Twilight Tales Omnibus
Date: 1911-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Supernatural; Murder; Mystery
Description: Many of Bown’s writings are concerned with the supernatural, ghostly, moody and Gothically dramatic, interweaving terror and mystery with the commonplaces of everyday life. ————— Here, an extensive collection of Bowen’s weird fiction, which she dubbed “twilight tales.” Fifty doors leading into dark places filled with gothic drama, murder, mystery and suspense, other-worldly encounters, and even touches of romance. Beautifully written and unsettling.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA

TWILIGHT  TALES

A N    O M N I B U S

MARJORIE BOWEN
(Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long)

MobileRead Edition
2023

Many of Bown’s writings are concerned with the supernatural, ghostly, moody and Gothically dramatic, interweaving terror and mystery with the commonplaces of everyday life.

—    —    —    —

Here, an extensive collection of Bowen’s weird fiction, which she dubbed “twilight tales.” Fifty doors leading into dark places filled with gothic drama, murder, mystery, suspense, other-worldly encounters, and touches of romance. Beautifully written and unsettling.

Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long (née Campbell; 1 November 1885 – 23 December 1952) was a British author who wrote historical romances, supernatural horror stories, popular history and biography. Her total output numbers over 150 volumes, with the bulk of her work under the pseudonym “Marjorie Bowen”, the name she is mostly known by. She also wrote under the names Joseph Shearing, George R. Preedy, John Winch, Robert Paye and Margaret Campbell.

Bowen’s books are much sought after by aficionados of gothic horror, and received praise from many critics. Several of her novels were adapted for film.

This is my own compilation, loosely based on bibliography provided by isfdb.com (numerous pieces are not available). Contents were retrieved from various online sources.

The contents of this book were first published 1912 ~ 1950. This ebook is assumed to be in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

CONTENTS

… Cover

… Titlepage / About

TWILIGHT TALES:

- Twilight
- The Burning of the Vanities
- A Poor Spanish Lodging
- The Folding Doors
- The Confession of Floris Heenvliet
- The Intruder
- The Gifts of the Dead
- The Fair Hair of Ambrosine
- Giudetta’s Wedding Night
- Pearls
- A Venetian Evening
- Scoured Silk
- Brent’s Folly
- The Housekeeper

- The Extraordinary Adventure of Mr John Proudie

- The Pleasant Husband
- Ann Mellor’s Lover
- The Avenging of Ann Leete
- Decay
- Kecksies
- “He Made a Woman—”
- I Will Never Leave You
- Red Champagne
- Florence Flannery
- The Bishop of Hell
- Cambric Tea
- Marwood’s Ghost Story
- The Accident
- A Persistent Woman
- Dark Ann
- Half-Past Two
- The Prescription
- Crab-Apple Harvest
- The Crown Derby Plate
- Raw Material
- The Sign-painter and the Crystal Fishes
- Elsie’s Lonely Afternoon
- The Hidden Ape
- The Lady Clodagh
- The Last Bouquet
- Love-in-a-Mist
- Madam Spitfire
- Incubus
- One Remained Behind
- They Found My Grave
- The Chinese Apple
- A Stranger Knocked
- The Grey Chamber
- The Tallow Candle
- The Breakdown

TWILIGHT TALES

A N    O M N I B U S

TWILIGHT

Lucrezia Borgia,
Duchess d’Este

Three women stood before a marble-margined pool in the grounds of the Ducal palace at Ferrara; behind them three cypresses waved against a purple sky from which the sun was beginning to fade; at the base of these trees grew laurel, ilex, and rose bushes. Round the pool was a sweep of smooth green across which the light wind lifted and chased the red, white and pink rose leaves.

Beyond the pool the gardens descended, terrace on terrace of opulent trees and flowers; behind the pool the square strength of the palace rose, with winding steps leading to balustraded balconies. Further still, beyond palace and garden, hung vineyard and cornfield in the last warm haze of heat.

All was spacious, noble, silent; ambrosial scents rose from the heated earth — the scent of pine, lily, rose and grape.

The centre woman of the three who stood by the pool was the Spanish Duchess, Lucrezia, daughter of the Borgia Pope. The other two held her up under the arms, for her limbs were weak beneath her.

The pool was spread with the thick-veined leaves of water-lilies and upright plants with succulent stalks broke the surface of the water. In between the sky was reflected placidly, and the Duchess looked down at the counterfeit of her face as clearly given as if in a hand-mirror.

It was no longer a young face; beauty was painted on it skilfully; false red, false white, bleached hair cunningly dyed, faded eyes darkened on brow and lash, lips glistening with red ointment, the lost loveliness of throat and shoulders concealed under a lace of gold and pearls, made her look like a portrait of a fair woman, painted crudely.

And, also like one composed for her picture, her face was expressionless save for a certain air of gentleness, which seemed as false as everything else about her — false and exquisite, inscrutable and alluring — alluring still with a certain sickly and tainted charm, slightly revolting as were the perfumes of her unguents when compared to the pure scents of trees and flowers. Her women had painted faces, too, but they were plainly gowned, one in violet, one in crimson, while the Duchess blazed in every device of splendour.

Her dress, of citron-coloured velvet, trailed about her in huge folds, her bodice and her enormous sleeves sparkled with tight-sewn jewels; her hair was twisted into plaits and curls and ringlets; in her ears were pearls so large that they touched her shoulders.

She trembled in her splendour and her knees bent; the two women stood silent, holding her up — they were little more than slaves.

She continued to gaze at the reflection of herself, in the water she was fair enough. Presently she moistened her painted lips with a quick movement of her tongue.

“Will you go in, Madonna?” asked one of the women.

The Duchess shook her head; the pearls tinkled among the dyed curls.

“Leave me here,” she said.

She drew herself from their support and sank heavily and wearily on the marble rim of the pool.

“Bring me my cloak.”

They fetched it from a seat among the laurels; it was white velvet, unwieldy with silver and crimson embroidery.

Lucrezia drew it round her shoulders with a little shudder.

“Leave me here,” she repeated.

They moved obediently across the soft grass and disappeared up the laurel-shaded steps that led to the terraces before the high-built palace.

The Duchess lifted her stiff fingers, that were rendered almost useless by the load of gems on them, to her breast.

Trails of pink vapour, mere wraiths of clouds began to float about the west; the long Italian twilight had fallen.

A young man parted the bushes and stepped on to the grass; he carried a lute slung by a red ribbon across his violet jacket; he moved delicately, as if reverent of the great beauty of the hour.

Lucrezia turned her head and watched him with weary eyes.

He came lightly nearer, not seeing her. A flock of homing doves passed over his head; he swung on his heel to look at them and the reluctantly departing sunshine was golden on his upturned face.

Lucrezia still watched him, intently, narrowly; he came nearer again, saw her, and paused in confusion, pulling off his black velvet cap.

“Come here,” she said in a chill, hoarse voice.

He obeyed with an exquisite swiftness and fell on one knee before her; his dropped hand touched the ground a pace beyond the furthest-flung edge of her gown.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Ormfredo Orsini, one of the Duke’s gentlemen, Madonna,” he answered.

He looked at her frankly surprised to see her alone in the garden at the turn of the day. He was used to see her surrounded by her poets, her courtiers, her women; she was the goddess of a cultured court and persistently worshipped.

“One of the Orsini,” she said. “Get up from your knees.”

He thought she was thinking of her degraded lineage, of the bad, bad blood in her veins. As he rose he considered these things for the first time. She had lived decorously at Ferrara for twenty-one years, nearly the whole of his lifetime; but he had heard tales, though he had never dwelt on them.

“You look as if you were afraid of me—”

“Afraid of you — I, Madonna?”

“Sit down,” she said.

He seated himself on the marble rim and stared at her; his fresh face wore a puzzled expression.

“What do you want of me, Madonna?” he asked.

“Ahè!” she cried. “How very young you are, Orsini!”

Her eyes flickered over him impatiently, greedily; the twilight was beginning to fall over her, a merciful veil; but he saw her for the first time as an old woman. Slightly he drew back, and his lute touched the marble rim as he moved, and the strings jangled.

“When I was your age,” she said, “I had been betrothed to one man and married to another, and soon I was wedded to a third. I have forgotten all of them.”

“You have been so long our lady here,” he answered. “You may well have forgotten the world, Madonna, beyond Ferrara.”

“You are a Roman?”

“Yes, Madonna.”

She put out her right hand and clasped his arm.

“Oh, for an hour of Rome! — in the old days!”

Her whole face, with its artificial beauty and undisguisable look of age, was close to his; he felt the sense of her as the sense of something evil.

She was no longer the honoured Duchess of Ferrara, but Lucrezia, the Borgia’s lure, Cesare’s sister, Alessandro’s daughter, the heroine of a thousand orgies, the inspiration of a hundred crimes.

The force with which this feeling came over him made him shiver; he shrank beneath her hand.

“Have you heard things of me?” she asked in a piercing voice.

“There is no one in Italy who has not heard of you, Madonna.”

“That is no answer, Orsini. And I do not want your barren flatteries.”

“You are the Duke’s wife,” he said, “and I am the servant of the Duke.”

“Does that mean that you must lie to me?”

She leant even nearer to him; her whitened chin, circled by the stiff goldwork of her collar, touched his shoulder.

“Tell me I am beautiful,” she said. “I must hear that once more — from young lips.”

“You are beautiful, Madonna.”

She moved back and her eyes flared.

“Did I not say I would not have your flatteries?”

“What, then, was your meaning?”

“Ten years ago you would not have asked; no man would have asked. I am old. Lucrezia old! — ah, Gods above!”

“You are beautiful,” he repeated. “But how should I dare to touch you with my mouth?”

“You would have dared, if you had thought me desirable,” she answered hoarsely. “You cannot guess how beautiful I was — before you were born, Orsini.”

He felt a sudden pity for her; the glamour of her fame clung round her and gilded her. Was not this a woman who had been the fairest in Italy seated beside him?

He raised her hand and kissed the palm, the only part that was not hidden with jewels.

“You are sorry for me,” she said.

Orsini started at her quick reading of his thoughts.

“I am the last of my family,” she added. “And sick. Did you know that I was sick, Orsini?”

“Nay, Madonna.”

“For weeks I have been sick. And wearying for Rome.”

“Rome,” he ventured, “is different now, Madonna.”

“Ahè!” she wailed. “And I am different also.”

Her hand lay on his knee; he looked at it and wondered if the things he had heard of her were true. She had been the beloved child of her father, the old Pope, rotten with bitter wickedness; she had been the friend of her brother, the dreadful Cesare — her other brother, Francesco, and her second husband — was it not supposed that she knew how both had died?

But for twenty-one years she had lived in Ferrara, patroness of poet and painter, companion of such as the courteous gentle Venetian, Pietro Bembo.

And Alfonso d’Este, her husband, had found no fault with her; as far as the world could see, there had been no fault to find.

Ormfredo Orsini stared at the hand sparkling on his knee and wondered.

“Suppose that I was to make you my father confessor?” she said. The white mantle had fallen apart and the bosom of her gown glittered, even in the twilight.

“What sins have you to confess, Madonna?” he questioned.

She peered at him sideways.

“A Pope’s daughter should not be afraid of the Judgement of God,” she answered. “And I am not. I shall relate my sins at the bar of Heaven and say I have repented — Ahè — if I was young again!”

“Your Highness has enjoyed the world,” said Orsini.

“Yea, the sun,” she replied, “but not the twilight.”

“The twilight?”

“It has been twilight now for many years,” she said, “ever since I came to Ferrara.”

The moon was rising behind the cypress trees, a slip of glowing light. Lucrezia took her chin in her hand and stared before her; a soft breeze stirred the tall reeds in the pool behind her and gently ruffled the surface of the water.

The breath of the night-smelling flowers pierced the slumbrous air; the palace showed a faint shape, a marvellous tint; remote it looked and uncertain in outline.

Lucrezia was motionless; her garments were dim, yet glittering, her face a blur; she seemed the ruin of beauty and graciousness, a fair thing dropped suddenly into decay.

Orsini rose and stepped away from her; the perfume of her unguents offended him. He found something horrible in the memory of former allurement that clung to her; ghosts seemed to crowd round her and pluck at her, like fierce birds at carrion.

He caught the glitter of her eyes through the dusk; she was surely evil, bad to the inmost core of her heart; her stale beauty reeked of dead abomination… Why had he never noticed it before?

The ready wit of his rank and blood failed him; he turned away towards the cypress trees.

The Duchess made no attempt to detain him; she did not move from her crouching, watchful attitude.

When he reached the belt of laurels he looked back and saw her dark shape still against the waters of the pool that were beginning to be touched with the argent glimmer of the rising moon. He hurried on, continually catching the strings of his lute against the boughs of the flowering shrubs; he tried to laugh at himself for being afraid of an old, sick woman; he tried to ridicule himself for believing that the admired Duchess, for so long a decorous great lady, could in truth be a creature of evil.

But the conviction flashed into his heart was too deep to be uprooted.

She had not spoken to him like a Duchess of Ferrara, but rather as the wanton Spaniard whose excesses had bewildered and sickened Rome.

A notable misgiving was upon him; he had heard great men praise her, Ludovico Ariosto, Cardinal Ippolito’s secretary and the noble Venetian Bembo; he had himself admired her remote and refined splendour. Yet, because of these few moments of close talk with her, because of a near gaze into her face, he felt that she was something horrible, the poisoned offshoot of a bad race.

He thought that there was death on her glistening painted lips, and that if he had kissed them he would have died, as so many of her lovers were reputed to have died.

He parted the cool leaves and blossoms and came on to the borders of a lake that lay placid under the darkling sky.

It was very lonely; bats twinkled past with a black flap of wings; the moon had burnt the heavens clear of stars; her pure light began to fill the dusk. Orsini moved softly, with no comfort in his heart.

The stillness was intense; he could hear his own footfall, the soft leather on the soft grass. He looked up and down the silence of the lake.

Then suddenly he glanced over his shoulder. Lucrezia Borgia was standing close behind him; when he turned her face looked straight into his.

He moaned with terror and stood rigid; awful it seemed to him that she should track him so stealthily and be so near to him in this silence and he never know of her presence.

“Eh, Madonna!” he said.

“Eh, Orsini,” she answered in a thin voice, and at the sound of it he stepped away, till his foot was almost in the lake.

His unwarrantable horror of her increased, as he found that the glowing twilight had confused him; for, whereas at first he had thought she was the same as when he had left her seated by the pool, royal in dress and bearing, he saw now that she was leaning on a stick, that her figure had fallen together, that her face was yellow as a church candle, and that her head was bound with plasters, from the under edge of which her eyes twinkled, small and lurid.

She wore a loose gown of scarlet brocade that hung open on her arms that showed lean and dry; the round bones at her wrist gleamed white under the tight skin, and she wore no rings.

“Madonna, you are ill,” muttered Orinfredo Orsini. He wondered how long he had been wandering in the garden.

“Very ill,” she said. “But talk to me of Rome. You are the only Roman at the Court, Orsini.”

“Madonna, I know nothing of Rome,” he answered, “save our palace there and sundry streets—”

She raised one hand from the stick and clutched his arm.

“Will you hear me confess?” she asked. “All my beautiful sins that I cannot tell the priest? All we did in those days of youth before this dimness at Ferrara?”

“Confess to God,” he answered, trembling violently.

Lucrezia drew nearer.

“All the secrets Cesare taught me,” she whispered. “Shall I make you heir to them?”

