care of it; one of them with a spindle, who stood winding and mumbling in the doorway, and who would as soon have let in the devil as the air. Master, mistress, la bella Carolina, and I, went all through the palazzo. I went first, though I have named myself last, opening the windows and the lattice-blinds, and shaking down on myself splashes of rain, and scraps of mortar, and now and then a dozing mosquito, or a monstrous, fat, blotchy, Genoese spider.

When I had let the evening light into a room, master, mistress, and la bella Carolina, entered. Then, we looked round at all the pictures, and I went forward again into another room. Mistress secretly had great fear of meeting with the likeness of that face — we all had; but there was no such thing. The Madonna and Bambino, San Francisco, San Sebastiano, Venus, Santa Caterina, Angels, Brigands, Friars, Temples at Sunset, Battles, White Horses, Forests, Apostles, Doges, all my old acquaintances many times repeated? — yes. Dark, handsome man in black, reserved and secret, with black hair and grey moustache, looking fixedly at mistress out of darkness? — no.

At last we got through all the rooms and all the pictures, and came out into the gardens. They were pretty well kept, being rented by a gardener, and were large and shady. In one place there was a rustic theatre, open to the sky; the stage a green slope; the coulisses, three entrances upon a side, sweet-smelling leafy screens. Mistress moved her bright eyes, even there, as if she looked to see the face come in upon the scene; but all was well.

“Now, Clara,” master said, in a low voice, “you see that it is nothing? You are happy.”

Mistress was much encouraged. She soon accustomed herself to that grim palazzo, and would sing, and play the harp, and copy the old pictures, and stroll with master under the green trees and vines all day. She was beautiful. He was happy. He would laugh and say to me, mounting his horse for his morning ride before the heat:

“All goes well, Baptista!”

“Yes, signore, thank God, very well.”

We kept no company. I took la bella to the Duomo and Annunciata, to the Café, to the Opera, to the village Festa, to the Public Garden, to the Day Theatre, to the Marionetti. The pretty little one was charmed with all she saw. She learnt Italian — heavens! miraculously! Was mistress quite forgetful of that dream? I asked Carolina sometimes. Nearly, said la bella — almost. It was wearing out.

One day master received a letter, and called me.

“Baptista!”

“Signore!”

“A gentleman who is presented to me will dine here today. He is called the Signor Dellombra. Let me dine like a prince.”

It was an odd name. I did not know that name. But, there had been many noblemen and gentlemen pursued by Austria on political suspicions, lately, and some names had changed. Perhaps this was one. Altro! Dellombra was as good a name to me as another.

When the Signor Dellombra came to dinner (said the Genoese courier in the low voice, into which he had subsided once before), I showed him into the reception-room, the great sala of the old palazzo. Master received him with cordiality, and presented him to mistress. As she rose, her face changed, she gave a cry, and fell upon the marble floor.

Then, I turned my head to the Signor Dellombra, and saw that he was dressed in black, and had a reserved and secret air, and was a dark, remarkable-looking man, with black hair and a grey moustache.

Master raised mistress in his arms, and carried her to her own room, where I sent la bella Carolina straight. La bella told me afterwards that mistress was nearly terrified to death, and that she wandered in her mind about her dream, all night.

Master was vexed and anxious — almost angry, and yet full of solicitude. The Signor Dellombra was a courtly gentleman, and spoke with great respect and sympathy of mistress’s being so ill. The African wind had been blowing for some days (they had told him at his hotel of the Maltese Cross), and he knew that it was often hurtful. He hoped the beautiful lady would recover soon. He begged permission to retire, and to renew his visit when he should have the happiness of hearing that she was better. Master would not allow of this, and they dined alone.

He withdrew early. Next day he called at the gate, on horseback, to inquire for mistress. He did so two or three times in that week.

What I observed myself, and what la bella Carolina told me, united to explain to me that master had now set his mind on curing mistress of her fanciful terror. He was all kindness, but he was sensible and firm. He reasoned with her, that to encourage such fancies was to invite melancholy, if not madness. That it rested with herself to be herself. That if she once resisted her strange weakness, so successfully as to receive the Signor Dellombra as an English lady would receive any other guest, it was for ever conquered. To make an end, the signore came again, and mistress received him without marked distress (though with constraint and apprehension still), and the evening passed serenely. Master was so delighted with this change, and so anxious to confirm it, that the Signor Dellombra became a constant guest. He was accomplished in pictures, books, and music; and his society, in any grim palazzo, would have been welcome.

I used to notice, many times, that mistress was not quite recovered. She would cast down her eyes and droop her head, before the Signor Dellombra, or would look at him with a terrified and fascinated glance, as if his presence had some evil influence or power upon her. Turning from her to him, I used to see him in the shaded gardens, or the large half-lighted sala, looking, as I might say, “fixedly upon her out of darkness.” But, truly, I had not forgotten la bella Carolina’s words describing the face in the dream.

After his second visit I heard master say:

“Now, see, my dear Clara, it’s over! Dellombra has come and gone, and your apprehension is broken like glass.”

“Will he — will he ever come again?” asked mistress.

“Again? Why, surely, over and over again! Are you cold?” (she shivered).

“No, dear — but — he terrifies me: are you sure that he need come again?”

“The surer for the question, Clara!” replied master, cheerfully.

But, he was very hopeful of her complete recovery now, and grew more and more so every day. She was beautiful. He was happy.

“All goes well, Baptista?” he would say to me again.

“Yes, signore, thank God; very well.”

We were all (said the Genoese courier, constraining himself to speak a little louder), we were all at Rome for the Carnival. I had been out, all day, with a Sicilian, a friend of mine, and a courier, who was there with an English family. As I returned at night to our hotel, I met the little Carolina, who never stirred from home alone, running distractedly along the Corso.

“Carolina! What’s the matter?”

“O Baptista! O, for the Lord’s sake! where is my mistress?”

“Mistress, Carolina?”

“Gone since morning — told me, when master went out on his day’s journey, not to call her, for she was tired with not resting in the night (having been in pain), and would lie in bed until the evening; then get up refreshed. She is gone! — she is gone! Master has come back, broken down the door, and she is gone! My beautiful, my good, my innocent mistress!”

The pretty little one so cried, and raved, and tore herself that I could not have held her, but for her swooning on my arm as if she had been shot. Master came up — in manner, face, or voice, no more the master that I knew, than I was he. He took me (I laid the little one upon her bed in the hotel, and left her with the chamber-women), in a carriage, furiously through the darkness, across the desolate Campagna. When it was day, and we stopped at a miserable post-house, all the horses had been hired twelve hours ago, and sent away in different directions. Mark me! by the Signor Dellombra, who had passed there in a carriage, with a frightened English lady crouching in one corner.

I never heard (said the Genoese courier, drawing a long breath) that she was ever traced beyond that spot. All I know is, that she vanished into infamous oblivion, with the dreaded face beside her that she had seen in her dream.

“What do you call that?” said the German courier, triumphantly. “Ghosts! There are no ghosts there! What do you call this, that I am going to tell you? Ghosts! There are no ghosts here!”

I took an engagement once (pursued the German courier) with an English gentleman, elderly and a bachelor, to travel through my country, my Fatherland. He was a merchant who traded with my country and knew the language, but who had never been there since he was a boy — as I judge, some sixty years before.

His name was James, and he had a twin-brother John, also a bachelor. Between these brothers there was a great affection. They were in business together, at Goodman’s Fields, but they did not live together. Mr. James dwelt in Poland Street, turning out of Oxford Street, London; Mr. John resided by Epping Forest.

Mr. James and I were to start for Germany in about a week. The exact day depended on business. Mr. John came to Poland Street (where I was staying in the house), to pass that week with Mr. James. But, he said to his brother on the second day, “I don’t feel very well, James. There’s not much the matter with me; but I think I am a little gouty. I’ll go home and put myself under the care of my old housekeeper, who understands my ways. If I get quite better, I’ll come back and see you before you go. If I don’t feel well enough to resume my visit where I leave it off, why you will come and see me before you go.” Mr. James, of course, said he would, and they shook hands — both hands, as they always did — and Mr. John ordered out his old-fashioned chariot and rumbled home.

It was on the second night after that — that is to say, the fourth in the week — when I was awoke out of my sound sleep by Mr. James coming into my bedroom in his flannel-gown, with a lighted candle. He sat upon the side of my bed, and looking at me, said:

“Wilhelm, I have reason to think I have got some strange illness upon me.”

I then perceived that there was a very unusual expression in his face.

“Wilhelm,” said he, “I am not afraid or ashamed to tell you what I might be afraid or ashamed to tell another man. You come from a sensible country, where mysterious things are inquired into and are not settled to have been weighed and measured — or to have been unweighable and unmeasurable — or in either case to have been completely disposed of, for all time — ever so many years ago. I have just now seen the phantom of my brother.”

I confess (said the German courier) that it gave me a little tingling of the blood to hear it.

“I have just now seen,” Mr. James repeated, looking full at me, that I might see how collected he was, “the phantom of my brother John. I was sitting up in bed, unable to sleep, when it came into my room, in a white dress, and regarding me earnestly, passed up to the end of the room, glanced at some papers on my writing-desk, turned, and, still looking earnestly at me as it passed the bed, went out at the door. Now, I am not in the least mad, and am not in the least disposed to invest that phantom with any external existence out of myself. I think it is a warning to me that I am ill; and I think I had better be bled.”

I got out of bed directly (said the German courier) and began to get on my clothes, begging him not to be alarmed, and telling him that I would go myself to the doctor. I was just ready, when we heard a loud knocking and ringing at the street door. My room being an attic at the back, and Mr. James’s being the second-floor room in the front, we went down to his room, and put up the window, to see what was the matter.

“Is that Mr. James?” said a man below, falling back to the opposite side of the way to look up.

“It is,” said Mr. James, “and you are my brother’s man, Robert.”

“Yes, Sir. I am sorry to say, Sir, that Mr. John is ill. He is very bad, Sir. It is even feared that he may be lying at the point of death. He wants to see you, Sir. I have a chaise here. Pray come to him. Pray lose no time.”

Mr. James and I looked at one another. “Wilhelm,” said he, “this is strange. I wish you to come with me!” I helped him to dress, partly there and partly in the chaise; and no grass grew under the horses’ iron shoes between Poland Street and the Forest.

Now, mind! (said the German courier) I went with Mr. James into his brother’s room, and I saw and heard myself what follows.

His brother lay upon his bed, at the upper end of a long bedchamber. His old housekeeper was there, and others were there: I think three others were there, if not four, and they had been with him since early in the afternoon. He was in white, like the figure — necessarily so, because he had his nightdress on. He looked like the figure — necessarily so, because he looked earnestly at his brother when he saw him come into the room.

But, when his brother reached the bedside, he slowly raised himself in bed, and looking full upon him, said these words:

“James, you have seen me before, tonight — and you know it!”

And so died!

•   •   •

I waited, when the German courier ceased, to hear something said of this strange story. The silence was unbroken. I looked round, and the five couriers were gone: so noiselessly that the ghostly mountain might have absorbed them into its eternal snows. By this time, I was by no means in a mood to sit alone in that awful scene, with the chill air coming solemnly upon me — or, if I may tell the truth, to sit alone anywhere. So I went back into the convent-parlour, and, finding the American gentleman still disposed to relate the biography of the Honourable Ananias Dodger, heard it all out.

THE HAUNTED AUTOMATON

W. C. Morrow

1885

Old man Erkins had three principal faults: he was rich, stingy, and a hard drinker. For the first of these he was to blame; for the second, pitied; for the third — but wait and read further before you express an opinion. At all events, by reason of these things and of others that I shall now write concerning him, I say and you will say that he should have been killed; which I am restrained from doing in this very line by the necessities of this story and not at all by fear either of the law or of punishment in the world to come.

Upon recovering from a hard spree, toward the end of which he would begin to see strange things, Erkins would not touch a drop for several days; then, recovering his nerve, he would laugh at his past timidity and — take a drink; the next day one, the next three, the next four, and so on, until snakes and other queer things would creep out of dark places.

There was an old servant, named Sarah, that kept his large prison (for such was his house) in order; and the one green spot in her shaky old life was a pretty girl, old Erkins’ niece, ward and prisoner combined — Alice by name, and the prettiest girl in all the country thereabout, though a very unhappy one, to be sure. Alice had inherited Sarah, who was Alice’s mother’s trusted servant, and who vowed that she never, never would leave the poor young orphan, though the old house should swarm with snakes and things.

Now, the old miser loved his niece in a certain way. There are persons who love others so deeply that they murder them. There are various ways of committing murder, and one of the cruellest is to shut up a pretty girl in a big house and never let a young fellow even look at her.

Merely because she accidentally — entirely accidentally — fell in love with a poor but good-looking young machinist whom she met at church, her old guardian, in a spirit of mean tyranny, forbade her ever going out again, and in a most insulting and over-bearing manner told this young man, Howard Rankin, that the girl should never see him again, and that any mendicant fortune-hunter who should ever present himself at the house or seek to capture her for her quarter of a million would be riddled with buckshot.

Old Erkins had a mania for curious mechanisms. He had clocks that did all manner of wonderful things, and hundreds of other ingenious contrivances of various kinds. Whenever he read of some curious invention he would have it. He never tired of amusing himself with these things. There was one thing that Erkins needed to complete his happiness as well as his collection, and that was an automaton — a working counterfeit man. He had read everything that had ever been written on the subject of such automata. He had visited museums and wax-works shows, and had seen gladiators and Zouaves dying their several deaths again and again; but they were all too suggestive, for there were times when old Erkins’ nerves were weak. Once he did buy a dying gladiator at enormous expense, but on the occasion of his next bad spell that gladiator’s departing life seemed to take the form of numberless snakes and monkeys; and, frantic with fright, its owner chopped it to pieces with a hatchet.

Howard Rankin had a certain inventive genius. Knowing the old man’s weakness, he conceived the idea of constructing an automaton, with which he hoped, he told a friend, to reinstate himself in the old man’s good graces. However, this was a secret. All that he gave out was that he was going to construct an automaton — he knew what would result. He really did think that he loved Alice very, very deeply. Why shouldn’t he? He promptly began to put his idea into execution, and selected the back room of his workshop.

Very soon the project caused such talk that old Erkins heard of it. As the work progressed and favoured bends were permitted to see the wonderful automaton as it grew under its author’s hands, old Erkins, hearing the stories, became more and more interested. When a few months had passed he heard that the automaton was nearly finished.

Erkins could restrain himself no longer — he must see that automaton and must secure it. But how should he proceed? He had grossly insulted the inventor. This was a serious difficulty. He pondered over it a few days, and then boldly sent a polite note, asking permission to see the automaton. A formal note, granting the request, came in reply. The old man went at once.

The young man received him with polite condescension. Erkins’ keen old eyes glittered eagerly; and Howard, noticing it, was secretly elated accordingly. Outwardly he was stiff and cold.

“And so you are at work on an automaton?” Erkins asked, as he was ushered into the back room.

“Yes,” deliberately responded the young mechanic, as he quietly proceeded with his work.

“Cheerful one?”

“What?”

“Cheerful?”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t die, or anything of that sort, does it?”

“Oh, no!”

“’Cause I had a dying gladiator once, and it died so hard that sna — that — that it was unpleasant.”

He stepped closer to the half finished automaton. It sat in an easy-chair. “So I killed it,” he said.

“Killed what?”

“Gladiator.”

He was devoured with curiosity concerning Howard’s automaton, and yet felt such timidity that he hesitated about asking questions. Howard, volunteering no information, continued his work. Presently Erkins mustered up courage.

“I see you haven’t put on its head yet,” he essayed.

“No.”

“Haven’t got it ready?”

“No.”

There was a pause.

“What will it do?”

“A good many things.”

The old man went round it and examined it narrowly. It was the figure of a fop, dressed in the extreme of fashion, sitting in an indolent posture.

“Everything finished except the head, eh?”

“Yes,” answered Howard; who seeing that he had carried his indifference far enough, left off his work, and said: “The head is to be the main part, because the more important work is to be done by it, and great care is required in making its wax face, its eyes, and so forth. Here is the block of it, with the machinery inside. That blonde wig will be its hair. As the automaton now is, however, it can give all the limb motions, though they are comparatively insignificant.”.Howard inserted a key in a hole in the back of the chair and wound up the automaton. The slight clicking of machinery was audible. Old Erkins trembled with excitement as he saw the automaton begin to move. It brought its right hand to the place where its mouth would be, then lowered it; brought up its left hand, and then crossed its legs.

“The right hand,” explained Howard, “will carry a cigar, for the automaton will smoke. See — it will take a few puffs and then withdraw the cigar. The other hand is now taking up an eyeglass. I must now stop the machinery, as other attachments, not yet supplied, will have to be added, and still other machinery, the most intricate of all, is contained within the head.”

“What will you do with the automaton?” asked Erkins, feeling his way.

“Don’t know — probably keep it for my own amusement.”

“Wouldn’t you sell it?”

“Sell it! why, who is rich enough to buy it!”

Erkins’ heart sank.

“What shall you ask for it?” he inquired in sheer desperation.

“A thousand dollars.”

Erkins’ heart leaped with joy.

“I’ll take it,” he eagerly said. He had expected to hear five-thousand. “It’s a go,” quietly responded Howard.

Then Erkins began to reflect that possibly he had been too hasty.

“I may be giving you too much,” he said.

“Don’t take it if you don’t want it,” coolly answered the young man.

“Will you give me a written guaranty of what it will do?” he asked.

Howard pondered a moment. “I will do not only that,” he said, “but more; for I have great confidence in the automaton. Let me see. This is the 12th of November. I will be married on Wednesday, the 24th of next month, the day before Christmas. I shall want eight hundred dollars for my wedding and to start in life. I—”

“Married!” exclaimed old Erkins in astonishment.

“Yes. I will take eight hundred dollars down. If the automaton please you, you are to pay the balance; if in any particular it fall below your expectations, you may keep the two hundred. I will give you a written guaranty that the automaton shall cross and uncross its legs, smoke cigars, adjust its eyeglass, incline its head, open and close its eyes, wink and talk — speak two or three words.”

“Good!” cried the old man. “It’s a bargain.” Erkins was very happy when he left. He had had two triumphs — secured the automaton and learned that Alice and her fortune were no longer in danger.

According to agreement the automaton was delivered on Saturday, December 20th, by a friend of Howard’s, the inventor sending word that under the circumstances he had no desire to enter Mr. Erkins’ house. The automaton was encased in a large box provided with handles, and four men were brought to carry it into the house. Old Erkins danced about in great excitement and high glee. It was a time of such rejoicing with him that he called Alice and Old Sarah to share his happiness and see the wonderful automaton. Much of his exhilaration was due to drink, for the old man was rapidly reaching the limit, and in two or three days his old wriggling friends would surely be upon him.

“How’s Rankin getting along with his wedding?” asked Erkins of the friend.

The latter gave some offhand reply, and as he did so he saw Alice stagger backward to the wall and her face blanch..“By the way, Alice,” said wicked old Erkins, delighting in the cruel stab he was giving, “Howard Rankin is to be married next Wednesday.”

The poor girl could say nothing, for her heart was broken; but old Erkins did not notice her strange conduct nor see the agony of shame, humiliation and despair she suffered. Sarah saw it all, and it wrung her faithful old heart. She slipped her arm around the young girl’s waist and would have led her away; but Erkins commanded them to remain, and Erkins’ word was law.

The men set down the big box in the hall.

“Mr. Erkins,” said the friend, “here are certain instructions that Howard sent for the management of the automaton. He insists that they be carried out to the letter, or he will not be responsible for failure.”

The old man hastily read the instructions. Among them there was this one: “The automaton must be kept in a room with a temperature not below 65 degrees Fahrenheit nor above 75 degrees, otherwise the springs, catgut strings, the wax of the face and of the head, and the glue of the various parts will be ruined.” Here was another: “There must be little light in the room, or the delicate colours in the face and hands will fade; and the automaton must not be placed with its face to the light” Another instruction made careful provision for ventilation, thus: “Exterior air, which at this time of year is either damp or frosty, must be excluded, and hence the window should never be opened; but as fresh air is necessary, the door must always be left slightly ajar — say six inches — and it must not open into any other room, but into a hall.” Winding at night or more than once a day was forbidden. There were also minute instructions for preparing and lighting the cigars that the automaton should smoke.

Erkins reflected. There was only one room in the house which permitted of compliance with these instructions, and that was upstairs. He slept downstairs, and he had intended to place it in a room adjoining his bedroom; but as he used that one for an office and kept a hot fire in it, the automaton would be ruined there. The only objection he had to its going upstairs was upon account of his fear that Sarah or Alice, who occupied rooms near the one that must receive the automaton, would surreptitiously wind up the treasure at unseasonable times and thus ruin it. But had he been shrewd enough to guess at the loathing they had for a thing that came from Howard’s hands, he would have felt no uneasiness.

“Sarah,” he sternly said, “I must put the automaton in the southwest room upstairs; but if either you or Alice dare to touch it or enter the room where it is, I’ll murder you. Do you understand that? I’ll murder you both.”

The four men carried the big box to the southwest room upstairs and set it just where it should be, according to the instructions. Old Erkins, gleeful and brutal, forced Sarah and Alice to accompany it, and compelled them to stand and see it uncovered. This was done by removing the top, ends, and sides of the box and lifting a cloth that covered the figure. The wonderful automaton sat revealed.

Alice had secretly hoped that Howard had made the automaton to resemble himself, though ever so slightly; but when she saw the figure, with flaxen hair and moustache, so different from his, which were black; and the broad black eyebrows; and the painted cheeks, so different from his own pale face; and the foppish costume; and the effeminately curled hair; and the general air of impudence that pervaded the whole figure, her last hope departed. There was not a shadow of Howard’s quiet manliness in anything about this mimic man.

Old Erkins regarded it otherwise. He saw only a wonderful mechanism, finished and decked out with fine art; and that was all he cared for. The artificial fop reclined indolently in an easy-.chair. Its head hung upon its breast and its eyes were closed, its appearance being that of a slumbering man.

The four carriers were dismissed, and the friend produced a key, inserted it in a hole in the back of the chair, and wound up the automaton. It raised its head, opened its eyes sleepily, and with the greatest dignity it slowly turned its head as though regarding each member of the company, and then it smiled and very graciously bowed. Howard’s friend produced a cigar and carefully prepared it, as a lesson to Erkins, the automaton meanwhile continuing to bow and smile. Following the instructions, the friend laid the cigar on a little stand convenient to the automaton’s right hand, and the automaton with absolutely accurate movement brought the cigar to its mouth and with great deliberation took several puffs. Then it removed the cigar, and with its left hand adjusted an eyeglass, with which it gravely regarded the company; then puffed at the cigar again, and then crossed its legs.

“I must go now,” said the friend. “The automaton will keep this up thirty minutes longer, and then it will have run down; but it must not be wound again till tomorrow. Remember the instructions”; and he left.

Alice then begged to be allowed to go, as she was dying with a headache, she said, and had seen enough of the automaton; and so old Erkins, deeply disgusted, dismissed them.

He remained alone with the automaton, sitting directly in front of it and eagerly drinking with his eyes every one of the slow, dignified, accurate motions that it made. The only sound audible was a faint ticking, a very soft creaking, of the intricate machinery. This comparative silence, and the subtle wisdom that the automaton seemed to have and its deliberate manner, and its impudence, began to work upon Erkins’ diseased imagination. As the thing continued to smoke, and adjust its eyeglass, and cross its legs, and open and close its eyes and bow so gravely, it took on, in Erkins’ opinion, a kind of uncanny, supernatural air that disturbed its owner. Erkins’ mind was not exactly right, and he knew it; but even making due allowance for it he was positive the thing was acting strangely. It seemed to be trying to exasperate him. This feeling was steadily growing upon Erkins; so that when there came a sharp little click in the machinery and the automaton dropped the cigar to the floor and boldly winked at Erkins, the old man began to experience downright fright. Yet he reflected that the guaranty called for winks. Still, this wink was too knowing. It was an insidious, wise, searching wink, that seemed to show cognizance of every sin that Erkins had ever committed. It was a leering, impudent wink; such a wink as innocence would be incapable of; a dangerous, mocking wink. It winked not only once, but twice, thrice, four times; taking a long time between winks, and accompanying each with a sinister leer. It did nothing but wink. Everything about it was perfectly still with the exception of that one eyelid, and the stare that it kept fastened upon Erkins was a cold and deadly stare; a stare that saw through and through him, he thought, and that acted upon him with such strange effect that it held him bound, cold with terror, to his seat.

It was also in the guaranty that the automaton should speak. As yet it had not spoken. When it had winked several times there came another sharp little click, which startled Erkins. The old man had forgotten all about the speaking, but that little click warned him that something else was coming. What would it be? Something awful, he instinctively felt.

The automaton sat still for five long seconds, and then very slowly, very cautiously, very mysteriously, it leaned forward and said in a hollow, ghostly voice, that seemed to come up from the bowels of the earth:

“I’m haunted!”.Erkins shivered, and he thought his heart had ceased beating. The automaton slowly resumed its former posture and fixed its dead stare upon its owner. It sat thus for what seemed to Erkins an age, and then again as before it leaned forward and in sepulchral tones it said:

“I’m haunted!”

Erkins could hear it no longer. White and trembling with fright, he backed out of the room, carefully left the door as the specifications required, and went out into the garden and shook himself like a dog.

“That thing,” he muttered, “is worse than a sna — than the dying gladiator. But it’s a beautiful piece of work,” he presently added, when he had somewhat recovered his nerve; “and of course I shall get used to it. Of course.”

Nevertheless, he needed something to help him in this and he sought it in his liquor. He drank frightfully all that day, and toward evening his old unwelcome visitors began to show themselves. And they were unusually bold. He went early to bed, and actually one hideous old monkey had the effrontery to pretend he was a dying gladiator. A young monkey assumed all the airs of a fop, and smoked a cigar, adjusted an eyeglass, crossed its legs, smiled and bowed, and then winked at the miserable old man in the most impudent and insulting manner; and, not satisfied with that, it leaned forward mysteriously from its perch on the foot-board of the bed, and in a rasping, sepulchral whisper, said:

“I’m haunted!”

Thus passed this hideous night — one of snakes, monkeys, dying gladiators, fops who declared they were haunted, and horrible nightmares.

But Sunday morning came at last, and old Erkins ushered in the new day with deep draughts of brandy. He was trying to steady himself for a second interview with the automaton.

At last he entered the automaton’s room. There sat the ingeniously constructed thing, sound asleep in its chair. Erkins approached it gingerly, but it sat so quiet and harmless, and looked so weak and effeminate, and so unlike the ghostly thing that leered and winked at him the day before, declaring it was haunted, that his courage revived and he laughed at his fright. The old fellow was badly shattered from drinking, and his old knees tottered and his bony hands trembled as he went to the mantel and returned with the key to wind the automaton. He was very nervous and jerky about the winding; but he managed to get through with it in a fashion, and then he sat down in front of the automaton and awaited developments. The same old motions were exactly repeated, although the automaton had to puff an imaginary cigar, as Erkins was too badly shaken up to remember it. But the oversight soon began to trouble him. In his befogged condition of mind he imagined that the automaton laid it up against him. He was positive that under the smile lurked a wicked look, and he was thoroughly convinced of this when the first click came and the winking and leering commenced. There was then exhibited by that soft-appearing automaton a diabolical deviltry and a deeply mysterious cunning that no mechanical thing — so Erkins thought — could show; and when it came to the second click, and began slowly to lean forward, the horrible thought stole into the old man’s mind that the devil himself sat before him.

“I’m haunted!”

Erkins’ blood ran cold. He suffered an agony of fright. Every nerve quivered, and he gasped for breath. A deathly perspiration exuded from his face and trickled down his cheeks. With hands upraised and fingers outspread, with gaping mouth and wide-staring eyes, he gazed with a terrible, tragic fascination at the awful thing before him.

“I’m haunted!”.The blind yet ever-watchful instinct of self-preservation dragged the old man tottering from his seat and thrust him out. Stumbling, staggering, mumbling, he found his way to his own room, and fell headlong upon the floor, and passed into grateful unconsciousness.

He lay thus an hour or more, and recovering, crawled to his bed. There he remained all day, discussing in his mind the ways and means for executing a design that he had conceived.

“He didn’t exactly say it would be a cheerful one,” he mused. “He said merely that it wouldn’t die. But it does worse than that. The gladiator wasn’t haunted. It was simply dying — dying all the time. Well, I put it out of its misery. I’ll have to do another thing like that. I’m going to kill that haunted automaton if I die in the attempt.”

Such was his design. But he was not yet able to put it into execution. He tried his strength; he could hardly stand. The day wore away, and still he was too weak. He drank more brandy. Night finally came, and then he dreaded the undertaking in the dark.

Finally twelve o’clock struck; then one o’clock. The frightful visitors had quit creeping about the halls, and all had congregated in his room. He drank more. He became stronger, and there came to him a boldness born of desperation. Not another minute would he delay the annihilation of the haunted automaton. He got out of bed and lighted a candle. He knew where to find the hatchet with which he had put a stop to the sufferings of the dying gladiator, and he desired to use that particular hatchet in the deadly work that lay before him. It was in the rear part of the house. He found it. He went cautiously upstairs and approached the room of the haunted automaton. As he drew near to it he became more and more violently agitated — so much so, in fact, that when he pushed the door to enter the room the candle fell from his trembling hand and was instantly extinguished. He nerved himself with all his might, for he was determined to accomplish the work.

As he approached stealthily, step by step, he imagined he felt that maddening wink, and momentarily he expected to hear that unearthly voice declare, “I’m haunted.” So, he decided to strike from the rear. He crept around and got behind the chair. He took one step forward, and that brought him just close enough. He raised the heavy hatchet in both hands, and with all the strength of a madman brought down its keen edge upon the head of his unconscious victim.

The automaton must have turned to air, for the blow fell upon empty space; and the strength that he had thrown into it precipitated him headlong into the automatons chair. But the haunted automaton was gone!

The old man, mad with terror and raving in delirium tremens, ran from the room, shrieking for help. He burst into Sarah’s room. She was gone. He tore into Alice’s room. She too was gone.

Yelling, screaming, raving, pursued by a thousand demons, desperately mad, he flew out of the house and down the street, shrieking “I’m haunted! I’m haunted! Help! Help!”