“Christ save me,” he said, “from the Duke of Valentinois’ secrets!”

“Who taught you to fear my family?” she questioned with a cunning accent. “Will you hear how the Pope feasted with his Hebes and Ganymedes? Will you hear how we lived in the Vatican?”

Orsini tried to shake her arm off, anger rose to equal his fear.

“Weed without root or flower, fruitless uselessness!” he said hoarsely.

“Let me free of your spells!”

She loosed his arm and seemed to recede from him without movement; the plasters round her head showed ghastly white, and he saw all the wrinkles round her drooped lips and the bleached ugliness of her bare throat.

“Will you not hear of Rome?” she insisted in a wailing whisper. He fled from her, crashing through the bushes.

Swiftly and desperately he ran across the lawns and groves, up the winding steps to the terraces before the palace, beating the twilight with his outstretched hands as if it was an obstacle in his way.

Stumbling and breathless, he gained the painted corridors that were lit with a hasty blaze of wax light. Women were running to and fro, and he saw a priest carrying the Holy Eucharist cross a distant door.

One of these women he stopped.

“The Duchess—” he began, panting.

She laid her finger on her lip.

“They carried her in from the garden an hour ago; they bled and plastered her, but she died — before she could swallow the wafer — (hush! she was not thinking of holy things, Orsini!) — ten minutes ago—”

God’s Playthings (1912)

THE BURNING
OF THE VANITIES

Being an Account of
the Last Day of Carnival
and the Vision of
Girolamo Savonarola
in the City of Florence, 1497

“Behold, the sky shall be darkened! Behold, it shall rain fire and flame, stones and rocks; it shall be wild weather. I have placed ye between four winds,” saith the Lord — namely, prelates, princes, priests and bad citizens.

“Fly from their vices; gather ye together in charity. Fly from Rome, O Florence, and come to repentance! The Lord saith: ‘I will debase the princes of Italy and trample on the pride of Rome’; then, O Italy, trouble after trouble shall befall thee, trouble from this side and from that — rumours from the east, rumours from the west, from all sides rumour after rumour.

“Then men shall yearn for the visions of the prophets, and shall have them not, for the Lord saith, ‘Now do I prophesy in my turn.’”

So ended the sermon of Frà Girolamo, preached from a temporary pulpit erected in front of the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, the last day of the Carnival of the year fourteen hundred and ninety-seven, the third year since the expulsion of the Medici, the third year of the Friar’s rule in Florence.

The monks of St Mark’s were gathered about the pulpit, and round them the Piangoni, the active supporters of the Friar; beyond them the crowd filled the Piazza from end to end, a crowd reverent, silent, excited.

It was a windless spring; the odours of the flowers in the fields without hung in the breezeless air and filled the city streets with perfume. Above the fine straight lines of the houses and the majestic shape of the church the sky hung pure of cloud and deeply blue as an early violet.

Frà Girolamo paused, gripping the smooth edge of the pulpit, and looked across the gathered multitude.

He wore the habit of the Friars of St Mark, a loose coarse brown robe and a hood and shoulder-piece in one that fitted closely round his face and neck. He was of the middle height, stooping a little and gaunt; his features were harsh and rudely modelled, his complexion dark and sickly, cheeks and forehead lined with deep furrows, his nose a heavy aquiline, his eyes large, expressive and of a sparkling grey tint; his thick but mobile lips were at that moment compressed in a firmness that had the sweetness of true strength.

Truly that expression of noble gentleness illumined the whole ungainly countenance, softened the unlovely lines and gave divine dignity to the common features.

As he stood so, motionless, the monks began to sing psalms and the crowd went to their knees on the paving stones of the great Piazza, their coloured garments shifting and changing in light and shade as they moved. When the men’s voices sank on the last pulse of the holy music that rose like incense on the clear thin air, Frà Girolamo took the Host, and raising it with his right hand lifted the left in blessing of the kneeling press of worshippers.

The great and stately door of the church was a fitting background for the frail figure holding the Host of God which gleamed in the lucid rays of the sun that struck straight from heaven on it, like a mystical jewel fed with inner light.

Frà Girolamo flashed his eyes over the crowd, among whom he could distinguish several of the Compagnacci, adherents of the vanished Medici, and many of the Arrabbiati, his bitter foes who had threatened to revive the old orgies of the Medicean rule, the pagan and splendid carnival of Lorenzo, called the Magnificent, now for years since dead in sin.

A strong excitement shook the slender frame of the Friar; his countenance became blanched with the intense emotion that inspired him. In a trembling but powerful voice he cried—

“O Lord, if my deeds be not sincere, if my words be not inspired by Thee, strike me dead on the instant.”

The Host was lowered and the people rose from their knees; but the Friar remained in the wooden pulpit.

Now the crowd drew back and made way for a strange procession that was wending across the Piazza.

It was headed by four fair-headed youths attired in white, who bore between them a marble figure of the Infant Christ, pointing with one hand to a wreath of thorns and raising the other in benediction; this was the work of Donato di Bardi, a famous sculptor. After came a company also in white and carrying in their hands red crosses, singing the lauds and hymns of Girolamo Benivieni in sweet and eager voices.

Behind them followed men and women soberly dressed who collected from the crowd, holding out on silver trays the alms they received; they were begging on behalf of the Monte di Pietà, and had already amassed more gold than had been given in charity in Florence during a year of the old Medicean order.

Next there came a vast number of children decently and quietly dressed, some singing, some repeating prayers, all carrying, dragging or supporting between them a strange and varied number of objects — books, dresses, pictures, statues, masks, false hair, boxes and cases of perfume, lutes, viols, mirrors, ornaments, gauds, manuscripts, cards, dice, cosmetics, chessboards, cups and balls of gold, and all manner of rich, precious trifles and beautiful gorgeous examples of art.

These were the vanities that had been collected during the Carnival by the very children who, under the rule of Lorenzo, had sung and danced, fought and played profane games in the streets they now traversed in orderly procession; then with the Carnival verses of the Medici on their lips, now with holy hymns.

From every house in Florence they had demanded all vanities to be given to them, and when they received the offerings they sang a devotional work composed by Frà Girolamo. Now laden with these relics of the old pagan rule, they were making their way to the Piazza del Signori, there to complete the purging of Florence by publicly burning the vanities that had been so long her temptation and her curse.

The Friar descended from the pulpit and joined the procession in company with his personal supporters; chanting and rejoicing, the children made their joyful way, dragging with them the trophies of luxury and wantonness, whose perfume of musk, ambergris and nard gave a heaviness to the air as they passed.

Frà Girolamo held himself, as was his habit, modestly, and kept his eye low in real humility; but in his great heart was a wild exultation that this city of his love had responded to the agonies of his exhortation and was turning from the wickedness of Borgia and Medici to the strong face of God.

Beneath his rough and long robe beat a spirit so lofty and enthusiastic that had it not been hampered and held down to earth by the poor enfeebled body it had walked on the heads of all of them and conversed with Angels.

But since He who made the soul of this Friar directed these things for His own ends, Frà Girolamo, who bore in his bosom a burning light of truth that might have served to redeem the world, worked in the wicked, lovely city of Florence and spent his strength to redeem this little circle of beloved sinners.

When the procession reached the Piazza there was found to be a great eight-sided pyramid there, built up in the centre of the square and reaching near as high as the Palace of the Signori; there were seven stages to this, one for each of the deadly sins. On the apex stood two grotesque and glittering figures, robed in gemmed satin and wearing high-coloured crowns; one was King Carnival, the old monarch of the wanton Medicean orgies; and in his monstrous, under-jawed face and princely garb, in his straight heavy locks and the velvet cap under the circlet of sovereignty, might be traced a malicious likeness to the magnificent Lorenzo, purposely contrived by the artificer as an affront to the banished House.

The other figure was Lucifer, horned, black, and hideous, bearing in the lap of his scarlet robes seven little images representing the seven mortal sins.

The procession paused; the men and women arranging themselves under the Loggia de’ Lanzi and along the Pinghiera, while the children advanced two at a time, and deposited their loads on the various platforms, where the soldiers of the Signori arranged them in piles from the bottom to the base of the pyramid.

So much had been collected, so many and various were the costly offerings, that several hours passed before the final vanity was cast on to the heap and the children retired to a great circle round the Piazza; but all this while there had been no sign of weariness or impatience on the part of the people, who continued with great spirit and gladness to sing their lauds and hymns, mingled with denunciations of the Carnival.

Frà Girolamo stood back from the pile with his hands folded in the sleeves of his robe; his face was largely concealed by the shadow of his hood, which he had partially drawn forward, and he conveyed neither by word nor gesture fanatic rejoicing or common triumph. Rather was his mien sad and grave, as if he weighed what was being done and pondered on that far greater cleansing of Florence of which this was but a symbol — the cleansing of the hearts of her citizens.

Truly when the last child cast down his burden and withdrew, it was a marvellous sight of worldly splendour to behold; all these gauds and glories cast together in this heap under the calm spring sky, half in the shadow of the palace and other noble buildings and half sparkling and glittering in the clear gold of the early sunshine, fainting in the approach of afternoon. Rich and valuable were these vanities, worth many thousands of ducats; a merchant of Venice had offered to buy them for the vast sum of twenty thousand crowns, and the portrait of this man was flung on top of the other baubles.

Carnival costumes were there of satin, silk and tinsel; chaplets and garlands of false flowers; locks and wigs of artificial hair, masks painted and gilt; necklets, bracelets and brocade shoes, girdles, ribbons and playing cards; chessmen in ivory, silver and ebony; fans in feathers dyed bright colours; books of profane poems with pictures tinted and gilt; lutes, viols and pipes painted and carved; boxes, bottles and caskets of cosmetics, powders, philtres and charms; statues and busts of pagan gods and goddesses, white marble, veined marble, and time-stained alabaster; mirrors set in copper, gold and silver; toy daggers for ladies with handles of jade, sardonyx and emerald; watches of crystal, of filigree, of enamel; caskets of perfumes; paintings of wanton figures, of beautiful women, of heathen scenes; velvet purses embroidered with armorial bearings; gauntlets stitched thickly with silver thread and pearl; mantles edged with vair and sable; sword-hilts fringed with knotted silk and gold; pins for the hair set with rubies and sapphires; false faces and gaudy finery for the carnival; statues in bronze, in gilt, in silver; enamel cups and drinking-horns bound with a rim of precious stones; cushions of brocade and down; boxes of ointment, of unguents; phials of rare perfumes; caskets of sweetmeats, bags of confetti, dice, parti-coloured playing balls, and many trifling things composed the pile. And with the glimmer of the gems, the shining of the gold and silver, the soft gleam of the rich stuffs, the flash of glass and crystal, the strange fantastic look of mask and carnival garment, it seemed as if the ransom of some monarch of the east, a pasha of Turkey or some potentate of Rhodes or Candy Isle was gathered there.

Now an excited and trembling silence of expectancy fell upon the crowd; four of the soldiers of the Signori stepped forward with flaming torches that showed pale and smoky in the daylight, and as Frà Girolamo raised his hand they lit the four corners of the pile, the interior of which was filled with combustibles.

As the flames hesitated, crouched, then seized hold and caught their prey, the trumpeters of Florence blew a blast of triumph, the bells broke out from the palace and the people gave free vent to their wild enthusiasm.

The Friar did not move nor even lift his eyes to the opulent sacrifice; the thick soft smoke spread sideways in a sudden little gust of wind and half obscured his figure.

The people burst out of their ordered ranks; they laughed, shouted, sang their spiritual lauds and crowded about the huge costly bonfire in a press of delirious pleasure; the Piangoni stood near and by the aid of long poles thrust the vanities deeper into the flames and cast back any that had slipped, chanting the while the hymns of Girolamo Benivieni.

The Friar maintained his position; his lips moved as if he ardently communed with himself, so absorbed was he in his own meditations that he did not notice a man standing close, and also motionless amid the circling and excited throng, who was observing him with intense and peculiar attention.

This man, although he wore the sober mantle of an ordinary citizen, and though he appeared to be there in sympathy with the general religious enthusiasm, was nevertheless in air and appearance one of the Arrabbiati or Compagnacci, who intrigued with the outcast Medici and hated the Friar, though they submitted to a force they could not withstand with safety as yet.

He was wrapped so completely in his dark cloak, the hood of which was well drawn over his face, that had any been free enough to observe him they would have had difficulty in judging of his person and character; the thick folds of the common stuff, however, could not disguise the virile grace of his figure, the beautiful poise of his head and the delicate shape of his feet and of the hand that clasped his hood at the chin.

The excited people and friars, breaking into a kind of religious dance, ran round and about this man, and in between him and Frà Girolamo; but he did not move nor once take his eyes from the equally still figure of the Friar, save to occasionally lift them to the pyre of the Vanities, now a burning cone of flames from base to apex, from which rose thick columns of sweet, heavy-scented smoke.

The slow Italian dusk was closing in; the sky deepened above the palace and the towers, the roofs and domes of Florence. The smoke, spreading, filled the Piazza and gave a cloudy unreality to the moving crowd who circled the strengthening light of the fire.

On the upper part of the buildings a pale sun-glow lingered; but the Lion on the Palace steps was absorbed in shade save for the flickering unearthly glow that the burning vanities emitted and that now and then touched the surroundings with a murky crimson reflection.

All the while the bells of the Signori were pealing, and the music of them rose and fell with the hymns. Frà Girolamo suddenly looked up at the flames, the cracking canvas, shrivelling silks, splitting marbles, melting gold and silver, flaring scrolls of manuscript and smoking boxes of perfumes that composed the pyre; then, with bowed head, made his way quickly and unobserved through the crowd and out of the Piazza. He was instantly and closely followed by the tall stranger who had so persistently regarded him, and who now came softly after without attracting his attention.

The streets were deserted; everyone being gathered in or near the Piazza, and the Friar passed unnoticed before the fronts of the tall, carved houses; he was swiftly making his way to the Convent of St Mark, and had turned down an empty side street, deep in shade, when he suddenly paused, as if inwardly troubled, and, turning slowly, beheld the stranger who had also come to a stop a few paces behind him.

Frà Girolamo regarded him earnestly; they were alone in the street at the bottom of which was a glimpse of the Arno’s arched bridge; behind them rose the steps and closed door of a hospital, above the garden wall of which showed cypress trees and branches of laurel.

“You,” said the tall man in sweet and cultivated Tuscan, “you are Frà Girolamo Savonarola, friar of St Mark’s and ruler of Florence?”

“Girolamo Savonarola I am,” answered the Friar; “ruler of Florence I am not, but God’s instrument for some good in this city.”

The other, still speaking from the depths of the coarse hood that completely concealed his face, made reply—

“Ruler and Master of Florence, Friar, even as Lorenzo was Ruler and Master, even as the Medici were great are you great, and today you have had proof of it.”

“Who are you?” demanded Frà Girolamo.

“One who loved Lorenzo and found Florence pleasant in his days.”

“I did not hate Lorenzo — I would have saved his soul.”

“You refused him absolution!”

“Because,” replied the Friar, “he would not repent of his sins.”

The stranger laughed impatiently.

“Usurper! You hold his place, while his son, at the Borgia’s footstool, eats in Rome the husks of charity.”

Frà Girolamo answered sternly, while the light of enthusiasm kindled to red fire in his eyes.