A policeman caught him and took him to prison. On Wednesday he was calm and rational, though somewhat ill and weak. A lawyer visited him at the hospital, whither he had been taken from jail, and handed him the following note, which the old man read several times before he could fully grasp its meaning:

My Dear Sir: I told you a few weeks ago that I should be married today, Wednesday, the 24th December. I have kept my word, as I was married an hour ago. If you want an automaton you may have that dummy that you saw in the back room of my workshop; for in reality that was the one you bought, and it has never left my shop. The money you paid me on account was just what I wanted to marry on. It is a little singular that when I told you I should marry today I had not even asked the girl! She never dreamed that such was my intention until last Saturday night, when I presented myself to her old servant, whose scream when she discovered me I greatly feared would betray my presence to a certain person who did not want me there. But the girl I wanted was sensible, and we made all necessary preparations and left the house Sunday. I feared that a certain person would hear our footfalls, though we went on tiptoes and as softly as possible.

That certain person was the girl’s uncle. He had done me a bad turn, and I am now even with him; for not only did I frighten him out of his wits but I stole his niece from under his very nose and made him pay all the expenses of the wedding.

She is an excellent girl and is rich besides. By the way, her name is Alice and she is your niece; and as I am now her legal guardian, I desire that you should make to Mr — , the bearer of this, my attorney, a full accounting of all her property.

And by the way, further, we are to have a little dinner at our hotel this evening, at which our friends are expected. Can’t you come? Do so, and let’s be friends; for Christmas is a time when we should all make up. Hope you are better.

Howard Rankin, alias The Haunted Automaton.

The old man thought it all over — and went; and I am happy to add that he never drank another drop.

THE BUNDLE OF LETTERS

Mor Jokai

1891

One of the celebrated medical practitioners of Pesth, Dr. K — , was one morning, at an early hour, obliged to receive a very pressing visitor. The man, who was waiting in the anteroom, sent in word by the footman that all delay would be dangerous to him; he had, therefore, to be received immediately.

The doctor hastily wrapped a dressing-gown about him, and directed the patient to be admitted to him.

He found himself in the presence of a man who was a complete stranger to him, but who appeared to belong to the best society, judging from his manners. On his pale face could discerned traces of great physical and moral sufferings. He carried his right hand in a sling, and, though he tried to restrain himself, he now and then could not prevent a stifled sigh escaping from his lips.

“You are Dr. K———?” he asked in a low and feeble tone of voice.

“That is my name, sir.”

“Living in the country, I have not the honour of knowing you, except by reputation. But I cannot say that I am delighted to make your acquaintance, because my visit to you is not a very agreeable one.”

Seeing that the sufferer’s legs were hardly able to sustain him, the doctor invited him to be seated.

“I am fatigued. It is a week since I had any sleep. Something is the matter with my right hand; I don’t know what it is — whether it is a carbuncle, or cancer. At first the pain was slight, but now it is a continuous horrible burning, increasing from day to day. I could bear it no longer, so threw myself into my carriage, and came to you, to beg you to cut out the affected spot, for an hour more of this torture will drive me mad.”

The doctor tried to reassure him, by saying that he might be able to cure the pain with dissolvents and ointments, without resorting to the use of the bistory.

“No, no, sir!” cried the patient; “no plaisters or ointments can give me any relief. I must have the knife. I have come to you to cut out the place which causes me so much suffering.”

The doctor asked to see the hand, which the patient held out to him, grinding his teeth, so insufferable appeared to be the pain he was enduring, and with all imaginable precaution he unwound the bandages in which it was enveloped.

“Above all, doctor, I beg of you not to hesitate on account of anything you may see. My disorder is so strange, that you will be surprised; but do not let that weigh with you.”

Doctor K — reassured the stranger. As a doctor in practice he was used to seeing everything, and there was nothing that could surprise him.

What he saw when the hand was freed from its bandages stupefied him nevertheless. Nothing abnormal was to be seen in it — neither wound nor graze; it was a hand like any other. Bewildered, he let it fall from his own.

A cry of pain escaped from the stranger, who raised the afflicted member with his right hand, showing the doctor that he had not come with the intention of mystifying him, and that he was really suffering.

“Where is the sensitive spot?”

“Here, sir,” said the stranger, indicating on the back of his hand a point where two large veins crossed, his whole frame trembling when the doctor touched it with the tip of his finger.

“It is here that the burning pain makes itself felt?”

“Abominably!”

“Do you feel the pressure when I place my finger on it?”

The man made no reply, but his eyes filled with tears, so acute was his suffering.

“It is surprising! I can see nothing at that place.”

“Nor can I; yet what I feel there is so terrible that at times I am almost driven to dash my head against the wall.”

The doctor examined the spot with a magnifying-glass, then shook his head.

“The skin is full of life; the blood within it circulates regularly; there is neither inflammation nor cancer under it; it is as healthy at that spot as elsewhere.”

“Yet I think it is a little redder there.”

“Where?”

The stranger took a pencil from his pocket book and traced on his hand a ring about the size of a sixpenny-piece, and said:

“It is there.”

The doctor looked in his face; he was beginning to believe that his patient’s mind was unhinged.

“Remain here,” he said, “and in a few days I’ll cure you.”

“I cannot wait. Don’t think that I am a madman, a maniac; it is not in that way that you would cure me. The little circle which I have marked with my pencil causes me internal tortures, and I have come to you to cut it away.”

“That I cannot do,” said the doctor.

“Why?”

“Because your hand exhibits no pathological disorder. I see at the spot you have indicated nothing more amiss than on my own hand.”

“You really seem to think that I have gone out of my senses, or that I have come here to mock you,” said the stranger, taking from his pocket-book a banknote for a thousand florins, and laying it on the table. “Now, sir, you see that I am not playing off any childish jest and that the service I seek of you is as urgent as it is important. I beg you to remove this part of my hand.”

“I repeat, sir, that for all the treasures in the world you cannot make me regard as unsound a member that is perfectly sound, and still less induce me to cut it with my instruments.”

“And why not?”

“Because such an act would cast a doubt upon my medical knowledge and compromise my reputation. Everybody would say that you were mad; that I was dishonest in taking advantage of your condition, or ignorant in not perceiving it.”

“Very well. I will only ask a small service of you, then. I am myself capable of making the incision. I shall do it rather clumsily with my left hand; but that does not matter. Be good enough only to bind up the wound after the operation.”

It was with astonishment that the doctor saw that this strange man was speaking seriously. He stripped off his coat, turned up the wristbands of his shirt, and took a bistory in his left hand.

A second later, and the steel had made a deep incision in the skin.

“Stay!” cried the doctor, who feared that his patient might, through his awkwardness, sever some important organ. “Since you have determined on the operation, let me perform it.”

He took the bistory, and placing in his left hand the right hand of the patient, begged him to turn away his face, the sight of blood being insupportable to many persons.

“Quite needless. On the contrary, it is I who must direct you where to cut.”

In fact he watched the operation to the end with the greatest coolness, indicating the limits of the incisions. The open hand did not even quiver in that of the doctor, and when the circular piece was removed, he sighed profoundly, like a man experiencing an enormous relief.

“Nothing burns you now?”

“All has ceased,” said the stranger, smiling. “The pain has completely disappeared, as if it had been carried away with the part excised. The little discomfort which the flowing of blood causes me, compared with the other pain, is like a fresh breeze after a blast from the infernal regions. It does me a real good to see my blood pouring forth: let it flow, it does me extreme good.”

The stranger watched with an expression of delight the blood pouring from the wound, and the doctor was obliged to insist on binding up the hand.

During the bandaging the aspect of his face completely changed. It no longer bore a dolorous expression, but a look full of good humour was turned upon the doctor. No more contraction of the features, no more despair. A taste for life had returned; the brow was once again calmed; the colour found its way back to the cheeks. The entire man exhibited a complete transformation.

As soon as his hand was laid in the sling he warmly wrung the doctor’s hand with the one that remained free, and said cordially:

“Accept my sincere thanks. You have positively cured me. The trifling remuneration I offer you is not at all proportioned to the service you have rendered me: for the rest of my life I shall search for the means of repaying my debt to you.”

The doctor would not listen to anything of the kind, and refused to accept the thousand florins placed on the table. On his side the stranger refused to take them back, and, observing that the doctor was losing his temper, begged him to make a present of the money to some hospital, and took his departure.

K — remained for several days at his town-house until the wound in his patient’s hand should be cicatrised. During this time the doctor was able to satisfy himself that he had to do with a man of extensive knowledge, reflective, and having very positive opinions in regard to the affairs of life. Besides being rich, he occupied an important official position. Since the taking away of his invisible pain, no trace of moral or physical malady was discoverable in him.

The cure completed, the man returned tranquilly to his residence in the country.

About three weeks had passed away when, one morning, at an hour as unduly as before, the servant again announced the strange patient.

The stranger, whom K — hastened to receive, entered the room with his right hand in a sling, his features convulsed and hardly recognisable from suffering. Without waiting to be invited to sit down, he sank into a chair, and, being unable to master the torture he was enduring, groaned, and without uttering a word, held out his hand to the doctor.

“What has happened?” asked K — , stupefied.

“We have not cut deep enough,” replied the stranger, sadly, and in a fainting voice. “It burns me more cruelly than before. I am worn out by it; my arm is stiffened by it. I did not wish to trouble you a second time, and have borne it, hoping that by degrees the invisible inflammation would either mount to my head or descend to my heart, and put an end to my miserable existence; but it has not done so. The pain never goes beyond the spot, but it is indescribable! Look at my face, and you will be able to imagine what it must be!”

The colour of the man’s skin was that of wax, and a cold perspiration beaded his forehead. The doctor unbound the bandaged hand. The point operated on was well healed; a new skin had formed, and nothing extraordinary was to be seen. The sufferer’s pulse beat quickly, without feverishness, while yet he trembled in every limb.

“This really smacks on the marvellous!” exclaimed the doctor, more and more astonished. “I have never before seen such a case.”

“It is a prodigy, a horrible prodigy, doctor. Do not try to find a cause for it, but deliver me from this torment. Take your knife and cut deeper and wider: only that can relieve me.”

The doctor was obliged to give in to the prayers of his patient. He performed the operation once again, cutting into the flesh more deeply; and, once more, he saw in the sufferer’s face the expression of astonishing relief, the curiosity at seeing the blood flow from the wound, which he had observed on the first occasion.

When the hand was dressed, the deadly pallor passed from the face, the colour returned to the cheeks; but the patient no more smiled. This time he thanked the doctor sadly.

“I thank you, doctor,” he said. “The pain has once more left me. In a few days the wound will heal. Do not be astonished, however, to see me return before a month has passed.”

“Oh! my dear sir, drive this idea from your mind.”

The doctor mentioned this strange case to several of his colleagues, who each held a different opinion in regard to it, without any of them being able to furnish a plausible explanation of its nature.

As the end of the month approached, K — awaited with anxiety the reappearance of this enigmatic personage. But the month passed and he did not reappear.

Several weeks more went by. At length the doctor received a letter from the sufferer’s residence. It was very closely written, and by the signature he saw that it had been penned by his patient’s own hand; from which he concluded that the pain had not returned, for otherwise it would have been very difficult for him to have held a pen.

These are the contents of the letter:

Dear doctor, I cannot leave either you or medical science in doubt in regard to the mystery of the strange malady which will shortly carry me to the grave.

I will here tell you the origin of this terrible malady. For the past week it has returned the third time, and I will no longer struggle with it. At this moment I am only able to write by placing upon the sensitive spot a piece of burning tinder in the form of a poultice. While the tinder is burning I do not feel the other pain; and what distress it causes me is a mere trifle by comparison.

Six months ago I was still a happy man. I lived on my income without a care. I was on good terms with everybody, and enjoyed all that is of interest to a man of five-and-thirty. I had married a year before — a young lady, handsome, with a cultivated mind and a heart as good as any heart could be, who has been a governess in the house of a countess, a neighbour of mine. She was fortuneless, and attached herself to me, not only from gratitude, but still more from real childish affection. Six months passed, during which every day appeared to be happier than the one which had gone before. If, at times, I was obliged to go to Pesth and quit my own land for a day, my wife had not a moment’s rest. She would come two leagues on the way to meet me. If I was detained late, she passed a sleepless night waiting for me; and if by prayers I succeeded in inducing her to go and visit her former mistress, who had not ceased to be extremely fond of her, no power could keep her away from home for more than half a day; and by her regrets for my absence, she invariably spoiled the good-humour of others. Her tenderness for me went so far as to make her renounce dancing, so as not to be obliged to give her hand to strangers, and nothing more displeased her than gallantries addressed to her. In a word, I had for my wife an innocent girl, who thought of nothing but me, and who confessed to me her dreams as enormous crimes, if they were not of me.

I know not what demon one day whispered in my ear: Suppose that all this were dissimulation? Men are mad enough to seek torments in the midst of their greatest happiness.

My wife had a work-table, the drawer of which she carefully locked. I had noticed this several times. She never forgot the key, and never left the drawer open.

That question haunted my mind. What could she be hiding there? I had become mad. I no longer believed either in the innocence of her face or the purity of her looks, nor in her caresses, nor in her kisses. What if all that were mere hypocrisy?

One morning the countess came anew to invite her to her house, and, after much pressing, succeeded in inducing her to go and spend the day with her. Our estates were some leagues from each other, and I promised to join my wife in the course of a few hours.

As soon as the carriage had quitted the courtyard, I collected all the keys in the house and tried them on the lock of the little drawer. One of them opened it. I felt like a man committing his first crime. I was a thief about to surprise the secrets of my poor wife. My hands trembled as I carefully pulled out the drawer, and, one by one, turned over the objects within it, so that no derangement of them might betray the fact of a strange hand having disturbed them. My bosom was oppressed; I was almost stifled. Suddenly — under some lace — I put my hand upon a packet of letters. It was as if a flash of lightning had passed through me from my head to my heart. Oh! they were the sort of letters one recognises at a glance — love letters!

The packet was tied with a rose-coloured ribbon, edged with silver.

As I touched that ribbon this thought came into my mind: Is it conceivable? — is this the work of an honest man? To steal the secrets of his wife! — secrets belonging to the time when she was a young girl. Have I any right to exact from her a reckoning for thoughts she may have had before she belonged to me? Have I any right to be jealous of a time when I was unknown to her? Who could suspect her of a fault? Who? I am guilty for having suspected her. The demon again whispered in my ears: “But what if these letters date from a time when you already had a right to know all her thoughts, when you might already be jealous of her dreams, when she was already yours?” I unfastened the ribbon. Nobody saw me. There was not even a mirror to make me blush for myself. I opened one letter, then another, and I read them to the end.

Oh, it was a terrible hour for me!

What was in these letters? The vilest treason of which a man has ever been the victim. The writer of these letters was one of my intimate friends! And the tone in which they were written! — what passion, what love, certain of being returned! How he spoke of “keeping the secret!” And all these letters dated at a time when I was married and so happy! How can I tell you what I felt? Imagine the intoxication caused by a mortal poison. I read all those letters — every one. Then I put them up again in a packet, re-tied them with the ribbon, and, replacing them under the lace, relocked the drawer.

I knew that if she did not see me by noon she would return in the evening from her visit to the countess — as she did. She descended from the caleche hurriedly, to rush towards me as I stood awaiting her on the steps. She kissed me with excessive tenderness, and appeared extremely happy to be once again with me. I allowed nothing of what was passing within me to appear in my face. We conversed, we supped together, and each retired to our bedrooms. I did not close an eye. Broad awake, I counted all the hours. When the clock struck the first quarter after midnight, I rose and entered her room. The beautiful fair head was there pressed into the white pillows — as angels are painted in the midst of snowy clouds. What a frightful lie of nature’s is vice under an aspect so innocent! I was resolved, with the headlong willfulness of a madman, haunted by a fixed idea. The poison had completely corroded my soul. I resolved to kill her as she lay.

I pass over the details of the crime. She died without offering the least resistance, as tranquilly as one goes to sleep. She was never irritated against me — even when I killed her. One single drop of blood fell on the back of my hand — you know where. I did not perceive until the next day, when it was dry.

We buried her without anybody suspecting the truth. I lived in solitude. Who could have controlled my actions? She had neither parent nor guardian who could have addressed to me any questions on the subject, and I designedly put off sending the customary invitations to the funeral, so that my friends could not arrive in time.

On returning from the vault I felt not the least weight upon my conscience. I had been cruel, but she had deserved it. I would not hate her — I would forget her. I scarcely thought of her. Never did a man commit an assassination with less remorse than I.

The countess, so often mentioned, was at the château when I returned there. My measures had been so well taken that she also had arrived too late for the internment. On seeing me she appeared greatly agitated. Terror, sympathy, sorrow, or, I know not what, had put so much into her words that I could not understand what she was saying to console me.

Was I even listening to her? Had I any need of consolation? I was not sad. At last she took me familiarly by the hand, and, dropping her voice, said that she was obliged to confide a secret to me, and that she relied on my honour as a gentleman not to abuse it. She had given my wife a packet of letters to mind, not having been able to keep them in her own house; and these letters she now requested me to return to her. While she was speaking, I several times felt a shudder run through my frame. With seeming coolness, however, I questioned her as to the content of the letters. At this interrogation the lady started, and replied angrily:

“Sir, your wife has been more generous than you! When she took charge of my letters, she did not demand to know what they contained. She even gave me her promise that she would never set eyes on them, and I am convinced that she never read a line of any one of them. She had a noble heart, and would have been ashamed to forfeit the pledge she had given.”

“Very well,” I replied. “How shall I recognise this packet?”

“It was tied with a rose-coloured ribbon edged with silver.”

“I will go and search for it.”

I took my wife’s keys, knowing perfectly well where I should find the packet; but I pretended to find it with much difficulty.

“Is this it?” I asked the countess, handing it to her.

“Yes, yes — that is it! See! — the knot I myself made has never been touched.”

I dared not raise my eyes to her; I feared lest she should read in them that I had untied the knot of that packet, and something more.

I took leave of her abruptly; she sprang into her carriage and drove off.

The drop of blood had disappeared, the pain was not manifested by any external symptom; and yet the spot marked by the drop burned me as if it had been bitten by a corrosive poison. This pain grows from hour to hour. I sleep sometimes, but I never cease to be conscious of my suffering. I do not complain to anybody: nobody, indeed, would believe my story. You have seen the violence of my torment, and you know how much the two operations have relieved me; but concurrently with the healing of the wound, the pain returns. It has now attacked me for the third time, and I have no longer strength to resist it. In an hour I shall be dead. One thought consoles me; it is that she has avenged herself here below. She will perhaps forgive me above. I thank you for all you have done for me. May heaven reward you.

•   •   •

A few days later one might have read in the newspapers that S———, one of the richest landowners, had blown out his brains. Some attributed his suicide to sorrow caused by the death of his wife; others, better informed, to an incurable wound. Those who best knew him said that he had been attacked by monomania, that his incurable wound existed only in his imagination.

A STRANGE REUNION

T. G. Atkinson

1893

In a poor little house in a wretched little town on a miserable day in November, two men sat by a small wood fire, warming their hands at the tiny blaze and silently watching the flicker of the flames. They were both young men; the elder was not more than twenty-six or seven and the younger was perhaps a year behind.

One of them was plain Charlie Osborne; the other rejoiced in the more aristocratic sobriquet of Eustace Margraf. But it mattered little by what different names they were called, since Fortune had forgotten to call on both alike. In short, they were “broke” — almost “stony broke.” There had been a lock-out at the works at which they were both employed, and although they had neither of them joined the combination, they were none the less out of a job, and the fact of their former employment at the works that had locked them out told heavily against their chance of procuring other work in the town.

Neither was there much likelihood of their going back to the works, for the owners were rich men who could afford a long struggle, and the men were obstinate; and even if the strikers ever got back, Osborne and Margraf were in the awkward positions of being blacklegs. Thus it was that Fortune had forgotten these two young men who sat by their little fire, doggedly silent, too low-hearted even to curse Fortune.

“I shall go to London, Charlie,” said the elder, suddenly, without looking up.

“What shall we do there?” growled the other. Osborne and Margraf had been more inseparable than brothers since the death of each of their parents ten years ago. Therefore it was that, when the latter announced his intention of going to London, the former instantly assumed his own share in the venture, and asked:

“What shall we do in London?”

“Don’t know till I get there,” answered Margraf, who, be it observed, did not encourage the first person plural. First person singular was a good deal more in his line. Yet he loved his chum, too, in his own way; but it was not the best way.

“What’s the use of going, then?”

“What’s the use of staying in this damned show? What’s the use of tramping round day and night after a job that never comes? What’s the use of anything? I’m tired of mill work; it isn’t what I was made for. I’m going to try my luck at something better. You needn’t come.”

But because Charlie Osborne was accustomed to be led by his comrade, he too gave out his intention to try his fortunes in London. This was not quite what Margraf wanted. He evidently had a scheme in contemplation in which he would prefer to be alone.

“I’ll tell you what, Charlie, old fellow,” he said after awhile. “I’ve got a plan I want you to help carry out. I want you and me to separate for three years — only three years — and try our luck alone. At the end of the three years we will meet again and see how each has got on, and divide takings.”

“Not see each other at all?” asked Charlie, ruefully. His love for his chum was of the better kind; the second person singular species.

“No, not at all,” answered the other, firmly, as though he were laying down a painful but apparent duty. “Not have any communication with each other except in case of extreme necessity. In that case we can put an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph. We will make a point of always seeing that paper.”

After a longer demur than he was accustomed to raise to any scheme of Margraf’s, however wild and chimerical, Charlie at last let his usual submission, and a vague suspicion that his companionship might be dragging Margraf back from attaining a position more worthy of that gentleman’s talents, get the better of him. He made a hard fight for the privilege of exchanging letters during the three years, but Eustace remained obdurate. There was to be no communication except under the circumstances and in the manner named. Each was to take care to see the Daily Telegraph every morning in case of such communications; and at the exact expiration of the three years, that is, on the 15th November, 188-, they were to meet at twelve o’clock noon at Charing Cross station.

So these two men divided up their little stock of belongings and smaller capital of money, took a third-class ticket each to London, went together to Charing Cross to verify the scene of their future reunion, and shook hands.

“We meet here in three years from today.”

“We do, all being well. Good-bye, Charlie.”

“Good-bye, old fellow.”

Thus they parted, each on his separate quest for fortune.

On the evening of the 14th November, 188 — , Eustace Margraf, Esq., Director and Chairman of the Anglican Debenture Corporation, Ltd., eke of the General Stock and Shareholders’ Protective Union, Ltd., and various other like speculative companies, sat in the luxurious dining-room of his well-appointed residence in Lewisham Park. He had finished his sumptuous but solitary meal, and, reclining in a spacious armchair, sipped his rare old wine. It was three years all but a day since he had parted from Charlie Osborne on Charing Cross Station, and set out with eighteenpence in his pocket to seek his fortune. In that brief time he had rapidly risen to wealth and distinction. Three years ago he was a penniless mechanic, forsaken by Fortune and discontented with his life; today he was a rich man, smiled on and courted by Fortune and envied by all her minions, and still he was discontented with his life.

It was strange that he should cherish this discontent, for Eustace Margraf, mindful of the fact that he was made for something better than mill work, had matriculated and graduated at the World’s University in the Department of Forgery and Theft. He had taken the highest diplomas in fraud; he had passed with honours the test of an accomplished swindler; and in the intricacies of embezzlement he was Senior Wrangler. Yet he was not content; some men are never satisfied.

This evening, as he sat sampling his ’18 Oporto, with the daily paper at his elbow, he actually felt some amount of regret that he had entered the course for such distinctions — which, by the way, his modesty forbade him publishing to the world at large. Only a select few knew the extent of his accomplishments.

In the paper at his side there was a little paragraph which had given his memory a rather unpleasant jog. It was in the personal column, and ran as follows: “E. M. — Don’t forget tomorrow, noon, C. C. Station. — Charlie.” He wanted to see Charlie, for he still loved him after his old fashion; but the memories which the advertisement called up, and a doubt as to whether Charlie would appreciate his accomplishments, made him fidgety; and the recollection of all that must pass between now and noon tomorrow filled him with uneasiness. For tonight he was to stake everything in one tremendous venture. If he succeeded he would need to do nothing more all his life; if he failed—

Tonight, at eight o’clock, the Continental mail train would start from Charing Cross Station with seventy-five thousand pounds worth of bullion for the Bank of France. If Eustace Margraf succeeded in his enterprise, it would reach Paris with the same weight of valueless shot in the strong iron boxes.

Everything had been nicely and minutely arranged. The shot had been carefully weighed to a quarter of a grain, and portioned into three equal lots to match the cases of bullion, which would be weighed on leaving London, again at Dover, once more at Calais, and finally on arrival at Paris. A key to fit the cases had been secretly made from a wax impression of the original, how obtained none but Margraf knew. This key he would hand to his confederates this evening at Charing Cross Station, after which he would go down by the seven o’clock train preceding the mail.

The stoker of the mail, an old railway hand, had been bribed, together with the guard in whose compartment the bullion would travel. It had been thought desirable to deal differently with the front guard and the driver; a specially prepared and powerful drug was to be given them in a pint of beer just before starting, which would take effect about an hour after administration and last till the sleepers should be aroused by brandy. During their slumber the stoker would pull up at convenient places on the line to allow the robbers to enter the guard’s carriage and leave it with their booty, when they would make off to where Margraf had arranged to meet them; he would manage the rest. The front guard and the driver, meanwhile, would for their own sakes be glad enough to say nothing about their long slumber.

All these arrangements had been made with great nicety, and told over twice; and yet Margraf was uneasy and nervous as he thought of all the risk he ran. Twice he stretched out his hand for the bell-rope for telegram forms to stay the whole business; once he went so far as to ring the bell, but he altered his mind by the time the servant answered it, and ordered hot brandy instead. It was now six o’clock; in another hour he must hand over the duplicate key to his accomplices and board the train for Dover.

Every moment he grew more nervous, his hand became so shaky that brandy failed to steady it; his face grew pale and haggard; his nerves were strung to a painful tension; and all sorts of possibilities of failure in his scheme haunted him till he could have cried out from sheer nervousness.

“God!” he exclaimed, as he drained a glass of brandy and water and rose to go. “A life like this would kill me. Well, this shall be the last risk. If it turns out all right — as it must — I shall give this kind of business up. I shall have plenty then, and old Charlie will go off and live quietly and comfortably.”

•   •   •

The rear guard of the seven o’clock Continental finished his last cup of tea, put on his thick winter coat, kissed his wife and baby girl, and took up his lantern preparatory to joining his train. He reached the station as the great engine was being coupled and gave the driver a cheery salute, which that official acknowledged with a surly growl.

“Something put Jimmy out tonight,” he laughed to the fireman, a young, inexperienced fellow, making his trial trip, and passed on to make his inspection of things in general before starting.

At the last moment a richly-dressed gentleman, wearing a long fur coat, and carrying a large travelling rug, entered a first-class smoking compartment. This gentleman, whom numerous people on the platform recognised as he passed and saluted respectfully, was Eustace Margraf, Esq. The carriage he got into was an empty one, and, lying full length on the seat, covered with his rug, he lit a cigar and composed himself to make the best of a long and tiresome railway journey. The guard blew his whistle, the great engine reproduced it in a loud, deep tone, and the train steamed slowly out of the station, twenty minutes late in starting.

Left to his own reflections, which were none of the liveliest, and lulled by the motion of the train, our traveller soon fell into a fitful sleep, wherein he was haunted by dreams that wrought upon his brain until he was almost as nervous as he had been in his own room some hours before.

He awoke suddenly, with a vague sense that the train was travelling at a most unusual and unaccountable speed: and, as he leapt to his feet in a half-dazed fright, they shot through Tunbridge — a place at which they were timed to make a ten minutes’ stop — and he was conscious of seeing, as in a flash, a crowd of frightened and awe-struck faces looking at the train from the platform. He sank back on the cushioned seat, seized with a nameless terror. Time and space seemed to his overwrought nerves to be filled with tokens of some approaching calamity which he was powerless to prevent; the terrific speed and violent swaying of the train, the shrill howl of the ceaseless whistle, the terrible darkness and silence of everything outside his immediate surroundings, and the recollection of that crowd of terrified faces, all seemed to thrill him with a sense of impending horror, and the wretched man sat terror-stricken on his seat, a mere mass of highly-strung and delicate nerves.

Suddenly, as he looked into the black night, a face passed the window, as of someone walking along the footboard to the engine; a stern-set face, as of one going to certain danger and needing all the pluck he possessed to carry him through: and at the apparition the traveller fairly shrieked aloud; but the face passed on and was gone.

In another moment there was a sudden shout — a terrific crash — a wild chaos of sight and sound — and our traveller knew no more.

When next he found his senses, he was lying among cushions and rugs in the waiting-room at Tunbridge Wells Station. He awoke with a faint shiver, and tried to raise himself, but found to his astonishment that he could not so much as lift a finger. As a matter of fact, he was among those whom the busy surgeons had given up as a desperate case; and, after doing all in their power to ease him, abandoned in favour of more hopeful subjects; but this he did not know.

Several of the passengers whose injuries were only very slight were discussing the accident in an animated manner, and, as usual in such cases, many wild and fanciful conjectures were passed about as truth. At last one said:

“Does anyone know the rights of the matter?”

“Yes, I do,” volunteered a young man with an arm in a sling; and Margraf lay silently listening, unable to move or speak.

“Well, what is it?”

“Just after we passed Grove Park, the fireman was on the front of the engine oiling, when he felt the locomotive increasing in speed till it became so appalling that he grew terrified and could not get back. He is a young fellow, and this is his trial trip. At length he managed to crawl back to the cab, where he found the driver lying, as he supposed, dead. This so increased his terror that he was only able to open the whistle and pull the cord communicating with the rear guard, and then fell in a swoon across the tender.

“The rear guard, a plucky young fellow of about six-and-twenty, twigging the situation, came, as we all know, along the footboard to the engine” — Margraf listened with all his remaining strength — “in order to stop the train before it ran into the Ramsgate express, but apparently was too late.”

“But what was up with the driver, and where was the front guard in the meanwhile?”

“Well, it appears from what the front guard says — marvellous how he escaped with hardly a scratch — both these men had been drugged, and as they were both of them to have run the mail train to the Continent tonight, things look very fishy.”

Margraf nearly fainted in his efforts to listen more intensely.

“They were changed on to this train at the last moment, and hence this accident. The rear guard, poor fellow, was shockingly mangled. Stone dead, of course; and leaves, I understand, a wife and child. There will no doubt be a collection made for him. He was a plucky fellow.”

“Does anyone know his name?” asked one.

“Yes; his name was Charlie Osborne.”

There was a heartrending groan from the cushions and rugs.

“Here,” cried a young medical student among the party to a passing surgeon, “you’d better come and have a look at this poor chap. He isn’t as dead as you thought he was.”

The surgeon came and looked at Margraf.

“Isn’t he?” he said, in his cool, professional way. “He is a good deal farther gone than I thought. He couldn’t be gone much farther.”

THE VENGEANCE
OF THE DEAD

Robert Barr

1894

It is a bad thing for a man to die with an unsatisfied thirst for revenge parching his soul. David Allen died, cursing Bernard Heaton and lawyer Grey; hating the lawyer who had won the case even more than the man who was to gain by the winning. Yet if cursing were to be done, David should rather have cursed his own stubbornness and stupidity.

To go back for some years, this is what had happened. Squire Heaton’s only son went wrong. The squire raged, as was natural. He was one of a long line of hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-swearing squires, and it was maddening to think that his only son should deliberately take to books and cold water, when there was manly sport on the countryside and old wine in the cellar. Yet before now such blows have descended upon deserving men, and they have to be borne as best they may. Squire Heaton bore it badly, and when his son went off on a Government scientific expedition around the world the squire drank harder and swore harder than ever, but never mentioned the boy’s name.

Two years after, young Heaton returned, but the doors of the Hall were closed against him. He had no mother to plead for him, although it was not likely that would have made any difference, for the squire was not a man to be appealed to and swayed this way or that. He took his hedges, his drinks, and his course in life straight. The young man went to India, where he was drowned. As there is no mystery in this matter, it may as well be stated here that young Heaton ultimately returned to England, as drowned men have ever been in the habit of doing, when their return will mightily inconvenience innocent persons who have taken their places. It is a disputed question whether the sudden disappearance of a man, or his reappearance after a lapse of years, is the more annoying.

If the old squire felt remorse at the supposed death of his only son he did not show it. The hatred which had been directed against his unnatural offspring redoubled itself and was bestowed on his nephew David Allen, who was now the legal heir to the estate and its income. Allen was the impecunious son of the squire’s sister who had married badly. It is hard to starve when one is heir to a fine property, but that is what David did, and it soured him. The Jews would not lend on the security — the son might return — so David Allen waited for a dead man’s shoes, impoverished and embittered.

At last the shoes were ready for him to step into. The old squire died as a gentleman should, of apoplexy, in his armchair, with a decanter at his elbow; David Allen entered into his belated inheritance, and his first act was to discharge every servant, male and female, about the place and engage others who owed their situations to him alone. Then were the Jews sorry they had not trusted him.

He was now rich but broken in health, with bent shoulders, without a friend on the earth. He was a man suspicious of all the world, and he had a furtive look over his shoulder as if he expected Fate to deal him a sudden blow — as indeed it did.

It was a beautiful June day, when there passed the porter’s lodge and walked up the avenue to the main entrance of the Hall a man whose face was bronzed by a torrid sun. He requested speech with the master and was asked into a room to wait.

At length David Allen shuffled in, with his bent shoulders, glaring at the intruder from under his bushy eyebrows. The stranger rose as he entered and extended his hand.

“You don’t know me, of course. I believe we have never met before. I am your cousin.”

Allen ignored the outstretched hand.

“I have no cousin,” he said.

“I am Bernard Heaton, the son of your uncle.”

“Bernard Heaton is dead.”

“I beg your pardon, he is not. I ought to know, for I tell you I am he.”

“You lie!”

Heaton, who had been standing since his cousin’s entrance, now sat down again, Allen remaining on his feet.

“Look here,” said the newcomer. “Civility costs nothing—”

“I cannot be civil to an impostor.”

“Quite so. It is difficult. Still, if I am an impostor, civility can do no harm, while if it should turn out that I am not an impostor, then your present tone may make after arrangements all the harder upon you. Now will you oblige me by sitting down? I dislike, while sitting myself, talking to a standing man.”

“Will you oblige me by stating what you want before I order my servants to turn you out?”

“I see you are going to be hard on yourself. I will endeavour to keep my temper, and if I succeed it will be a triumph for a member of our family. I am to state what I want? I will. I want as my own the three rooms on the first floor of the south wing — the rooms communicating with each other. You perceive I at least know the house. I want my meals served there, and I wish to be undisturbed at all hours. Next, I desire that you settle upon me, say, five hundred a year — or six hundred — out of the revenues of the estate. I am engaged in scientific research of a peculiar kind. I can make money, of course, but I wish my mind left entirely free from financial worry. I shall not interfere with your enjoyment of the estate in the least.”

“I’ll wager you will not. So you think I am fool enough to harbour and feed the first idle vagabond that comes along and claims to be my dead cousin. Go to the courts with your story and be imprisoned as similar perjurers have been.”

“Of course I don’t expect you to take my word for it. If you were any judge of human nature you would see I am not a vagabond. Still that’s neither here nor there. Choose three of your own friends. I will lay my proofs before them, and abide by their decision. Come, nothing could be fairer than that, now could it?”

“Go to the courts, I tell you.”

“Oh certainly. But only as a last resort. No wise man goes to law if there is another course open. But what is the use of taking such an absurd position? You know I’m your cousin. I’ll take you blindfold into every room in the place.”

“Any discharged servant could do that. I have had enough of you. I am not a man to be blackmailed. Will you leave the house yourself, or shall I call the servants to put you out?”

“I should be sorry to trouble you,” said Heaton, rising. “That is your last word, I take it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then good-bye. We shall meet at Philippi.”

Allen watched him disappear down the avenue, and it dimly occurred to him that he had not acted diplomatically.

Heaton went directly to lawyer Grey, and laid the case before him. He told the lawyer what his modest demands were, and gave instructions that if, at any time before the suit came off, his cousin would compromise, an arrangement avoiding publicity should be arrived at.

“Excuse me for saying that looks like weakness,” remarked the lawyer.

“I know it does,” answered Heaton. “But my case is so strong that I can afford to have it appear weak.”

The lawyer shook his head. He knew how uncertain the law was. But he soon discovered that no compromise was possible.

The case came to trial, and the verdict was entirely in favour of Bernard Heaton.

The pallor of death spread over the sallow face of David Allen as he realized that he was once again a man without a penny or a foot of land. He left the court with bowed head, speaking no word to those who had defended him. Heaton hurried after him, overtaking him on the pavement.

“I knew this had to be the result,” he said to the defeated man. “No other outcome was possible. I have no desire to cast you penniless into the street. What you refused to me I shall be glad to offer you. I will make the annuity a thousand pounds.”

Allen, trembling, darted one look of malignant hate at his cousin.

“You successful scoundrel!” he cried. “You and your villainous confederate Grey. I tell you — ”

The blood rushed to his mouth; he fell upon the pavement and died. One and the same day had robbed him of his land and his life.

Bernard Heaton deeply regretted the tragic issue, but went on with his researches at the Hall, keeping much to himself. Lawyer Grey, who had won renown by his conduct of the celebrated case, was almost his only friend. To him Heaton partially disclosed his hopes, told what he had learned during those years he had been lost to the world in India, and claimed that if he succeeded in combining the occultism of the East with the science of the West, he would make for himself a name of imperishable renown.

The lawyer, a practical man of the world, tried to persuade Heaton to abandon his particular line of research, but without success.

“No good can come of it,” said Grey. “India has spoiled you. Men who dabble too much in that sort of thing go mad. The brain is a delicate instrument. Do not trifle with it.”

“Nevertheless,” persisted Heaton, “the great discoveries of the twentieth century are going to be in that line, just as the great discoveries of the nineteenth century have been in the direction of electricity.”

“The cases are not parallel. Electricity is a tangible substance.”

“Is it? Then tell me what it is composed of? We all know how it is generated, and we know partly what it will do, but what is it?”

“I shall have to charge you six-and-eightpence for answering that question,” the lawyer had said with a laugh. “At any rate there is a good deal to be discovered about electricity yet. Turn your attention to that and leave this Indian nonsense alone.”

Yet, astonishing as it may seem, Bernard Heaton, to his undoing, succeeded, after many futile attempts — several times narrowly escaping death. Inventors and discoverers have to risk their lives as often as soldiers, with less chance of worldly glory.

First his invisible excursions were confined to the house and his own grounds, then he went further afield, and to his intense astonishment one day he met the spirit of the man who hated him.

“Ah,” said David Allen, “you did not live long to enjoy your ill-gotten gains.”

“You are as wrong in this sphere of existence as you were in the other. I am not dead.”

“Then why are you here and in this shape?”

“I suppose there is no harm in telling you. What I wanted to discover, at the time you would not give me a hearing, was how to separate the spirit from its servant, the body — that is, temporarily and not finally. My body is at this moment lying apparently asleep in a locked room in my house — one of the rooms I begged from you. In an hour or two I shall return and take possession of it.”

“And how do you take possession of it and quit it?”

Heaton, pleased to notice the absence of that rancour which had formerly been Allen’s most prominent characteristic, and feeling that any information given to a disembodied spirit was safe as far as the world was concerned, launched out on the subject that possessed his whole mind.

“It is very interesting,” said Allen, when he had finished.

And so they parted.

David Allen at once proceeded to the Hall, which he had not seen since the day he left it to attend the trial. He passed quickly through the familiar apartments until he entered the locked room on the first floor of the south wing. There on the bed lay the body of Heaton, most of the colour gone from the face, but breathing regularly, if almost imperceptibly, like a mechanical wax-figure.

If a watcher had been in the room, he would have seen the colour slowly return to the face and the sleeper gradually awaken, at last rising from the bed.

Allen, in the body of Heaton, at first felt very uncomfortable, as a man does who puts on an ill-fitting suit of clothes. The limitations caused by the wearing of a body also discommoded him. He looked carefully around the room. It was plainly furnished. A desk in the corner he found contained the MS. of a book prepared for the printer, all executed with the neat accuracy of a scientific man. Above the desk, pasted against the wall, was a sheet of paper headed:

“What to do if I am found here apparently dead.” Underneath were plainly written instructions. It was evident that Heaton had taken no one into his confidence.

It is well if you go in for revenge to make it as complete as possible. Allen gathered up the MS., placed it in the grate, and set a match to it. Thus he at once destroyed his enemy’s chances of posthumous renown, and also removed evidence that might, in certain contingencies, prove Heaton’s insanity.

Unlocking the door, he proceeded down the stairs, where he met a servant who told him luncheon was ready. He noticed that the servant was one whom he had discharged, so he came to the conclusion that Heaton had taken back all the old retainers who had applied to him when the result of the trial became public. Before lunch was over he saw that some of his own servants were also there still.

“Send the gamekeeper to me,” said Allen to the servant.

Brown came in, who had been on the estate for twenty years continuously, with the exception of the few months after Allen had packed him off.

“What pistols have I, Brown?”

“Well, sir, there’s the old squire’s duelling pistols, rather out of date, sir; then your own pair and that American revolver.”

“Is the revolver in working order?”

“Oh yes, sir,”

“Then bring it to me and some cartridges.”

When Brown returned with the revolver his master took it and examined it.

“Be careful, sir,” said Brown anxiously. “You know it’s a self cocker, sir.”

“A what?”

“A self-cocking revolver, sir” — trying to repress his astonishment at the question his master asked about a weapon with which he should have been familiar.

“Show me what you mean,” said Allen, handing back the revolver.

Brown explained that the mere pulling of the trigger fired the weapon.

“Now shoot at the end window — never mind the glass. Don’t stand gaping at me, do as I tell you.”

Brown fired the revolver, and a diamond pane snapped out of the window.

“How many times will that shoot without re-loading?”

“Seven times, sir.”

“Very good. Put in a cartridge for the one you fired and leave the revolver with me. Find out when there is a train to town, and let me know.”

It will be remembered that the dining-room incident was used at the trial, but without effect, as going to show that Bernard Heaton was insane. Brown also testified that there was something queer about his master that day.

David Allen found all the money he needed in the pockets of Bernard Heaton. He caught his train, and took a cab from the station directly to the law offices of Messrs. Grey, Leason, and Grey, anxious to catch the lawyer before he left for the day.

The clerk sent up word that Mr. Heaton wished to see the senior Mr. Grey for a few moments. Allen was asked to walk up.

“You know the way, sir,” said the clerk.

Allen hesitated.

“Announce me, if you please.”

The clerk, being well trained, showed no surprise, but led the visitor to Mr. Grey’s door.

“How are you, Heaton?” said the lawyer cordially. “Take a chair. Where have you been keeping yourself this long time? How are the Indian experiments coming on?”

“Admirably, admirably,” answered Allen.

At the sound of his voice the lawyer looked up quickly, then apparently reassured he said — “You’re not looking quite the same. Been keeping yourself too much indoors, I imagine. You ought to quit research and do some shooting this autumn.”

“I intend to, and I hope then to have your company.”

“I shall be pleased to run down, although I am no great hand at a gun.”

“I want to speak with you a few moments in private. Would you mind locking the door so that we may not be interrupted?”

“We are quite safe from interruption here,” said the lawyer, as he turned the key in the lock; then resuming his seat he added, “Nothing serious, I hope?”

“It is rather serious. Do you mind my sitting here?” asked Allen, as he drew up his chair so that he was between Grey and the door, with the table separating them. The lawyer was watching him with anxious face, but without, as yet, serious apprehension.

“Now,” said Allen, “will you answer me a simple question? To whom are you talking?”

“To whom—?” The lawyer in his amazement could get no further.

“Yes. To whom are you talking? Name him.”

“Heaton, what is the matter with you? Are you ill?”

“Well, you have mentioned a name, but, being a villain and a lawyer, you cannot give a direct answer to a very simple question. You think you are talking to that poor fool Bernard Heaton. It is true that the body you are staring at is Heaton’s body, but the man you are talking to is me — David Allen — the man you swindled and then murdered. Sit down. If you move you are a dead man. Don’t try to edge to the door. There are seven deaths in this revolver and the whole seven can be let loose in less than that many seconds, for this is a self-cocking instrument. Now it will take you at least ten seconds to get to the door, so remain exactly where you are. That advice will strike you as wise, even if, as you think, you have to do with a madman. You asked me a minute ago how the Indian experiments were coming on, and I answered ‘Admirably.’ Bernard Heaton left his body this morning, and I, David Allen, am now in possession of it. Do you understand? I admit it is a little difficult for the legal mind to grasp such a situation.”

“Ah, not at all,” said Grey airily. “I comprehend it perfectly. The man I see before me is the spirit, life, soul, whatever you like to call it — of David Allen in the body of my friend Bernard Heaton. The — ah — essence of my friend is at this moment fruitlessly searching for his missing body. Perhaps he is in this room now, not knowing how to get out a spiritual writ of ejectment against you.”

“You show more quickness than I expected of you;” said Allen.

“Thanks,” rejoined Grey, although he said to himself, “Heaton has gone mad! stark staring mad, as I expected he would. He is armed. The situation is becoming dangerous. I must humour him.”

“Thanks. And now may I ask what you propose to do? You have not come here for legal advice. You never, unluckily for me, were a client of mine.”

“No. I did not come either to give or take advice. I am here, alone with you — you gave orders that we were not to be disturbed, remember — for the sole purpose of revenging myself on you and on Heaton. Now listen, for the scheme will commend itself to your ingenious mind. I shall murder you in this room. I shall then give myself up. I shall vacate this body in Newgate prison and your friend may then resume his tenancy or not as he chooses. He may allow the unoccupied body to die in the cell or he may take possession of it and be hanged for murder. Do you appreciate the completeness of my vengeance on you both? Do you think your friend will care to put on his body again?”

“It is a nice question,” said the lawyer, as he edged his chair imperceptibly along and tried to grope behind himself, unperceived by his visitor, for the electric button placed against the wall. “It is a nice question, and I would like to have time to consider it in all its bearings before I gave an answer.”

“You shall have all the time you care to allow yourself. I am in no hurry, and I wish you to realize your situation as completely as possible. Allow me to say that the electric button is a little to the left and slightly above where you are feeling for it. I merely mention this because I must add, in fairness to you, that the, moment you touch it, time ends as far as you are concerned. When you press the ivory button, I fire.”

The lawyer rested his arms on the table before him, and for the first time a hunted look of alarm came into his eyes, which died out of them when, after a moment or two of intense fear, he regained possession of himself.

“I would like to ask you a question or two,” he said at last.

“As many as you choose. I am in no hurry, as I said before.”

“I am thankful for your reiteration of that. The first question is then: has a temporary residence in another sphere interfered in any way with your reasoning powers?”

“I think not.”

“Ah, I had hoped that your appreciation of logic might have improved during your — well, let us say absence; you were not very logical — not very amenable to reason, formerly,”

“I know you thought so.”

“I did; so did your own legal adviser, by the way. Well, now let me ask why you are so bitter against me? Why not murder the judge who charged against you, or the jury that unanimously gave a verdict in our favour? I was merely an instrument, as were they.”

“It was your devilish trickiness that won the case.”

“That statement is flattering but untrue. The case was its own best advocate. But you haven’t answered the question. Why not murder judge and jury?”

“I would gladly do so if I had them in my power. You see, I am perfectly logical.”

“Quite, quite,” said the lawyer. “I am encouraged to proceed. Now of what did my devilish trickiness rob you?”

“Of my property, and then of my life.”

“I deny both allegations, but will for the sake of the argument admit them for the moment. First, as to your property. It was a possession that might at any moment be jeopardized by the return of Bernard Heaton.”

“By the real Bernard Heaton — yes.”

“Very well then. As you are now repossessed of the property, and as you have the outward semblance of Heaton, your rights cannot be questioned. As far as property is concerned you are now in an unassailable position where formerly you were in an assailable one. Do you follow me?”

“Perfectly.”

“We come (second) to the question of life. You then occupied a body frail, bent, and diseased, a body which, as events showed, gave way under exceptional excitement. You are now in a body strong and healthy, with apparently a long life before it. You admit the truth of all I have said on these two points?”

“I quite admit it.”

“Then to sum up, you are now in a better position — infinitely — both as regards life and property, than the one from which my malignity — ingenuity I think was your word — ah, yes — trickiness — thanks — removed you. Now why cut your career short? Why murder me? Why not live out your life, under better conditions, in luxury and health, and thus be completely revenged on Bernard Heaton? If you are logical, now is the time to show it.”

Allen rose slowly, holding the pistol in his right hand.

“You miserable scoundrel!” he cried. “You pettifogging lawyer — tricky to the last! How gladly you would throw over your friend to prolong your own wretched existence! Do you think you are now talking to a biased judge and a susceptible, brainless jury? Revenged on Heaton? I am revenged on him already. But part of my vengeance involves your death. Are you ready for it?”

Allen pointed the revolver at Grey, who had now also risen, his face ashen. He kept his eyes fastened on the man he believed to be mad. His hand crept along the wall. There was intense silence between them. Allen did not fire. Slowly the lawyer’s hand moved towards the electric button. At last he felt the ebony rim and his fingers quickly covered it. In the stillness, the vibrating ring of an electric bell somewhere below was audible. Then the sharp crack of the revolver suddenly split the silence. The lawyer dropped on one knee, holding his arm in the air as if to ward off attack. Again the revolver rang out, and Grey plunged forward on his face. The other five shots struck a lifeless body.

A stratum of blue smoke hung breast high in the room as if it were the departing soul of the man who lay motionless on the floor. Outside were excited voices, and someone flung himself ineffectually against the stout locked door.

Allen crossed the room and, turning the key, flung open the door. “I have murdered your master,” he said, handing the revolver butt forward to the nearest man. “I give myself up. Go and get an officer.”

A TRAGIC HONEYMOON

G. R. Sims

1894

My chambermaid at the ——— Hotel, Scarborough, was a nice, motherly, middle-aged woman. I like motherly, middle-aged women for chambermaids. They know their business better, and they answer the bell quicker than young, flighty chambermaids. And they are not so fond of reading the letters you leave about you, and prying into your private affairs.

The bump of curiosity is strongly developed in some women, and you find striking examples of the length to which female curiosity will go in hotels, lodging-houses, and places where they let apartments.

I stayed for a fortnight once in private apartments in Broadstairs, and when I left I recommended them to a friend of mine. He took them later on in the season without saying that they had been recommended to him by anyone. The landlady was a gossip — the kind of landlady that comes in herself to clear away the tea-things, and stands at the door for half an hour with the tray in her hand, while she tells you her trials and troubles, and throws in an anecdote or two concerning her former lodger.

I suffered considerably from this kind of landlady in my early days when hotels were beyond my means, and when I had to be content with two rooms in an unfashionable quarter.

It is only fair to say that in after-life I turned my sufferings to good account, and used up a lot of material that had been supplied by lodging-housekeepers.

My friend who took my old apartments at Broadstairs was full of his adventures when he met me again. He assured me that he had learnt more about me in one week than he had learnt in all the ten years he had known me. His informant was the landlady.

She had furnished him with a full, true and particular account of a lodger she had had earlier in the season — a lodger who was always writing and walking up and down the room, and muttering to himself, and she had grave misgivings that he had a crime on his conscience, because one day she picked up a sheet of paper he had left on the table, and it was all about a robbery or something. She fancied her lodger had begun to write a confession of what he had done, and then thought better of it, for she put the paper back, and the next day she found it all torn and “scrobbled up” in the waste-paper basket. With an utter lack of consideration the landlady gave my real name, and furthermore furnished my friend with choice extracts from some of my private letters, and wound up by saying: “I wonder what he could have been, sir; I’m sure there was something wrong about him.”

I have a friend, a celebrated novelist, whose housemaid for years read every letter that he left on his table, and a good many that he put away in the pigeon-holes of his desk, and when, in consequence of having stayed out till one o’clock in the morning on a bank holiday, she received notice, her temper got the better of her discretion, and she gave her astonished master a “bit of her mind”, and referred to various matters which she could only have become acquainted with by a very close study of his correspondence.

Hotel servants are not so inquisitive as private servants and lodging-house servants. They have not the same opportunity for minutely investigating; but even in hotels there are chambermaids who want to know all about the guests, and who chatter among themselves concerning No. 157, No. 63, or No. 215, and speculate as to his profession, his financial position, and his moral qualities. Chambermaids in large hotels have some curious experiences, and, as the records of the law courts plainly show, they are close observers, and are able months, sometimes years, afterwards to identify parties, and to favour the court with detailed statements worthy of a detective or a paid spy.

Let me hasten to remove the impression that I wish to be “down” on chambermaids. As a whole I look upon them as very worthy and decidedly useful members of the community. But I still prefer, when I am staying for any length of time at a hotel, to have a chambermaid who has passed her first youth and settled down to a staid and matronly sort of person.

Such a chambermaid was Agnes, who, a few years ago, when for some five days I had to keep my room at the — Hotel, Scarborough, showed me the greatest kindness and consideration, gave me my medicine, and, like a good, kind-hearted woman, endeavoured to cheer me up and amuse me whenever she came in to tidy up the room, or to see how I was getting on, or to inquire if I wanted anything.

It was one morning while she was dusting my room that she told me the story which I am about to relate. I had been (not entirely without a view to copy) asking her questions as to her experiences as a chambermaid, and after telling me one or two incidents in her professional career, she informed me that the most curious experience she had ever had in her life was while she was a chambermaid at one of the big London hotels much frequented by people on their way to the Continent.

•   •   •

I’ve seen people arrested there, (said Agnes) nice quiet people, that you would never have suspected of anything wrong; and I’ve seen runaway couples stopped just as they were coming downstairs to go off by the Continental mail. There’s always something or other happening in a big hotel, but of all the extraordinary affairs that ever came under my notice the most terrible was one that happened about a year before I left. I was the head-chamber-maid on the third floor then, and had, of course, to look generally after all the rooms, and see that everything was right. One day we received a letter from the country, ordering a suite of rooms to be reserved for a newly-married couple on a certain date.

The bride and bridegroom were coming up to London on their way to spend their honeymoon abroad, and they would break the journey at our hotel, going on by the Continental train the next day.

The housekeeper came up to me with the letter, and gave me instructions to get a suite on my floor ready, and to see that everything was in proper order. The bridegroom had been a constant visitor at the hotel in his bachelor days, and the manager was anxious that everything should be made as comfortable for him and the young lady as possible.

As soon as I had received my orders I began to execute them, and I had the rooms thoroughly turned out, and everything dusted and rearranged. I put clean curtains at the windows, and womanlike, always feeling interested in bridals and honeymoons, I took extra pains to make the rooms look cheerful and pretty, and I think I succeeded.

The following evening, about an hour before the young couple were to arrive, I went in and gave a last look round to see that everything was right, and just went over the mantelpiece myself with a duster and gave the furniture a flick here and there where the dust — that no power on earth can keep out of a London room — had settled down again.

Satisfied that everything was in perfect order, I closed the door and went to give some instructions to one of the girls about lighting a fire in a room at the end of the corridor, which was always a fearful nuisance to us when a fire was wanted in it. But so sure as we were full up, and that room had to be given to a visitor, the visitor would want a fire lit in it. It seemed just as if it was to be. It became a joke all over the hotel at last.

Whenever a message came up that No. 63 was let, we always used to say, “Of course there’s a fire wanted,” and, upon my word, it really always was so.

The girl whose business it was to light the fire passed me in the corridor.

“Oh,” I said to her, “I was coming to see you about No. 63. Be sure to have the window open and the door open when you light the fire.”

“I’ve got ’em open,” she said, “but the wind’s the wrong way or something, and the fire won’t light at all.”

“Oh, nonsense!” I said; “I’ll come and see to it.”

We went back together and into the room. The gentleman who’d taken it was already there. He was standing with his hands in his pockets looking at the fireplace, and he seemed the picture of misery.

“Poor young fellow!” I said to myself “he looks ill and unhappy, and wants cheering up. This is not the sort of room to make him feel at home, any way.”

“If you could do without a fire, sir,” I said, “it would be better. We always have a trouble with this fireplace. I am sorry to say it smokes.”

“I must have a fire,” said the young gentleman. “If I can’t have one here, give me another room.”

“I’m afraid we’re full up, sir,” I said; “but I’ll go and see what can be done if you don’t mind waiting a little.”

I really was sorry for the poor young gentleman, he looked so utterly wretched, and I couldn’t bear to think of him, ill as he evidently was, shut up in that dreadful No. 63. half suffocated all night. There’s nothing I think makes one feel so miserable as a room full of smoke, especially when you’re away from home and alone.

Leaving the girl to struggle with the fire, I went downstairs to the housekeeper’s room to see if there was a chance of putting the young gentleman anywhere else, if it was only for the night. As luck would have it, a telegram had just been received from a gentleman who was to have come from Scotland that night. He had missed his train, and wouldn’t be in London till the following evening. The room reserved for him was on the fourth floor, immediately over the sitting-room on the third floor which we were keeping for the newly-married pair.

Having obtained permission, I went back to the young gentleman in No. 63, and told him that if he did not mind we would give him a room on the fourth floor, No. 217, where he could have a fire and be comfortable. I explained to him, however, that he would have to be moved on the following day if he intended staying on.

“Thank you very much,” he said; “that will do very well. I shall not want the room after tomorrow.”

I called one of the porters and told him to take the gentleman’s portmanteau up to 217, and then I went to the chambermaid for the fourth floor, and asked her to get a fire lighted at once.

When I came downstairs the newly-married couple had just arrived, and were being shown to their rooms.

I took in the warm water myself and had an opportunity of seeing the young lady. She was very pretty, I thought, and she looked quite a picture in her lovely travelling dress.

The bridegroom was a tall, handsome gentleman, but much older than the young lady. I’d seen him several times at the hotel, and so, of course, I knew him. I should say he was about forty-five, and she couldn’t have been more than nineteen. It was about seven o’clock when they came, and they ordered dinner for eight o’clock. Of course it was known among all the servants on the floor that they were a newly-married couple. It would have been even if we hadn’t been told beforehand.

You can trust hotel servants for knowing a honeymoon when they see one. Plenty of brides and bridegrooms like to pretend that they’ve been married ever so long, especially at the very first, but they never deceive us. I remember a private sitting-room waiter telling me a story of a newly-married couple once, who, when he went into the sitting-room at breakfast time, began to talk to each other in a way to make him believe they’d been married for years. But when the young lady was pouring out the tea, and said to her husband, “How many lumps of sugar do you take, dear?” he had all his work to prevent himself from grinning. He did smile, and the poor young things went quite scarlet both of them, and he went out of the room and had a good laugh all to himself in the service-room, and, of course, told it to everybody as a good joke. Men have no sympathy with young married people; they’re not like womenfolk in these matters.

Of course I had no opportunity of seeing the bride and bridegroom again for some time. But the sitting-room waiter told us they seemed nice people, and the young lady was full of spirits.

I went downstairs to supper at ten o’clock, and was back on duty again soon after ten-thirty. I had one or two things to see to, and when I had finished I sat down to do a little needlework.

It must have been nearly eleven o’clock, when a bell rang violently. The waiter for the floor had gone downstairs for his supper, so I went into the service-room and saw that it was the sitting-room bell of the bride and bridegroom. While I was looking at the indicator, the bell rang again, this time more violently still. I ran along the corridor to the room and knocked at the door.

“Come in! come in!” cried a man’s voice, and I went in, and there I saw the poor young bride in a chair and her husband bending over her.

“Some water, quick!” he cried. “She’s fainted.”

I ran into the bedroom and brought some water and a towel, and bathed her face.

“Is anything the matter, sir?” I said.

“Yes!” he exclaimed, “it’s terrible. I wouldn’t have had such a thing happen for the world. Look, don’t you see?”

He pointed to her hands, where they lay quite helpless in her lap.

On one hand — the hand that wore the wedding-ring — was a big, bright drop of blood. It had fallen right on the wedding-ring, and stained her hand as well.

“Oh dear !” I cried, feeling quite faint myself, “what is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said; “I can’t understand it. It’s the most awful thing I ever knew in my life.”

He seemed quite terrified himself, and certainly it was a dreadful thing, especially to anybody who was at all superstitious or who believed in omens.

I took the towel, and dipped it in the water and wiped the bloodstain from the poor young lady’s hand. Presently she opened her eyes and looked about her.

“Are you better, my darling?” her husband said, stooping over her, and touching her forehead with his lips.

“Yes, I’m better, dear,” she said; “but it was so dreadful! Oh, what does it mean? what does it mean?”

She glanced down at her hand with a look of horror in her eyes, and when she saw that the blood had been removed she gave a deep sigh of relief.

Seeing she was a little better, I got up off my knees — I had been kneeling beside her — and went back into the bedroom with the water.

I was a little bit dazed myself, for I couldn’t understand how that drop of bright red blood could have got on the poor dear’s hand.

I was just putting the tumbler down on the washstand, when I heard a shriek from the bride, followed by a cry from the bridegroom. I ran back into the sitting-room, and there I found them both standing with terrified faces.