“Who are you who speak for the wicked? Piero de’ Medici abused his power; he would have sold our liberty to the French — lustful, vain, hollow; he was banished Florence for his sins and a price put upon his head. Woe to this city if he returns! At the Borgia’s footstool, you say! It is fitting that such a prince should fly to such a Pope!”

The stranger came a short step nearer and loosened his hand on his hood so that his face was visible to the Friar, who observed that he wore one of the hideous masks of the Medicean Carnival, mottled and spotted to represent a plague-stricken countenance; he noticed the Friar’s start of aversion and laughed again.

“This should have gone to feed yonder pyre!” he said. “Oh, credulous Friar, do you think that you have burnt all the sins in Florence?”

Girolamo Savonarola answered simply.

“I have done what God put it into my heart to do. Let Him judge me. For you, ask me what question you would have answered, or if this is but idleness, let me on my way.”

“This is your day of triumph,” said the other man with a passionate ring in his voice. “You today have burnt all the Medici rejoiced in — painting, statuary, music, books, poetry, gay dresses, perfumes, cards and dice; and those people who praised Lorenzo for making this Florence so beautiful and splendid have danced round your pyre in gladness!”

Frà Girolamo regarded him steadily.

“Are not you also,” he asked gently, “pleased to see this city brought a little way to repentance?”

“Friar,” answered the stranger vehemently, “I am your enemy. I stand for all you would destroy — the lust of the world, the pride of the beautiful, the power of the devil. I am also a ruined, outcast, beggared man, one of those your rule has banished from Florence. If I were discovered I should be murdered, and that would be better than to starve in Rome.”

“Your name?” interrupted Frà Girolamo. “Are you one whom I know?”

“You know me,” was the haughty response; “but my name is not pleasing to your ears. You I hate, ay, and all your works; but there is a day soon when all hates shall be satisfied.”

Girolamo Savonarola made quiet answer.

“If you are a follower of Piero de’ Medici, I warn you to quit Florence, for I cannot and would not save one of the tyrant’s tools from the just anger of the People — the People! — in them is my trust against these evils you threaten me with.”

He turned to pass on his way, but the young man sprang lightly after him and caught his mantle.

“The People!” he laughed. “Did not the People shout for Lorenzo yesterday? Will they not shout for Piero tomorrow!”

Frà Girolamo looked at him with serene eyes.

“Never for the Medici,” he answered. “Never for the tyrant. Florence is free.”

“You are a bold man to say so,” returned the stranger, standing at his ease, with one foot on the lowest hospital step. “Free! No, Florence is no freer than she was five years ago; only now it is you who rule instead of the Magnificent. But not for long, Friar.”

“Again, who are you who stay me in the street with these prophecies?”

The sun had left even the tops of the buildings now, and the lucid light was fading from the heavens where an early star hung chill and pale above the Duomo; the black foliage of the cypress and the sharp, long leaves of the laurel showed clearly over the wall and against the argent flush of twilight; a little fear crept into the Friar’s heart, not base fear, or cowardice, or any trembling for himself, but the shadow of some coming doubt lest after all he had not saved Florence; in the tall, dark-robed figure of the stranger, now standing with his arms folded on his breast and regarding him with eyes that shot evil glimmers from the holes in the mottled green and yellow mask, in this man with his settled enmity, his mocking composure, he saw testified all the hatred, scorn and malice that had opposed his life-work.

“Begone!” he said sternly, “and disturb me not.”

The stranger gave him a disdainful salutation and flung up his graceful head.

“Back to your cell, and pray the people in whom you trust keep faithful!” he cried lightly. “Two thousand crowns today for the head of Piero de’ Medici — how much in a year’s time for thine, O Friar, when Alessandro Borgia cries you excommunicate?”

Frà Girolamo stepped away and his dark eyes lifted to the evening sky.

“The Pope is a broken tool, a vile trader in holy things,” he answered with great dignity. “And in Florence, where I am beloved, his authority is worth nothing; here the voice of God alone is strong.”

“And the voice of the People,” returned the stranger mockingly; and with a low, insulting laugh he moved slowly away and was soon lost in the shadows.

Girolamo Savonarola gazed after him a moment, then proceeded on his way, a strange excitement throbbing in his veins and before his eyes a mistiness of familiar objects, as if an unnatural darkness had fallen.

He walked for a while in this manner, meeting no one, marvelling at the curious emptiness of the city and the increasing blackness; everything seemed strange and unusual. He thought he should have reached his Convent by now, but instead found himself traversing dark, empty streets that were those of Florence yet unknown to him. He turned to retrace his steps, but was like one groping in the labyrinth, roads and houses crossed and re-crossed, and he wandered confused. Nowhere was there any light, in either window or in the heaven; he had lost sight of the Duomo and the star above it; as if the Plague had crept through the city was the silence and the loneliness.

Then out of the empty hush came the sound as of harsh wings beating together, and a voice cried strongly—

“Girolamo Savonarola!”

The Friar cast up his eyes to the blinding mist and answered—

“I am here!”

And the voice made reply—

“Come thou and see how the people of Florence love thee!”

With great rejoicing he said, “I come!”

Forward he pressed through the obscurity, and the darkness began to be tinged with red and dispelled as from the spreading glow of flames, and as Frà Girolamo hastened on he found himself suddenly on the Piazza again, standing apart from a vast crowd that was dancing and singing about a huge fire that lit the whole black sky and stained the blank buildings with a lurid colour.

And the voice said, very low and in the Friar’s ear—

“These are the people who sang the songs of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the people who burnt the vanities. Behold what task they perform now!”

Frà Girolamo looked and saw that the crowd was very brilliantly dressed, that the women wore jewels and paints, the men fine silks and rich weapons, and that they danced in a mad profane style; many were masked and all wreathed with flowers, and the heavy scents they were anointed with hung in the thick air; nor did they sing hymns, but the wanton carnival songs of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

And in the midst of their reckless rejoicing flared and blazed the vivid devouring flames, soaring one above the other until they far overtopped the dark palace; the deep crimson glow of them picked out from the darkness the painted, leering faces, the evil masks, the leaping, dancing, abandoned forms.

“This is not Florence,” murmured the Friar.

“This is Florence,” came the answer. “And these are the people — thy people—”

Frà Girolamo felt a hand on his shoulder, and withdrawing his horrified eyes from the devilish crowds saw at his side the tall figure of the stranger who had accosted him before the hospital.

“Look closer,” he urged. “Look closer. What vain things do they burn now? Not cards, lutes and paintings. Look closer.”

The Friar again gazed at the Piazza, and this time discerned above the flames the outline of a huge gallows from which depended several bodies, hung by the necks, and the blood of these men rained down on to the fire, for the crowd with jeering and laughter threw stones at them that broke their flesh.

“They wear monks’ habits,” said Frà Girolamo, and he strained forward.

At this moment the fire consumed the rope holding one of the victims, and as the crowd gave a shout of rejoicing he fell into the white heat of the fire. In that second the Friar had caught sight of the face; it was the dead tortured countenance of his beloved disciple, Frà Domenico. He gave a cry of anguish, and would have thrown himself into the crowd, but the tall stranger held him back.

And now his maddened eyes noticed a man in scarlet and purple, mounted on a white mule, who rode round the edge of the pyre and urged on the crowd with ribald triumph. This man was old, and wore a triple crown; and at his bridle were two younger men, like him in the face — horribly beautiful, wearing extravagant garments.

“Alessandro Borgia,” said the stranger in the Friar’s ear, “and his two sons, Francesco and Cesare.”

Frà Girolamo tried to speak, but his tongue refused to move.

“Look again,” urged the voice, low, insistent and mocking.

The Friar gazed up through the smoke and flame, and in the horrid blaze saw another figure dangle at the rope’s end, then drop; again, in the instant’s downward fall he saw the face — livid and despairing.

This time his own. His — face and figure.

“See how the people of Florence burn Girolamo Savonarola!” cried the stranger. “These people who wept to hear you preach in the Duomo!”

Frà Girolamo fell back a step and raised a shuddering hand to shut out the awful fire.

The other flung back his mantle, and the great glow of the fire caught the embroideries on the gay dress hitherto concealed beneath.

“You dethroned the Medici,” he said; “these” — he pointed to the crowd — “will dethrone you.”

Soft blackness rose up, choking the bright flames, blotting out the shouting people, the dim outline of the buildings swirling round the feet of Frà Girolamo and mounting to his eyes. He cast himself on his knees and seemed to sink forward on nothingness; his senses broke and forsook him; he flung out his hands and made an effort to hurl off the darkness as if it were a mantle tossed over his head; he felt his knees strike stone, the blackness rent, tore, lifted and disappeared; he found himself lying up the hospital steps; before him the low wall, the cypress tree, the laurel branches; beyond, the darkening pure sky. And beside him the tall stranger staring at him through the holes of his hideous mask.

The Friar staggered to his feet.

“I have had a vision,” he said under his breath. “Methought you were my guide. Who are you?”

The other tore off the mask, snapping the orange ribbons that bound it to his head, and disclosing a superb face framed in clusters of brown curls, flushed with crimson.

“I am Piero!” he cried. “I am the Medici! And after the burning of Girolamo Savonarola I shall rule again in Florence!”

“Then it was no vision,” answered Frà Girolamo, “but a Devil’s fantasy—”

“A fantasy,” said Piero; “but you shall test its truth.”

The Friar leant against the wall of the hospital and closed his eyes to shut out the picture of the wicked face and red eyes he had last seen with that same smiling expression casting hate on him from beside the death-bed of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

“Lord! Lord!” he cried strongly. “Save me from the snares and delusions of evil!”

Now he opened his eyes and saw about him his own cell in St Mark, and he lay on his bed, and beside him sat his beloved disciple, Frà Domenico, and he shuddered as one waking from a terrible dream.

“How got I here from the Piazza?” he asked, sitting up. And they told him that a faintness had come over him as would often happen in the pulpit, and that so insensible he had been brought to the Convent.

“Truly,” said Frà Domenico, with love beaming in his eyes, “this was the day of your glory — for all the vanities in Florence were burnt to ashes — yes, even to nothingness was all that wantonness reduced.”

Girolamo Savonarola looked at Frà Domenico, then at his own body.

“To ashes, to nothingness!” he murmured. “Oh, God, make the spirit strong!”

The disciple asked tenderly—

“Father, what troubled you?”

Frà Girolamo made the sign of the cross and replied with a sweet composure—

“Nought — but in the crowd methought that I did see — Piero de’ Medici.”

God’s Playthings (1912)

A POOR SPANISH LODGING

Philip Wharton,
Duke of Wharton

“The scorn and wonder of his age.”

— Alexander Pope

A young man sat at a wooden table in a small, mean room.

His hands were in his pockets and his head sunk on his breast, his legs outstretched before him.

A miserable bed, covered with a dirty blanket, occupied one corner of the room, above it being a gaunt and poorly carved crucifix.

The floor, walls and ceiling were lath, plaster and worn wood, all soiled, smoked and crumbling.

The one small window was covered with a thick pane of discoloured glass that could not open; some portmanteaux stood beneath and a broken chair.

On the table was a coarse glass stained with lees of wine, a loaf of bread, an hour-glass and a knife.

The flies turned in and out of the glass, clustered round the loaf and hung in clouds about the window.

Outside the sun, at its full height and strength, blazed at white heat, and a bar of vivid light streamed through the smeared glass and fell in a pool of gold on the dirty floor near to the young man, who appeared to be dozing, so still did he sit and so level was his breathing.

He was humbly dressed in a travelling coat that was much worn, though of a good cloth and fashionable cut, a frayed blue silk waistcoat, black breeches, boots to his knees, and a coat of grey tabinet, all much used and soiled.

At his side was a light sword, and round his throat a neck-cloth of fine Venetian lace, carelessly folded.

His hair hung untidily down his back and forward over his face; it was a charming chestnut-brown colour and very thick. Presently he stretched himself and raised his head without removing his hands from his breeches pockets.

He glanced round the room, and it would have been impossible to discover from his expression whether the squalor of his surroundings moved him to disgust or no.

His face was unusually handsome, of a highborn and rakish type, but ravaged in a ghastly fashion by want and illness. The contour and pose of youth remained, but all bloom, freshness and colour had gone; his person seemed to have seen as much hard service as his clothes and to have suffered more.

From the lines on his brow and at the corners of his remarkably beautiful mouth it might have been supposed that he was in pain, but his expression was calm and his large hazel eyes serene. The flies circled the room and beat at the window with a monotonous persistency; the sun burnt up the already foul air and heated the room almost unbearably. The young man rose, displaying a figure no more than the middle height, but of a graceful, well-trained manliness, and walked unsteadily to the window.

As he moved he felt his own weakness and caught his breath with a quick exclamation.

For years he had been warned that he was killing himself as he had been warned that he was ruining himself. The last had occurred; he had been ruined in fame and fortune, and it seemed as if the first prophecy would be justified also. Two nights ago he had ridden from one town to another; six hours in the rain and the chill that had followed had greatly increased the vague illness that had been for the last two years threatening his life.

He had always been as reckless of his health as of all the other great gifts he had once been blessed with, and he was paying toll now, a penniless exile, bankrupt in everything.

He could see nothing from the window, the blaze of the sun was too strong on the white Spanish street.

The flies droned in his ears, and they were the only sound.

He closed his eyes, for the dazzle of sunshine made him feel giddy.

“Gad,” he murmured, “one could do with a few drops of rain — a cloud at least.”

He began to be conscious of a great thirst; there was no water in the brown earthenware jug standing in the corner, he knew. Languidly, but with the well-schooled and now unconscious grace of the man of fashion who is used to move with a thousand eyes watching every detail of his dress and deportment, the young Englishman crossed the room, unlatched the door and went slowly down the dark, steep and dirty stairs.

He came directly into a large picturesque room that gave by a tall open door on to the street.

It was a kind of general hall or kitchen, the smooth black beams of the ceiling hung with rows of onions and herbs, all manner of pots and pans about the huge open hearth, a window at the back looking on to the garden, and in a dusky corner an empty cradle and a spinning wheel.

The young man went to the shelf where the thick green glasses stood, took one down and dipped it into the red-glazed pitcher that stood beneath. The bubble of the water sounded pleasantly; he raised the dripping glass and drank with a grateful air.

He was glad of the cool shadows and of the intense quiet; every one seemed abroad; it was autumn and he supposed they were at work in the vineyards.

There was an old rush-bottomed chair near the black-carved supports of the door; he seated himself with his back to the sunlight in the deserted street, and his eyes on the window the other side of the room that gave an exquisite glimpse of a fig-tree drooping in the shadowed garden, and beyond a glossy myrtle, glittering in distant sunbeams. The young man knew that he had not long to live, both from ordinary signs and forewarnings and the sure inner instinct his keen intelligence was quick to notice and regard.

He was absolutely without fear; he had never had any credence in any religion or any belief, even vague, in a future state of existence, nor had, like many, tried to invent these feelings for himself or supply their place with superstitions and conventions.

He had never needed these lures to gild his life with promise, always he had found the moment sufficient, and whatever the moment demanded, in wealth, honour, talent, charm or health, he had given lavishly, not unthinkingly, for he had always known that a price would be demanded, as he had seen it demanded from others of his kind.

And he was prepared to pay.

A long life did not attract him; all the pleasures he valued were pleasures that could not with dignity be enjoyed when youth was past; his own sparkling wit had often made a butt of an old rake, or an elderly prodigal; he had never intended to join the ranks of those people who had outworn their enjoyments.