They couldn’t speak, but the bridegroom pointed to his wife’s hand.

It was stained with blood again.

“It has dropped upon her hand — this moment!” cried the gentleman. “I saw it, I saw it — with my own eyes!”

“Dropped!” I exclaimed; “where — where from?”

I saw the gentleman look up at the ceiling; my eyes followed his, and then I felt as if I should go through the floor. On the ceiling above was a dark moist patch, and slowly dripping from it were drops of blood.

“I can’t stop here,” wailed the poor young bride. “Take me away, take me away!”

“My dear young lady,” I said, trying to soothe her, “don’t be frightened; nothing can hurt you here.”

I don’t know why I said it, but I felt I must say something.

The gentleman’s face was very pale, and I could see he was trembling. He was terribly upset, and who could wonder at it?

I think he guessed that something awful had happened up above. I did, and it had come upon me all at once who was in that room. It was the young gentleman who had looked so ill and miserable, and who had wanted a fire in 63.

“Take her in the next room, sir,” I whispered. “She won’t see it there, and I’ll go and find out what it means.”

“No, no,” she cried. “I can’t — I won’t stay here! Oh, it is too horrible, and on my wedding-day — on my wedding-day!”

She wrung her hands, and then put them over her face.

And there on her hand — the hand with the wedding-ring-was still that terrible bloodstain.

I could not stand it any longer. I felt as if I should go off myself, so I made a desperate effort and got out of the room, and ran downstairs to the manager.

“Something dreadful’s happened, sir, and it’s in No. 217. Please go at once. There’s blood dripping through the ceiling of No. 13.”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed the manager. “What do you mean?”

He was at supper when I told him, and he started up quite horrified.

“Please come at once, sir. The poor young lady’s seen it, and she’s in a terrible way.”

The manager went up the stairs at once, and I followed him as fast as I could. On the first floor he met one of the porters, and he told him to come with us, and we all three went up on to the fourth floor, and the manager went straight to No. 217 and knocked at the door.

There was no answer.

The chambermaid on the floor had come up, seeing something was the matter, and she gave the manager her master-key.

He put it in the door and turned it, but the door did not open.

It was bolted on the inside.

“Go and get something at once,” the manager said to the porter; “we must break the door open.”

It seemed an hour while we waited outside that door for the man to fetch his tools.

“You’re sure it’s blood?” the manager said to me.

“Oh yes, sir; I could see it by the stain on the ceiling, and some of it had dropped on to the young lady’s hand.”

“What an awful thing!” he exclaimed. “Who’s in here — do you know?”

“Yes, sir. It’s a young gentleman who came this afternoon, and we put him into 63 first, and moved him up here because of the smoke. He would have a fire!”

“I’m afraid it’s a case of suicide.”

“It’s something dreadful, sir, I’m sure, or the blood couldn’t have soaked through like that.”

Presently the porter came back, but it was a long job and a hard job to get that door open, the bolt held so firmly; but at last it went with a terrific crash, and then we all stood outside and peered into the room.

There was no light, but the fire was still burning brightly, and by the glow it cast over the room we saw something was lying on the floor.

The chambermaid brought a light, and the manager went in first and knelt down by the “something”.

He had sent for the doctor directly I’d told him about the blood, and at that moment the doctor came up with the sub-manager.

The doctor went in and looked at the body while the light was held up for him.

“He’s dead,” he said, and the words almost made my heart stand still, though I had expected them.

The poor young fellow had gashed his throat in a frightful way, and was lying in a pool of blood on the floor.

I was in the room while they examined the body, but I couldn’t look at it. I turned my back and looked at the fireplace. There was a lot of burnt paper on the hearth, and some bits of torn-up letters and envelopes that hadn’t fallen into the fire.

The young fellow had been burning his letters and papers.

I knew then why he was so particular about having a fire in his room.

The doctor finished his examination, and then he got up and turned to the manager.

“It’s a case of suicide,” he said. “Do you know anything about him?”

“No; we’ve never seen him before; he only came this afternoon.”

“Well, you’d better not let anything be touched tonight. Nothing can be done for him. You’ll send for the police at once?”

“Of course.”

“Then, until they come you’d better lock up the room, and leave everything as it is. I’ll come down and sit in your room and wait for the police if you like.”

“Yes,” said the manager, “that will be best. I’ve been here ten years, and this is the first case of suicide we’ve had in the hotel.”

As soon as we were all outside, the manager pulled the door to, but it wouldn’t lock. He had forgotten that it had been burst open.

“I see,” said the doctor, “you can’t lock it up. You’d better put a man outside, then, to see that nobody goes in. He must remain there till the police come.”

So the porter was put on guard outside, and we all went along the corridor, looking very scared and frightened, as you can imagine, except the doctor, and of course doctors never look scared at anything — they take it all as a matter of business.

I had been so horrified at seeing the young fellow lying there dead that everything else had gone out of my head; but when we got to the top of the stairs I remembered the young lady, and all at once I thought perhaps it would be only right if the doctor were to see her.

I spoke to the manager, and he turned to the doctor at once.

“Doctor,” he said, “there are very painful circumstances connected with this unhappy business. It seems, at least so the chambermaid tells me, that blood must have dropped through into the room below.”

“I don’t wonder at that,” said the doctor; “there’s quite a pool on the floor.”

“Unfortunately, the room below is occupied by a newly-married couple, and the blood has fallen on the young lady. The chambermaid tells me she is terribly upset. I think, perhaps, you had better see her.”

“Certainly I will, but I don’t think, under the circumstances, it will be advisable to tell her the truth.”

“No, not if you can help it.”

“I’ll see how she is, and try to reassure her, somehow. Where is she?”

“I’ll take you to her,” I said. “The poor young lady fainted, and I left her almost beside herself; and no wonder, for the blood was on her hands.”

“Dear me!” said the doctor, his face looking quite grave; “and on her wedding-night, too. Poor thing! why, it’s enough to turn her brain.”

I led the way to No. 13 and knocked at the door, and without waiting for an answer, opened it and said: “If you please, sir, here’s our doctor, in case the young lady would like to see him.”

Then I pulled the door to again, for I had had enough of horrors, and went to sit in the service-room with two of the waiters.

I wanted to be with somebody, for I felt too upset and nervous to be alone.

The waiters were full of it, as anything of that sort soon goes all over a hotel, and they wanted to know all about it, but I said I couldn’t talk of it, it had upset me too much; but I told them there was no doubt that the young fellow in No. 217 had killed himself, and that he was quite dead.

The doctor was with the young lady quite half an hour. He passed me on his way downstairs, and I asked him how she was, and if there was anything I could do.

“She’s a little better now,” he said, “but, of course, very much upset. I’ve persuaded her that it is only someone who has met with an accident and lost a quantity of blood, and although it was a very unpleasant experience, there is nothing for her to take to heart, or to be alarmed at; but I called the husband on one side and told him the truth, and he thinks it better they should go to another hotel.”

“Well, sir,” I said, “under the circumstances it will be, perhaps. It would be a dreadful thing for her to know that at the very beginning of her married life there was a suicide’s body lying above her.”

“Yes, that’s a woman’s way of looking at it, no doubt. You can go if you like and see if you can help them to pack and put their things together. I’m going to ask the manager to send out and get them rooms in another hotel, so that they have no bother.”

I could see that the doctor was really sorry for the poor bride and bridegroom, and who could help being, under the circumstances?

I went in and helped to pack the things they had unpacked, and they were very grateful. I could see they were both awfully shocked and worried, and hardly knew what they were doing.

Presently the manager came up and said he had got rooms for them at another hotel near, and we got all the luggage down and put it on a cab, and then they came down and drove away.

It was past midnight when they went, and as I watched them going down the great staircase, the poor girl trembling and holding on to her husband’s arm for support, and he as white as a ghost, I couldn’t help thinking myself that it was about as unhappy a beginning to a honeymoon as their worst enemy, if they had one, could have wished for them.

Of course the police were very soon in the hotel, and had taken possession of the room where the suicide lay. I didn’t hear anything more that night, for I was tired out and upset, and glad to go to bed when it came to my turn to go off duty; and the next morning when I got up I heard the body had been taken away in the night to the mortuary, and that an inquest was to be held on it.

Of course I was called at the inquest to give my evidence, and it was then I heard all about the poor young gentleman.

His friends had been found and communicated with, and it seems that the young gentleman had been disappointed in love, and had been very strange in his manner, and very desponding for some time, but nobody thought he meant to kill himself.

His brother, who was one of the witnesses, stated that he had been in love with a young lady who had not returned his affection, and this young lady had recently married, and that seemed to have preyed upon his mind very much. “In fact,” said the brother, “he killed himself on the very day that the marriage took place.”

A good deal of evidence was given by the doctor and others, and the jury brought in a verdict of temporary insanity.

After the case was over I saw our manager go away with the brother, and they were talking together. Of course I went back to the hotel, but all day I couldn’t help thinking things over, and I thought to myself how strange it was that he should have killed himself right over the room in which there was a young lady who had only been married that day.

That evening when I went downstairs, the manager called me into his office and said he wanted to ask me a question or two.

“When that poor fellow came to the hotel, did he ask any questions of you?” he said. “Did he mention any names, and ask if they were in the hotel or coming to the hotel?”

“No, sir,” I said; “he only asked for a fire.”

“It was your idea to put him in the room above — 217?”

“Yes, sir. I did it because 63 smoked so badly.”

“Well, it’s rather an odd coincidence, then. Do you know that he came to this hotel because the young lady he was in love with was coming to stay here with her husband. He had found out somehow they were coming here after the marriage.”

“Good gracious, sir!” I exclaimed, beginning to see what the manager meant, “you don’t mean to say that the young lady in 13 was the one he wanted to marry?”

“Yes, there is no doubt, from what the brother has told me, that it is so.”

And I had put him, quite by accident, in the room above the bride and bridegroom. Only one thin floor separated him from the girl he had broken his heart over, and on her bridal night, while he lay a corpse above her, his blood had dripped through and had fallen on her hands and stained her wedding-ring.

He had doubtless timed his suicide. He had intended to take his life upon her wedding-day, and in the building in which she was to pass the first hours of her married life with the husband of her choice.

But I am sure he did not know when he planned that terrible tragedy that she would be the first to see his life-blood flow — that her cry of horror would be the first thing to lead to the discovery of his terrible fate.

It was chance that had brought that about — coincidence, as the manager called it — and I had been the innocent means of bringing it to pass.

•   •   •

“I don’t know whether the poor bride ever learned the truth. I hope she didn’t, for it isn’t the sort of thing a woman would ever be able to forget. If she had known the truth that night when she felt a cold, wet splash, and looked at her wedding-ring — but there, it isn’t a thing to think about, is it, sir?”

I said that I didn’t think it was; but after Agnes had finished her story and left me to myself I thought a good deal about it, and it has remained upon the tablets of my memory until now.

In one thing I cordially agree with Agnes, that it was a strange experience for a chambermaid. I doubt if many chambermaids have had one stranger.

THE DREAM-GOWN
OF THE
JAPANESE AMBASSADOR

Brander Matthews

1896

I

After arranging the Egyptian and Mexican pottery so as to contrast agreeably with the Dutch and the German beer-mugs on the top of the bookcase that ran along one wall of the sitting-room, Cosmo Waynflete went back into the bedroom and took from a half-empty trunk the little cardboard boxes in which he kept the collection of playing-cards, and of all manner of outlandish equivalents for these simple instruments of fortune, picked up here and there during his two or three years of dilettante travelling in strange countries. At the same time he brought out a Japanese crystal ball, which he stood upon its silver tripod, placing it on a little table in one of the windows on each side of the fireplace; and there the rays of the westering sun lighted it up at once into translucent loveliness.

The returned wanderer looked out of the window and saw on one side the graceful and vigorous tower of the Madison Square Garden, with its Diana turning in the December wind, while in the other direction he could look down on the frozen paths of Union Square, only a block distant, but as far below him almost as though he were gazing down from a balloon. Then he stepped back into the sitting-room itself, and noted the comfortable furniture and wood-fire crackling in friendly fashion on the hearth, and his own personal belongings, scattered here and there as though they were settling themselves for a stay. Having arrived from Europe only that morning, he could not but hold himself lucky to have found these rooms taken for him by the old friend to whom he had announced his return, and with whom he was to eat his Christmas dinner that evening. He had not been on shore more than six or seven hours, and yet the most of his odds and ends were unpacked and already in place as though they belonged in this new abode. It was true that he had toiled unceasingly to accomplish this, and as he stood there in his shirtsleeves, admiring the results of his labours, he was conscious also that his muscles were fatigued, and that the easy-chair before the fire opened its arms temptingly.

He went again into the bedroom, and took from one of his many trunks a long, loose garment of pale-grey silk. Apparently this beautiful robe was intended to serve as a dressing-gown, and as such Cosmo Waynflete utilized it immediately. The ample folds fell softly about him, and the rich silk itself seemed to be soothing to his limbs, so delicate was its fibre and so carefully had it been woven. Around the full skirt there was embroidery of threads of gold, and again on the open and flowing sleeves. With the skilful freedom of Japanese art the pattern of this decoration seemed to suggest the shrubbery about a spring, for there were strange plants with huge leaves broadly outlined by the golden threads, and in the midst of them water was seen bubbling from the earth and lapping gently over the edge of the fountain. As the returned wanderer thrust his arms into the dressing-gown with its symbolic embroidery on the skirt and sleeves, he remembered distinctly the dismal day when he had bought it in a little curiosity-shop in Nuremberg; and as he fastened across his chest one by one the loops of silken cord to the three coins which served as buttons down the front of the robe, he recalled also the time and the place where he had picked up each of these pieces of gold and silver, one after another. The first of them was a Persian daric, which he had purchased from a dealer on the Grand Canal in Venice; and the second was a Spanish peso struck under Philip II. at Potosi, which he had found in a stall on the embankment of the Quay Voltaire, in Paris; and the third was a York shilling, which he had bought from the man who had turned it up in ploughing a field that sloped to the Hudson near Sleepy Hollow.

Having thus wrapped himself in this unusual dressing-gown with its unexpected buttons of gold and silver, Cosmo Waynflete went back into the front room. He dropped into the arm-chair before the fire. It was with a smile of physical satisfaction that he stretched out his feet to the hickory blaze.

The afternoon was drawing on, and in New York the sun sets early on Christmas day. The red rays shot into the window almost horizontally, and they filled the crystal globe with a curious light. Cosmo Waynflete lay back in his easy-chair, with his Japanese robe about him, and gazed intently at the beautiful ball which seemed like a bubble of air and water. His mind went back to the afternoon in April, two years before, when he had found that crystal sphere in a Japanese shop within sight of the incomparable Fujiyama.

II

As he peered into its transparent depths, with his vision focused upon the spot of light where the rays of the setting sun touched it into flame, he was but little surprised to discover that he could make out tiny figures in the crystal. For the moment this strange thing seemed to him perfectly natural. And the movements of these little men and women interested him so much that he watched them as they went to and fro, sweeping a roadway with large brooms. Thus it happened that the fixity of his gaze was intensified. And so it was that in a few minutes he saw with no astonishment that he was one of the group himself, he himself in the rich and stately attire of a samurai. From the instant that Cosmo Waynflete discovered himself among the people whom he saw moving before him, as his eyes were fastened on the illuminated dot in the transparent ball, he ceased to see them as little figures, and he accepted them as of the full stature of man. This increase in their size was no more a source of wonderment to him than it had been to discern himself in the midst of them. He accepted both of these marvellous things without question — indeed, with no thought at all that they were in any way peculiar or abnormal. Not only this, but thereafter he seemed to have transferred his personality to the Cosmo Waynflete who was a Japanese samurai and to have abandoned entirely the Cosmo Waynflete who was an American traveller, and who had just returned to New York that Christmas morning. So completely did the Japanese identity dominate that the existence of the American identity was wholly unknown to him. It was as though the American had gone to sleep in New York at the end of the nineteenth century, and had waked a Japanese in Nippon in the beginning of the eighteenth century.

With his sword by his side — a Murimasa blade, likely to bring bad luck to the wearer sooner or later — he had walked from his own house in the quarter of Kyoto which is called Yamashina to the quarter which is called Yoshiwara, a place of ill repute, where dwell women of evil life, and where roisterers and drunkards come by night. He knew that the sacred duty of avenging his master’s death had led him to cast off his faithful wife so that he might pretend to riot in debauchery at the Three Sea-Shores. The fame of his shameful doings had spread abroad, and it must soon come to the ears of the man whom he wished to take unawares. Now he was lying prone in the street, seemingly sunk in a drunken slumber, so that men might see him and carry the news to the treacherous assassin of his beloved master. As he lay there that afternoon, he revolved in his mind the devices he should use to make away with his enemy when the hour might be ripe at last for the accomplishment of his holy revenge. To himself he called the roll of his fellow-ronins, now biding their time, as he was, and ready always to obey his orders and to follow his lead to the death, when at last the sun should rise on the day of vengeance.

So he gave no heed to the scoffs and the jeers of those who passed along the street, laughing him to scorn as they beheld him lying there in a stupor from excessive drink at that inordinate hour of the day. And among those who came by at last was a man from Satsuma, who was moved to voice the reproaches of all that saw this sorry sight.

“Is not this Oishi Kuranosuke,” said the man from Satsuma, “who was a councillor of Asano Takumi no Kami, and who, not having the heart to avenge his lord, gives himself up to women and wine? See how he lies drunk in the public street! Faithless beast! Fool and craven! Unworthy of the name of a samurai!”

And with that the man from Satsuma trod on him as he lay there, and spat upon him, and went away indignantly. The spies of Kotsuke no Suke heard what the man from Satsuma had said, and they saw how he had spurned the prostrate samurai with his foot; and they went their way to report to their master that he need no longer have any fear of the councillors of Asano Takumi no Kami. All this the man, lying prone in the dust of the street, noted; and it made his heart glad, for then he made sure that the day was soon coming when he could do his duty at last and take vengeance for the death of his master.

III

He lay there longer than he knew, and the twilight settled down at last, and the evening stars came out. And then, after a while, and by imperceptible degrees, Cosmo Waynflete became conscious that the scene had changed and that he had changed with it. He was no longer in Japan, but in Persia. He was no longer lying like a drunkard in the street of a city, but slumbering like a weary soldier in a little oasis by the side of a spring in the midst of a sandy desert. He was asleep, and his faithful horse was unbridled that it might crop the grass at will.

The air was hot and thick, and the leaves of the slim tree above him were never stirred by a wandering wind. Yet now and again there came from the darkness a faintly foetid odour. The evening wore on and still he slept, until at length in the silence of the night a strange huge creature wormed its way steadily out of its lair amid the trees, and drew near the sleeping man to devour him fiercely. But the horse neighed vehemently and beat the ground with his hoofs and waked his master. Then the hideous monster vanished; and the man, aroused from his sleep, saw nothing, although the evil smell still lingered in the sultry atmosphere. He lay down again once more, thinking that for once his steed had given a false alarm. Again the grisly dragon drew nigh, and again the courser notified its rider, and again the man could make out nothing in the darkness of the night; and again he was well nigh stifled by the foul emanation that trailed in the wake of the misbegotten creature. He rebuked his horse and laid him down once more.

A third time the dreadful beast approached, and a third time the faithful charger awoke its angry master. But there came the breath of a gentle breeze, so that the man did not fear to fill his lungs; and there was a vague light in the heavens now, so that he could dimly discern his mighty enemy; and at once he girded himself for the fight. The scaly monster came full at him with dripping fangs, its mighty body thrusting forward its huge and hideous head. The man met the attack without fear and smote the beast full on the crest, but the blow rebounded from its coat of mail.

Then the faithful horse sprang forward and bit the dreadful creature full upon the neck and tore away the scales, so that its master’s sword could pierce the armoured hide. So the man was able to dissever the ghastly head and thus to slay the monstrous dragon. The blackness of night wrapped him about once more as he fell on his knees and gave thanks for his victory; and the wind died away again.

IV

Only a few minutes later, so it seemed to him, Cosmo Waynflete became doubtfully aware of another change of time and place — of another transformation of his own being. He knew himself to be alone once more, and even without his trusty charger. Again he found himself groping in the dark. But in a little while there was a faint radiance of light, and at last the moon came out behind a tower. Then he saw that he was not by the roadside in Japan or in the desert of Persia, but now in some unknown city of Southern Europe, where the architecture was hispano-moresque. By the silver rays of the moon he was able to make out the beautiful design damascened upon the blade of the sword which he held now in his hand ready drawn for self-defence.

Then he heard hurried footfalls down the empty street, and a man rushed around the corner pursued by two others, who had also weapons in their hands. For a moment Cosmo Waynflete was a Spaniard, and to him it was a point of honour to aid the weaker party. He cried to the fugitive to pluck up heart and to withstand the enemy stoutly. But the hunted man fled on, and after him went one of the pursuers, a tall, thin fellow, with a long black cloak streaming behind him as he ran.

The other of the two, a handsome lad with fair hair, came to a halt and crossed swords with Cosmo, and soon showed himself to be skilled in the art of fence. So violent was the young fellow’s attack that in the ardour of self-defence Cosmo ran the boy through the body before he had time to hold his hand or even to reflect.

The lad toppled over sideways. “Oh, my mother!” he cried, and in a second he was dead. While Cosmo bent over the body, hasty footsteps again echoed along the silent thoroughfare. Cosmo peered around the corner, and by the struggling moonbeams he could see that it was the tall, thin fellow in the black cloak, who was returning with half a score of retainers, all armed, and some of them bearing torches.

Cosmo turned and fled swiftly, but being a stranger in the city he soon lost himself in its tortuous streets. Seeing a light in a window and observing a vine that trailed from the balcony before it, he climbed up boldly, and found himself face to face with a grey-haired lady, whose visage was beautiful and kindly and noble. In a few words he told her his plight and besought sanctuary. She listened to him in silence, with exceeding courtesy of manner, as though she were weighing his words before making up her mind. She raised the lamp on her table and let its beams fall on his lineaments. And still she made no answer to his appeal.

Then came a glare of torches in the street below and a knocking at the door. Then at last the old lady came to a resolution; she lifted the tapestry at the head of her bed and told him to bestow himself there. No sooner was he hidden than the tall, thin man in the long black cloak entered hastily. He greeted the elderly lady as his aunt, and he told her that her son had been set upon by a stranger in the street and had been slain. She gave a great cry and never took her eyes from his face. Then he said that a servant had seen an unknown man climb to the balcony of her house. What if it were the assassin of her son? The blood left her face and she clutched at the table behind her, as she gave orders to have the house searched.

When the room was empty at last she went to the head of the bed and bade the man concealed there to come forth and begone, but to cover his face, that she might not be forced to know him again. So saying, she dropped on her knees before a crucifix, while he slipped out of the window again and down to the deserted street.

He sped to the corner and turned it undiscovered, and breathed a sigh of relief and of regret. He kept on steadily, gliding stealthily along in the shadows, until he found himself at the city gate as the bell of the cathedral tolled the hour of midnight.

V

How it was that he passed through the gate he could not declare with precision, for seemingly a mist had settled about him. Yet a few minutes later he saw that in some fashion he must have got beyond the walls of the town, for he recognized the open country all around. And, oddly enough, he now discovered himself to be astride a bony steed. He could not say what manner of horse it was he was riding, but he felt sure that it was not the faithful charger that had saved his life in Persia, once upon a time, in days long gone by, as it seemed to him then. He was not in Persia now — of that he was certain, nor in Japan, nor in the Iberian peninsula. Where he was he did not know.

In the dead hush of midnight he could hear the barking of a dog on the opposite shore of a dusky and indistinct waste of waters that spread itself far below him. The night grew darker and darker, the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from his sight. He had never felt so lonely and dismal. In the centre of the road stood an enormous tulip-tree; its limbs were gnarled and fantastic, large enough to form trunks for ordinary trees, twisting down almost to the earth, and rising again into the air. As he approached this fearful tree he thought he saw something white hanging in the midst of it, but on looking more narrowly he perceived it was a place where it had been scathed by lightning and the white wood laid bare. About two hundred yards from the tree a small brook crossed the road; and as he drew near he beheld — on the margin of this brook, and in the dark shadow of the grove — he beheld something huge, misshapen, black, and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the traveller.

He demanded, in stammering accents, “Who are you?” He received no reply. He repeated his demand in a still more agitated voice. Still there was no answer. And then the shadowy object of alarm put itself in motion, and with a scramble and a bound stood in the middle of the road. He appeared to be a horseman of large dimensions and mounted on a black horse of powerful frame. Having no relish for this strange midnight companion, Cosmo Waynflete urged on his steed in hopes of leaving the apparition behind; but the stranger quickened his horse also to an equal pace. And when the first horseman pulled up, thinking to lag behind, the second did likewise. There was something in the moody and dogged silence of this pertinacious companion that was mysterious and appalling. It was soon fearfully accounted for. On mounting a rising ground which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller against the sky, gigantic in height and muffled in a cloak, he was horror-struck to discover the stranger was headless! — but his horror was still more increased in observing that the head which should have rested on the shoulders was carried before the body on the pommel of the saddle.

The terror of Cosmo Waynflete rose to desperation, and he spurred his steed suddenly in the hope of giving his weird companion the slip. But the headless horseman started full jump with him. His own horse, as though possessed by a demon, plunged headlong down the hill. He could hear, however, the black steed panting and blowing close behind him; he even fancied that he felt the hot breath of the pursuer. When he ventured at last to cast a look behind, he saw the goblin rising in the stirrups, and in the very act of hurling at him the grisly head. He fell out of the saddle to the ground; and the black steed and the goblin rider passed by him like a whirlwind.

VI

How long he lay there by the roadside, stunned and motionless, he could not guess; but when he came to himself at last the sun was already high in the heavens. He discovered himself to be reclining on the tall grass of a pleasant graveyard which surrounded a tiny country church in the outskirts of a pretty little village. It was in the early summer, and the foliage was green above him as the boughs swayed gently to and fro in the morning breeze. The birds were singing gayly as they flitted about over his head. The bees hummed along from flower to flower. At last, so it seemed to him, he had come into a land of peace and quiet, where there was rest and comfort and where no man need go in fear of his life. It was a country where vengeance was not a duty and where midnight combats were not a custom he found himself smiling as he thought that a grisly dragon and a goblin rider would be equally out of place in this laughing landscape.

Then the bell in the steeple of the little church began to ring merrily, and he rose to his feet in expectation. All of a sudden the knowledge came to him why it was that they were ringing. He wondered then why the coming of the bride was thus delayed. He knew himself to be a lover, with life opening brightly before him; and the world seemed to him sweeter than ever before and more beautiful.

Then at last the girl whom he loved with his whole heart and who had promised to marry him appeared in the distance, and he thought he had never seen her look more lovely. As he beheld his bridal party approaching, he slipped into the church to await her at the altar. The sunshine fell full upon the portal and made a halo about the girl’s head as she crossed the threshold.

But even when the bride stood by his side and the clergyman had begun the solemn service of the church the bells kept on, and soon their chiming became a clangour, louder and sharper and more insistent.

VII

So clamorous and so persistent was the ringing that Cosmo Waynflete was roused at last. He found himself suddenly standing on his feet, with his hand clutching the back of the chair in which he had been sitting before the fire when the rays of the setting sun had set long ago. The room was dark, for it was lighted now only by the embers of the burnt-out fire; and the electric bell was ringing steadily, as though the man outside the door had resolved to waken the seven sleepers.

Then Cosmo Waynflete was wide-awake again; and he knew where he was once more — not in Japan, not in Persia, not in Lisbon, not in Sleepy Hollow, but here in New York, in his own room, before his own fire. He opened the door at once and admitted his friend, Paul Stuyvesant.

“It isn’t dinnertime, is it?” he asked. “I’m not late, am I? The fact is, I’ve been asleep.”

“It is so good of you to confess that,” his friend answered, laughing; “although the length of time you kept me waiting and ringing might have led me to suspect it. No, you are not late and it is not dinnertime. I’ve come around to have another little chat with you before dinner, that’s all.”

“Take this chair, old man,” said Cosmo, as he threw another hickory-stick on the fire. Then he lighted the gas and sat down by the side of his friend.

“This chair is comfortable, for a fact,” Stuyvesant declared, stretching himself out luxuriously. “No wonder you went to sleep. What did you dream of? — strange places you had seen in your travels or the homely scenes of your native land.”

Waynflete looked at his friend for a moment without answering the question. He was startled as he recalled the extraordinary series of adventures which had fallen to his lot since he had fixed his gaze on the crystal ball. It seemed to him as though he had been whirled through space and through time.

“I suppose every man is always the hero of his own dreams,” he began, doubtfully.

“Of course,” his friend returned; “in sleep our natural and healthy egotism is absolutely unrestrained. It doesn’t make any matter where the scene is laid or whether the play is a comedy or a tragedy, the dreamer has always the centre of the stage, with the calcium light turned full on him.”

“That’s just it,” Waynflete went on; “this dream of mine makes me feel as if I were an actor, and as if I had been playing many parts, one after the other, in the swiftest succession. They are not familiar to me, and yet I confess to a vague feeling of unoriginality. It is as though I were a plagiarist of adventure — if that be a possible supposition. I have just gone through these startling situations myself, and yet I’m sure that they have all of them happened before — although, perhaps, not to any one man. Indeed, no one man could have had all these adventures of mine, because I see now that I have been whisked through the centuries and across the hemispheres with a suddenness possible only in dreams. Yet all my experiences seem somehow second-hand, and not really my own.”

“Picked up here and there — like your bric-à-brac?” suggested Stuyvesant. “But what are these alluring adventures of yours that stretched through the ages and across the continents?”

Then, knowing how fond his friend was of solving mysteries and how proud he was of his skill in this art, Cosmo Waynflete narrated his dream as it has been set down in these pages.

When he had made an end, Paul Stuyvesant’s first remark was: “I’m sorry I happened along just then and waked you up before you had time to get married.”

His second remark followed half a minute later.

“I see how it was,” he said; “you were sitting in this chair and looking at that crystal ball, which focused the level rays of the setting sun, I suppose? Then it is plain enough — you hypnotized yourself!”

“I have heard that such a thing is possible,” responded Cosmo.

“Possible?” Stuyvesant returned, “it is certain! But what is more curious is the new way in which you combined your self-hypnotism with crystal-gazing. You have heard of scrying, I suppose?”

“You mean the practice of looking into a drop of water or a crystal ball or anything of that sort,” said Cosmo, “and of seeing things in it — of seeing people moving about?”

“That’s just what I do mean,” his friend returned. “And that’s just what you have been doing. You fixed your gaze on the ball, and so hypnotized yourself; and then, in the intensity of your vision, you were able to see figures in the crystal — with one of which visualized emanations you immediately identified yourself. That’s easy enough, I think. But I don’t see what suggested to you your separate experiences. I recognize them, of course—”

“You recognize them?” cried Waynflete, in wonder.

“I can tell you where you borrowed every one of your adventures,” Stuyvesant replied, “But what I’d like to know now is what suggested to you just those particular characters and situations, and not any of the many others also stored away in your subconsciousness.”

So saying, he began to look about the room.

“My subconsciousness?” repeated Waynflete. “Have I ever been a samurai in my subconsciousness?”

Paul Stuyvesant looked at Cosmo Waynflete for nearly a minute without reply. Then all the answer he made was to say: “That’s a queer dressing-gown you have on.”

“It is time I took it off,” said the other, as he twisted himself out of its clinging folds. “It is a beautiful specimen of weaving, isn’t it? I call it the dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador, for although I bought it in a curiosity-shop in Nuremberg, it was once, I really believe, the slumber-robe of an Oriental envoy.”

Stuyvesant took the silken garment from his friend’s hand.

“Why did the Japanese ambassador sell you his dream-gown in a Nuremberg curiosity-shop?” he asked.

“He didn’t,” Waynflete explained. “I never saw the ambassador, and neither did the old German lady who kept the shop. She told me she bought it from a Japanese acrobat who was out of an engagement and desperately hard up. But she told me also that the acrobat had told her that the garment had belonged to an ambassador who had given it to him as a reward of his skill, and that he never would have parted with it if he had not been dead-broke.”

Stuyvesant held the robe up to the light and inspected the embroidery on the skirt of it.

“Yes,” he said, at last, “this would account for it, I suppose. This bit here was probably meant to suggest ‘the well where the head was washed,’ — see?”

“I see that those lines may be meant to represent the outline of a spring of water, but I don’t see what that has to do with my dream,” Waynflete answered.

“Don’t you?” Stuyvesant returned. “Then I’ll show you. You had on this silk garment embroidered here with an outline of the well in which was washed the head of Kotsuke no Suke, the man whom the Forty-Seven Ronins killed. You know the story?”

“I read it in Japan, but—” began Cosmo.

“You had that story stored away in your subconsciousness,” interrupted his friend. “And when you hypnotized yourself by peering into the crystal ball, this embroidery it was which suggested to you to see yourself as the hero of the tale — Oishi Kuranosuke, the chief of the Forty-Seven Ronins, the faithful follower who avenged his master by pretending to be vicious and dissipated — just like Brutus and Lorenzaccio — until the enemy was off his guard and open to attack.”

“I think I do recall the tale of the Forty-Seven Ronins, but only very vaguely,” said the hero of the dream. “For all I know I may have had the adventure of Oishi Kuranosuke laid on the shelf somewhere in my subconsciousness, as you want me to believe. But how about my Persian dragon and my Iberian noblewoman?”

Paul Stuyvesant was examining the dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador with minute care. Suddenly he said, “Oh!” and then he looked up at Cosmo Waynflete and asked: “What are those buttons? They seem to be old coins.”

“They are old coins,” the other answered; “it was a fancy of mine to utilize them on that Japanese dressing-gown. They are all different, you see. The first is—”

“Persian, isn’t it?” interrupted Stuyvesant.

“Yes,” Waynflete explained, “it is a Persian daric. And the second is a Spanish peso made at Potosi under Philip II. for use in America. And the third is a York shilling, one of the coins in circulation here in New York at the time of the Revolution — I got that one, in fact, from the farmer who ploughed it up in a field at Tarrytown, near Sunnyside.”

“Then there are three of your adventures accounted for, Cosmo, and easily enough,” Paul commented, with obvious satisfaction at his own explanation. “Just as the embroidery on the silk here suggested to you — after you had hypnotized yourself — that you were the chief of the Forty-Seven Ronins, so this first coin here in turn suggested to you that you were Rustem, the hero of the ‘Epic of Kings.’ You have read the ‘Shah-Nameh?’”

“I remember Firdausi’s poem after a fashion only,” Cosmo answered. “Was not Rustem a Persian Hercules, so to speak?”

“That’s it precisely,” the other responded, “and he had seven labours to perform; and you dreamed the third of them, the slaying of the grisly dragon. For my own part, I think I should have preferred the fourth of them, the meeting with the lovely enchantress; but that’s neither here nor there.”

“It seems to me I do recollect something about that fight of Rustem and the strange beast. The faithful horse’s name was Rakush, wasn’t it?” asked Waynflete.

“If you can recollect the ‘Shah-Nameh,’” Stuyvesant pursued, “no doubt you can recall also Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Custom of the Country?’ That’s where you got the midnight duel in Lisbon and the magnanimous mother, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know,” the other declared.

“Well, you did, for all that,” Paul went on. “The situation is taken from one in a drama of Calderon’s, and it was much strengthened in the taking. You may not now remember having read the play, but the incident must have been familiar to you, or else your subconsciousness couldn’t have yielded it up to you so readily at the suggestion of the Spanish coin, could it?”

“I did read a lot of Elizabethan drama in my senior year at college,” admitted Cosmo, “and this piece of Beaumont and Fletcher’s may have been one of those I read; but I totally fail to recall now what it was all about.”

“You won’t have the cheek to declare that you don’t remember the ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ will you?” asked Stuyvesant. “Very obviously it was the adventure of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman that the York shilling suggested to you.”

“I’ll admit that I do recollect Irving’s story now,” the other confessed.

“So the embroidery on the dream-gown gives the first of your strange situations; and the three others were suggested by the coins you have been using as buttons,” said Paul Stuyvesant. “There is only one thing now that puzzles me: that is the country church and the noon wedding and the beautiful bride.”

And with that he turned over the folds of the silken garment that hung over his arm.

Cosmo Waynflete hesitated a moment and a blush mantled his cheek. Then he looked his friend in the face and said: “I think I can account for my dreaming about her — I can account for that easily enough.”

“So can I,” said Paul Stuyvesant, as he held up the photograph of a lovely American girl that he had just found in the pocket of the dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador.

(1896.)

THE GHOST
AT POINT OF ROCKS

Frank H. Spearman

1907

As for the country — there is really no end of country around Point of Rocks. When Hughie Morrison asked about the station after he had been assigned to it, he was told that on the north his territory would extend to the pole. He was assured that he would find very little of the country in any direction competitive, and, in matter of fact, he never did find any, though Martin Duffy at one time advised him to circularize the Eskimos with a view of securing any portion of their cold-storage business that might be getting away from Jim Hill.

On the south, while there was no competition in sight, there was even less of business. The southern country for three thousand miles stood on end — at least so Hughie concluded after he had climbed the peak of Point of Rocks to look the field over and make a preliminary traffic survey. After he had climbed down he wrote to his mother that if arrangements could be made to ship all the scenery out of his territory and ship all the unassigned rainbows in, it would make a great farming country. Answering her affectionate inquiries from the East, he wrote that he was making money fast; that he feared, at the moment, to ship it in large sums out of the country, but that she need feel no anxiety; he really had the rocks and would show them to her when she came out.

Point of Rocks has been called everything that is bad because of its reputation for loneliness. The point, a mere speck on a spreading map, set far and singly out on the high seas of the railroad desert, was the dread of all operators on the mountain division, and Hughie Morrison was the first night man sent there after the panic. When there were but two passenger trains a day on the division, and the Government receivers were objecting to these, Hughie, with the rattlesnakes and a worn-out key, was holding down Point of Rocks. Before he and the day man were sent, the Point had long been abandoned. One building, the section house, stood half a mile east of the station, and in this the section men hived. Other than these no human beings lived within miles of Hughie. To the north stretched the forgotten land, on the west rose the point monstrous, and to the south, generally speaking, hell prevailed.

To this spot President Bucks had sent his nephew, Hugh Morrison, to learn the railroad business. Hughie was a Princeton man when he asked his uncle to come through with some sort of job; and his uncle, at that time reorganizing the system, and having troubles of his own, was not disposed to take on any family difficulties. He merely passed the word to Martin Duffy, chief dispatcher at Medicine Bend, to put Hughie through. Accordingly the Princeton man, who had turned twenty, could count to a hundred, and knew that the Rocky Mountains were surrounded by land, was brought to the Mountain Division. Martin soon saw that he could not get rid of Hughie merely by putting him through. Hughie learned the key with facility, ate what was set before him, and looked pleasant when the railroad men set up jobs. Worst of all, Martin Duffy found that he was beginning to like the green one. But orders were orders. Bucks had said Hughie was to be put through, and there was nothing more merciful to Martin’s mind for the boy than a quick railroad death. Martin considered that in such a case strong medicine is best, and well knew that to assign a man to a night job at Point of Rocks was equivalent to the knock-out drops.

Hughie never blanched when the orders came. Why should he? He did not know Point of Rocks from Colorado Springs, and made his preparations and departed promptly for the new post. When he asked Duffy where he should board, Martin, a taciturn man, said he might board in Texas if he liked, provided he could make the hours for the job.

Hughie took hold, and the fun began. The trainmen bullied him, called him Hughie and “Nephew,” stole his cigars, and made him glad to be left alone with the night, the desert, the coyotes, and the stars. Hughie got used to looking for the constellations of his youth, and to know for a certainty that Orion, calm and immensely dignified, would never fail him and that between freight trains about three o’clock in the morning the red heart of the Scorpion in the south-west could always be counted on, was a mild sort of consolation. Poling at Princeton, they had made, at three in the morning, no impression on him; at Point of Rocks there were absolutely no other associations to suggest God’s country.

Besides these there was, in matter of fact, nothing and nobody within measurable distance of the night man. Hughie was a good bit of a philosopher; but even among those of the railroad men who had never been east of the Missouri River a shift from Princeton to Point of Rocks was commonly conceded to be a fright.

When Hugh was told that at one time a colony had existed at Point of Rocks he was unbelieving. Yet an Englishman, fascinated in an earlier day by the mountains, had chosen the wildest spot between Medicine Bend and Bear Dance for a cattle-ranch, and his shipping yards were put in at Point of Rocks. He built for himself in the hills east of the station a great brick house. Deserted and in the slow decay of loneliness, it had stood long after the downfall of his hopes, to serve while a vagrant army of prospectors moved across the country as a quarry for the hammer and chisel of their campfires. After they had left it naked in its ruin to the elements it had been struck by lightning and burned. Yet after all of this the house stood. Built in staunch English fashion, its walls remained, and scarred and roofless its height and strength still defied the sun and the sand and the wind.

At one time the Englishman had a hundred men working on his ranches. He founded a colony, planned an abattoir, rode like a fiend, and drank like an engine. The beginning had been ten years before Hughie’s day, the end perhaps five. A sheep-herder knew the story. Sitting on the ground one night beside the passing track, a full-moon night with the white streaming through the sightless windows of the ruin on the hill, he had told Hughie about the Swintons — Richard and the bachelor brother John — Hughie, silent, in his belted trousers and bare arms, standing while the wind blew softly, with his back and one foot against the station building, listening.

Once in a month, out of the dreadful south, the sheep-herder, a lost man with sand-burned eyes and sun-split lips, came to hear a human voice. He was the sole caller on the college man at Point of Rocks.

The sheep-herder was pointing in the moonlight to the east. “Dick Swinton built yards from the switch away over to the creek, and from there down to the curve.”

“Yards?” echoed Hughie incredulously.

“Cattle yards. He had a barn five hundred feet long the other side of the draw for his Holsteins; another big barn over there to the right for a string of thoroughbreds. He run his horses in Denver and Colorado Springs. The whole family used to go down there summers — had a house down at the Springs nigh as big as this one. Mrs. Swinton, she was the thoroughbred, and the governess and the boy and the little girl — she had her own maid — used to go down regular with the China-boy cook and all hands, private car. I seen twenty-two trunks to one time piled up right there where you stand — oh, they were blooded, all right. Champagne right along from New York, twelve cases at a lick, piled up here for the wagons, when their cousins come out from the old country. All gone to hell. Was you ever in England?”

Hughie used to think about the story. He never tired of hearing about the Swintons. They were people, and had done things on a scale, and being the only interest, living or dead, about Point of Rocks, they were naturally matter for reflection. What if they had sunk their money? They had sunk it royally. The east-bound passenger train was not due to pass Point of Rocks until midnight, and from then until four thirty o’clock in the morning, when the west-bound train was due, the operator had abundance of time to think. Even from sunset until midnight all alone under the lamp in the station, reading, perhaps, or writing, was a good bit of a stretch. But after Hughie got acquainted with the weather-warped sheep-herder he found something to look forward to in the night at Point of Rocks — he was waiting for a storm.

“Wait till you get a good thunder-storm some night,” the sheep-herder had muttered. “Then watch them windows over on the hill — you’ll see dancing over there yet; I seen it since the house was burned, right along.” When he spoke, he was telling of the big dances he remembered in the brick house at times that the New Yorkers and the English cousins came out in the car. The sheep-herder believed that when it stormed in the mountains they still danced through the floorless halls. Hughie wanted to ask a lot more questions when he heard of this: it was a story different from the others. But the passenger train in the west was whistling, and when it had come and gone the sheep-herder had disappeared. He blew in from the south like the wind, and died as silently away.

Night after night Hughie waited for him to come back; night after night, at sunset, he scanned the vanishing point of the track, looking in vain for the stunted figure and the sidewise, twisted shamble. The silence of the place with the long hours of twilight and dark outside his window began to grow on Hughie, and one evening he walked across the creek for a change and up the hill to the ruin.

He had not realized before how large the house had been. Standing under the brick entrance arch where double doors had enclosed a deep vestibule, he saw how heavily every part of the house was built. The timbers that had crashed through the floors when the roof fell were like bridge stringers. The floors themselves had been framed like decks, and their charred debris lay in a forbidding tangle just as the storm drowning the conflagration had left it. The blackened walls gaped; the parting light streamed through vacant casements, and above the arches of the tower — which had suffered least from the fire — stars twinkled. The desolation was complete.

He climbed into the tower. A stairway still remained, and, climbing higher, he found intact a half-story, once a child’s playroom. Prints pasted on the walls hung in tatters. A little scrap-heap of rusty tin cars lay under the window opening. The sheep-herder had said the little girl was wild about engines and often used to ride with the enginemen on the passenger trains when the family were travelling. In a corner Hughie saw a Japanese doll, weather-beaten, but still lying where it had been left to its last sleep, with a battered locomotive for pillow. The frock was faded, and the pink cheeks and almond brows of the doll were blanched. He stooped to lift it from its long nap and something fell from its bosom. Hughie picked the something up. It was a broken ivory miniature, but the colours cunningly laid in still preserved the features of a little girl. Nearly half of the oval had been broken away, but the child’s face remained. Under his lamp that night, Hughie examined it. Brown hair fell over the temples and the high cheeks were touched with pink. The eyes deep-set and the nose straight and determined, looked boyish, but below it the face narrowed to a mere dimple of a girl’s mouth; the chin was gone.

That night the east-bound train was an hour late. The operator, idle in his solitude, studied the miniature. He wanted to know more about the children that had played in the tower and ridden the desert on their ponies — he had heard something about it — and wished continually for the sheep-herder to come back. The old fellow had been gone this time for weeks. While Hughie was reflecting, the train whistled, and he was still in a study when the engineman, Oliver Sollers, walked into the office for orders.

“I struck a man tonight, Hughie,” said Oliver, sitting down as he drew off his heavy gloves.

“Where?”

“Somewhere the other side of Castle Creek. He’s back in the baggage-car. I didn’t see him. It’s bad luck, too, to strike a man that you don’t see; leastwise, it never happened to me before. He must have been walking ahead of us, I guess, and the pilot picked him up. When we stopped at Castle Creek for water I got down to oil around and found him on the front end. He was an old man, too,” added the engineman moodily. “We will have to leave him here with you, Hughie, for Number One to take back to Sleepy Cat. Well, it can’t be helped. Got any orders, boy?”

The trainmen brought in the body. They laid it on the waiting-room floor and Hughie, busy with his orders, did not look at the man. After the train pulled out and the dull red of the tail-lights had disappeared in the east he sat down under his lamp at the window table, the telegraph key in front of him clicking vagrant messages, to wait a few minutes before stepping out of the office to close the waiting-room door. The door was left open at night, but tonight it must not be, because the coyotes had long noses for blood. When Hughie went at length to bolt the outside door he took the lamp in his hand and, coming back, stooped to lift the newspaper from the dead man’s face. It was the sheep-herder.

The operator let the newspaper drop. He went slowly back into the office. He remembered now that he had never asked the man his name. If he knew it he could perhaps notify relatives somewhere — at the very least supply a name to go on the coffin.

Dismiss the shock as he would, he realized that he was unnerved. He sat down with his head in his hands, thinking over it, when he heard thunder in the mountains; the sky had been overcast when the train pulled in. Soon rain began to fall in great drops on the roof above his head, and within a few moments in the land of no rain it was raining a flood. For a long time the storm hung above the peaks in the Mission range. Presently the wind shifted and shook the little station building with a yelp. Then, with the shock of an earthquake, the lightning claps of a cloudburst, and the pent-up fury of a long, dry summer, down came the storm from the high mountains.

The wind whipped the water in sheets against the window-panes, and little gusts, exploding in the downpour, rattled the sash viciously. If the wind abated the rain plunged on the roof, and when it blew, water poured in at every joint and crevice of the dried-out building. Hughie turned down the lamp, cut in the lightning arrester, and sat down with his hands in his pockets.

He knew now what the sheep-herder had meant when he talked of a storm. The lightning ceased to crash very soon and the thunder that shook the earth for a few moments abated, but great electric waves played almost silently and in a terrifying way through the deluge of falling rain. The desert rippled and swam in the dance of waters, the far mountains were strangely lighted, and above them distant thunder moaned unceasingly.

Hughie unaffectedly wished himself away from Point of Rocks. He swore mentally but savagely at everything about the place except his dead companion, and when he could sit still no longer he began to walk around with his hands in his pockets. As he passed the waiting-room door he saw that the rain was driving in at the open window above the head of the sheep-herder. He resisted an inclination to turn away, for the window ought to be closed. Above the roar of the rain he heard now through the open sash the roar of the water foaming down Dry Bitter Creek. Hughie walked out into the dark waiting-room to close the window. As he stepped toward it he saw the play of the storm in the ruin on the hill.

From the heavens to the horizon the naked basin of the desert trembled in the shock of the storm. Through the deluge great curtains of light, shot from horizon to horizon, threw the landscape up in fanciful, quivering pictures. Water leaped on arid slopes, hills floated in falling rivers, rain fell in never-ending sheets, and above all played the incessant blaze of the maddened sky and the long roll of the far and sullen thunder.

He looked at the old house. Like a lamp set within a skull, lightning burned and played about it. Through the casements he saw the staring walls lighted again. The words of the dead sheep-herder came back and he waited for graceful figures to weave past the burning windows to the trembling rhythm of the storm. He stood only for a moment. Then he lowered the sash, stepped away from the dead man and going back into the office, sat down at his table with his head between his hands.

Chapter II

The chief dispatcher, Martin Duffy — this is the same man who is digging the Panama Canal — called Hughie up on the wire and began talking with him as soon as he received his letter of resignation. “You don’t know your own mind,” declared Martin Duffy, sending his annoyance fast, because the furtive liking he had for the boy made him the more solicitous. “Take off your head and pound it, Hughie. Your uncle won’t like this. You are in line for a better thing. Just as soon as we can get a man to take Point of Rocks you are to come in and take an East-end trick under me. I’ve been keeping it as a surprise. Just hold your horses thirty days, and see what will happen.”

“It may well be,” returned Hughie over the wire in dry reply, “but that is just the point: I don’t want anything to happen — leastwise, not anything at Point of Rocks.”

“Hold your horses thirty days, will you?” retorted Martin Duffy, who when incensed always said “horses” with a hiss.

“I can hold my horses for thirty days,” returned Hughie, always impudent and already clever at a key, “but who will hold them for thirty nights? Forty-second Street and slavery for life for mine, Mr. Duffy, if I can’t get away from this job.”

However, Hughie held on as he had been told to and nothing whatever happened either at Point of Rocks or elsewhere. But he realized uncomfortably that Point of Rocks was getting on his nerves, and when the desert really does get on a man’s nerves, it is time to get out. He was already conscious that he was overstaying his leave, and but for Duffy he never could have been persuaded to hang on. The nights grew lonelier and lonelier. But just as they had become unbearable he got the long-awaited reprieve — orders to report at Medicine Bend on the 1st of September for the dispatcher’s trick. It was then the 30th of August.

Since the storm the desert nights had seemed never so peaceful. Hughie felt ashamed of himself almost as soon as he knew he was going to leave. For nearly a month there had not been a cloud in the evening sky — just the clear lilies or roses of the sunset streaming into a high salmon field; then, purple; grey patches of dusk, and over all a lighting of stars.

At dawn it was the very same: one morning prettier than the other. Hughie began to realize he should lose something in leaving the desert. That night, the last but one, he was sneakingly sorry to go. The whole evening went to getting up his reports, and when he looked at the clock the east-bound passenger was due. Hughie had no orders for it, but the engineman stopped that night to tighten a nut, and the conductor came in to congratulate the boy on his promotion; also to give him a cigar instead of stealing one, and to beg Hughie to remember him when he came into the seats of the mighty — not to leave him lying out long hours at Point of Rocks on cold nights waiting for orders. Hughie had already promised everybody the best of every thing, and after the conductor signalled and the long string of Pullmans drew past the station into the eastern night, he watched the lights vanish upon the distant tangent feeling content with himself and the world.

Chapter III

The lamp had burned bad all evening. After the train was gone Hughie stopped poking at the wick. His reports were up and signed, and he had finished a long letter home when he remembered that in his report to the express company he had forgotten, under the head of “Unusual Incidents,” to note the death of the sheep-herder and the fact of the body’s being brought in to the station and left all night in the waiting-room. By keeping a record of such events the company sometimes developed clues to thefts, robberies, and other unpleasant happenings. While Hughie felt certain that there could be no after-clap to this affair, since the dead man had been taken away and duly buried, it was a part of the routine work to make up the record, and he began a brief account of the matter.

As he wrote, the night of the death came back. The storm presented itself, and so vividly that he hesitated at times for words. His thoughts crowded fast one on another. It was what there was in his recollections to leave out that bothered him; things indefinable but things creepy to think about. He stopped his writing for a moment and took the chimney from the lamp to poke the ill wick with his pen. Through the open doors the south wind, fanning the uncertain flame, caused it to flare suddenly, and as he put back the chimney he heard the office door behind him close. The wind often closed or opened the door and the south wind was a kindly companion, blowing for hours together with the same gentle swiftness over the desert wastes. Hughie wrote the last words of his report. Just as he pressed the blotter down upon the signature he became aware of an odd sensation; an impression that he was no longer alone in the room.

He passed his fingers mechanically across the blotter-pad waiting for the impression to pass. Instead, an almost imperceptible shiver ran up his back. He rubbed the blotter more firmly, almost officiously, but with the growing conviction that someone else was in the room, and soon the difficulty was to stop the rubbing. When he did lay the pad aside a faint moisture suffused his forehead. He wanted then to open the door that he had heard close, but to do it he should be compelled to turn around. This required an effort, and he tried to summon the resolve. He looked at the lamp — it burned brightly. The moisture cooled on his forehead; the signature he had just blotted lay under his eyes. He recognized it perfectly and felt sure he was awake. He was even conscious that his hands were growing cold, and he put them up to his head; what it cost mentally to do even this surprised him. He could not look around. He attempted to whistle softly and had almost shamed himself out of a fear he felt to be ridiculous when he was stunned by a voice at his very side: “Should you like to have your grave dug out here under the stars?”

The words were distinct. Hughie froze to his chair. If the tones were soft they were perfectly clear, and the words were already stamped on his consciousness. What did it mean? Could it be the voice of a living creature? Of a woman? No woman lived within twenty miles of Point of Rocks — no living creature with a voice such as that within a hundred miles. He heard it again:

“Your grave will be under the stars.” Hughie’s fingers moved, but beyond that he sat paralysed, and his tongue clove dry to the roof of his mouth. He knew now that an unreal presence had come upon him. He knew, too, that in the mountains men went mad of mere loneliness, and faint with horror, he clutched his temples, waiting every instant for reason to leave.

“The stars are singing for us tonight.” With these words, spoken softly and almost in his ear, something touched his shoulder. The touch went through him like needles, and he sprang like a madman from his chair.

He whirled and cried out in a cracked voice. A figure shrank quickly away — a woman’s figure, seemingly, with a shadowy face and loosened hair. When he could realize that he really saw something the head was averted and he could remember only a glimpse of startled eyes. The apparition, with hands outstretched, was moving toward the door. He heard a suppressed utterance, “I cannot find my grave.”

The voice was too human. “Who are you?” cried the operator in desperation. “Why are you here?”

“I cannot find my grave.”

“I — I haven’t got it,” stammered Hughie, with hair on end.

The figure shrank farther away. In the dim light he could see outlines of loosened draperies and falling hair. It already seemed as if the ghost were more frightened, if possible, than he, and his scattered faculties began to act. The figure moved toward the door and laid a white hand on the knob, but could not turn it. Hughie saw that the spring lock would hold the door and the helplessness of his unreal visitor inspired courage. If it was a woman she was trying painfully to open the door. Hughie took a cautious step. There was no longer any thought of a vision in his mind; the clock was ticking loudly, the sounder clicked at intervals on the table and his heart beat fast and heavily. He was awake, and whether living or dead, a woman was standing before him. If she had not dropped from the stars, how could she have come? There had not been the slightest warning of an approach save the closing of the door — no wagon rattle from some far-off ranch, no sound of horses’ hoofs, and as for walking, there was no place to walk from. Even believing her to be a living creature, there was something unnatural in her manner. She inspired fear. When she put her hands to her face a shiver passed over him. When she moved, her feet gave forth no sound. Hesitating between the fear of what the wildest surmise could not explain and the conviction that this must be a reality, Hughie heard a sob and pity moved him.

“I will let you out,” he exclaimed unsteadily. Watching his visitor narrowly as he stepped forward, he released the spring-bolt. In doing so he saw her face. A shock checked him and a new fear overcame him. What mystery could this be? It was the face of the broken miniature. The head, as he now saw it, was bent and the eyes were drooping, but the high cheeks, the lines of the hair falling over the temples, the straight nose, and the curving side mouth. With the certainty of an acute memory the operator knew it all. He collected himself and spoke again. “Shall I let you out?”

Failing to see that he held the knob in his hand, she put forward her own to reach it. Her fingers touched his, and he knew that he faced a creature of flesh and blood. He released the lock. “Shall I let you out?” She looked helplessly before her and her voice trembled. “It is cold.”

He closed the door. “It is cold,” he echoed. “How did you come here?”

She drew timidly back. “What is your name?” he persisted.

“It is so cold.”

To none of his questions could she give an answer. She spoke like one in a trance; at times trying pathetically to put back her loosened hair, pleading at times to be let go and shrinking in fear from her companion, who found himself now the protector of his unaccountable apparition. He continued to speak and with growing excitement, to all of which the strange visitor appeared insensible. He saw very soon that he was unnecessarily frightening his ghost, and he presently stood silent with his hands on the back of a surprised chair, waiting for his visitor to make the next move herself.

She had, so far as he could ever remember afterward, but two coherent movements; either her eyes sought in hope the light of his lamp or turned from it in despair. This much, at least, was intelligible, even if incomprehensible. Not until he saw her falter, put her hands blindly out and sink to the floor did he realize that she was ill and in distress. Too excited to breathe as he took her in his arms, he lifted her up and placed her inert upon a chair. She opened her eyes in a moment. A chill passed over her. Hughie threw open the drafts of the stove and chafed her hands. Something of gratitude seemed to move her, for as she shrank into the chair she looked at him with less of fear. He sat down then himself, and facing her, tried with his hands on his knees to inspire confidence. She would not talk. Instead, as the fire in the stove blazed up and the heat diffused itself she showed unmistakable drowsiness and added the last straw to Hughie’s embarrassment by asking him why he did not go to bed. He tried to explain that he went to bed in the daytime. His apparition was too far overcome by the warmth to comprehend, but an inspiration seized him. He asked if she would rest for a while on the long table at the back of the room. She opposed nothing that he suggested, and he took the cushion of his chair for a pillow and helped her as well as he could to lie down on the table. When he had done this he went back to his end of the room and watched the dim corner beyond the stove. His charge, for he now made her such, lay perfectly quiet, and when she breathed regularly he took his overcoat from the nail behind the door, tiptoed over to the corner, and laid it across her shoulders. It had been a swagger coat at school, but was short for a coverlet. Still, it served, and as he walked back better satisfied to his chair he heard a rapid clicking from the sounder. The train dispatcher at Medicine Bend was sending the 19 — the imperative call from headquarters to clear the line for the dispatched office — and every night operator on the division was getting out of his way. As soon as the wire was free a station call came, and to Hughie’s surprise it was for Point of Rocks. He answered instantly, and the message came so fast he could hardly write it.

“Passenger missing from Chicago sleeper on Train Number Two — a young Englishwoman. Is believed to be somewhere between Castle Creek and Point of Rocks. Get your section men out quick with lights and hand-cars and with orders to stay out till they find her. Name, Grace Swinton. Answer quick.”

The chief dispatched initials were appended. Hughie Morrison sent his answer straightway.

“Unnecessary to call out the men. I have the missing passenger. She is asleep here in the office. Instruct.”

“Good boy, Hughie,” returned the pleased dispatcher. “Hold her for special car and engine from here running as second Number One. Make her as comfortable in every way as possible. Get whole story. If injured in any way notify office of Whispering Smith.”

Hughie Morrison, turning from the key, drew a breath. It was his last night at Point of Rocks. He looked with curious feelings into the dim corner where the missing passenger lay. He turned in his chair again and again, but she did not move. He adjusted and readjusted the drafts of the stove, noisily and at times officiously, but her soft, regular breathing never varied and day broke on a face upon the table as delicate as ivory and the operator in despair for a sign of awakening.

First Number Two, the regular train, came and went, with every man of the train and engine crews peering furtively into the shaded corner at Hughie Morrison’s ghost, but Hughie waved them away and knew that the Special to bear her away would follow all too soon. When it drew in, bringing the superintendent’s car, he was ready to rebel against his orders and disposed to hold the ghost against all comers. But with careful tread they brought in heavy blankets, and as Grace Swinton lay wrapped her in them and carried her, sleeping heavily, to the car, regardless of Hughie’s protests that they ought at least to wait till he had got her story from her own lips. They asked for orders, got them almost at once, and puffed noisily away for Medicine Bend. When they were gone Hughie folded his papers; he was all ready to say good-bye to Point of Rocks.