A poet whom he had patronised had called him “The scorn and wonder of the age;” but from his own point of view his life had been the very steady following of a very simple philosophy.

Caring for nothing but the world, that he regarded as the golden apple hung above the head of every youth to ignore or gain, he had bought the world, with money, with charm, with honour, with talent, with beauty and strength and exulted in it and sated himself — and he did not complain of the bargain. He never complained of anything; his sweet, good humour was held by many to condone his villainies as the grace with which he took his final fall almost justified the acts which had led to that fall. When his political levity, his social extravagances, his dissipations had finally left him without health or money, he had taken the verdict of the doctors, the curses of his creditors and the flight of his friends with the same gentle smile, and, urged by his ardent love of the world to make life an adventure to the last, had disappeared from London, where he was so dazzling and infamous a figure, to die abroad, in the sun and among scenes that by their freshness and simplicity disguised, at least to a stranger’s eyes, the sharpness of their poverty. So he, by birth an English Marquis, by patent of the Pretender a Duke, son of a famous man and himself the most renowned rake in London, even among a set that included Viscount Bolingbroke, stayed his obscure wanderings at a poor inn in an unknown Spanish village and prepared himself for death among the peasants of a strange land.

He regretted nothing, not the splendid chances he had thrown away, not the fine name he had tarnished, not the great talents he had wasted, not the life he had sapped and used up before its time. He admitted no sins, he claimed no virtues and he believed in no judgement.

God he considered a polite myth, invented to frighten human weaknesses, the devil a fable to excuse man’s breakage of his own laws; he had never paid the least regard to either; never, in any moment of disappointment or sickness, had he felt any touch of remorse, of regret or fear.

If he had been given his life over again he would have again used it for the same extravagances, the same follies, the same short brilliant flare.

As he sat now, looking at the distant fig-tree and myrtle, he was thinking of his past life without compunction, though every incident that rose to his memory was connected with some broken promise, some shameless deception, some ruined heart, some wanton, dishonourable action.

The one thing he had been faithful to (beyond his own Epicurean creed) was the code of a gentleman, as interpreted by the society in which he moved. It was a curious code, inherited, not learnt, an instinct more than a quality only remotely connected with the chivalry from which it had sprung.

The Duke would have found this code difficult to define; he called it honour, but it was only a kind of flourishing likeness of honour.

Its laws were simple, mainly these: never be afraid; never chaffer with money nor earn it in any way, nor mingle in trade; never play false in your games or your bets; always be courteous to your inferiors and to women; never take insolence from any one, even the King; seek out danger and the company of your equals; never take up money once you have put it down; smile when you win and laugh when you lose; never speak of your loves nor toast an actress at your club.

My lord had never broken these laws: he did not put this to his credit; he took them as naturally as clean linen and neat table manners, but perhaps in the casting up of his worthless life they might be set against the black length of his wicked record, as some poor palliative. There was something else my lord could claim, a personal quality this and peculiar to himself: he was tender to animals and anything weak that came his way.

He could not have turned a step aside to seek out the poor or miserable, but when they crossed his path he was lavish.

And no bird or beast had ever suffered through him; he had never lent the brilliance of his presence to any baiting or cock-fighting or bullfight.

This, too, might be set to my lord’s account, but there was little else.

Yet he was lovable; he had always been lovable.

People who knew him and scorned him still cared for him; he had been caressed by Charles Edward in genuine affection and liked by King George. Perhaps because he was so utterly soulless and made no pretence of being other than he was, because he was so entirely frank in his passionate capacity for happiness, in his beautiful gaiety he attracted those who were themselves divided in their aims and too timid to crown their own vices as he crowned his, for his fascination was more than merely physical and the attraction of exquisite manners.

He was lovable now; even after his long exile from the splendours of St. James, even in his worn clothes, even marred by illness and weariness, he carried with him something that was wholly pleasing, not in the least suggestive of the shameful, unlovely things with which his name was branded.

He was reviewing the final adventure of his life with no changed sense of values, no blurred outlook.

The near presence of death did not alter his opinion in one jot on any particular nor confuse his estimate nor awaken new feeling; he must have satisfied, in some way, the purposes for which he had been born, to be so serene, so content on the eve of the complete end.

All his senses were absolutely clear, even more exquisite than usual; even more perhaps than ever did he appreciate the beauties of light and colour and scent, the delicacies of sound, of touch, yet his mean and unbeautiful surroundings did not trouble him; compared to what they might have been they were well enough. It was better to die in a poor Spanish lodging than in the Fleet, or a garret in Whitefriars, or some kinsman’s back room; nay, better this than the Tower and the panoply of death some chill morning on the scaffold.

He would perhaps have preferred an active death in some duel, but he made no complaint that this had not been the end ordained for him.

He was grateful that he was going to die in the sun.

Leaning back easily in the old willow-wand chair, he began to compose some verses — some of those witty cynical lines for which he had been famous in London and which amused him to fashion.

Presently his sensitive ears detected a light sound, a sweet and familiar sound, the play of a woman’s skirt against her ankles and the floor.

He broke off his mental composition and turned his head towards the shadowy depths of the room that lay between him and the window at which he had been gazing.

From out these darknesses a figure emerged from a mysterious door that opened and shut on farther recesses of blackness, moved into the clearer shadows and finally into the full light.

It was a woman, young and notable, who appeared not to notice that there was any one in the room, for she stood in a watchful, motionless pose, gazing up the dark staircase from which the Duke had descended.

Her dress was fantastic and charming, a tight blue satin bodice gleamed round her slender waist, and beneath it panniers of pink gauze billowed over her hips and were looped away from a white petticoat trimmed with blue jet that glimmered even when she stood still.

Round the bottom of this petticoat was a garland of pink roses, her stockings, that showed well above her ankles, were blue, her shoes white, heelless and fastened in with embroidered pink ribbons.

On one arm she carried a pale yellow cloak and a black velvet mask; over her wide shoulders was flung, carelessly, but gracefully, a white silk scarf with a deep fringe border.

Her dusky brown hair was slightly powdered and gathered on the top of her small head by a huge tortoiseshell comb set with red coral, long blue jet earrings quivered in her ears, and she wore a necklace of fine pearls.

The Duke noticed these things and the delicacy and grace of the woman herself, the poise of her head, the straight lines of her profile, the fineness of her hands and ankles, the richness of her locks, the dark sweep of her eyebrows and the dusky bloom on her round cheek.

He also knew her dress to be that of a dancer or ballerina, despite the blue brocade train that dragged a couple of yards behind her.

What or who she was he did not care, nor how she came to be in this poor inn dressed in this festal fashion.

He was pleased to see again one of the pretty creatures who had always been to him the most entrancing and beautiful objects in an entrancing and beautiful world.

He watched the gentle vision with interest and tenderness, making no movement or sound.

Suddenly she turned full on him her dark face that, although it was too broad for perfect beauty, was piquant and glowing with fine colour.

The Duke rose and bowed.

“I am Philip Wharton, Señora,” he said in Spanish.

She advanced towards him.

“I thought you were upstairs,” she said gravely.

Her voice was delicate, but her speech had the peasant accent of Andalusia.

“Were you watching for me?” he asked curiously.

“Yes,” she said. “For who else? Why should I come back after this long time save to see you! Yesterday I was here,” she added, “but you would not see me.”

“Pardon me, I was ill yesterday and did not come downstairs.”

She gazed at him with soft, luminous and unfathomable eyes.

“Have I seen you before?” asked the Duke, endeavouring to place her among the many women who had flitted across his life.

“I used to dance,” she answered, “at the opera in Venice.”

He did not remember her. How could he recall one face from out the whirl of joy and gaiety he had known in Venice?

“You are Spanish?” he asked.

“From Andalusia. And you are English!”

“Yes.”

“And dying!”

“Ah, you know as much as that, do you!” he smiled.

“I know many things now.”

“Ah, wisdom!” he mocked. “I could wager your knowledge begins and ends with the list of your victims and triumphs. How did you come here?” he asked abruptly.

“I ran away.”

“To this place?”

“It was but a stage on the road.”

“You know me?” he asked.

“Yes; I have met you at Paris, at Vienna, at Rome and Naples.”

“By gad,” he said, “you flatter me by your memory.”

He began to notice that she never smiled, and it displeased him; he disliked a grave woman.

“What is your name?” he asked in the tone of a master, and sank back into the chair, for indeed he felt very weak.

She shook her head.

“I have so many.”

“Give me one.”

She bent her eyes on him earnestly.

“What was the name of your first love?” she asked.

He started.

“I have forgotten.”

“What was the name of the woman you loved the most?”

Fair faces rose before him, tearful faces, pleading faces, angry faces — he could not choose between them.

“I do not know,” he said faintly.

She glanced round the room as if she, too, saw the faces that had risen so clearly before his mental eyes.

“You were not kind or loyal to one of them,” she said.

Philip Wharton laughed.

“Tell me your name,” he insisted.

“You have forgotten it, and you do not know it,” she returned quickly. “Once I was called Helen, but that was a long time ago.”

He looked at her curiously.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said, “and how you come to be here alone.”

She put her hands behind her back; the mantle trailed over her train and her fragile dress glimmered in the shade.

“It was after the opera at Versailles,” she began. “I was dressed for the ballet and was leaving my dressing-room, when they put a cloak over my head and carried me out to a coach — we drove all night to the house of an English lord in the Rue de Vaugirard—”

She stepped suddenly and noiselessly behind the Duke.

“ — as I was descending from the coach they put a handkerchief over my eyes, so—”

Philip Wharton felt a scrap of muslin flung over his head and drawn tight over his eyes, leaving him in pleasant darkness.

“ — and one led me by the hand, thus—”

Her fingers touched his; he smiled passively beneath the bandage.

“ — and took me into the presence of my lord, who had betted a thousand guineas that I should ride in his cabriolet through Paris. But it was not very long before he was tired of me.”

She loosened the handkerchief and withdrew it gently.

Phillip Wharton opened his eyes on cool shade, a room hung with raised crimson and white velvet and furnished in a very stately style.

An arched marble window looked on to a blue canal on which the rays of the setting sun sparkled, and in the seat of this window, that was piled with cushions, a lady sat; she wore a great hooped skirt, fluttering with sarcenet ribbons, and in her red-gold locks drooped a red rose.

“As I was saying,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone, “you very soon got tired of me.”

“Carina, no,” answered the Duke. “I have always been in love with you and Venice.”

“You went away. It was the day of the Carnival. I was then wearing an orange cloak with a fringe. It was exactly five days since I had met you. But you cared for me more than for any woman you met in Venice.”

“I love you now,” said Philip Wharton, “for I have come back to you when I am dying.”

She looked at him gravely and stepped out of the window on to the balcony.

“Will you come once more in my gondola?” she asked.

He followed her.

Light steps led from the balcony to the Canal, where a gay gondola cushioned in sapphire blue floated.

The lady stepped in and the Duke after her; the gondolier sped the light boat forward between the palaces.

“This has always been a pleasant memory to me,” he said.

She sat erect with a fan of curled white ostrich to lips and looked at him over the feather tips.

“The night you went away,” she said, “my husband hired three bravos. I was crossing the bridge when I met them — this bridge—”

Suddenly the Rialto was over them; the gondola had shot from blue and gold into darkness.

“They thought I was coming to meet you. My husband—”

The boat stopped in the blackness; he felt, though he could not see, the lady rise and step out.

Her hand touched his, and blindly following the guidance of it, he stepped ashore, and felt a step beneath his feet; the firm clasp on his wrist drew him through a doorway.

“My husband is coming back to-morrow,” the voice continued. “Oh, Phillip, I am afraid!”

He put his free hand to his sword.

“That is foolish of you,” he said. “I am here.”

“But you have begun to cease to care,” her voice wailed, “and you will go away.”

As she spoke a door opened to her right, and she released his wrist; he followed her into a little boudoir charmingly hung with straw-coloured silk.

The Duke remembered it very well; he turned to the woman.

She was now a pale blonde wrapped in an embroidered mob and wearing dazzling little silver slippers.

Her face was tear-stained and her eyes pleading.

“Paris was terrible after you left,” she said. “Why did you go? You tired so soon.”

“You have remarked that,” he returned, “twice, I think, before.”

She began to cry.

“Do not you love me any more, Philip?”

“I have come back to you,” he answered; “but my head is rather confused. And, Madame, you are spoiling your complexion with these tears.”

“Hush!” she cried.

She ran to the dainty hangings that concealed the door, raised them, and listened.

“Some one is coming!”

She hastened back to him and half dragged, half pushed him to a secret door; as she touched a spring it flew open, and he stepped with a laugh into the concealment of a dark secret room that was filled with a bitter, pungent perfume. He closed his eyes; there was a heaviness in his head; he could not tell how long he had been closed in when the sliding panel was drawn.

“It was a false alarm after all,” said the woman.

Her black hair hung dishevelled on her brocade gown, her hollow face was pale and her eyes stormy.

“Did you say that you must leave Bois-le-Duc to-morrow?” she demanded hoarsely.

She held a candle in a pewter stick in her right hand and her left clasped her dress together over her palpitating bosom.

“The Prince gave me leave to return to England,” he answered.

He stepped from his concealment into a room with polished walls, furnished heavily and well.

“You would not betray him after he has given you a Dukedom — you would not forsake me?” she asked anxiously.

“Do you not trust me?” he asked lightly.

“Oh yes, I trusted you. But you went away.”

“Always the same!” he exclaimed impatiently. “Have I not been faithful to return to you now?”

She began to laugh.

“Faithful!” she cried. “Faithful!”

He laughed too, and the echo was long and loud.

He went to the door and opened it on dark stairs; without looking back he descended.

The first landing blazed with the light of a thousand candles; a magnificent doorway with portals flung wide invited him into a gorgeous ballroom, where splendidly dressed people moved to and fro to the melody of violin and harp.

Philip Wharton entered; in a little alcove to his right he found the woman waiting for him.

The diamonds sparkled red and blue as if her flesh was on fire; her powdered locks were piled high, and the billows of her violet dress spread wide on the settee where she sat.

She laughed.

“Faithful!” she cried. “Faithful! And you are leaving Vienna to-morrow!”

He seated himself on the small portion of the brocade her spreading skirts had left uncovered.

His nostrils distended to drink in the perfumed air, and his eyes sparkled; his whole spirit became animated in the congenial atmosphere of a court — a luxurious court.

“And I must really die and leave all this,” he complained.

He looked at the lady and smiled; but her face was very grave.

“Let us walk once more in the garden,” she said, and rose and opened a glass door in the alcove that led into a garden that was very prettily lit by coloured lanterns. She took the Duke’s arm, and they passed along the prim paths between avenues of clipped limes and box bushes.

For some while she did not speak; then she whispered—

“It is strange to see you at Kensington again, my lord.” Her voice sounded as if it was full of tears. “Strange to think that you must leave again so soon.”

She pressed close to his side now, for she no longer wore a hoop; a quilted hood and cloak concealed her head and figure, and he thought that she must wear jasmine somewhere on her person, so strong was the scent of that blossom on the air.

“I wonder,” she continued, “if, when you come to die, you will ever think of these moments — the broken promises, the broken hearts?”

“When I come to die,” repeated the Duke musingly, “I shall no doubt think of you and your sweetness.”

“Not of me and my sadness?”

Phillip Wharton did not answer; he smiled into the darkness, which he perceived was beginning to be lightened by the first delicate sparkle of dawn.

“Have you ever done one good action?” continued the voice at his side.

“Oh, Madame!”

“Or shed one tear — one tear for another? One tear to heal all the wickedness you have committed — all the grief you have caused?”

“Never!” he answered. “Never!”

“Is there no memory you can recall that would soften you to tears now?”

He answered “None.”

Her hand slackened on his arm and was withdrawn; in the confusion of the lifting shadows and the spreading milky whiteness of the new day he lost her.

He was alone in the garden. No, not a garden; it was soon light enough to see, and he then noticed that he was walking in an English field in early spring-time.

Before him a meadow sloped to a fence that enclosed a little wood; bluebells, daffodils, and primroses grew under the branches of the trees; the meadow was starred all over with buttercups and daisies.

To one side of the fence was a small thatched cottage behind which the sun was rising, and where the distance merged into the early blue vapour the sharp spire of a church rose.

A slight, very slight, feeling of apprehension came over Philip Wharton.

“I do not wish to come back here,” he said. “This has all been a dream, and I will wake up now.”

Yet he walked on.

It was absolutely still; though the sun had now risen clear of the mists and was glittering in a clear heaven, there was no one abroad.

The Duke approached the cottage, saying to himself—

“I know this place, and I do not wish to see it again.”

Before the wooden gate of the tiny garden he paused.

A few modest flowers were growing in neat beds — pinks, wallflowers, and sweet williams; beside the closed door was a lavender bush.

The Duke’s sensation of dread deepened. He noticed that a white blind hung behind each of the four windows. He felt that he was there against his will. Peaceful and lovely as the scene was, it was one from which he would willingly have fled.

He left the garden and wandered away into the little wood and seated himself under a pine tree and took his head in his hands.

And as he sat there he heard the church bell tolling.

“I am not going,” he said to himself, and for a while he was resolute and would not move; yet presently he rose and went back to the cottage.

The door was half open now.

He pushed wide the garden gate and entered; he was acutely conscious of the scent of the simple flowers and the tolling of the bell.

Without knocking he entered.

Two men were in the narrow passage carrying before them a coffin.

Philip Wharton found himself face to face with it; it was held upright, and the name-plate was near his eyes. He read, “Aged nineteen.”

He heard a woman sobbing in the room into which the coffin was being taken, and he peered through the crack of the door.

On a humble bed lay the wasted form of a young girl from which the soul had recently departed.

Philip Wharton passed out of the house, out of the garden, and down the meadow.

“I am sorry,” he said; he had never sincerely spoken those words before.

He walked till he came to the church, and then he entered the graveyard, and seated himself on an old sunken tomb and watched the poor funeral procession that presently wound through the lych-gate.

When they had all left and he was again alone, he walked down the sloping churchyard path and looked at the new-made grave.

A simple headstone was already in place; it bore no name, but only the date and the words—

“A broken and a contrite heart, Lord, Thou wilt not despise.”

Philip Wharton put his hand before his eyes; he felt sorry and afraid.

All the women who had ever loved him seemed to lie buried in that humble grave. Love itself, compact of a thousand graces, a thousand transports, which had been made manifest to him under so many different shapes, in so many climes, seemed to have fallen and died at last and to lie buried here with Lucy…

He took his hand from his eyes and saw about him the poor Spanish lodging, the distant window with the fig and myrtle from which the sun had now departed. He sat up shivering.

“What dreams!” he muttered. “What dreams!”

He found his eyes wet with tears; he rose and held on to the back of the chair. For one awful moment he believed in God. Then he shook off the oppression.

“She died as I must die,” he said. “Why not?”

A chill had fallen with the setting of the sun. He shivered again, and found that his limbs were stiff beneath him; he pushed the dark hair back from his face and gazed before him, trying to conjure the figure of the dancer in the pink gauze and blue jet out of the encroaching shadows.

But he knew that it was useless, that she was dead and buried with all those other women.

And death had him by the throat, was struggling with him even now, and he must prepare himself to go down into the darkness that enveloped them.

He went upstairs to the room he called his own; as he opened the door of it he heard steps below, and leaning over the rails saw the old woman who owned the inn enter with a basket of grapes on her grey head.

The young Duke blew her a kiss; she was the last woman whom he would ever see. He entered his room; the flies still buzzed round the stale bread and dirty glass, but the golden pool of sunlight had gone from the floor.

“Not one of those women,” reflected Philip Wharton, “ever thought that I should die — like this!”

So saying the young rake seated himself heavily and wearily in his former seat by the table and stretched out his hand for his pipe which lay next the glass.

But before he touched it, he felt a slight cold touch on his shoulder, and thought he heard some one behind him.

As he turned to look he drew a long breath.

“Why, Lucy—” he said, and on that word — died.

God’s Playthings (1912)

THE FOLDING DOORS

A young man was coming slowly down the wide staircase of a palace in the Rue de Vaugirard. It was, by the new reckoning, the 13th of Brumaire; evening, and cold, moonlit, and clear; these things being the same by any reckoning, as the young man thought, pausing by the tall window on the landing-place that looked out on to the blue-shadowed, silent street.

There was a ball overhead in the great state rooms, and he could hear the music, violins, flutes and harpsichord, distinctly, though he had closed the door behind him. He was one of the guests, and had the watchful, furtive air of one who has stolen away unperceived, and fears that he may be discovered. He seemed now to have stopped with an idea of ascertaining if anyone was abroad, for he leant over the smooth gilt banisters and listened. The great staircase was empty, and empty the vast hall below.

Opposite the landing window was a long mirror, with three branched candles before it. The young man turned to this quickly and noiselessly, and pulled from the pocket of his coat a strip of gilt-edged paper, folded tightly. He unrolled this and read the message it contained, written in a light pencil.

“At half-past ten knock four times on the folding doors. Do not be late; every moment is one of terror. I am afraid of HIM.”

The last two sentences were underlined, the last word twice.

The young man looked up and down the stairs, twisted the paper up, and was about to thrust it into the flame of one of the candles, when he caught sight of himself in the tall mirror, and stood staring at the image with the paper held out in his hand.

He saw a figure that to his thinking was that of a mountebank, for it had once been that of the Due de Jaurès — Citizen Jaurès now — courtier of his one-time Christian Majesty Louis XVI., beheaded recently as Louis Capet in the great square now called by the people the Place de la Revolution.

The People had altered everything, even the person of M. de Jaurès, who wore the classic mode beloved of liberty — the fashion of this year one of freedom, hair à la Titus and a black stock swathing the chin. His face was without colour, the black, hollow eyes and black hair accentuating this pallor; his countenance, though sombre in expression, was beautiful by reason of the exquisite lines of the mouth and nostrils, and something elevated and noble in the turn of the head. As he stared at himself a slow flush of terrible shame overspread his paleness; with something like a suppressed shudder, he gave the paper to the flame, and scattered the ashes down the stairs.

Then he pulled out the watch hanging from the black watered-silk fob.

It wanted ten minutes to half-past ten. The dance music ceased overhead; in its place came laughter, loud talking, and presently a woman singing in a rapt and excited fashion.

Monsieur de Jaurès paced to and fro on the landing. He loathed these people he mixed with, so like him in dress and appearance, but bourgeois and canaille all of them; some butchers of the Terror, some smug deputies, some one-time servants, some soldiers, some dancers from the opera, some provincials and their wives — all, by the grace of the People, free and equal.

The Citizen de Jaurès, aristocrat by virtue of birth, tradition, temper, and qualities, bit his underlip fiercely to hear these people rioting in this house. The late owner, his once dear friend, had been massacred in the prison of La Force a month ago, and the house now belonged to a deputy from Lyons, married to the daughter of a nobleman long since sent to the guillotine.

The note that M. de Jaurès had burnt was from this lady. They had known each other before the rule of chaos, and when the revolution brought him out of the prison, where he had been consigned for a political offence by the late King’s ministers, and he had found her, terror-subdued, mistress of a revolutionary salon, the similarity between their positions, the common memories of another world, the sense of kinship amidst a society so alien, so monstrous, so hideous, had grown into a sad but strong love.

She was spared because she had married one of the tyrants, and pretended to forget her father’s murder; he, because he had been a prisoner of the King, and affected to subscribe to the new rule of the people. Both had tasted of shame, and together they sought to redeem themselves.

Fired by their mutual sympathy, the horror of what they daily saw round them, the desire to redeem their acquiescence in the overthrow of their order, to redeem, at the risk of death, the lives they should never have consented to save, they had been the instigators of one of the many desperate plots against the Government, the object of which was to rescue the Austrian Queen from the Temple and the ultimate guillotine.

Tonight the intrigue, evolved with skill and secrecy, and materially helped by the knowledge Hortense was enabled to obtain through her husband’s position, was to be put into execution, and they were either to fly across the frontier with the rescued Queen, or to give up life together, as aristocrats, upon the scaffold.

M. de Jaurès, on the threshold of this hazard, felt that chill suspension of all the faculties which fills that waiting pause before the plunge into great actions. He was conscious of neither exaltation nor despair, but of a strange sense that time had stopped, or had never been, and that all the events which so oppressed his brain were but pictures, that would clear away and reveal at last — reality.

The dance music began again; the noisy music of the People, with its distinct rise and fall. He and Hortense had been present at the opera the night they had played Richard Coeur de Lion and the audience had risen in a frenzy of devotion at the strains of “O Richard, O mon roi.”

He recalled the Queen with her children, worshipped and very stately, and Hortense with powdered hair and a hoop festooned with roses; then he thought of the wretched captive in the Temple, and the haggard woman in a Greek gown with a fillet through her flowing hair, waiting for him downstairs behind the folding doors.

Pacing to and fro, facing now the cold street and bitter night, now his own reflection in the glass, the inner agony of suspense, regret, remorse, broke through the dazed control of his overwrought passions. He gave a little sound, caught into the whirl of the dance music unheard, and stepped back sideways against the gleaming white wall, his hand instinctively to his heart.

The next second he was master of himself, and wondering wildly what had caused him that sudden utter pang of terror, a terror beyond fear of death or any definition, awful, hideous. He listened, as men will in great dread, and heard what seemed a curious short cry, like the echo of his own, that rose above the dance-beat. He thought it came from the street, and softly opened the window.

Everything was still, but in the distance, where the moonlight fell between two houses, three of the Republican soldiers were dragging a man along, and a girl in a blue gown was following, wringing her hands.

A second, and the little group had passed out of sight. M. de Jaurès closed the window, feeling strangely relieved that his emotion had been caused by such a common thing as the cry of a poor creature following a suspect to the Abbaye. He must, unconsciously, have heard her cry before, and this had given him that sensation of terror.

The dance music fell to a softer measure; a clock struck the half-hour, and Camille de Jaurès descended to the salon on the next floor.

He entered softly, yet confident of being neither interrupted nor observed.

The room was large, with great windows looking on to the street. It had once been painted with flowers, and shepherds asleep with their flocks, and nymphs seated beside fountains, but had lately been painted white from floor to ceiling by a Republican who detested these remnants of aristocracy. White, with stiff wreaths of classic laurel, candles in plain sconces shaded with dead-hued silk, straight grey curtains before the windows, and very little furniture to cumber the polished floor and that little, simple, bare-legged, and comprising a couch of Grecian shape, covered with striped brocade, such as ladies, dressed in the fashions of the year one of liberty, loved to recline on.

A cold, bare room, with a glimmer from the shaded light like the moon-glow, and with no colour, nor gleam, nor brightness. The wall that faced the window was almost entirely occupied by high, white folding doors with crystal knobs. M. de Jaurès’ glance fell at once on these; they led to the private apartments of Hortense, and through them, by the back way across the garden, they were to escape tonight. He advanced, and was about to knock, when one leaf was opened sharply in his face, and a man stepped out.

It was Citizen Durosoy, husband of Hortense. M. de Jaurès stepped back; he saw that the room beyond the folding doors was dark, but close where the light penetrated he noticed a fold of soft satin with a pearl border, and an empty white shoe softly rounded to the shape of a foot, lying sideways, as if it had just been taken off. Hortense was there, then, he knew, waiting for him. He straightened himself to meet the unlooked-for interruption.

He was quite composed as Durosoy closed the doors.

“Your room upstairs is very close,” he said, “and I suppose I am not in a festival mood — it is pleasantly cool here.”

“Cool!” echoed the Deputy of Lyons. “It seems to me cold,” he laughed. “Perhaps it is the singing of La Marguerite, which is so bad for the nerves, for my wife has a headache, and must lie down in the dark.”

M. de Jaurès smiled. He felt such a contempt for this man that it put him absolutely at his ease. The Deputy had been a poor provincial lawyer, to whom the late de Jaurès had been kind. He affected to remember this now, and was warmly friendly, even patronising, to his old patron’s son. The aristocrat hated him doubly for it, scorned him that no echo of this hatred seemed ever to awake in his mind; for the Deputy was almost familiar in his manner to M. de Jaurès. He was quiet and modest with everybody.

“I hope my wife is not delicate,” he said with an air of anxiety. “I have thought lately that she was in ill-health.”

“I have not noticed it,” answered the other.

He seated himself on the striped couch, and looked carelessly at the grate, where a pale fire burnt. The Deputy crossed to the hearth, and stood looking at his guest with an amiable smile. He was a slight man, brown-haired and well looking, but of a common appearance. He wore a grey cloth coat, with a black sash up under his armpits, and white breeches. This dress, and the stiff, long straggling locks that fell on to his bullion-stitched collar, gave him an appearance of anarchy and wildness not in keeping with his pleasant countenance.

He stood so long smiling at M. de Jaurès, that a feeling of impatience came over the nobleman. He glanced at the pendule clock on the mantelpiece, and wondered how long the fool would stay.

“It is unfortunate that you and the Citizeness should both be absent at once,” he remarked. He had still the tone of an aristocrat when speaking to Durosoy.

The Deputy held out his right hand.

“I cut my finger with a fruit knife,” he answered, “and came down to Hortense to tie it up; but she seemed so to wish to be alone I did not like to press her; her head hurt so, she said.”

A handkerchief was twisted about his hand, and he began to unwind it as he spoke. “Now you are here,” he added, “perhaps you could help me tie it up; it really is bleeding damnably.”

M. de Jaurès rose slowly. He let his glance rest for a moment on the folding doors. It was as if he could see Hortense standing at the other side in the dark, listening, waiting for her husband to go.

Durosoy held up his bare hand. There was a deep cut on the forefinger, and the blood was running down the palm and staining the close frill of muslin at his wrist.

“A severe wound for a silver knife,” remarked M. de Jaurès, taking him by the wrist.

“A steel knife,” said the Deputy — “steel as sharp as La Guillotine — you see, mon ami,” and he smiled, “what comes of trying to cut a peach with a steel knife.”

M. de Jaurès slowly tore his own handkerchief into strips and carefully bound up the wound. He was wondering the while if Hortense had been delayed by the unexpected visit of her husband; if she was venturing to change her clothes before he finally returned to their guests. By the white shoe he had seen through the folding doors, he thought she had done so.

“Thank you, Camille,” said the Deputy. He had a trick of using Christian names, odious to M. de Jaurès. “It is astonishing how faint the loss of a little blood makes one.”

“This from our modern Brutus!” exclaimed M. de Jaurès. That term had been given once, in the Convention, to the Deputy, and the man whose dupe he was dared to quote it ironically, knowing the stupidity of the provincial. As he had expected, the Deputy seemed pleased; he shrugged modestly.