Chapter IV

The promotion had come. After all, it was not exciting. Indeed, nothing excited Hughie any more. Martin Duffy was the most crestfallen man, save one, on the division over having picked Hughie for a dispatcher, that one being the new dispatcher himself. The change that had come over the president’s nephew was the common talk of the trainmen. His alertness, the light play of his humour, the grasp that met the little desert emergencies at Point of Rocks with the ease of a veteran — where were they? As to the night with the ghost, nobody gave that any consideration, because where things happen all the time, and where everything that happens is unusual, an incident holds the stage only for its fleeting instant. Hughie himself felt the situation keenly. He even asked to be relieved, but Martin Duffy was above all things not a quitter. “Don’t commit suicide,” he growled. “You’re in a funk, that is all. I pulled a woman once from in front of a locomotive. What do you think she did? Sent me a cross-stitched waistcoat and a copy of ‘The Simple Life.’ Wouldn’t that kill you? And I’ve wanted a meerschaum pipe for twenty years.”

The advice was good, and Hughie swallowed it, as a fool should, with disgust and humility. But Martin Duffy usually caused things to happen, and this time proved no exception. When the new dispatcher walked into the office just before twelve o’clock that night for his trick, the mail from Number One was being distributed and a letter, small but plump-looking, bearing a foreign postmark and addressed in a clear, firm hand to Hughie Morrison, was laid before him. He cut open the envelope with feverish haste and began to read. Line after line and page after page slipped past the lightning of his eyes, and one would have said that the play of his mental fire had quite come back. This was the letter that it should be. This was the story, her own story with its frank account of the long illness that had first shown itself during an overland railroad journey in America; here were the prettily chosen expressions of gratitude — all that the greediest Princeton man could ask for, and Hughie was greedy — thanking him for the delicate kindnesses she said he had shown to her during her night of trance and terror on the desert. Hughie, unable to read and breathe at the same time, sat down. The desert came back; the stillness of the wind and the glory of the stars, the stealing fear, the shock, and now the grip of the eagerly waited letter.

I had come from the coast, (she wrote) and was bringing home from California my invalid brother. He was then, and is still very ill. The worry of providing for his journey and the fear that I might not be able to bring him home alive had worn upon me until I was in but little better condition, I fear, than he.

How I ever came to leave my berth in my sleep and to walk asleep straight out of our sleeping-car when the train stopped that night at Point of Rocks I cannot, of course, explain. But the doctor has since told me that in crossing the Rocky Mountains the altitude is often accountable for strange things that people do. When I reached home after the ocean voyage I was already ill of brain fever — less, I suppose, could hardly have been looked for — and my recovery has been very slow. But for your delicate consideration in that night of delirium I should probably never have recovered at all. Wandering as I did over the open country around the station in the cold of those dreadful hours of unconsciousness, I seem faintly to remember seeing the light in your window — the only light, I was afterward told, within many, many miles. And I want now to apologize with all humility for breaking in upon your solitude at so unearthly an hour and in so forlorn a condition. If at any time hereafter, you should ever be in England, I hope you will surely come to Ormonde Road, Richmond. You will find us at The Knolls, and it will give me a chance to tell you in person how grateful I am for all you did for me. It will surprise you very much, I know, to learn that I myself once really lived at Point of Rocks, but it was years ago, during my childhood. An uncle of mine had cattle ranches in that country, and built a large house near the Point, which afterward burned. As a little girl I lived with my aunt, and I often played with my dolls among the very rocks near the railroad station.

The letter bore the signature of Grace Swinton. Hughie Morrison brought his hand down on the table and a new light shone in his face. His resolve was taken. Saint George and Merry England was the watchword, whether it forever blasted hopes of promotion or not. He began his eight-hour trick on the instant that night and did the best work with the trains he had done since his promotion. Moreover, he found time to write a letter and start it at six o’clock that morning on Grace Swinton’s own train, as he called Number Two, to The Knolls, in Ormonde Road, Richmond, explaining how he had happened to be sent to Point of Rocks — with incidental mention that he had long known of her having lived there. And mention, too, of a broken miniature and of one surviving doll that she might, he hoped, still be interested in.

Inquiries mutually began could not, of course, be satisfied at so long distance with a single exchange of letters. When Bucks heard the story he seemed more pleased than he ever had been with a relative in his life, and to Hughie’s surprise, gave the six months’ leave asked for the trip to England and The Knolls without a word of reproach. But an account of that trip with its surprises, with the international complications that followed, with Hughie’s questions as to whether the stars really had sung on the desert that night and Grace Swinton’s denials as to ever having said anything about their singing; the journey made by President Bucks to inspect the English railways and to be present at The Knolls at his nephew, Hughie Morrison’s, wedding — all this would make a chapter told too often in the traditions of the Mountain Division. What is of importance is that Hughie, being now general manager of the coast lines, is stationed where his English bride — having lived in the Rocky Mountains as a little girl — professes to feel entirely at home.

THE TERROR BY NIGHT

Lewis Lister

1915

Maynard disencumbered himself from his fishing-creel, stabbed the butt of his rod into the turf, and settled down in the heather to fill a pipe. All round him stretched the undulating moor, purple in the late summer sunlight. To the southward, low down, a faint haze told where the sea lay. The stream at his feet sang its queer, crooning moor-song as it rambled onward, chuckling to meet a bed of pebbles somewhere out of sight, whispering mysteriously to the rushes that fringed its banks of peat, deepening to a sudden contralto as it poured over granite boulders into a scum-flecked pool below.

For a long time the man sat smoking. Occasionally he turned his head to watch with keen eyes the fretful movements of a fly hovering above the water. Then a sudden dimple in the smooth surface of the stream arrested his attention. A few concentric ripples widened, travelled towards him, and were absorbed in the current. His lips curved into a little smile and he reached for his rod. In the clear water he could see the origin of the ripples; a small trout, unconscious of his presence, was waiting in its hover for the next tit-bit to float downstream. Presently it rose again.

“The odds are ten to one in your favour,” said the man. “Let’s see!”

He dropped on one knee and the cast leapt out in feathery coils. Once, twice it swished; the third time it alighted like thistledown on the surface. There was a tiny splash, a laugh, and the little green-heart rod flicked a trout high over his head. It was the merest baby — half-an-ounce, perhaps — and it fell from the hook into the herbage some yards from the stream.

“Little ass!” said Maynard. “That was meant for your big brother.”

He recovered his cast and began to look for his victim. Without avail he searched the heather, and as the fateful seconds sped, at last laid down his rod and dropped on hands and knees to probe among the grass-stems.

For a while he hunted in vain, then the sunlight showed a golden sheen among some stones. Maynard gave a grunt of relief, but as his hand closed round it a tiny flutter passed through the fingerling; it gave a final gasp and was still. Knitting his brows in almost comical vexation, he hastened to restore it to the stream, holding it by the tail and striving to impart a lifelike wriggle to its limpness.

“Buck up, old thing!” he murmured encouragingly. “Oh, buck up! You’re all right, really you are!”

But the “old thing” was all wrong. In fact, it was dead. Standing in the wet shingle, Maynard regarded the speckled atom as it lay in the palm of his hand.

“A matter of seconds, my son. One instant in all eternity would have made just the difference between life and death to you. And the high gods denied it you!”

On the opposite side of the stream, set back about thirty paces from the brink, stood a granite boulder. It was as high as a man’s chest, roughly cubical in shape; but the weather and clinging moss had rounded its edges, and in places segments had crumbled away, giving foothold to clumps of fern and starry moor-flowers. On three sides the surrounding ground rose steeply, forming an irregular horseshoe mound that opened to the west. Perhaps it was the queer amphitheatrical effect of this setting that connected up some whimsical train of thought in Maynard’s brain.

“It would seem as if the gods had claimed you,” he mused, still holding the corpse. “You shall be a sacrifice — a burnt sacrifice to the God of Waste Places.”

He laughed at the conceit, half-ashamed of his own childishness, and crossing the stream by some boulders, he brushed away the earth and weed from the top of the great stone. Then he retraced his steps and gathered a handful of bleached twigs that the winter floods had left stranded along the margin of the stream. These he arranged methodically on the cleared space; on the top of the tiny pyre he placed the troutlet.

“There!” he said, and smiling gravely struck a match. A faint column of smoke curled up into the still air, and as he spoke the lower rim of the setting sun met the edge of the moor. The evening seemed suddenly to become incredibly still, even the voice of the stream ceasing to be a sound distinct. A wagtail bobbing in the shallows fled into the waste. Overhead the smoke trembled upwards, a faint stain against a cloudless sky. The stillness seemed almost acute. It was as if the moor were waiting, and holding its breath while it waited. Then the twigs upon his altar crackled, and the pale flames blazed up. The man stepped back with artistic appreciation of the effect.

“To be really impressive, there ought to be more smoke,” he continued.

Round the base of the stone were clumps of small flowers. They were crimson in colour and had thick, fleshy leaves. Hastily, he snatched a handful and piled it on the fire. The smoke darkened and rose in a thick column; there was a curious pungency in the air.

Far off the church-bell in some unseen hamlet struck the hour. The distant sound, coming from the world of men and everyday affairs, seemed to break the spell. An ousel fluttered across the stream and dabbled in a puddle among some stones. Rabbits began to show themselves and frisk with lengthened shadows in the clear spaces. Maynard looked at his watch, half-mindful of a train to be caught somewhere miles away, and then, held by the peace of running water, stretched himself against the sloping ground.

The glowing world seemed peopled by tiny folk, living out their timid, inscrutable lives around him. A water-rat, passing bright-eyed upon his lawful occasion, paused on the border of the stream to consider the stranger, and was lost to view. A stagnant pool among some reeds caught the reflection of the sunset and changed on the instant into raw gold.

Maynard plucked a grass stem and chewed it reflectively, staring out across the purple moor and lazily watching the western sky turn from glory to glory. Over his head the smoke of the sacrifice still curled and eddied upwards. Then a sudden sound sent him on to one elbow — the thud of an approaching horse’s hoofs.

“Moor ponies!” he muttered, and, rising, stood expectant beside his smoking altar.

Then he heard the sudden jingle of a bit, and presently a horse and rider climbed into view against the pure sky. A young girl, breeched, booted and spurred like a boy, drew rein, and sat looking down into the hollow.

For a moment neither spoke; then Maynard acknowledged her presence by raising his tweed hat. She gave a little nod.

“I thought it was somebody swaling — burning the heather.” She considered the embers on the stone, and then her grey eyes travelled back to the spare, tweed-clad figure beside it.

He smiled in his slow way — a rather attractive smile.

“No. I’ve just concluded some pagan rites in connection with a small trout!” He nodded gravely at the stone. “That was a burnt sacrifice.” With whimsical seriousness he told her of the trout’s demise and high destiny.

For a moment she looked doubtful; but the inflection of breeding in his voice, the wholesome, lean face and humorous eyes, reassured her. A smile hovered about the corners of her mouth.

“Oh, is that it? I wondered… ”

She gathered the reins and turned her horse’s head.

“Forgive me if I dragged you out of your way,” said Maynard, never swift to conventionality, but touched by the tired shadows in her eyes. The faint droop of her mouth, too, betrayed intense fatigue. “You look fagged. I don’t want to be a nuisance or bore you, but I wish you’d let me offer you a sandwich. I’ve some milk here, too.”

The girl looked round the ragged moor, brooding in the twilight, and half hesitated. Then she forced a wan little smile.

“I am tired, and hungry, too. Have you enough for us both?”

“Lots!” said Maynard. To himself he added: “And what’s more, my child, you’ll have a little fainting affair in a few minutes, if you don’t have a feed.”

“Come and rest for a minute,” he continued aloud.

He spoke with pleasant, impersonal kindliness, and as he turned to his satchel she slipped out of the saddle and came towards him, leading her horse.

“Drink that,” he said, holding out the cup of his flask. She drank with a wry little face, and coughed. “I put a little whisky in it,” he explained. “You needed it.”

She thanked him and sat down with the bridle linked over her arm. The colour crept back into her cheeks. Maynard produced a packet of sandwiches and a pasty.

“I’ve been mooning about the moor all the afternoon and lost myself twice,” she explained between frank mouthfuls. “I’m hopelessly late for dinner, and I’ve still got miles to go.”

“Do you know the way now?” he asked.

“Oh, yes! It won’t take me long. My family are sensible, too, and don’t fuss.” She looked at him, her long-lashed eyes a little serious. “But you — how are you going to get home? It’s getting late to be out on the moor afoot.”

Maynard laughed.

“Oh, I’m all right, thanks!” He sniffed the warm September night. “I think I shall sleep here, as a matter of fact. I’m a gipsy by instinct—

“‘Give to me the life I love,

Let the lave go by me,

Give the jolly Heaven above—’”

He broke off, arrested by her unsmiling eyes. She was silent a moment.

“People don’t as a rule sleep out — about here.” The words came jerkily, as if she were forcing a natural tone into her voice.

“No?” He was accustomed to being questioned on his unconventional mode of life, and was prepared for the usual expostulations. She looked abruptly towards him.

“Are you superstitious?”

He laughed and shook his head.

“I don’t think so. But what has that got to do with it?”

She hesitated, flushing a little.

“There is a legend — people about here say that the moor here is haunted. There is a Thing that hunts people to death!”

He laughed outright, wondering how old she was. Seventeen or eighteen, perhaps. She had said her people “didn’t fuss.” That meant she was left to herself to pick up all these old wives’ tales.

“Really! Has anyone been caught?”

She nodded, unsmiling.

“Yes; old George Toms. He was one of Dad’s tenants, a big purple-faced man, who drank a lot and never took much exercise. They found him in a ditch with his clothes all torn and covered with mud. He had been run to death; there was no wound on his body, but his heart was broken.” Her thoughts recurred to the stone against which they leant, and his quaint conceit. “You were rather rash to go offering burnt sacrifices about here, don’t you think? Dad says that stone is the remains of an old Phoenician altar, too.”

She was smiling now, but the seriousness lingered in her eyes.

“And I have probably invoked some terrible heathen deity — Ashtoreth, or Pugm, or Baal! How awful!” he added, with mock gravity.

The girl rose to her feet.

“You are laughing at me. The people about here are superstitious, and I am a Celt, too. I belong here.”

He jumped up with a quick protest.

“No, I’m not laughing at you. Please don’t think that! But it’s a little hard to believe in active evil when all around is so beautiful.” He helped her to mount and walked to the top of the mound at her stirrup. “Tell me, is there any charm or incantation, in case—?” His eyes were twinkling, but she shook her fair head soberly.

“They say iron — cold iron — is the only thing it cannot cross. But I must go!” She held out her hand with half-shy friendliness. “Thank you for your niceness to me.” Her eyes grew suddenly wistful. “Really, though, I don’t think I should stay there if I were you. Please!”

He only laughed, however, and she moved off, shaking her impatient horse into a canter. Maynard stood looking after her till she was swallowed by the dusk and surrounding moor. Then, thoughtfully, he retraced his steps to the hollow.

•   •   •

A cloud lay across the face of the moon when Fear awoke Maynard. He rolled on to one elbow and stared round the hollow, filled with inexplicable dread. He was ordinarily a courageous man, and had no nerves to speak of; yet, as his eyes followed the line of the ridge against the sky, he experienced terror, the elementary, nauseating terror of childhood, when the skin tingles, and the heart beats at a suffocating gallop. It was very dark, but momentarily his eyes grew accustomed to it. He was conscious of a queer, pungent smell, horribly animal and corrupt.

Suddenly the utter silence broke. He heard a rattle of stones, the splash of water about him, realized that it was the brook beneath his feet, and that he, Maynard, was running for his life.

Neither then nor later did Reason assert herself. He ran without question or amazement. His brain — the part where human reasoning holds normal sway — was dominated by the purely primitive instinct of flight. And in that sudden rout of courage and self-respect one conscious thought alone remained. Whatever it was that was even then at his heels, he must not see it. At all costs it must be behind him, and, resisting the sudden terrified impulse to look over his shoulder, he unbuttoned his tweed jacket and disengaged himself from it as he ran. The faint haze that had gathered round the full moon dispersed, and he saw the moor stretching before him, grey and still, glistening with dew.

He was of frugal and temperate habits, a wiry man at the height of his physical powers, with lean flanks and a deep chest.

At Oxford they had said he was built to run for his life. He was running for it now, and he knew it.

The ground sloped upwards after a while, and he tore up the incline, breathing deep and hard; down into a shallow valley, leaping gorse bushes, crashing through whortle and meadowsweet, stumbling over peat-cuttings and the workings of forgotten tin-mines. An idiotic popular tune raced through his brain. He found himself trying to frame the words, but they broke into incoherent prayers, still to the same grotesque tune.

Then, as he breasted the flank of a boulder-strewn tor, he seemed to hear snuffling breathing behind him, and, redoubling his efforts, stepped into a rabbit hole. He was up and running again in the twinkling of an eye, limping from a twisted ankle as he ran.

He sprinted over the crest of the hill and thought he heard the sound almost abreast of him, away to the right. In the dry bed of a watercourse some stones were dislodged and fell with a rattle in the stillness of the night; he bore away to the left. A moment later there was Something nearly at his left elbow, and he smelt again the nameless, fetid reek. He doubled, and the ghastly truth flashed upon him. The Thing was playing with him! He was being hunted for sport — the sport of a horror unthinkable. The sweat ran down into his eyes.

He lost all count of time; his wrist watch was smashed on his wrist. He ran through a reeling eternity, sobbing for breath, stumbling, tripping, fighting a leaden weariness; and ever the same unreasoning terror urged him on. The moon and ragged skyline swam about him; the blood drummed deafeningly in his ears, and his eyeballs felt as if they would burst from their sockets. He had nearly bitten his swollen tongue in two falling over an unseen peat-cutting, and blood-flecked foam gathered on his lips.

God, how he ran! But he was no longer among bog and heather. He was running — shambling now — along a road. The loping pursuit of that nameless, shapeless Something sounded like an echo in his head.

He was nearing a village, but saw nothing save a red mist that swam before him like a fog. The road underfoot seemed to rise and fall in wavelike undulations. Still he ran, with sobbing gasps and limbs that swerved under his weight; at his elbow hung death unnamable, and the fear of it urged him on while every instinct of his exhausted body called out to him to fling up his hands and end it.

Out of the mist ahead rose the rough outline of a building by the roadside; it was the village smithy, half workshop, half dwelling. The road here skirted a patch of grass, and the moonlight, glistening on the dew, showed the dark circular scars of the turf where, for a generation, the smith’s peat fires had heated the great iron hoops that tyred the wheels of the wains. One of these was even then lying on the ground with the turves placed in readiness for firing in the morning, and in the throbbing darkness of Maynard’s consciousness a voice seemed to speak faintly — the voice of a girl: “There’s a Thing that hunts people to death. But iron — cold iron — it cannot cross.”

The sweat of death was already on his brow as he reeled sideways, plunging blindly across the uneven tufts of grass. His feet caught in some obstruction and he pitched forward into the sanctuary of the huge iron tyre — a spasm of cramp twisting his limbs up under him.

As he fell a great blackness rose around him, and with it the bewildered clamour of awakened dogs.

•   •   •

Dr. Stanmore came down the flagged path from the smith’s cottage, pulling on his gloves. A big car was passing slowly up the village street, and as it came abreast the smithy the doctor raised his hat.

The car stopped, and the driver, a fair-haired girl, leant sideways from her seat.

“Good-morning, Dr. Stanmore! What’s the matter here? Nothing wrong with any of Matthew’s children, is there?”

The Doctor shook his head gravely.

“No, Lady Dorothy; they’re all at school. This is no one belonging to the family — a stranger who was taken mysteriously ill last night just outside the forge, and they brought him in. It’s a most queer case, and very difficult to diagnose — that is to say, to give a diagnosis in keeping with one’s professional — er — conscience.” The girl switched off the engine, and took her hand from the brake-lever. Something in the doctor’s manner arrested her interest.

“What is the matter with him?” she queried. “What diagnosis have you made, professional or otherwise?”

“Shock, Lady Dorothy; severe exhaustion and shock, heart strained, superficial lesions, bruises, scratches, and so forth. Mentally he is in a great state of excitement and terror, lapsing into delirium at times — that is really the most serious feature. In fact, unless I can calm him I am afraid we may have some brain trouble on top of the other thing. It’s most mysterious!”

The girl nodded gravely, holding her underlip between her white teeth.

“What does he look like — in appearance, I mean? Is he young?” The shadow of a smile crossed the doctor’s eyes.

“Yes, Lady Dorothy — quite young, and very good-looking. He is a man of remarkable athletic build. He is calmer now, and I have left Matthew’s wife with him while I slip out to see a couple of other patients.”

Lady Dorothy rose from her seat and stepped down out of the car. “I think I know your patient,” she said. “In fact, I had taken the car to look for him, to ask him to lunch with us. Do you think I might see him for a minute? If it is the person I think it is I may be able to help you diagnose his illness.”

Together they walked up the path and entered the cottage. The doctor led the way upstairs and opened a door. A woman sitting by the bed rose and dropped a curtsey.

Lady Dorothy smiled a greeting to her and crossed over to the bed. There, his face grey and drawn with exhaustion, with shadows round his closed eyes, lay Maynard; one hand lying on the counterpane opened and closed convulsively, his lips moved. The physician eyed the girl interrogatively.

“Do you know him?” he asked.

She nodded, and put her firm, cool hand over the twitching fingers. “Yes,” she said. “And I warned him. Tell me, is he very ill?”

“He requires rest, careful nursing, absolute quiet—”

“All that he can have at the Manor,” said the girl softly. She met the doctor’s eyes and looked away, a faint colour tingeing her cheeks. “Will you go and telephone to father? I will take him back in the car now if he is well enough to be moved.”

“Yes, he is well enough to be moved,” said the doctor. “It is very kind of you, Lady Dorothy, and I will go and telephone at once. Will you stay with him for a little while?”

He left the room, and they heard his feet go down the narrow stairs. The cottage door opened and closed.

The two women, the old and the young, peasant and peer’s daughter, looked at each other, and there was in their glance that complete understanding which can only exist between women. “Do ’ee mind old Jarge Toms, my lady?”

Lady Dorothy nodded.

“I know, I know! And I warned him! They won’t believe, these men! They think because they are so big and strong that there is nothing that can hurt them.”

“’Twas th’ iron that saved un, my lady. ’Twas inside one of John’s new tyres as was lyin’ on the ground that us found un. Dogs barkin’ wakened us up. But it’d ha’ had un, else—” A sound downstairs sent her flying to the door. “’Tis the kettle, my lady. John’s dinner spilin’, an’ I forgettin’.”

She hurried out of the room and closed the door.

The sound of their voices seemed to have roused the occupant of the bed. His eyelids fluttered and opened; his eyes rested full on the girl’s face. For a moment there was no consciousness in their gaze; then a whimsical ghost of a smile crept about his mouth. “Go on,” he said in a weak voice. “Say it!”

“Say what?” asked Lady Dorothy. She was suddenly aware that her hand was still on his, but the twitching fingers had closed about hers in a calm, firm grasp.

“Say ‘I told you so’!”

She shook her head with a little smile.

“I told you that cold iron—”

“Cold iron saved me.” He told her of the iron hoop on the ground outside the forge. “You saved me last night.”

She disengaged her hand gently.

“I saved you last night — since you say so. But in future—” Someone was coming up the stairs. Maynard met her eyes with a long look.

“I have no fear,” he said. “I have found something better than cold iron.”

The door opened and the doctor came in. He glanced at Maynard’s face and touched his pulse.

“The case is yours, Lady Dorothy!” he said with a little bow.

THE STRANGE STORY OF
NORTHAVON PRIORY

Frank Frankfort Moore

1919

When Arthur Jephson wrote to me to join his Christmas party at Northavon Priory, I was set wondering where I had heard the name of this particular establishment. I felt certain that I had heard the name before, but I could not recollect for the moment whether I had come upon it in a newspaper report of a breach of promise of marriage or in a Blue-Book bearing upon Inland Fisheries: I rather inclined to the belief that it was in a Blue-Book of some sort. I had been devoting myself some years previously to an exhaustive study of this form of literature; for being very young, I had had a notion that a Blue-Book education was essential to any one with parliamentary aspirations. Yes, I had, I repeat, been very young at that time, and I had not found out that a Blue-Book is the oubliette of inconvenient facts.

It was not until I had promised Arthur to be with him on Christmas Eve that I recollected where I had read something about Northavon Priory, and in a moment I understood how it was I had acquired the notion that the name had appeared in an official document. I had read a good deal about this Priory in a curious manuscript which I had unearthed at Sir Dennis le Warden’s place in Norfolk, known as Marsh Towers. The document, which, with many others, I found stowed away in a wall-cupboard in the great library, purported to be a draft of the evidence taken before one of the Commissions appointed by King Henry VIII to inquire into the abuses alleged to be associated with certain religious houses throughout England. An ancestor of Sir Dennis’s had, it appeared, been a member of one of these Commissions, and he had taken a note of the evidence which he had in the course of his duties handed to the King.

The parchments had, I learned, been preserved in an iron coffer with double padlocks, but the keys had been lost at some remote period, and then the coffer had been covered over with lumber in a room in the east tower overlooking the moat, until an outbreak of fire had resulted in an overturning of the rubbish and a discovery of the coffer. A blacksmith had been employed to pick the locks, which he did with a sledge-hammer; but it was generally admitted that his energy had been wasted when the contents of the box were made known. Sir Dennis cared about nothing except the improvement of the breed of horses through the agency of race meetings, so the manuscripts of his painstaking ancestor were bundled into one of the presses in the library, some, however, being reserved by the intelligent housekeeper in the still-room to make jam-pot covers — a purpose for which, as she explained to me at considerable length, they were extremely well adapted.

I had no great difficulty in deciphering those that came under my hand, for I had had considerable experience of the tricks of early English writers; and as I read I became greatly interested in all the original “trustie and well-beelou’d Sir Denice le Warden” had written. The frankness of the evidence which he had collected on certain points took away my breath, although I had been long accustomed to the directness with which some of the fifteenth-century people expressed themselves.

Northavon Priory was among the religious houses whose practices had formed the subject of the inquiry, and it was the summary of Sir Denice’s notes regarding the Black Masses alleged to have been celebrated within its walls that proved so absorbing to me. The bald account of the nature of these orgies would of itself have been sufficient, if substantiated, to bring about the dissolution of all the order in England. The Black Mass was a pagan revel, the details of which were unspeakable, though their nature was more than hinted at by the King’s Commissioner. Anything so monstrously blasphemous could not be imagined by the mind of man, for with the pagan orgy there was mixed up the most solemn rite of the Mass. It was celebrated on the night of Christmas Eve, and at the hour of midnight the celebration culminated in an invocation to the devil, written so as to parody an office of the Church, and, according to the accounts of some witnesses, in a human sacrifice. Upon this latter point, however, Sir Denice admitted there was a diversity of opinion.

One of the witnesses examined was a man who had entered the Priory grounds from the river during a fearful tempest, on one Christmas Eve, and had, he said, witnessed the revel through a window to which he had climbed. He declared that at the hour of midnight the candles had been extinguished, but that a moment afterwards an awful red light had floated through the room, followed by the shrieks of a human being at the point of strangulation, and then by horrible yells of laughter. Another man who was examined had been a wood-cutter in the service of the Priory, and he had upon one occasion witnessed the celebration of a Black Mass; but he averred that no life was sacrificed, though he admitted that in the strange red light, which had flashed through the room, he had seen what appeared to be two men struggling on the floor. In the general particulars of the orgy there was, however, no diversity of opinion, and had the old Sir Denice le Warden been anything of a comparative mythologist, he could scarcely fail to have been greatly interested in being brought face to face with so striking an example of the survival of an ancient superstition within the walls of a holy building.

During a rainy week I amused myself among the parchments dealing with Northavon Priory, and although what I read impressed me greatly at the time, yet three years of pretty hard work in various parts of the world had so dulled my memory of any incident so unimportant as the deciphering of a mouldy document that, as I have already stated, it was not until I had posted my letter to Arthur Jephson agreeing to spend a day or two with his party, that I succeeded in recalling something of what I had read regarding Northavon Priory.

I had taken it for granted that the Priory had been demolished when Henry had superintended the dissolution of the religious establishments throughout the country: I did not think it likely that one with such a record as was embodied in the notes would be allowed to remain with a single stone on another. A moment’s additional reflection admitted of my perceiving how extremely unlikely it was that, even if Northavon Priory had been spared by the King, it would still be available for visitors during the latter years of the nineteenth century. I had seen many red-brick “abbeys” and “priories” in various parts of the country, not more than ten years old, inhabited mostly by gentlemen who had made fortunes in iron, or perhaps lard, which constitutes, I understand, an excellent foundation for a fortune. There might be, for all I knew, a score of Northavon Priories in England. Arthur Jephson’s father had made his money by the judicious advertising of a certain oriental rug manufactured in the Midlands, and I thought it very likely that he had built a mansion for himself which he had called Northavon Priory.

A letter which I received from Arthur set my mind at rest. He explained to me very fully that Northavon Priory was a hotel built within the walls of an ancient religious house. He had spent a delightful month fishing in the river during the summer — I had been fishing in the Amazon at that time — and had sojourned at the hotel, which he had found to be a marvel of comfort in spite of its picturesqueness. This was why, he said, he had thought how jolly it would be to entertain a party of his friends at the place during the Christmas week.

That explanation was quite good enough for me. I had a week or two to myself in England before going to India, and so soon as I recalled what I had read regarding Northavon Priory, I felt glad that my liking for Jephson had induced me to accept his invitation.

It was not until we were travelling together to the station nearest to the Priory that he mentioned to me, quite incidentally, that during the summer he had been fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a young woman who resided in a spacious mansion within easy distance of the Priory Hotel, and who was, so far as he was capable of judging — and he considered that in such matters his judgment was worth something — the most charming girl in England.

“I see,” I remarked, before his preliminary panegyric had quite come to a legitimate conclusion — “I see all now: you haven’t the courage — to be more exact, the impudence — to come down alone to the hotel — she has probably a brother who is a bit of an athlete — but you think that Tom Singleton and I will form a good enough excuse for an act on your part which parents and guardians can construe in one way only.”