“Oh, one’s own blood, you know, not that of other people. I can endure the loss of that with great equanimity.” He smiled, as if he had made a joke, and the aristocrat smiled too, for other reasons. “Will you drink with me — down here? It is, as you say, very close upstairs.”

“I fear to detain you, Citizen.”

Durosoy rang the bell, then seated himself by the fire.

“No, I am tired of their chatter. I would rather talk with a sensible man like yourself, my dear Camille.”

M. de Jaurès did not move from his easy attitude on the brocade couch.

“But we shall disturb the Citizeness,” he said. His idea was that if he could make Durosoy leave with him, he could, more or less easily, get rid of him upstairs and return.

The Deputy smiled. “Hortense is not so ill. Besides, the doors are thick enough.”

M. de Jaurès wondered — how thick? Could she hear their talk? Would she understand the delay? His straining ears could catch no sound of her movements.

The Deputy continued in a kind of fatuous self-satisfaction.

“I hope she will be well enough to return soon to the ball. When one has a beautiful wife one likes to show her off.”

He paused, put his head on one side, and added:

“You do think her beautiful, do you not, Camille?”

M. de Jaurès looked at him coldly. He felt he could afford to despise this man, since in a few moments he and she would be riding away from his house forever.

“Naturally, Citizen.”

A citizen servant entered, and the Deputy ordered wine.

“I must not stay,” said M. de Jaurès. He raised his voice a little that she might hear. “One glass, and I will go back to make my adieux.”

Durosoy appeared mildly surprised.

“So early! You cannot have any business this time of night.”

The wine was brought in and placed on a thin-legged table by the hearth. M. de Jaurès glanced at the clock. The hand was creeping on towards eleven. His contempt of the Deputy was beginning to change to an impatient hatred of the creature’s very presence.

“A matter of mood, not of time,” he answered. “I am in no merry-making vein tonight.”

The Deputy, pouring out wine, looked at him critically.

“You are too lazy, my friend. You do nothing from one day’s end to another — naturally you are wearied. And it is dangerous, too.”

M. de Jaurès took the glass offered him. “How dangerous?”

Durosoy lifted his common brown eyes. “Those who will not serve the Republic are apt to be considered her enemies.”

The young noble smiled.

“Oh, as to that, I am a very good friend to France, but I lack the qualities to be of any use.”

He sipped his wine, and looked indifferently past the Deputy at the folding doors. His thoughts were: ‘The time is getting on. How long will a carriage take from here to the rue du Temple? Half an hour, allowing for the pace we must go and the crowd coming out of the opera.’

“No use!” exclaimed the Deputy. “Why, you are a soldier, are you not?”

“Once — that seems a long time ago.”

Durosoy laughed and poured out more wine. The tinkling of the glass on the silver stand had the same thin quality as his voice.

“There is always Toulon,” he said. “The Royalists there are giving us a good deal of trouble.”

“I do not fancy going there to be hewn down by a lot of rascals. I leave that to braver men,” smiled de Jaurès lazily; but his blood leapt with the desire to be with these same Royalists in Toulon, with his sword drawn against such as this Deputy, whose wine seemed to scorch and choke tonight. When would the man go? The carriage that was waiting at the back might be noticed. The servant in the plot would begin to wonder at the delay; and she, could she hear? She must be undergoing torture — as he was.

“Then there is the revolt in Caen,” said the Deputy; “we want good men there.”

“I’ve no fancy to go soldiering.”

“You are dull tonight, Citizen. Does the business of the Widow Capet interest you? It is to come on this month.”

“Ah! The trial?”

“Yes.”

“I heard something of it. No, I am not interested.”

When would this babbling cease? Ten minutes past eleven, and the rendezvous in the rue du Temple at twelve.

“Not interested?” echoed the Deputy. “Now if I might hazard a guess, my friend, I should say that you were rather too interested.”

M. de Jaurès looked at him steadily.

“How — too interested?” he asked in accents painfully calm.

“I do not think you would like the Widow Capet to take the same journey to the Place de la Révolution as her husband did.”

“Why should I trouble?” answered M. de Jaurès, who for one instant had thought himself suspected. He drew his breath a little unevenly; the delay, the suspense, were beginning to tell on him, were becoming serious, too. He remembered that the hour had been altered at the last moment from one to twelve, and that he had had no opportunity of telling Hortense so. They had to be so careful, there had been so few chances for them to meet at all. Hortense would think they had an hour longer than was the case.

The Deputy was taking his third glass; he seemed to be settled comfortably in his chair. It appeared as if he might maunder on with his idle talk for another hour; and the delay of another hour would be fatal to M. de Jaurès.

“It must seem very strange to you,” said the Deputy reflectively, “this year one of liberty.”

M. de Jaurès sat forward on the couch. Durosoy had never taken this tone of gravity with him before.

“No stranger to me than to you,” he answered. He finished the wine, and set the glass back on the table.

“Well, then, strange to me and to you.”

M. de Jaurès laughed; he could not control himself.

“What makes you say that?” he asked. The Deputy shrugged.

“The thought will occur — sitting here in this palace that I used to pass with awe — talking to you whom I used to regard with awe — married to Hortense! Yes, you are right, it is strange to me.”

The noble’s mouth tightened; a black shame overwhelmed him that he was sitting here listening to this man.

“You,” continued the Deputy, “used to know the former owner of this house, did you not?”

M. de Jaurès rose.

“I knew him.”

“He was killed at La Force, was he not?”

“I believe so; why do you recall him?” M. de Jaurès leant against the mantelpiece. The cold, white room, the inane Deputy, were fast becoming intolerable. He began to be hideously conscious of two things: the clock whose hands were coming round slowly to the half-hour, and the folding doors behind which Hortense waited. The interruption, of which he had thought nothing at first, was like to prove fatal. Could he do it in less than half an hour? Merciful God! it was not possible! Some of them were already at the rendezvous — the Queen was ready.

“Let us go back upstairs,” he said. “It is, after all, rather doleful here.”

“On the contrary, I am very comfortable,” smiled the Deputy, crossing his legs.

“You will be missed,” said M. de Jaurès. His thoughts were racing furiously. How could he convey to Hortense that the time had been altered — that he could not wait?

The Deputy nodded towards the high ceiling. “Missed? You hear the music? I think they are enjoying themselves.”

To abandon her, or to miss the appointment in the rue du Temple; to break faith with his friends or with her, to lose all chance of redemption, to jeopardise the Queen’s escape, or to forsake Hortense (for success meant that he must be across the frontier, and failure meant death; either way he was useless to her) — it was fast narrowing to these terrible decisions.

He looked at his face in the large mirror above the mantelpiece, and was almost startled to see how white it was above the close cravat and blue striped waistcoat. Surely Durosoy must notice!

The Deputy sat looking into the fire. M. de Jaurès, glancing at him out of furtive eyes, observed that he, too, was pale.

A pause of silence was broken by the shrill chimes of the gilt clock striking the half-hour.

M. de Jaurès could not restrain a start. He must go. He could come back for her if alive; his honour (Heaven help him! he still thought of that) was the pledge to them, his affection to her — she would understand. Perhaps by the servant waiting with the carriage at the back entrance he could convey a message, telling her of the changed time.

“You will forgive me,” he said with that ease with which breed enabled him to cover his agony, “but I am due at my chambers” — he raised his voice for her to hear — “the truth is I have business — important business tonight. Good-evening, Durosoy.”

He went towards the door; it would be quick running to make the rue du Temple in time. Heaven enlighten her as to the cause of his desertion.

“Business?” said the Deputy good-humouredly. “There is no business nowadays but politics or plots. I hope you are not engaged in the latter, my dear Camille.”

M. de Jaurès had his hand on the doorknob. “This is private business,” he answered, “about my property. I am trying to save some of it.”

The Deputy turned in his chair.

“Why, I did not know that your estates were confiscated. Why did not you tell me? I might have helped you.”

M. de Jaurès opened the door.

“You are such a busy man, Durosoy. I think I shall manage the affair satisfactorily.”

“Monseigneur le Duc.”

At that title he turned sharply, and saw the Deputy standing before the fire looking at him.

“Why do you say that?” he asked, and his nostrils widened.

“Forgive me, the expression slipped out. I still think of you as Monseigneur le Duc. It is an astonishing thing, but I believe I am still in awe of you, as I used to be in my little office in Lyons.” He smiled fatuously, lowered his eyes to the floor and shook his head.

“Why did you call me?”

“Well, I wanted to speak to you. Take another glass of wine; it is still early.”

“Indeed, it is impossible for me to stay. I have an appointment.”

“Bah! Make him wait.”

“It is a rendezvous that I would rather keep.”

“A strange hour for a business appointment. Are you sure it is not a lady that you are so anxious to see?”

“Say a lady, then,” said M. de Jaurès; “but, believe me that I must go.” He was leaving on that, when the Deputy called after him.

“I entreat you to stay. It is also a lady of whom I wish to speak.”

M. de Jaurès turned slowly and closed the door.

“Come,” smiled the Deputy, “another glass.”

“What have you to say to me, Durosoy?” He felt as if the hand of fate were on his shoulder, dragging him back into the room; yet every moment — nay, every second — was precious, fast becoming doubly precious.

The Deputy was pouring out the wine. His grey and black figure was illumined by the increasing glow of the fire. He moved bottles and glasses clumsily by reason of the bandaged forefinger of his right hand; behind him the clock showed twenty minutes to twelve.

M. de Jaurès crossed the long room to the hearth.

“What did you wish to say?” he asked, “nay” — he put the glass aside — “of what was it that you wished to speak?”

“My wife.”

The noble’s first thought was — ‘This man is not a fool’; his second, ‘He suspects’ — accompanied with a sense of stupor and confusion.

“You,” continued Durosoy, “have known her longer than I have; she was very much admired, was she not, when she was at the Court?”

“She was admired, naturally. A strange question! I never knew her well,” answered M. de Jaurès. He was sure the fellow suspected, not the plot but the elopement. He desperately readjusted his plans. He could not leave her now; he must forsake his friends sooner. Had she not said, “I am afraid of him.”

“Well, that is all,” said the Deputy. “Go and keep your appointment, my friend” — his eyes suddenly gleamed — “and I will finish my wine and presently go and fetch Hortense back to the ballroom.”

M. de Jaurès answered his look. “No, I will stay,” he said with a kind of cold calm.

“Ah! Now why have you changed your mind?”

“Because you,” was the grim reply, “are so amusing.”

He was wondering in his anguish why she did not come out. Surely she might have made some diversion with her presence. Yet she had probably changed her gown. Could she hear — could she understand?

The man was playing with him; he might even know of the plot. He must suspect, else why did he remain here, and why did the guests not notice his or her absence, if they had not been prepared? It was too late to get to the rue du Temple now. The governor of the prison was to be abroad for an hour, from twelve to one, and in that time they were to make their attempt. They would make it without him. He could not leave Hortense now. It was certain death ahead of him; he would be denounced tomorrow, and dishonoured, for he had forsaken his friends.

So raced the thoughts of M. de Jaurès, keeping time to the music of the quadrille coming from the room overhead, while he stood impassive by the head of the brocade sofa, and gazed at the Deputy, who sipped his wine and blinked into the fire.

Two men went by shouting in the street. When their voices had sunk into the distance the Deputy spoke:

“You are rather imprudent, Citizen.”

M. de Jaurès was silent; if he had but some manner of weapon he would kill this man — perhaps with his bare hands even — he came a step nearer.

“I see,” continued the Deputy, still looking into the fire, “that you have a coronet on this handkerchief. Now, do not you think that very imprudent?”

M. de Jaurès stood arrested. Was this creature, after all, only a fool? He would, in any case, have killed him; but the days were gone when noblemen wore swords. Besides, the Deputy sat very near the bell, and was a strong man. Traditions, too, were a clog on the young man’s passions. He could not use his hands.

“My dear Camille,” exclaimed the Deputy, suddenly glancing up, “you look very pale.”

The aristocrat, with the instinct of his breed, was silent under agony. He gazed at the Deputy straightly.

“Are you going to keep this on your linen?” asked Durosoy, pointing to the coronet on the bloodstained bandage.

“Are you,” answered M. de Jaurès, “going to denounce me?”

The Deputy smiled.

“Because of this? Why, no, how absurd!” he laughed. “As if you, of all men, had not given proof of your love for the people by becoming plain Citizen Jaurès. Not so many aristocrats did that.”

M. de Jaurès fixed his eyes on the folding doors. It was the one thing that gave him courage to endure, thinking of her waiting there, thinking that he would share the inevitable end with her; thinking she would know he had waited.

The quadrille music took on another measure. The clock gave a little whirr and struck twelve. The aristocrat shuddered, but held himself erect. Durosoy suddenly grinned up at him.

“What about your appointment?” he asked.

“I am keeping a more important one,” said M. de Jaurès through cold lips.

The Deputy rose.

“Do you not think that I act very well?” he said in a changed tone.

M. de Jaurès smiled superbly.

“My opinion of you is unchanged, Monsieur.”

He had now no longer anything to gain or lose by adopting the manner of the people. The two men took a step towards the middle of the room, still facing each other.

“Your appointment,” repeated Durosoy. “Why did you not keep it?”

M. de Jaurès raised his right hand to his heart and retreated a pace backwards. He hardly heard the words; the speaker’s presence offended him indescribably; he lowered his eyes in instinctive disgust, withdrawn into his own soul. The attempt in the rue du Temple had failed or succeeded without him; he had lost the glory of rescuing the Queen, or the glory of being with the aristocrats in La Force. They would justly despise him as a coward and a man of broken faith, but the thing that had induced him to act thus was the thing that rewarded him — the thought of Hortense. Waiting behind the folding doors, she must have heard his and her fate. She knew perhaps before he came that Durosoy suspected and their chance was over; she knew now that he had preferred her even to his word, his pledged honour, for surely that was gone unless it would be some honour for them to die together — he hoped it would be the guillotine, not butchery in the prison yard — as befell, good God — as befell Charles de Maury, with whom he had once eaten and drunk in this very room—

He steadied his reeling senses with a jerking shudder and caught the back of the chair near him. That brute Durosoy was watching him, waiting for him to betray himself, being, no doubt, very sure of both of them, the man before him and the woman behind the folding doors.

M. de Jaurès smiled.

“What are you and I looking at each other like this for, eh?” he asked.

A soldier went past singing Ça ira; it mingled with the monotonous repeated music of the quadrille; the coals fell together with a little crash; the Deputy stood in a slack attitude surveying his victim.

M. de Jaurès laughed.

“We will see,” said Durosoy slowly, “if Hortense is recovered from her headache.”

He turned towards the folding doors. M. de Jaurès longed for them to open; at least he would have that moment when she came forth and walked straight to him, all disguises over.

The Deputy turned the crystal handle and opened the door a little way; he looked over his shoulder and said one word:

“Aristocrat!”

“Yes,” answered M. de Jaurès. “She and I — both aristocrats.”

Durosoy pushed the door a little wider open; his dull, foolish manner was changing to a deep breathing ferocity.

“The Widow Capet is still in the Temple, aristocrat,” he said, “and your friends are in La Force by now.”

M. de Jaurès kept his head high.

“So you knew,” he said softly. “You are a cunning rat, Citizen Durosoy.”

The Deputy’s eyes were suddenly flushed with blood.

“Hortense must thank you, aristocrat, for breaking your appointment for her sake.”

M. de Jaurès came nearer. There was darkness beyond the folding doors — the white shoe in the same position and the fold of pearl-braided satin.

The Deputy suddenly flung the other leaf wide.

“I am a cunning rat, am I not?” he said with a sob of hate. “My wife! My wife!” he cried, pointing to her.

She sat just inside the doors, facing them. There was a long red streak down the bosom of her white bodice, her eyes were fixed and her jaw dropped; across her knee was a knife stained with marks like rust.

The Deputy stood looking at M. de Jaurès.

“You see, I have been cutting peaches with a steel knife….”

“Pearson’s Magazine” Dec 1912

THE CONFESSION
OF FLORIS HEENVLIET

Floris Heenvliet was skating along the canal that runs from Delft to Rotterdam. He had his back to the former town, which was where he lived, but he had not yet come so far that he could see the houses of Rotterdam, or even the spires of the big churches with their lead cupolas visible as far as Schiedam.

It was late afternoon, cold and lonely.

Floris had passed no one since he had left his uncle’s house in the Koornmarkt, and he was glad. He was skating in face of the wind, he had his fur collar turned up, his cap pulled low, and his hands in his pockets.

It was delightful to feel his body swing forward without exertion or fatigue, to feel the ice spinning away from under his feet, to see the long canal ever widening before him, and to hear the solitary yet homely sound of the wind that blew back his coat and seemed to be struggling to lift up his cap, that it might whisper something in his ear.

On either side the flat, bare country was lying under a white salt mist that became grey in the distance and mingled with the sombre-coloured sky.

Floris skated through field after field, where the canal was edged by spears of broken grass, and low bushes, bearing glittering lines of snow, bent over the frozen tow-path, and beyond this nothing but the straight line of the land merging into the mist.

Then he passed windmills with the date painted in large letters under the thatch, and the sails turning briskly, and in the distance he could sometimes see another windmill — a grey shape that did not catch the wind, but was still as a painting on the background of the mist.

He smiled to think that he had ever been tired, and yet in the perfect exaltation of his body, in the joy of the swift motion and the keen air, he thought of fatigue and weariness, and even now and then of death.

He went between scattered houses built down close to the water, with their own little wooden landing-stages, on which stood familiar objects — a pair of sabots, a pile of logs, or even a cat walking cautiously.

He passed a trim villa, the red bricks mortared with lines of white, one window open and a rich Persian cloth of glowing colours hanging out, and on the roof a crow.

These things flew past, and he was in the bare, open country again.

Because he was so utterly alone and untrammelled, he felt as if he was being watched, and in the complete silence he distinguished voices that he never heard at other times.

He knew what they said perfectly well, and that they spoke the truth; he smiled in his collar and wondered.

He did not believe in remorse — he believed in no emotion once other men had put a name to it — yet he had experienced most feelings, and his cynicism had saved him very little.

He thrust his hands deeper into his pockets and hunched his shoulders up to his ears. Was this remorse? Did the wind and the loneliness and the white mist fill him with remorse?

It was foolish to suppose so. What had these things to do with his inner feelings?

No, it was not remorse.

He skated past another windmill. A bird flew up out of the grass, darted up, then down again.

Ugh, how cold it was!

A deeper shade seemed to be falling over the landscape.

Floris straightened his shoulders and raised his eyes.

Ahead of him was the sun, red and hard and sullen, hanging above the towers of Schiedam.

The short winter day was nearly over. He made a graceful sweeping curve on the ice, and turned towards Delft.

No, it was not remorse, he said to himself, but pride.

He wished to show that he could do without these things — comforts, luxuries, the respect of the neighbours, the prospect of an easy and wealthy future, the affection of his uncle, even his good name and the love of Elizabeth Van Decken.

Yes, he was eager to show that these things, for the sake of which he had lost his honour, were really nothing to him, and that he could sacrifice them all.

But to whom was he eager to show it? Who would care? Everyone would scorn him if he confessed.

Then it was a strange kind of pride, because there was no one to admire him, or be convinced, or hold him justified.

Except, perhaps, Heaven.

He skated between the fields, the windmills, and the houses.

He would lose everything; let him consider that. People would turn their backs on him — even Elizabeth. He would have to leave Delft.

Perhaps his cousin, the man whom he had wronged and whose memory he would right, if he confessed, might have said a good word for him, but, he being dead, there was no other, Floris reflected, with an unreasonable sneer.

Then why did he think of confessing, since he would gain nothing, but lose everything, since he did not feel remorseful towards the man whom he had ruined?

He asked himself, bending his head before the veering wind.

There was no answer.

It was an impulse turning into a resolution. He felt impelled to confess as he had never felt impelled to anything in his life.

The canal broadened before him; he could see the towers of St. Ursula and the Oude Kerk rising above the bare trees; he passed little houses with painted shutters and the dark building of the arsenal, where the arms of the Republic frowned from the stone.

A few flakes of snow began to fall.

An old woman going along the towpath recognised his slender, graceful figure as it sped along, and called out a greeting.

He answered her over his shoulder and hurried on.

Now he had entered the town; either side of him was the high brick pavement planted with bare lime trees, and beyond the plain red houses, with the lights appearing here and there in the windows.

Floris thought of the last time that he had skated through Delft, one arm round Elizabeth’s waist, holding, with the other hand, hers in its fur glove on his breast, her hooded head on his shoulder, and their feet keeping perfect time on the shining ice.

When he had almost reached the end of the Koornmarkt, he stopped, sat down on the edge of the pavement, took off his skates, and tied them together as he had done a hundred times before. No one would have imagined that any deep thought or extraordinary resolve lay under his demeanour as he passed into his uncle’s quiet house in the shadow of the Oude Kerk.

A passer-by on the other side of the canal saw just Mynheer Floris Van Heenvliet going home; Floris himself, as he passed under the portico, was thinking that nothing would ever be the same again after he had said what he was going to say.

He took off his cap and shook the snowflakes from it, and got out of his coat.

Anna, the housekeeper, came down the black-and-white tiled hall.

“It is beginning to snow again,” she said. “I am glad you have come back. You have been gone a long time.”

Floris gave her his cap, coat, and skates.

“Where is my uncle?” he asked.

“In the parlour — waiting for you, Mynheer Floris.”

“Very well.” He put his hand to his hair, which was damp and clinging to his brow, then thrust his finger inside his black cravat, as if he wished to loosen it.

“I will bring a light,” said old Anna.

“No” — he lowered his dark eyes and gazed at the black-and-white pattern of the tiles — “do not bring a light — yet, Anna. I will ring when we need the lamp.”

“But you cannot see,” she protested.

“It does not matter — I want to speak to my uncle—”

He saw she was looking at him curiously, and he flushed.

“Yes, I want to speak to my uncle … and it will do as well … better in the dark.”

“Well, we will have a light in the door, or the neighbours will—”

She turned off, then paused and looked back.

“Are not Mejufvrouw Elizabeth and her mother coming to supper?”

Floris stared.

“You told me so yourself,” said old Anna, quite angrily.

“Yes, of course … they are coming.”

Anna looked at him crossly; she was annoyed by his vacant ways and his whim about the light.

“I hope you will have finished by then,” she answered, “for one cannot show people into the dark.”

“I shall have finished by then,” said Floris.

After Anna had gone, he stood with his hand on the parlour door.

How difficult words were! Now he came to consider it, he could not recall having ever put anything vital into words.

What had he said when he had asked Elizabeth to be his wife?

He had written a letter; he had spoken to her father; it had been understood between them before his awkward, broken sentences had won her loving consent. Well, that was no help to him now….

He had to open this door, enter the familiar parlour, and empty his soul to the old man who would be sitting within.

He pressed his brow against the lintel of the doorpost, shivered, and set his teeth; then he heard Anna returning with the lamp for the hall, and, goaded by this, he turned the handle.

Softly entering, he closed the door behind him.

The room was brightly lit with firelight; in a high-backed chair by the hearth sat his uncle, with his face half towards the fire and half concealed by the sides of the chair. Floris was seized with a terror lest he should look round and break the silence with some cheerful commonplace.

For that would make everything impossible.

“Uncle,” he said, in a quick, low voice, “it is I, Floris! Do not look at me — nor speak to me … I want to say something … it is very difficult.”

He sat down at the table and hid his face in his hands, for he knew Mynheer Heenvliet must instinctively look round, and he did not want to see his expression of wonder and alarm.

After waiting a little, he spoke again.

“Will you sit as you are, looking into the fire … and listen to me? How impossible it is to explain! I went skating this afternoon, out through the Rotterdam Gate, as far as Schiedam … I made a resolution … I want to confess.”

He raised his eyes and saw his uncle leaning back in the deep chair, motionless.

“Perhaps I can speak like this, in the dark, if you do not say anything or — look at me … It is about your son I am going to speak … my cousin Hendrick.”

He drew a deep breath, and strove to probe the very depths of his own meaning.

“I do not know why I am confessing … I do not know … because I do not love my cousin any more than I ever did … I have nothing to gain.”

He drew his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow and lips; he fixed his eyes on the dark walls, the well-known pictures, the blue-and-white curtains, the chimney-piece, with its dull mirror, ornaments of blue-and-white Delft, and black marble clock.

All these things had become strange and far away; he felt giddy, confused by the shadows that were blotting everything out.

Even the firelight, it seemed, for the logs were flaring fitfully and sinking into ashes.

Floris clenched his hands on the table, forcing the words out of himself.

“I was always jealous of Hendrick — because he was your heir, and I was poor, with no claim on you … and I was cleverer than he. I found that out when we were clerks together … in your counting-house … in Amsterdam … He was foolish enough to be always getting into trouble … and I was clever enough to make the most of it….”

A sound like a sigh broke from the old man.

“Do not say anything!” cried Floris. “I am going to tell you all. … You began to find his accounts were wrong, and he could not explain—” The speaker’s voice sank lower. “I did it … it was very easy.”

The firelight seemed to be sinking rapidly; only a faint, pulsing glow remained over the figure of Mynheer Heenvliet.

“That was the beginning,” continued Floris, leaning heavily on the table and staring at the dull patch of window, against which the hastening snow was drifting. “Then one day he came to me and told me that he was tired of it … I was the favourite, and he was always in your displeasure. I knew why — I had taken pains it should be so … yet you had trusted him with a large amount of money to be conveyed to the bank at Utrecht. … Well, he was going away, he told me. Since then I have often wondered why he should make a confidant of me; but he was always simple … he thought I was honourable. Do not speak! … I am telling you that I am not honourable.”

He paused, clenching his hand tightly before him on the smooth, shining table, where he had often arranged the ranks of his lead soldiers when he was a child, or opened the great black-letter Bible on Sundays and gazed at the terrible woodcut of the Last Judgement.

He did not see anything — not even Mynheer Heenvliet. He was utterly absorbed in getting this thing into words; he wondered he could do it; he wondered why he was doing it. Still, cold and sick, he went on, forcing his soul to penance.

“Hendrick gave me the money and a letter for you; he would not be beholden for a ducat … He ran away and joined the merchant service, as you know.”

Floris shuddered, as if the snow falling softly against the pane was drifting on to his bare heart.

“Listen! I burnt the letter and I buried the money.

“You thought he had robbed you and disgraced you … and I thought … ‘He is a fool. What does it matter?’”

The logs fell together with a little empty sound.

Floris gave a groan.

“What does it matter? Oh, Heavens, I do not know, but I must speak! Hush! hear me to the end. You disinherited him — as I meant you should — and I was your heir … You cursed him; now you will curse me. … Listen! I am confessing. He was never to blame. … When he died … in China, I laughed to think how safe I was. No one knew … except Heaven. We have been happy together — you and I. I have pleased you better than he could ever have done. … Am I not a fool to confess? That is all. … I did not think that I could ever bring these words over my lips; but it is done….

“I will go away … you must tell Elizabeth … It would be better if I were dead, for I love her … I do not ask you to forgive me, even to speak to me.

“I am going now….”

His head sank lower and lower, until it rested on the edge of the table.

The marble clock gave a little whirr and struck six.

The clear strokes fell echoing into the dark stillness. In the distance the Stadhuis clock was chiming, then that from the Oude Kerk sounded close, deep and earnest.

Floris dragged himself into a sitting posture.

“Elizabeth will hate me … It always seemed to me that she would have loved … him … if he had stayed … Elizabeth …”

He rose, staggering, and flung out his hand against the wall to support himself.

“I am going.” He bit his weak lips.

A door opened and closed somewhere. His head was reeling; he had to lean against the wall, for his limbs were trembling and weak.

Voices, footsteps, sounded from without.

He tried to find his way to the door, when it was opened swiftly by a girl carrying a candle.

The picture of light, life, and happiness which she made blinded him; he stood with his hand over his eyes.

“What is the matter, Floris?”

She smiled, holding up the candle, whose beams glittered in her fair hair.

“How cold you have let the room get! Ah, the fire is nearly out. And why are you in the dark, Floris?”

She went lightly round to the hearth.

“Elizabeth,” he said miserably, “I am going; my uncle will speak to you.”

“What do you mean?”

She was by the old man’s chair, and bent over it as she spoke.

“He is asleep,” she smiled. “Come, Mynheer, wake up and tell me what Floris means.”

She shook him by the shoulder, and Mynheer Heenvliet gave a sigh and sat up, blinking his eyes.

Floris came round the table.

“Asleep?” he said.

The old man looked from one to the other, then he asked—

“Who let the fire out? I told Anna to bring in the lamp at half-past five.”

“You have been asleep?” demanded Floris, with his hand on his heart.

“It seems so,” smiled the merchant. “How quietly you came in! Ugh, it is chilly!” He rose. “We will go into the other room and have supper.”

He took Elizabeth’s arm, and she smiled at Floris.

“You look rather pale,” she remarked. “There is nothing the matter, is there?”

“Nothing; let us go in to supper.”

There are some things a man can do only once.

“The Windsor Magazine” Mar. 1910

THE INTRUDER

As she stood on the threshold of the home that was his and would soon (so soon!) be hers, her heart was filled with a noble happiness.

She paused, with a delicate hesitation, delaying a moment of yet deeper joy that she might dwell on it with a longer delight, beside the ancient cypress that hugely overshadowed the long terrace, and looked at the beautiful outlines of Fordyce Hall. Turrets and gables, the work of different builders in different ages, showed dark and clear against an autumn sky of golden grey, and beyond the house miles of hushed wood and parkland swept to the misty horizon.

Below the terrace where Ann Vereker stood, the gardens dipped in old and perfect arrangement of walk and fountain, rosary and quidnunc, arbour and bowling-green, The bright, large flowers of the late year glowed against the worn stone and the rich lawns; there was nothing to disturb the ordered loveliness that had been so wisely planned and so long-enduring. “And in this place I shall be his wife,” thought Ann.

She looked at him as he paused a few paces away from her; he stood in the shadow of the cypress, and was gazing past the gardens to the fair, open prospect beyond. She had never seen him in these surroundings before; always their background had been a town — London, Bath, the Wells, a fashionable world, gaiety, a crowd — the proper natural setting for those born to aristocratic ease. A country life was not the mode, and it had not seemed strange to Ann that Sir Richard made no suggestion of showing her his home until their betrothal was nearly at an end.

Yet she had always longed for this moment, always wished to see him in the place where he belonged, where he was master — the place where he was born, and his fathers born before him back to the time of the first Norman king.