“Well, perhaps — Hang it all, man, you needn’t attribute to me any motives but those of the purest hospitality,” laughed my companion. “Isn’t the prospect of a genuine old English Christmas — the Yule log, and that sort of thing — good enough for you without going any further?”

“It’s quite good enough for me,” I replied. “I only regret that it is not good enough for you. You expect to see her every day?”

“Every day? Don’t be a fool, Jim. If I see her more than four times in the course of the week — I think I should manage to see her four times — I will consider myself exceptionally lucky.”

“And if you see her less than four times you will reckon yourself uncommonly unlucky?”

“O, I think I have arranged for four times all right: I’ll have to trust to luck for the rest.”

“What! You mean to say that the business has gone as far as that?”

“As what?”

“As making arrangements for meeting with her?”

My friend laughed complacently.

“Well, you see, old chap, I couldn’t very well give you this treat without letting her know that I should be in the neighbourhood,” said he.

“Oh, indeed. I don’t see, however, what the — .”

“Great heavens! You mean to say that you don’t see — Oh, you will have your joke.”

“I hope I will have one eventually; I can’t say that I perceive much chance of one at present, however. You’ll not give us much of your interesting society during the week of our treat, as you call it.”

“I’ll give you as much of it as I can spare — more than you’ll be likely to relish, perhaps. A week’s a long time, Jim.”

“ ‘Time travels at divers paces with divers persons,’ my friend. I suppose she’s as lovely as any of the others of past years?”

“As lovely! Jim, she’s just the—”

“Don’t trouble yourself over the description. I have a vivid recollection of the phrases you employed in regard to the others. There was Lily, and Gwen, and Bee, and — yes, by George! there was a fourth; her name was Nelly, or—”

“All flashes in the pan, my friend. I didn’t know my own mind in those old days; but now, thank heaven! — Oh, you’ll agree with me when you see her. This is the real thing and no mistake.”

He was good enough to give me a genuine lover’s description of the young woman, whose name was, he said, Sylvia St. Leger; but it did not differ materially from the descriptions which had come from him in past days, of certainly four other girls for whom he had, he imagined, entertained a devotion strong as death itself. Alas! his devotion had not survived a single year in any case.

When we arrived at the hotel, after a drive of eight miles from the railway station, we found Tom Singleton waiting for us rather impatiently, and in a quarter of an hour we were facing an excellent dinner. We were the only guests at the hotel, for though it was picturesquely situated on the high bank of the river, and was doubtless a delightful place for a sojourn in summer, yet in winter it possessed few attractions to casual visitors.

After dinner I strolled over the house, and found, to my surprise, that the old walls of the Priory were practically intact. The kitchen was also unchanged, but the great refectory was now divided into four rooms. The apartments upstairs had plainly been divided in the same way by brick partitions; but the outer walls, pierced with narrow windows, were those of the original Priory.

In the morning I made further explorations, only outside the building, and came upon the ruins of the old Priory tower; and then I perceived that only a small portion of the original building had been utilised for the hotel. The landlord, who accompanied me, was certainly no antiquarian. He told me that he had been “let in” so far as the hotel was concerned. He had been given to understand that the receipts for the summer months were sufficiently great to compensate for the absence of visitors during the winter; but his experience of one year had not confirmed this statement, made by the people from whom he had bought the place, and he had come to the conclusion that, as he had been taken in in the transaction, it was his duty to try to take in some one else in the same way.

“I only hope that I may succeed, sir,” he said, “but I’m doubtful about it. People are getting more suspicious every day.”

“You weren’t suspicious, at any rate,” said I.

“That I weren’t — more’s the pity, sir,” said he. “But it’ll take me all my time to get the place off my hands, I know. Ah, yes; it’s hard to get people to take your word for anything nowadays.”

For the next two days Tom Singleton and I were left a good deal together, the fact being that our friend Arthur parted from us after lunch and only returned in time for dinner, declaring upon each occasion that he had just passed the pleasantest day of his life. On Christmas Eve he came to us in high spirits, bearing with him an invitation from a lady who had attained distinction, through being the mother of Miss St. Leger, for us to spend Christmas Day at her house — it had already been pointed out to us by Arthur: it was a fine Georgian country house, named The Grange.

“I’ve accepted for you both,” said Arthur. “Mrs. St. Leger is a most charming woman, and her daughter — I don’t know if I mentioned that she had a daughter — well, if I omitted, I am now in a position to assure you that her daughter — her name is Sylvia — is possibly the most beautiful — But there’s no use trying to describe her; you’ll see her for yourselves tomorrow, and judge if I’ve exaggerated in the least when I say that the world does not contain a more exquisite creature.”

“Yes, one hour with her will be quite sufficient to enable us to pronounce an opinion on that point,” laughed Tom.

We remained smoking in front of the log fire that blazed in the great hearth, until about eleven o’clock, and then went to our rooms upstairs, after some horse-play in the hall.

My room was a small one at the beginning of the corridor, Arthur Jephson’s was alongside it, and at the very end of the corridor was Tom Singleton’s. All had at one time been one apartment.

Having walked a good deal during the day, I was very tired, and had scarcely got into bed before I fell asleep.

When I awoke it was with a start and a consciousness that something was burning. A curious red light streamed into the room from outside. I sprang from my bed in a moment and ran to the window. But before I had reached it the room was in darkness once more, and there came a yell of laughter, apparently from the next room.

For a moment I was paralysed. But the next instant I had recovered my presence of mind. I believed that Arthur and Tom had been playing some of their tricks upon me. They had burnt a red light outside my window, and were roaring with laughter as they heard me spring out of bed.

That was the explanation of what I had seen and heard which first suggested itself to me; and I was about to return to bed when my door was knocked at and then opened.

“What on earth have you been up to?” came the voice of Arthur Jephson. “Have you set the bed-curtains on fire? If you have, that’s nothing to laugh at.”

“Get out of this room with your larking,” said I. “It’s a very poor joke that of yours, Arthur. Go back to your bed.”

He struck a light — he had a matchbox in his hand — and went to my candle without a word. In a moment the room was faintly illuminated.

“Do you mean to say that you hadn’t a light here just now — a red light?” he cried.

“I had no light: a red light floated through the room, but it seemed to come from outside,” said I.

“And who was it laughed in that wild way?”

“I took it for granted that it was you and Tom who were about your usual larks.”

“Larks! No, I was about no larks, I can promise you. Good Lord! man, that laugh was something beyond a lark.” He seated himself on my bed. “Do you fancy it may have been some of the servants going about the stables with a carriage-lamp?” he continued. “There may have been a late arrival at the hotel, you know.”

“That’s not at all unlikely,” said I. “Yes, it may have been that, and the laughter may have been between the grooms.”

“I don’t hear any sound of bustle through the house or outside,” said he.

“The stables are not at this angle of the building,” said I. “We must merely have seen the light and heard that laughter as the carriage passed our angle. Anyhow, we’ll only catch cold if we lounge about in our pyjamas like this. You’d best get back to bed and let me do the same.”

“I don’t feel much inclined to sleep, but I’ll not prevent your having your night’s rest,” said he, resting. “I wonder is it near morning?”

I held the candle before the dial of my watch that hung above my bed.

“It’s exactly five minutes past twelve,” said I. “We’ve slept barely an hour.”

“Then the sooner I clear out the better it will be for both of us,” said he.

He went away slowly, and I heard him strike a match in his own room. He evidently meant to light his candle.

Some hours had passed before I fell into an uneasy sleep, and once more I was awakened by Arthur Jephson, who stood by my bedside. The morning light was in the room.

“For God’s sake, come into Tom’s room!” he whispered. “He’s dead! — Tom is dead!”

I tried to realize his words. Some moments had elapsed before I succeeded in doing so. I sprang from my bed and ran down the corridor to the room occupied by Tom Singleton. The landlord and a couple of servants were already there. They had burst in the door.

It was but too true: our poor friend lay on his bed with his body bent and his arms twisted as though he had been struggling desperately with someone at his last moment. His face, too, was horribly contorted, and his eyes were wide open.

“A doctor,” I managed to say.

“He’s already sent for, sir,” said the landlord.

In a few moments the doctor arrived.

“Cardiac attack,” said he. “Was he alone in the room? No, he can’t have been alone.”

“He was quite alone,” said Arthur. “I knocked at the door a quarter of an hour ago, but getting no answer, I tried to force the lock. It was too strong for me; but the landlord and the manservant who was bringing us our hot water burst in the door at my request.”

“And the window — was it fastened?” asked the doctor.

“It was secure, sir,” said the landlord.

“Ah, a sudden cardiac attack,” said the doctor.

There was, of course, an inquest, but as no evidence of foul play was forthcoming, the doctor’s phrase “cardiac attack” satisfied the jury, and a verdict of “death from natural causes” was returned.

Before I went back to town I examined the room in which our poor friend had died. On the side of one of the window-shutters there were four curious burnt marks. They gave one the impression that the shutter had at one time been grasped by a man wearing a red-hot gauntlet.

I started for India before the end of the year and remained there for eight months. Then I thought I would pay a visit to a sister of mine in Queensland. On my return at the end of the year I meant to stop at Cairo for a few weeks. On entering Shepheard’s Hotel I found myself face to face with Arthur Jephson and his wife — he called her Sylvia. They had been married in August, but their honeymoon seemed still to be in its first quarter. It was after Mrs. Jephson had retired, and when Arthur was sitting with me enjoying the cool of the night by the aid of a pretty strong cigar or two, that we ventured to allude to the tragic occurrence which marked our last time of meeting.

“I wish to beg of you not to make any allusion to that awful business in the hearing of my wife,” said Arthur. “In fact I must ask you not to allude to that fearful room in the Priory in any way.”

“I will be careful not to do so,” said I. “You have your own reasons, I suppose, for giving me this warning.”

“I have the best of reasons, Jim. She too had her experience of that room, and it was as terrible as ours.”

“Good heavens! I heard nothing of that. She did not sleep in that room?”

“Thank God, she didn’t. I arrived in time to save her.”

I need scarcely say that my interest was now fully aroused.

“Tell me what happened — if you dare tell it,” I said.

“You were abroad, and so you wouldn’t be likely to hear of the fire at The Grange,” said my friend, after a pause.

“I heard nothing of it.”

“It took place only two days before last Christmas. I had been in the south of France, where I had spent a month or two with my mother — she cannot stand a winter at home — and I had promised Sylvia to return to The Grange for Christmas. When I got to Northavon I found her and her mother and their servants at the Priory Hotel. The fire had taken place the previous night, and they found the hotel very handy when they hadn’t a roof of their own over their heads. Well, we dined together, and were as jolly as was possible under the circumstances until bedtime. I had actually said ‘Good night’ to Sylvia before I recollected what had taken place the previous Christmas Eve in the same house. I rushed upstairs, and found Sylvia in the act of entering the room — that fatal room. When I implored of her to choose some other apartment, she only laughed at first, and assured me that she wasn’t superstitious; but when she saw that I was serious — I was deadly serious, as you can believe, Jim—”

“I can — I can.”

“Well, she agreed to sleep in her mother’s room, and I went away relieved. So soon as I returned to the fire in the dining-room I began to think of poor Tom Singleton. I felt curiously excited, and I knew that it would be useless for me to go to bed — in fact, I made up my mind not to leave the dining-room for some hours, at any rate, and when the landlord came to turn out the lights I told him he might trust me to do that duty for him. He left me alone in the room about half-past eleven o’clock. When the sound of his feet upon the oaken stairs died away I felt as fearful as a child in the dark. I lit another cigar and walked about the room for some time. I went to the window that opened upon the old Priory ground, and, seeing that the night was a fine one, I opened the door and strolled out, hoping that the cool air would do me good. I had not gone many yards across the little patch of green before I turned and looked up at the house — at the last window, the window of that room. A fire had been lighted in the room early in the evening, and its glow shone through the white blind. Suddenly that faint glow increased to a terrific glare — a red glare, Jim — and then there came before my eyes for a moment the shadow of two figures upon the blind — one the figure of a woman, the other — God knows what it was. I rushed back to the room, but before I had reached the door I heard the horrible laughter once again. It seemed to come from that room and to pass on through the air into the distance across the river. I ran upstairs with a light, and found Sylvia and her mother standing together with wraps around them at the door of the room. ‘Thank God, you are safe!’ I managed to cry. ‘I feared that you had returned to the room.’  ‘You heard it — that awful laughter?’ she whispered. ‘You heard it, and you saw something — what was it?’ I gently forced her and her mother back to their room, for the servants and the landlord’s family were now crowding into the corridor. They, too, had heard enough to alarm them.”

“You went to the room?”

“The scene of that dreadful morning was repeated. The door was locked on the inside. We broke it in and found a girl lying dead on the floor, her face contorted just as poor Singleton’s was. She was Sylvia’s maid, and it was thought that, on hearing that her mistress was not going to occupy the room, she had gone into it herself on account of the fire which had been lighted there.”

“And the doctor said—?”

“Cardiac attack — the same as before — singular coincidence! I need scarcely say that we never slept again under that accursed roof. Poor Sylvia! She was overwhelmed at the thought of how narrow her escape had been.”

“Did you notice anything remarkable about the room — about the shutters of the windows?” I asked.

He looked at me curiously for a moment. Then he bent forward and said—

“On the edge of the shutter there were some curious marks where the wood had been charred.”

“As if a hand with a red-hot gauntlet had been laid upon it?”

“There were the marks of two such hands,” said my friend slowly.

We remained for an hour in the garden; then we threw away the ends of our cigars and went into the hotel without another word.

THE RED BUNGALOW

B. M. Croker

1919

It is a considerable time since my husband’s regiment (“The Snapshots”) was stationed in Kulu, yet it seems as if it were but yesterday, when I look back on the days we spent in India. As I sit by the fire, or in the sunny corner of the garden, sometimes when my eyes are dim with reading I close them upon the outer world, and see, with vivid distinctness, events which happened years ago. Among various mental pictures, there is not one which stands forth with the same weird and lurid effect as the episode of “The Red Bungalow.”

Robert was commanding his regiment, and we were established in a pretty spacious house at Kulu, and liked the station. It was a little off the beaten track, healthy and sociable. Memories of John Company and traces of ancient Empires still clung to the neighbourhood. Pig-sticking and rose-growing. Badminton and polo, helped the residents of the place to dispose of the long, long Indian day — never too long for me!

One morning I experienced an agreeable surprise, when, in reading the Gazette, I saw that my cousin, Tom Fellowes, had been appointed Quartermaster-General of the district, and was to take up the billet at once.

Tom had a wife and two dear little children (our nursery was empty), and as soon as I had put down the paper I wired to Netta to congratulate and beg them to come to us immediately. Indian moves are rapid. Within a week our small party had increased to six, Tom, Netta, little Guy, aged four, and Baba, a dark-eyed coquette of nearly two. They also brought with them an invaluable ayah — a Madrassi. She spoke English with a pretty foreign accent, and was entirely devoted to the children.

Netta was a slight young woman with brilliant eyes, jet black hair, and a firm mouth. She was lively, clever, and a capital helpmate for an army man, with marvellous energy, and enviable taste.

Tom, an easy-going individual in private life, was a red-hot soldier. All financial and domestic affairs were left in the hands of his wife, and she managed him and them with conspicuous success.

Before Netta had been with us three days, she began, in spite of my protestations, to clamour about “getting a house.”

“Why, you have only just arrived,” I remonstrated. “You are not even half unpacked. Wait here a few weeks, and make acquaintance with the, place and people. It is such a pleasure to me to have you and the children.”

“You spoil them — especially Guy!” she answered with a laugh. “The sooner they are removed the better, and, seriously, I want to settle in. I am longing to do up my new house, and make it pretty, and have a garden — a humble imitation of yours — a Badminton court, and a couple of ponies. I’m like a child looking forward to a new toy, for, cooped up in Fort William in Calcutta, I never felt that I had a real home.”

“Even so,” I answered, “there is plenty of time, and I think you might remain here till after Christmas.”

“Christmas!” she screamed. “I shall be having Christmas parties myself, and a tree for the kids; and you, dear Liz, shall come and help me. I want to get into a house next week.”

“Then pray don’t look to me for any assistance. If you make such a hasty exit the station will think we have quarrelled.”

“The station could not be so detestable, and no one could quarrel with you, you dear old thing,” and as she stooped down and patted my cheek, I realised that she was fully resolved to have her own way.

“I have yards and yards of the most lovely cretonne for cushions, and chairs, and curtains,” she continued, “brought out from home, and never yet made up. Your Dirzee is bringing me two men tomorrow. When I was out riding this morning, I went to an auction-room — John Mahomed, they call the man — and inspected some sofas and chairs. Do let us drive there this afternoon on our way to the club, and I also wish to have a look round. I hear that nearly all the good bungalows are occupied.”

“Yes, they are,” I answered triumphantly. “At present there is not one in the place to suit you! I have been running over them with my mind’s eye, and either they are near the river, or too small, or — not healthy. After Christmas the Watsons are going home; there will be their bungalow — it is nice and large, and has a capital office, which would suit Tom.”

We drove down to John Mahomed’s that afternoon, and selected some furniture — Netta exhibiting her usual taste and business capacity. On our way to the club I pointed out several vacant houses, and, among them, the Watsons’ charming abode — with its celebrated gardens, beds of brilliant green lucerne, and verandah curtained in yellow roses.

“Oh yes,” she admitted, “it is a fine, roomy sort of abode, but I hate a thatched roof — I want one with tiles — red tiles. They make such a nice bit of colour among trees.”

“I’m afraid you won’t find many tiled roofs in Kulu,” I answered; “this will limit you a good deal.”

For several mornings, together, we explored bungalows — and I was by no means sorry to find that, in the eyes of Netta, they were all more or less found wanting — too small, too damp, too near the river, too stuffy — and I had made up my mind that the Watsons’ residence (despite its thatch) was to be Netta’s fate, when one afternoon she hurried in, a little breathless and dusty, and announced, with a wild wave of her sunshade, “I’ve found it!”

“Where? Do you mean a house?” I exclaimed.

“Yes. What moles we’ve been! At the back of this, down the next turn, at the cross roads! Most central and suitable. They call it the Red Bungalow.”

“The Red Bungalow,” I repeated reflectively. I had never cast a thought to it — what is always before one is frequently unnoticed. Also it had been unoccupied ever since we had come to the station, and as entirely overlooked as if it had no existence! I had a sort of recollection that there was some drawback — it was either too large, or too expensive, or too out of repair.

“It is strange that I never mentioned it,” I said. “But it has had no tenant for years.”

“Unless I am greatly mistaken, it will have one before long,” rejoined Netta, with her most definite air. “It looks as if it were just waiting for us — and had been marked ‘reserved.’”

“Then you have been over it?”

“No, I could not get in, the doors are all bolted, and there seems to be no chowkidar. I wandered round the verandahs, and took stock of the size and proportions — it stands in an imposing compound. There are the ruins at the back, mixed up with the remains of a garden — old guava trees, lemon trees, a vine, and a well. There is a capital place at one side for two Badminton courts, and I have mentally laid out a rose-garden in front of the portico.”

“How quickly your mind travels!”

“Everything must travel quickly in these days,” she retorted. “We all have to put on the pace. Just as I was leaving, I met a venerable coolie person, who informed me that John Mahomed had the keys, so I despatched him to bring them at once, and promised a rupee for his trouble. Now do, like a good soul, let us have tea, and start off immediately after to inspect my treasure-trove!”

“I can promise you a cup of tea in five minutes,” I replied, “but I am not so certain of your treasure-trove.”

“I am. I generally can tell what suits me at first sight. The only thing I am afraid of is the rent. Still, in Tommy’s position one must not consider that. He is obliged to live in a suitable style.”

“The Watsons’ house has often had a staff-tenant. I believe it would answer all your requirements.”

“Too near the road, and too near the General,” she objected, with a gesture of impatience. “Ah, here comes tea at last!”

It came, but before I had time to swallow my second cup, I found myself hustled out of the house by my energetic cousin and en route to her wonderful discovery — the Red Bungalow.

We had but a short distance to walk, and, often as I had passed the house, I now gazed at it for the first time with an air of critical interest. In Kulu, for some unexplained reason, this particular bungalow had never counted; it was boycotted — no, that is not the word — ignored, as if, like some undesirable character, it had no place in the station’s thoughts. Nevertheless, its position was sufficiently prominent — it stood at a point where four ways met. Two gateless entrances opened into different roads, as if determined to obtrude upon public attention. Standing aloof between the approaches was the house — large, red-tiled, and built back in the shape of the letter “T” from an enormous pillared porch, which, with some tall adjacent trees, gave it an air of reserve and dignity.

“The coolie with the keys has not arrived,” said Netta, “so I will just take you round and show you its capabilities myself. Here” — as we stumbled over some rough grass — “is where I should make a couple of Badminton courts, and this” — as we came to the back of the bungalow — “is the garden.”

Yes, here were old choked-up stone water-channels, the traces of walks, hoary guava and apricot trees, a stone pergola and a dead vine, also a well, with elaborate tracery, and odd, shapeless mounds of ancient masonry. As we stood we faced the back verandah of the house. To our right hand lay tall cork trees, a wide expanse of compound, and the road; to our left, at a distance, more trees, a high wall, and clustered beneath it the servants’ quarters, the cookhouse, and a long range of stables.

It was a fine, important-looking residence, although the stables were almost roofless and the garden and compound a wilderness, given over to stray goats and tame lizards.

“Yes, there is only one thing I am afraid of,” exclaimed Netta.

“Snakes?” I suggested. “It looks rather snaky.”

“No, the rent; and here comes the key at last,” and as she spoke a fat young clerk, on a small yellow pony, trotted quickly under the porch — a voluble person, who wore spotless white garments, and spoke English with much fluency.

“I am abject. Please excuse being so tardy. I could not excavate the key; but at last I got it, and now I will hasten to exhibit premises. First of all, I go and open doors and windows, and call in the atmosphere — ladies kindly excuse.” Leaving his tame steed on its honour, the babu hurried to the back, and presently we heard the grinding of locks, banging of shutters, and grating of bolts. Then the door was flung open and we entered, walked (as is usual) straight into the drawing-room, a fine, lofty, half-circular room, twice as large and well-proportioned as mine. The drawing-room led into an equally excellent dining-room. I saw Netta measuring it with her eye, and she said, “One could easily seat thirty people here, and what a place for a Christmas-tree!”

The dining-room opened into an immense bedroom which gave directly on the back verandah, with a flight of shallow steps leading into the garden.

“The nursery,” she whispered; “capital!”

At either side were two other rooms, with bath and dressing-rooms complete. Undoubtedly it was an exceedingly commodious and well-planned house.

As we stood once more in the nursery — all the wide doors being open — we could see directly through the bungalow out into the porch, as the three large apartments were en suite.

“A draught right through, you see!” she said. “So cool in the hot weather.”

Then we returned to the drawing-room, where I noticed that Netta was already arranging the furniture with her mental eye. At last she turned to the babu and said, “And what is the rent?”

After a moment’s palpable hesitation he replied, “Ninety rupees a month. If you take it for some time it will be all put in repair and done up.”

“Ninety!” I mentally echoed — and we paid one hundred and forty!

“Does it belong to John Mahomed?” I asked.

“No — to a client.”

“Does he live here?”

“No — he lives far away, in another region; we have never seen him.”

“How long is it since this was occupied?”

“Oh, a good while—”

“Some years?”

“Perhaps,” with a wag of his head.

“Why has it stood empty? Is it unhealthy?” asked Netta.

“Oh no, no. I think it is too majestic, too gigantic for insignificant people. They like something more altogether and cosy; it is not cosy — it is suitable to persons like a lady on the General’s staff,” and he bowed himself to Netta.

I believe she was secretly of his opinion, for already she had assumed the air of the mistress of the house, and said briskly, “Now I wish to see the kitchen, and servants’ quarters,” and, picking up her dainty skirts, she led the way thither through loose stones and hard yellow grass. As I have a rooted antipathy to dark and uninhabited places, possibly the haunt of snakes and scorpions, I failed to attend her, but, leaving the babu to continue his duty, turned back into the house alone.

I paced the drawing-room, dining-room, the nursery, and as I stood surveying the long vista of apartments, with the sun pouring into the porch on one hand, and on the green foliage and baked yellow earth of the garden on the other, I confessed to myself that Netta was a miracle!

She, a new arrival, had hit upon this excellent and suitable residence; and a bargain. But, then, she always found bargains; their discovery was her metier!

As I stood reflecting thus, gazing absently into the outer glare, a dark and mysterious cloud seemed to fall upon the place, the sun was suddenly obscured, and from the portico came a sharp little gust of wand that gradually increased into a long-drawn wailing cry — surely the cry of some lost soul! What could have put such a hideous idea in my head? But the cry rang in my ears with such piercing distinctness that I felt myself trembling from head to foot; in a second the voice had, as it were, passed forth into the garden and was stifled among the tamarind trees in an agonised wail. I roused myself from a condition of frightful obsession, and endeavoured to summon my common sense and self-command. Here was I, a middle-aged Scotchwoman, standing in this empty bungalow, clutching my garden umbrella, and imagining horrors!

Such thoughts I must keep exclusively to myself, lest I become the laughing-stock of a station with a keen sense of the ridiculous.

Yes, I was an imaginative old goose, but I walked rather quickly back into the porch, and stepped into the open air, with a secret but invincible prejudice against the Red Bungalow. This antipathy was not shared by Netta, who had returned from her quest all animation and satisfaction.

“The stables require repair, and some of the go-downs,” she said, “and the whole house must be recoloured inside, and matted. I will bring my husband round tomorrow morning,” she announced, dismissing the babu. “We will be here at eight o’clock sharp.”

By this I knew — and so did the babu — that the Red Bungalow was let at last!

“Well, what do you think of it?” asked Netta triumphantly, as we were walking home together.

“It is a roomy house,” I admitted, “but there is no office for Tom.”

“Oh, he has the Brigade Office. — Any more objections?”

“A bungalow so long vacant, so entirely overlooked, must have something against it — and it is not the rent—”

“Nor is it unhealthy,” she argued. “It is quite high, higher than your bungalow — no water near it, and the trees not too close. I can see that you don’t like it. Can you give me a good reason?”

“I really wish I could. No, I do not like it — there is something about it that repels me. You know I’m a Highlander, and am sensitive to impressions.”

“My dear Liz,” and here she came to a dead halt, “you don’t mean me to suppose that you think it is haunted? Why, this is the twentieth century!”

“I did not say it was haunted” — (I dared not voice my fears) — “but I declare that I do not like it, and I wish you’d wait; wait only a couple of days, and I’ll take you to see the Watsons’ bungalow — so sunny, so lived in — always so cheerful, with a lovely garden, and an office for Tom.”

“I’m not sure that that is an advantage!” she exclaimed with a smile. “It is not always agreeable to have a man on the premises for twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four hours!”

“But the Watsons—”

“My dear Liz, if you say another word about the Watsons’ bungalow I shall have a bad attack of the sulks, and go straight to bed!”

It is needless to mention that Tom was delighted with the bungalow selected by his ever-clever little wife, and for the next week our own abode was the resort of tailors, hawkers, butchers, milkmen, furniture-makers, ponies and cows on sale, and troops of servants in quest of places.

Every day Netta went over to the house to inspect, and to give directions, to see how the mallees were laying out the garden and Badminton courts, and the matting people and whitewashers were progressing indoors.

Many hands make light work, and within a week the transformation of the Red Bungalow was astonishing. Within a fortnight it was complete; the stables were again occupied — also the new spick-and-span servants’ quarters; Badminton courts were ready to be played upon; the verandah and porch were gay with palms and plants and parrots, and the drawing-room was the admiration of all Kulu. Netta introduced plants in pots — pots actually dressed up in pongee silk! — to the station ladies; her sofa cushions were frilled, she had quantities of pretty pictures and photos, silver knick-knacks, and gay rugs.

But before Netta had had the usual name-board — “Major Fellowes, A.Q.M.G.” — attached to the gate piers of the Red Bungalow, there had been some demur and remonstrance. My ayah, an old Madrassi, long in my service, had ventured one day, as she held my hair in her hand, “That new missus never taking the old Red Bungalow?”

“Yes.”

“My missus then telling her, please, that plenty bad place — oh, so bad! No one living there this many years.”

“Why — what is it?”

“I not never knowing, only the one word — bad. Oh, my missus! you speak, never letting these pretty little children go there—”

“But other people have lived there, Mary—”

“Never long — so people telling — the house man paint bungalow all so nice — same like now — they make great bargain — so pleased. One day they go away, away, away, never coming back. Please, please,” and she stooped and kissed my hand, “speak that master, tell him — bad bungalow.”

Of course I pooh-poohed the subject to Mary, who actually wept, good kind creature, and as she did my hair had constantly to dry her eyes on her sari.

And, knowing how futile a word to Tom would prove, I once more attacked Netta. I said, “Netta, I’m sure you think I’m an ignorant, superstitious imbecile, but I believe in presentiments. I have a presentiment, dear, about that Bungalow — do give it up to please and, yes, comfort me—”

“What! my beautiful find — the best house in Kulu — my bargain?”

“You may find it a dear bargain!”

“Not even to oblige you, dear Liz, can I break off my agreement, and I have really set my heart on your bête noire. I am so, so sorry,” and she came over and caressed me.

I wonder if Netta in her secret heart suspected that I, the Colonel’s wife, might be a little jealous that the new arrival had secured a far more impressive looking abode than her own, and for this mean reason I endeavoured to persuade her to “move on.”

However, her mind must have been entirely disabused of this by a lady on whom we were calling, who said:

“Oh, Mrs. Fellowes, have you got a house yet, or will you wait for the Watsons’? Such a—”

“I am already suited,” interrupted Netta. “We have found just the thing — not far from my cousin’s, too — a fine, roomy, cheerful place, with a huge compound; we are already making the garden.”

“Roomy — large compound; near Mrs. Drummond,” she repeated with knitted brow. “No — oh, surely you do not mean the Red Bungalow?”

“Yes, that is its name; I am charmed with it, and so lucky to find it.”

“No difficulty in finding it, dear Mrs. Fellowes, but I believe the difficulty is in remaining there.”

“Do you mean that it’s haunted?” enquired Netta with a rather superior air.

“Something of that sort — the natives call it ‘the devil’s house.’ A terrible tragedy happened there long ago — so long ago that it is forgotten; but you will find it almost impossible to keep servants!”

“You are certainly most discouraging, but I hope someday you will come and dine with us, and see how comfortable we are!”

There was a note of challenge in this invitation, and I could see with the traditional “half-eye” that Mrs. Dodd and Mrs. Fellowes would scarcely be bosom friends.

Nor was this the sole warning.

At the club a very old resident, wife of a Government employee, who had spent twenty years in Kulu, came and seated herself by me one morning with the air of a person who desired to fulfill a disagreeable duty.

“I am afraid you will think me presuming, Mrs. Drummond, but I feel that I ought to speak. Do you know that the house your cousin has taken is said to be unlucky? The last people only remained a month, though they got it for next to nothing — a mere song,”

“Yes, I’ve heard of these places, and read of them, too,” I replied, “but it generally turns out that someone has an interest in keeping it empty; possibly natives live there.”

“Anywhere but there!” she exclaimed. “Not a soul will go near it after nightfall — there is not even the usual chowkidar—”

“What is it? What is the tale? ”

“Something connected with those old mounds of brickwork, and the well. I think a palace or a temple stood on the spot thousands of years ago, when Kulu was a great native city.

“Do try and dissuade your cousin from going there; she will find her mistake sooner or later. I hope you won’t think me very officious, but she is young and happy, and has two such dear children, especially the little boy.”

Yes, especially the little boy! I was devoted to Guy — my husband, too. We had bought him a pony and a tiny monkey, and were only too glad to keep him and Baba for a few days when their parents took the great step and moved into the Red Bungalow.

In a short time all was in readiness; the big end room made a delightful nursery; the children had also the run of the back verandah and the garden, and were soon completely and happily at home.

An inhabited house seems so different to the same when it stands silent, with closed doors — afar from the sound of voices and footsteps. I could scarcely recognise Netta’s new home. It was the centre of half the station gaieties — Badminton parties twice a week, dinners, “Chotah Hazra” gatherings on the great verandah, and rehearsals for a forthcoming play; the pattering of little feet, servants, horses, cows, goats, dogs, parrots, all contributed their share to the general life and stir. I went over to the Bungalow almost daily: I dined, I breakfasted, I had tea, and I never saw anything but the expected and the commonplace, yet I failed to eradicate my first instinct, my secret apprehension and aversion. Christmas was over, the parties, dinners and teas were among memories of the past; we were well advanced in the month of February, when Netta, the triumphant, breathed her first complaint. The servants — excellent servants, with long and bond fide characters — arrived, stayed one week, or perhaps two, and then came and said, “Please I go!”

None of them remained in the compound at night, except the horse-keepers and an orderly; they retired to more congenial quarters in an adjoining bazaar, and the maddening part was that they would give no definite name or shape to their fears — they spoke of “It” and a “Thing” — a fearsome object, that dwelt within and around the Bungalow..

The children’s ayah, a Madras woman, remained loyal and staunch; she laughed at the Bazaar tales and their reciters; and, as her husband was the cook, Netta was fairly independent of the cowardly crew who nightly fled to the Bazaar.

Suddenly the ayah, the treasure, fell ill of fever — the really virulent fever that occasionally seizes on natives of the country, and seems to lick up their very life. As my servants’ quarters were more comfortable — and I am something of a nurse — I took the invalid home, and Netta promoted her understudy (a local woman) temporarily into her place. She was a chattering, gay, gaudy creature, that I had never approved, but Netta would not listen to any advice, whether with respect to medicines, servants, or bungalows. Her choice in the latter had undoubtedly turned out well, and she was not a little exultant, and bragged to me that she never left it in anyone’s power to say, “There — I told you so!”

It was Baba’s birthday — she was two — a pretty, healthy child, but for her age backward: beyond “Dadda,” “Mamma,” and “Ayah,” she could not say one word. However, as Tom cynically remarked, “she was bound to make up for it by and by!”

It was twelve o’clock on this very warm morning when I took my umbrella and topee and started off to help Netta with her preparations for the afternoon. The chief feature of the entertainment was to be a bran pie,

I found my cousin hard at work when I arrived. In the verandah a great bathtub full of bran had been placed on a table, and she was draping the said tub with elegant festoons of pink glazed calico — her implement a hammer and tacks — whilst I burrowed into the bran, and there interred the bodies of dolls and cats and horses, and all manner of pleasant surprises. We were making a dreadful litter, and a considerable noise, when suddenly above the hammering I heard a single sharp cry.

“Listen!” I said.

“Oh, Baba is awake — naughty child — and she will disturb her brother,” replied the mother, selecting a fresh tack. “The ayah is there. Don’t go.”

“But it had such an odd, uncanny sound,” I protested.

“Dear old Liz! how nervous you are! Baba’s scream is something between a whistle of an express and a foghorn. She has abnormal lung power — and today she is restless and upset by her birthday — and her teeth. Your fears—”

Then she stopped abruptly, for a loud, frantic shriek, the shriek of extreme mortal terror, now rose high above her voice, and, throwing the hammer from her, Netta fled into the drawing-room, overturning chairs in her route, dashed across the drawing-room, and burst into the nursery, from whence came these most appalling cries. There, huddled together, we discovered the two children on the table which stood in the middle of the apartment. Guy had evidently climbed up by a chair, and dragged his sister along with him. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sun streamed in upon them, and the room, as far as we could see, was empty. Yes, but not empty to the trembling little creatures on the table, for with wide, mad eyes they seemed to follow the motion of a something that was creeping round the room close to the wall, and I noticed that their gaze went up and down, as they accompanied its progress with starting pupils and gasping breaths.

“Oh! what is it, my darling?” cried Netta, seizing Guy, whilst I snatched at Baba.

He stretched himself stiffly in her arms, and, pointing with a trembling finger to a certain spot, gasped, “Oh, Mummy! look, look, look!” and with the last word, which was a shriek of horror, he fell into violent convulsions.

But look as we might, we could see nothing, save the bare matting and the bare wall. What frightful object had made itself visible to these innocent children has never been discovered to the present day.

Little Guy, in spite of superhuman efforts to save him, died of brain fever, unintelligible to the last; the only words we could distinguish among his ravings were, “Look, look, look! Oh, Mummy! look, look, look!” and as for Baba, whatever was seen by her is locked within her lips, for she remains dumb to the present day.

The ayah had nothing to disclose; she could only beat her head upon the ground and scream, and declare that she had just left the children for a moment to speak to the milkman.

But other servants confessed that the ayah had been gossiping in the cook-house for more than half an hour. The sole living creature that had been with the children when “It” had appeared to them, was Guy’s little pet monkey, which was subsequently found under the table quite dead.

At first I was afraid that after the shock of Guy’s death poor Netta would lose her reason. Of course they all came to us, that same dreadful afternoon, leaving the birthday feast already spread, the bran pie in the verandah, the music on the piano; never had there been such a hasty flight, such a domestic earthquake. We endeavoured to keep the mysterious tragedy to ourselves. Little Guy had brain fever; surely it was natural that relations should be together in their trouble, and I declared that I, being a noted nurse, had bodily carried off the child, who was followed by the whole family.

People talked of “A stroke of the sun,” but I believe something of the truth filtered into the Bazaar — where all things are known. Shortly after little Guy’s death Netta took Baba home, declaring she would never, never return to India, and Tom applied for and obtained a transfer to another station. He sold off the household furniture, the pretty knick-knacks, the pictures, all that had gone to make Netta’s house so attractive, for she could not endure to look on them again. They had been in that house. As for the Red Bangalow, it is once more closed, and silent. The squirrels and hoopoes share the garden, the stables are given over to scorpions, the house to white ants. On application to John Mahomed, anyone desirous of becoming a tenant will certainly find that it is still to be had for a mere song!

THE FACE

E. F. Benson

1928

Hester Ward, sitting by the open window on this hot afternoon in June, began seriously to argue with herself about the cloud of foreboding and depression which had encompassed her all day, and, very sensibly, she enumerated to herself the manifold causes for happiness in the fortunate circumstances of her life. She was young, she was extremely good-looking, she was well-off, she enjoyed excellent health, and above all, she had an adorable husband and two small, adorable children. There was no break, indeed, anywhere in the circle of prosperity which surrounded her, and had the wishing-cap been handed to her that moment by some beneficent fairy, she would have hesitated to put it on her head, for there was positively nothing that she could think of which would have been worthy of such solemnity. Moreover, she could not accuse herself of a want of appreciation of her blessings; she appreciated enormously, she enjoyed enormously, and she thoroughly wanted all those who so munificently contributed to her happiness to share in it.

She made a very deliberate review of these things, for she was really anxious, more anxious, indeed, than she admitted to herself, to find anything tangible which could possibly warrant this ominous feeling of approaching disaster. Then there was the weather to consider; for the last week London had been stiflingly hot, but if that was the cause, why had she not felt it before? Perhaps the effect of these broiling, airless days had been cumulative. That was an idea, but, frankly, it did not seem a very good one, for, as a matter of fact, she loved the heat; Dick, who hated it, said that it was odd he should have fallen in love with a salamander.

She shifted her position, sitting up straight in this low window-seat, for she was intending to make a call on her courage. She had known from the moment she awoke this morning what it was that lay so heavy on her, and now, having done her best to shift the reason of her depression on to anything else, and having completely failed, she meant to look the thing in the face. She was ashamed of doing so, for the cause of this leaden mood of fear which held her in its grip, was so trivial, so fantastic, so excessively silly.

“Yes, there never was anything so silly,” she said to herself. “I must look at it straight, and convince myself how silly it is.” She paused a moment, clenching her hands.

“Now for it,” she said.

She had had a dream the previous night, which, years ago, used to be familiar to her, for again and again when she was a child she had dreamed it. In itself the dream was nothing, but in those childish days, whenever she had this dream which had visited her last night, it was followed on the next night by another, which contained the source and the core of the horror, and she would awake screaming and struggling in the grip of overwhelming nightmare. For some ten years now she had not experienced it, and would have said that, though she remembered it, it had become dim and distant to her. But last night she had had that warning dream, which used to herald the visitation of the nightmare, and now that whole store-house of memory crammed as it was with bright things and beautiful contained nothing so vivid.

The warning dream, the curtain that was drawn up on the succeeding night, and disclosed the vision she dreaded, was simple and harmless enough in itself. She seemed to be walking on a high sandy cliff covered with short down-grass; twenty yards to the left came the edge of this cliff, which sloped steeply down to the sea that lay at its foot. The path she followed led through fields bounded by low hedges, and mounted gradually upwards. She went through some half-dozen of these, climbing over the wooden stiles that gave communication; sheep grazed there, but she never saw another human being, and always it was dusk, as if evening was falling, and she had to hurry on, because someone (she knew not whom) was waiting for her, and had been waiting not a few minutes only, but for many years. Presently, as she mounted this slope, she saw in front of her a copse of stunted trees, growing crookedly under the continual pressure of the wind that blew from the sea, and when she saw those she knew her journey was nearly done, and that the nameless one, who had been waiting for her so long was somewhere close at hand. The path she followed was cut through this wood, and the slanting boughs of the trees on the sea-ward side almost roofed it in; it was like walking through a tunnel. Soon the trees in front began to grow thin, and she saw through them the grey tower of a lonely church. It stood in a graveyard, apparently long disused, and the body of the church, which lay between the tower and the edge of the cliff, was in ruins, roofless, and with gaping windows, round which ivy grew thickly.

At that point this prefatory dream always stopped. It was a troubled, uneasy dream, for there was over it the sense of dusk and of the man who had been waiting for her so long, but it was not of the order of nightmare. Many times in childhood had she experienced it, and perhaps it was the subconscious knowledge of the night that so surely followed it, which gave it its disquiet. And now last night it had come again, identical in every particular but one. For last night it seemed to her that in the course of these ten years which had intervened since last it had visited her, the glimpse of the church and churchyard was changed. The edge of the cliff had come nearer to the tower, so that it now was within a yard or two of it, and the ruined body of the church, but for one broken arch that remained, had vanished. The sea had encroached, and for ten years had been busily eating at the cliff.

Hester knew well that it was this dream and this alone which had darkened the day for her, by reason of the nightmares that used to follow it, and, like a sensible woman, having looked it once in the face, she refused to admit into her mind any conscious calling-up of the sequel. If she let herself contemplate that, as likely or not the very thinking about it would be sufficient to ensure its return, and of one thing she was very certain, namely, that she didn’t at all want it to do so. It was not like the confused jumble and jangle of ordinary nightmare, it was very simple, and she felt it concerned the nameless one who waited for her. . . . But she must not think of it; her whole will and intention was set on not thinking of it, and to aid her resolution, there was the rattle of Dick’s latchkey in the front-door, and his voice calling her.

She went out into the little square front hall; there he was, strong and large, and wonderfully undreamlike.

“This heat’s a scandal, it’s an outrage, it’s an abomination of desolation,” he cried, vigorously mopping. “What have we done that Providence should place us in this frying-pan? Let us thwart him, Hester! Let us drive out of this inferno and have our dinner at — I’ll whisper it so that he shan’t overhear — at Hampton Court!”

She laughed: this plan suited her excellently. They would return late, after the distraction of a fresh scene; and dining out at night was both delicious and stupefying.

“The very thing,” she said, “and I’m sure Providence didn’t hear. Let’s start now!”

“Rather. Any letters for me?”

He walked to the table where there were a few rather uninteresting-looking envelopes with half penny stamps.

“Ah, receipted bill,” he said. “Just a reminder of one’s folly in paying it. Circular . . . unasked advice to invest in German marks . . . Circular begging letter, beginning “Dear Sir or Madam.” Such impertinence to ask one to subscribe to something without ascertaining one’s sex . . . Private view, portraits at the Walton Gallery . . . Can’t go: business meetings all day. You might like to have a look in, Hester. Some one told me there were some fine Vandycks. That’s all: let’s be off.”

Hester spent a thoroughly reassuring evening, and though she thought of telling Dick about the dream that had so deeply imprinted itself on her consciousness all day, in order to hear the great laugh he would have given her for being such a goose, she refrained from doing so, since nothing that he could say would be so tonic to these fantastic fears as his general robustness. Besides, she would have to account for its disturbing effect, tell him that it was once familiar to her, and recount the sequel of the nightmares that followed. She would neither think of them, nor mention them: it was wiser by far just to soak herself in his extraordinary sanity, and wrap herself in his affection . . . They dined out-of-doors at a river-side restaurant and strolled about afterwards, and it was very nearly midnight when, soothed with coolness and fresh air, and the vigour of his strong companionship, she let herself into the house, while he took the car back to the garage. And now she marvelled at the mood which had beset her all day, so distant and unreal had it become. She felt as if she had dreamed of shipwreck, and had awoke to find herself in some secure and sheltered garden where no tempest raged nor waves beat. But was there, ever so remotely, ever so dimly, the noise of far-off breakers somewhere?

He slept in the dressing-room which communicated with her bedroom, the door of which was left open for the sake of air and coolness, and she fell asleep almost as soon as her light was out, and while his was still burning. And immediately she began to dream.

She was standing on the seashore; the tide was out, for level sands strewn with stranded jetsam glimmered in a dusk that was deepening into night. Though she had never seen the place it was awfully familiar to her. At the head of the beach there was a steep cliff of sand, and perched on the edge of it was a grey church tower. The sea must have encroached and undermined the body of the church, for tumbled blocks of masonry lay close to her at the bottom of the cliff, and there were gravestones there, while others still in place were silhouetted whitely against the sky. To the right of the church tower there was a wood of stunted trees, combed sideways by the prevalent sea-wind, and she knew that along the top of the cliff a few yards inland there lay a path through fields, with wooden stiles to climb, which led through a tunnel of trees and so out into the churchyard. All this she saw in a glance, and waited, looking at the sand-cliff crowned by the church tower, for the terror that was going to reveal itself. Already she knew what it was, and, as so many times before, she tried to run away. But the catalepsy of nightmare was already on her; frantically she strove to move, but her utmost endeavour could not raise a foot from the sand. Frantically she tried to look away from the sand-cliffs close in front of her, where in a moment now the horror would be manifested . . .

It came. There formed a pale oval light, the size of a man’s face, dimly luminous in front of her and a few inches above the level of her eyes. It outlined itself, short reddish hair grew low on the forehead, below were two grey eyes, set very close together, which steadily and fixedly regarded her. On each side the ears stood noticeably away from the head, and the lines of the jaw met in a short pointed chin. The nose was straight and rather long, below it came a hairless lip, and last of all the mouth took shape and colour, and there lay the crowning terror. One side of it, soft-curved and beautiful, trembled into a smile, the other side, thick and gathered together as by some physical deformity, sneered and lusted.

The whole face, dim at first, gradually focused itself into clear outline: it was pale and rather lean, the face of a young man. And then the lower lip dropped a little, showing the glint of teeth, and there was the sound of speech. “I shall soon come for you now,” it said, and on the words it drew a little nearer to her, and the smile broadened. At that the full hot blast of nightmare poured in upon her. Again she tried to run, again she tried to scream, and now she could feel the breath of that terrible mouth upon her. Then with a crash and a rending like the tearing asunder of soul and body she broke the spell, and heard her own voice yelling, and felt with her fingers for the switch of her light. And then she saw that the room was not dark, for Dick’s door was open, and the next moment, not yet undressed, he was with her.

“My darling, what is it?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

She clung desperately to him, still distraught with terror.

“Ah, he has been here again,” she cried. “He says he will soon come to me. Keep him away, Dick.”

For one moment her fear infected him, and he found himself glancing round the room.

“But what do you mean?” he said. “No one has been here.”

She raised her head from his shoulder.

“No, it was just a dream,” she said. “But it was the old dream, and I was terrified. Why, you’ve not undressed yet. What time is it?”

“You haven’t been in bed ten minutes, dear,” he said. “You had hardly put out your light when I heard you screaming.”

She shuddered.

“Ah, it’s awful,” she said. “And he will come again . . .”

He sat down by her.

“Now tell me all about it,” he said.

She shook her head.

“No, it will never do to talk about it,” she said, “it will only make it more real. I suppose the children are all right, are they?”

“Of course they are. I looked in on my way upstairs.”

“That’s good. But I’m better now, Dick. A dream hasn’t anything real about it, has it? It doesn’t mean anything?”

He was quite reassuring on this point, and soon she quieted down. Before he went to bed he looked in again on her, and she was asleep.

Hester had a stern interview with herself when Dick had gone down to his office next morning. She told herself that what she was afraid of was nothing more than her own fear. How many times had that ill-omened face come to her in dreams, and what significance had it ever proved to possess? Absolutely none at all, except to make her afraid. She was afraid where no fear was: she was guarded, sheltered, prosperous, and what if a nightmare of childhood returned? It had no more meaning now than it had then, and all those visitations of her childhood had passed away without trace . . . And then, despite herself, she began thinking over that vision again. It was grimly identical with all its previous occurrences, except . . . And then, with a sudden shrinking of the heart, she remembered that in earlier years those terrible lips had said: “I shall come for you when you are older,” and last night they had said: “I shall soon come for you now.” She remembered, too, that in the warning dream the sea had encroached, and it had now demolished the body of the church. There was an awful consistency about these two changes in the otherwise identical visions. The years had brought their change to them, for in the one the encroaching sea had brought down the body of the church, in the other the time was now near . . .

It was no use to scold or reprimand herself, for to bring her mind to the contemplation of the vision meant merely that the grip of terror closed on her again; it was far wiser to occupy herself, and starve her fear out by refusing to bring it the sustenance of thought. So she went about her household duties, she took the children out for their airing in the park, and then, determined to leave no moment unoccupied, set off with the card of invitation to see the pictures in the private view at the Walton Gallery. After that her day was full enough, she was lunching out, and going on to a matinée e, and by the time she got home Dick would have returned, and they would drive down to his little house at Rye for the week-end. All Saturday and Sunday she would be playing golf, and she felt that fresh air and physical fatigue would exorcise the dread of these dreaming fantasies.

The gallery was crowded when she got there; there were friends among the sightseers, and the inspection of the pictures was diversified by cheerful conversation. There were two or three fine Raeburns, a couple of Sir Joshuas, but the gems, so she gathered, were three Vandycks that hung in a small room by themselves. Presently she strolled in there, looking at her catalogue. The first of them, she saw, was a portrait of Sir Roger Wyburn. Still chatting to her friend she raised her eye and saw it . . .

Her heart hammered in her throat, and then seemed to stand still altogether. A qualm, as of some mental sickness of the soul overcame her, for there in front of her was he who would soon come for her. There was the reddish hair, the projecting ears, the greedy eyes set close together, and the mouth smiling on one side, and on the other gathered up into the sneering menace that she knew so well. It might have been her own nightmare rather than a living model which had sat to the painter for that face.

“Ah, what a portrait, and what a brute!” said her companion. “Look, Hester, isn’t that marvellous?”

She recovered herself with an effort. To give way to this ever-mastering dread would have been to allow nightmare to invade her waking life, and there, for sure, madness lay. She forced herself to look at it again, but there were the steady and eager eyes regarding her; she could almost fancy the mouth began to move. All round her the crowd bustled and chattered, but to her own sense she was alone there with Roger Wyburn.

And yet, so she reasoned with herself, this picture of him — for it was he and no other — should have reassured her. Roger Wyburn, to have been painted by Vandyck, must have been dead near on two hundred years; how could he be a menace to her? Had she seen that portrait by some chance as a child; had it made some dreadful impression on her, since overscored by other memories, but still alive in the mysterious subconsciousness, which flows eternally, like some dark underground river, beneath the surface of human life? Psychologists taught that these early impressions fester or poison the mind like some hidden abscess. That might account for this dread of one, nameless no longer, who waited for her.

That night down at Rye there came again to her the prefatory dream, followed by the nightmare, and clinging to her husband as the terror began to subside, she told him what she had resolved to keep to herself. Just to tell it brought a measure of comfort, for it was so outrageously fantastic, and his robust common sense upheld her. But when on their return to London there was a recurrence of these visions, he made short work of her demur and took her straight to her doctor.

“Tell him all, darling,” he said. “Unless you promise to do that, I will. I can’t have you worried like this. It’s all nonsense, you know, and doctors are wonderful people for curing nonsense.”

She turned to him.

“Dick, you’re frightened,” she said quietly.

He laughed.

“I’m nothing of the kind,” he said, “but I don’t like being awakened by your screaming. Not my idea of a peaceful night. Here we are.”

The medical report was decisive and peremptory. There was nothing whatever to be alarmed about; in brain and body she was perfectly healthy, but she was run down. These disturbing dreams were, as likely as not, an effect, a symptom of her condition, rather than the cause of it, and Dr. Baring unhesitatingly recommended a complete change to some bracing place. The wise thing would be to send her out of this stuffy furnace to some quiet place to where she had never been. Complete change; quite so. For the same reason her husband had better not go with her; he must pack her off to, let us say, the East coast. Sea-air and coolness and complete idleness. No long walks; no long bathings; a dip, and a deckchair on the sands. A lazy, soporific life. How about Rushton? He had no doubt that Rushton would set her up again. After a week or so, perhaps, her husband might go down and see her. Plenty of sleep — never mind the nightmares — plenty of fresh air.

Hester, rather to her husband’s surprise, fell in with this suggestion at once, and the following evening saw her installed in solitude and tranquillity. The little hotel was still almost empty, for the rush of summer tourists had not yet begun, and all day she sat out on the beach with the sense of a struggle over. She need not fight the terror any more; dimly it seemed to her that its malignancy had been relaxed. Had she in some way yielded to it and done its secret bidding? At any rate no return of its nightly visitations had occurred, and she slept long and dreamlessly, and woke to another day of quiet. Every morning there was a line for her from Dick, with good news of himself and the children, but he and they alike seemed somehow remote, like memories of a very distant time. Something had driven in between her and them, and she saw them as if through glass. But equally did the memory of the face of Roger Wyburn, as seen on the master’s canvas or hanging close in front of her against the crumbling sand-cliff, become blurred and indistinct, and no return of her nightly terrors visited her. This truce from all emotion reacted not on her mind alone, lulling her with a sense of soothed security, but on her body also, and she began to weary of this day-long inactivity.

The village lay on the lip of a stretch of land reclaimed from the sea. To the north the level marsh, now beginning to glow with the pale bloom of the sea-lavender, stretched away featureless till it lost itself in distance, but to the south a spur of hill came down to the shore ending in a wooded promontory. Gradually, as her physical health increased, she began to wonder what lay beyond this ridge which cut short the view, and one afternoon she walked across the intervening level and strolled up its wooded slopes. The day was close and windless, the invigorating sea-breeze which till now had spiced the heat with freshness had died, and she looked forward to finding a current of air stirring when she had topped the hill. To the south a mass of dark cloud lay along the horizon, but there was no imminent threat of storm. The slope was easily surmounted, and presently she stood at the top and found herself on the edge of a tableland of wooded pasture, and following the path, which ran not far from the edge of the cliff, she came out into more open country. Empty fields, where a few sheep were grazing, mounted gradually upwards. Wooden stiles made a communication in the hedges that bounded them. And there, not a mile in front of her, she saw a wood, with trees growing slantingly away from the push of the prevalent sea winds, crowning the upward slope, and over the top of it peered a grey church tower.

For the moment, as the awful and familiar scene identified itself, Hester’s heart stood still: the next a wave of courage and resolution poured in upon her. Here, at last was the scene of that prefatory dream, and here was she presented with the opportunity of fathoming and dispelling it. Instantly her mind was made up, and under the strange twilight of the shrouded sky, she walked swiftly on through the fields she had so often traversed in sleep, and up to the wood, beyond which he was waiting for her. She closed her ears against the clanging bell of terror, which now she could silence for ever, and unfalteringly entered that dark tunnel of wood. Soon in front of her the trees began to thin, and through them, now close at hand, she saw the church tower. In a few yards farther she came out of the belt of trees, and round her were the monuments of a graveyard long disused. The cliff was broken off close to the church tower: between it and the edge there was no more of the body of the church than a broken arch, thick hung with ivy. Round this she passed and saw below the ruin of fallen masonry, and the level sands strewn with headstones and disjected rubble, and at the edge of the cliff were graves already cracked and toppling. But there was no one here, none waited for her, and the churchyard where she had so often pictured him was as empty as the fields she had just traversed.

•  •  •

A huge elation filled her; her courage had been rewarded, and all the terrors of the past became to her meaningless phantoms. But there was no time to linger, for now the storm threatened, and on the horizon a blink of lightning was followed by a crackling peal. Just as she turned to go her eye fell on a tombstone that was balanced on the very edge of the cliff, and she read on it that here lay the body of Roger Wyburn.

Fear, the catalepsy of nightmare, rooted her for the moment to the spot; she stared in stricken amazement at the moss-grown letters; almost she expected to see that fell terror of a face rise and hover over his resting-place. Then the fear which had frozen her lent her wings, and with hurrying feet she sped through the arched pathway in the wood and out into the fields. Not one backward glance did she give till she had come to the edge of the ridge above the village, and, turning, saw the pastures she had traversed empty of any living presence. None had followed; but the sheep, apprehensive of the coming storm, had ceased to feed, and were huddling under shelter of the stunted hedges.

Her first idea, in the panic of her mind, was to leave the place at once, but the last train for London had left an hour before, and besides, where was the use of flight if it was the spirit of a man long dead from which she fled? The distance from the place where his bones lay did not afford her safety; that must be sought for within. But she longed for Dick’s sheltering and confident presence; he was arriving in any case tomorrow, but there were long dark hours before tomorrow, and who could say what the perils and dangers of the coming night might be? If he started this evening instead of tomorrow morning, he could motor down here in four hours, and would be with her by ten o’clock or eleven. She wrote an urgent telegram:

COME AT ONCE (she said). DON’T DELAY.

The storm which had flickered on the south now came quickly up, and soon after it burst in appalling violence. For preface there were but a few large drops that splashed and dried on the roadway as she came back from the post-office, and just as she reached the hotel again the roar of the approaching rain sounded, and the sluices of heaven were opened.

Through the deluge flared the fire of the lightning, the thunder crashed and echoed overhead, and presently the street of the village was a torrent of sandy turbulent water, and sitting there in the dark, one picture leapt floating before her eyes — that of the tombstone of Roger Wyburn, already tottering to its fall at the edge of the cliff of the church tower. In such rains as these, acres of the cliffs were loosened; she seemed to hear the whisper of the sliding sand that would precipitate those perished sepulchres and what lay within to the beach below.

By eight o’clock the storm was subsiding, and as she dined she was handed a telegram from Dick, saying that he had already started and sent this off en route. By half-past ten, therefore, if all was well, he would be here, and somehow he would stand between her and her fear. Strange how a few days ago both it and the thought of him had become distant and dim to her; now the one was as vivid as the other, and she counted the minutes to his arrival. Soon the rain ceased altogether, and looking out of the curtained window of her sitting-room where she sat watching the slow circle of the hands of the clock, she saw a tawny moon rising over the sea. Before it had climbed to the zenith, before her clock had twice told the hour again, Dick would be with her.

It had just struck ten when there came a knock at her door, and the pageboy entered with the message that a gentleman had come for her. Her heart leaped at the news; she had not expected Dick for half an hour yet, and now the lonely vigil was over. She ran downstairs, and there was the figure standing on the step outside. His face was turned away from her; no doubt he was giving some order to his chauffeur. He was outlined against the white moonlight, and in contrast with that, the gas-jet in the entrance just above his head gave his hair a warm, reddish tinge.

She ran across the hall to him.

“Ah, my darling, you’ve come,” she said. “It was good of you. How quick you’ve been!” Just as she laid her hand on his shoulder he turned. His arm was thrown out round her, and she looked into a face with eyes close set, and a mouth smiling on one side, the other, thick and gathered together as by some physical deformity, sneered and lusted.

The nightmare was on her; she could neither run nor scream, and supporting her dragging steps, he went forth with her into the night.

•  •  •

Half an hour later Dick arrived. To his amazement he heard that a man had called for his wife not long before, and that she had gone out with him. He seemed to be a stranger here, for the boy who had taken his message to her had never seen him before, and presently surprise began to deepen into alarm; enquiries were made outside the hotel, and it appeared that a witness or two had seen the lady whom they knew to be staying there walking, hatless, along the top of the beach with a man whose arm was linked in hers. Neither of them knew him, but one had seen his face and could describe it.

The direction of the search thus became narrowed down, and though with a lantern to supplement the moonlight they came upon footprints which might have been hers, there were no marks of any who walked beside her. But they followed these until they came to an end, a mile away, in a great landslide of sand, which had fallen from the old churchyard on the cliff, and had brought down with it half the tower and a gravestone, with the body that had lain below.

The gravestone was that of Roger Wyburn, and his body lay by it, untouched by corruption or decay, though two hundred years had elapsed since it was interred there. For a week afterwards the work of searching the landslide went on, assisted by the high tides that gradually washed it away. But no further discovery was made.