It was more beautiful than she had expected, he was more completely one with this setting than she had pictured. Suddenly all the time they had spent together in London seemed wasted; she thought coldly of the town mansion that was being refurnished.

“We will live here,” she decided.

She looked at the open door through which she had not yet passed, and then again at him.

“Dick,” she said, and her voice was low, “how long is it since you were here?”

“Three years,” he answered, quietly.

“Why did you never bring me before?” asked Ann.

He looked at her and seemed to brace himself.

“Oh, my dear,” he said — “my dear!” He raised his hand and let it fall as if dismissing a subject impossible of expression.

She noticed then that he was unusually grave — she remembered that he had been grave ever since they had left her brother in the coach in obedience to her wish to see the place alone with him, and they entered the grounds together.

“Did you think I would not care?” she asked. It occurred to her that perhaps he thought her frivolous — that perhaps he had not read her intense desire to take her position and future responsibilities seriously. Her sensitive, mobile face flushed; she leaned her slender figure against the warm, hard stone of the terrace and fixed her eyes on the house; she trembled with the desire to convey to him what she felt for this house of his and all the tradition it stood for. His race had bred fine, useful men and women; she wanted to tell him that she would be worthy of them.

But he was so silent that her delicate desires were abashed. “Shall we go into the house?” she said.

“Ah yes,” he answered. “I hope, Ann, that you will like it,” he added; and she smiled, for it seemed to her that his tone was a very formal one to be used between such complete friends and lovers as they were; but it did not displease her; she liked the surprises his moods afforded, she was even glad of his present gravity; she felt reserved herself in her own deep happiness.

They walked along the terrace to the side door that stood open; the sunlight had parted the grey veil of clouds and lay lightly over the steps as Ann Vereker ascended them and entered Fordyce Hall.

In accordance with her wish there were no servants to welcome them. “Let me be quite alone with you for the first time,” she had said, and he had acceded to her whim without comment.

She had always been exquisite in her observation and keen in her perceptions, and since she had met Richard Fordyce she had known the great sharpening of the senses a strong passion brings; colours, sounds, light, and perfume were now to her so many ecstasies, almost unbearable in their poignancy. And all that he now revealed to her — the fine corridors, the great dining-room, the ball-room, the old carving, the old painted ceilings, the old tapestries, the old furniture — gave her a pleasure that deepened to pain.

In the deep oriel window his quarterings showed, and the bearings of the various heiresses who had at one time or another graced the name of Fordyce. In the dining-room hung the portraits of his ancestors, men and women who seemed strangely remote and aloof, and who yet shared his dear traits in their dark, masterful features. An atmosphere of loneliness and desertion hung heavy in these rooms, but that did not sadden Ann; she felt the place was stately with memories — chambers where so many had lived and died must convey this air of regret. She hushed her footsteps and her voice, and thought that this house peopled with shadows of past achievements would make a worthy background for a warm and living love.

They had not gone above the ground floor when he led her to the great hall and state entrance, and, opening the portals that were stiff on their hinges, showed her the famous view across the woodland and river, that embraced three counties.

She stood, with the soft airs blowing her nut-brown curls beneath the wide brim of her Leghorn hat, and gazed on the entrancing prospect. Directly before her, half concealed by a little belt of elm trees, was a squat Norman church.

“Your church?” she questioned.

“Yes,” said Sir Richard, “but it is the only church for the village, too — they come here on Sunday, but they marry and bury at Earl’s Stanton, ten miles away.”

She touched his arm half timidly; he did not look at her, and a faint sensation of coldness on his part tinged her happiness with apprehension.

“May I see the church now?” she asked, on a sudden impulse.

“Whatever you wish, Ann,” he answered.

They crossed the open lawn and the broad drive and entered a green gate in a red wall which admitted them, not, as she expected, into the churchyard, but into a fruit garden that sloped down the side of a little hill.

The fully ripe peaches and apricots hung amid the curling leaves on the sunburnt walls, and some had escaped the nets that held them and lay on the freshly turned earth, and clusters of St. Michael’s daisies and sunflowers grew amid the plum and pear trees. Sir Richard crossed the end of the garden and opened another door in the farther wall; as he held it aside for Ann, she stepped past him and found herself among the graves.

A few yew-trees rose in still darkness from the even grass that was scattered with the scarlet berries that fell from the sombre boughs.

The flat, discoloured grave-stones were mostly in shade, but over those upright against the wall the misty sunshine fell in a dreamy radiance; above the wall the fruit-trees showed, and Ann noticed how the fruit had fallen and lay among the graves.

An old man was trimming the grass; at sight of Sir Richard he took off his hat and stood respectfully at attention. Ann smiled at him; this place was sacred but not sad to her; she wondered why Sir Richard had arranged their marriage for a London church — she would like to have been married here where someday she would be buried — a Fordyce among her kin.

They entered the church; it was small, old, sunken, and dedicated to a forgotten saint — Vedust. The painted glass in the windows was ancient and beautiful, the worn rood-screen had guarded the altar for two hundred years; there were some beautiful brasses in the chancel, and in the Lady Chapel a tomb in fair painted marble.

One name was repeated on brasses and marble, the name of Fordyce; as Ann Vereker stood in a reverent attitude behind the altar she saw this word again and again on tomb and tablet with varying inscriptions and titles of honour.

Among the newer mural tablets which showed white among the time-stained stones were those of his father, his mother, his sister. And, newest of all, one that made Ann catch her breath with a sense of shock.

It was the small square of alabaster dedicated to the memory of his first wife. His first wife. Ann read the inscription:

Sacred to the Memory of Margaret,
Daughter of John Basinghall of Salop
and Wife of Richard Fordyce,
Baronet of Fordyce, Hampshire,
who died May 1725, aet. 23.

Nothing else; no word of love or regret. Ann was glad that there was no parade of mock sentiment; she had been little in his life, Ann was convinced — he never spoke of her, and Ann had tried to forget her existence, had succeeded indeed in closing her mind to all thoughts of her — what was she but an incident to be forgotten — the wife of two years who had died without children. Yet standing here in the sombre silence, Ann found herself forced to consider this woman. Somewhere near she was actually lying in her coffin. “Perhaps,” thought Ann, “I am standing over her now.”

She turned to Sir Richard; his face was inscrutable, his figure dark in the shadows. “Were you—” she broke off, unable to form the words: she had wanted to ask him if he had been married in this church.

It was suddenly horrible that he had ever been married before.

She glanced at their pew, and saw that to sit there would be to sit in full view of this white tablet — “Sacred to the Memory of Margaret… Wife of Richard Fordyce—”

“How close the air is!” she said. “Shall we not go?”

He moved away in silence, and they came together out of the hushed church into the hushed graveyard. The sun had withdrawn behind the increasing grey vapours and would be seen no more that day; the elms that half concealed the house were shaking in a little breeze, and the yellow leaves were drifting steadily down. The place was sad — sad with an atmosphere her happiness could not defy; the air had become chill, and she shivered in her silk coat.

In the distance the old man was cleaning the moss from a headstone. It occurred to Ann that he had seen (many times!) this Margaret; she wished to stop and question him, for a great curiosity now pressed her about the woman whose existence she had hitherto been content to ignore — had this dead wife of his been dark or fair, sad or gay, beautiful or lovable?

She had heard nothing of her, she was sure that she had been an insignificant personality, but she wanted to ask the old gardener and be certain.

“How silent you are, Ann!” said Sir Richard.

She looked up at him with a little start. “So are you,” she smiled.

“The day is overcast,” he answered, “and a gloomy one in which to overlook an empty house.”

“But I will see the rest,” she interrupted — “an empty house! Your home, Dick, and mine to be.”

“You like the place?” he asked.

She wanted to say so much and words were so inadequate — she wished he would look at her. “I love every stone,” she said, passionately.

“We shall not be here much,” replied Sir Richard, opening the gate.

“Why not? — the place lacks a master.”

“Oh, it is old — and dreary — and in need of repair—”

“That can be altered,” she smiled; in her heart she was wondering if he had trodden these churchyard grasses, or crossed the end of this fruit garden, since his first wife had died.

She was sure he had not; no, nor entered the house. Were old memories holding him silent? — the thought tortured her; yet she tried to reason it away and to dispel this shadowy menace of Margaret Fordyce. She had always known that he had been married, and always been able to ignore it; in no way had it come between them. Why should it now?

Yet the old perfect happiness did not return even when they had entered the house again together; the solemn atmosphere of the ancient church seemed to lurk in the quiet rooms; she could not people them with the sweet visions of her own future and his — it was the past that seemed to fill them, and when she mounted the wide, dark stairs she pictured Margaret Fordyce going up them in her bridal dress and being carried down them in her coffin.

He took her to the armoury, and she stood pale and thoughtful among the beautiful weapons with which the walls were lined; he showed her his father’s sword, his own favourite weapon, and a light French rapier water-waved in gold.

“Do you fence?” he asked, as he hung the rapier back next another of the same weight and length.

“No,” said Ann. He made no comment, but she knew now that his first wife had fenced with him — with those two rapiers, in this very room.

They went into the picture-gallery, and she was blind to the beauty of painting and carving, for her eyes were straining, half guiltily, half fearfully, for a portrait of Margaret Fordyce.

He showed her one after another of his ancestors, explaining their lives and actions, and when he came to the great picture of his father on horseback, with the taking of Namur in the distance, her heart was beating fast and her eyes searching furtively for a woman’s face. But Margaret Fordyce was not there; yet Ann detected a bare space next to the likeness of Sir Richard’s sister — as if, she thought, a painting had been hung there and removed.

It seemed that it would have only been natural for her to ask for his first wife, but she could not, though she was aware that her remarks were vague and forced; he, too, seemed absorbed in some inner thought, and did not notice her distraction.

As they came out from the picture-gallery on to the great stairs again she was struck anew by the chill and ominous atmosphere of the house. She regretted now her desire to have the house empty on her first visit; some servant or kinsman would have been a relief, someone who could have spoken casually and naturally of Margaret Fordyce.

He showed her the paintings on the stairway, and they mounted higher into a region of silence and shadows. The windows were shuttered, the blinds drawn, and the furniture in linen covers.

Without waiting for Sir Richard, Ann hurried through the first suite of rooms: she was looking still for some sign of Margaret, some portrait. These were — had been — a woman’s rooms. Would she have to live in them? — to use this furniture, to gaze at herself in these mirrors?

At the end of the suite was a locked door; she tried the handle with a sudden desperation, as if she expected to find the solution of some mystery.

Sir Richard was quickly beside her. “There is nothing of interest there,” he said, quietly.

She turned, and they looked at each other for the first time since they had entered the house together.

“Why may I not go in?” asked Ann.

“I did not forbid you,” he said. He was pale but smiling; the expression of his face was so different from any that she had ever seen there before that he seemed to her for the moment a stranger.

“I want to go in,” she said, trying to smile too, but with a bitter sensation that everything was becoming ghastly and unnatural; she endeavoured to struggle against this; she had been perfectly happy a few moments ago — and nothing had happened, she told herself; nothing had happened.

“May I not see this room?” she asked, not knowing what impulse goaded her to insist.

Without answering, he took a key from the pocket of his brocade waistcoat. He carried the key with him, then — perhaps all the while, ever since she had known him, he had had this key to the past next his heart.

In silence he unlocked the door and in silence she entered. The chamber was small, the air close and oppressive; the first glance showed Ann that it was a lady’s apartment, and that it had been locked away hastily, with every article untouched as the former occupant had left it. Beyond was another room, the door of which was half open; Ann could see a bed, with curtains of fine needlework, and a mirror covered with a white cloth.

Dust was over everything; Ann could hardly fetch her breath; she unlatched one of the shutters, and the sad autumn light revealed the ruin wrought by time and neglect. Cobwebs clung round the windows, the gilt chairs were tarnished, dust lay grey and heavy in the folds of the curtains. On a side table was a bunch of flowers — changed to a little powder among the wired and faded ribbons of the bouquet; near it was a box of gloves half opened, the string and wrappings thrown carelessly down, the yellow, shrivelled gloves unworn.

In one corner of the room stood a harpsichord, open and covered with sheets of music, some of which had fallen to the floor. Beside this, standing against the wall, was a large picture in a dark frame, concealed by a red cloak flung over it.

Ann was drawn by this picture to a forgetfulness of everything else, even to a forgetfulness of Sir Richard, who stood motionless on the threshold. She crossed the floor, and the boards creaked beneath her feet, a startled mouse sprang across her path and disappeared into the dark bedroom.

She stooped and lifted the red cloak. A woman’s face looked at her from the glowing canvas.

A beautiful face, alive, alert, fair, and proud, with a peculiar triumphant smile on the lips. She was painted against a dark curtain and a glimpse of summer trees; her unpowdered hair was bound with a purple ribbon, and her brocaded dress was cut low over her jewelled bosom. The painting was stiff and precise, but marvellously lifelike and glowing in colour.

In the left-hand corner was written in white letters, “Margaret Fordyce, May, 1725”-the year, the month she died.

Ann stepped back from the painting; her heart was beating thickly and the world was rapidly changing about her; she put out her hand and touched by chance the keyboard of the harpsichord, that gave forth a dismal and jangled sound that she echoed with a low and horrified cry. Sir Richard stepped into the room.

“After three years,” he said, looking round — “after three years—”

“What has happened?” murmured Ann. “What has happened?” She leaned weakly against the corner of the harpsichord and gazed still at that third presence in the room — the portrait of Margaret Fordyce.

“Why did you not tell me?” she asked, faintly. He made no defence.

“We are quite strangers,” continued Ann.

He turned his eyes on her, but still did not speak.

“How did she die?” asked Ann.

“She was flung from her horse… on her birthday — she was wearing that cloak.”

“Why did you not tell me?” repeated Ann Vereker.

“I thought — I hoped—” he broke off.

“You loved her,” said Ann.

He stumbled to the bouquet and fingered the ruins of the roses.

“This is as she left it,” said Ann. “You shut it away as she left it — but she is still here. In this room. In this house. In the church. How she must laugh at me!”

He stared at her.

“She called you. You could not help coming here — even though it meant bringing me. I was to help you forget.”

The triumphant face on the canvas seemed to deepen its disdainful smile.

“You will never forget,” continued Ann. “You love her.”

“She is dead,” said Sir Richard, and he braced his shoulders with the action of a man who endeavours to shake off the oppression of a hideous dream. “Dead. Dead.”

“She is here,” repeated Ann.

Sir Richard turned his eyes fearfully, hungrily to the portrait. “Oh, God!” he said, sharply.

“This is tragedy,” thought Ann. She seemed dull in a dull world; she looked across the harpsichord and noticed that the rain was falling aslant the dry leaves on the withered trees outside. When last the sun shone she had been supremely happy. What had happened?

Nothing… save that she had seen the portrait of Margaret Fordyce.

She had loved him so sincerely, and he had used this love of hers as an opiate — and now the other woman triumphed.

“Dick,” she said, in a hopeless voice, “I am going.”

He did not answer; the painted figure seemed to step from the frame and dominate both of them. Before her beauty, her assurance, Ann felt insignificant, a creature who did not matter.

Sir Richard picked up one of the faded white gloves and sank onto the tarnished chair; he looked at the portrait, and Ann knew that the last three years had rolled away for him. He belonged to the other woman.

Ann Vereker, the intruder, left him with his wife and went away forever.

“Harper’s Magazine” Feb 1913

THE GIFTS
OF THE DEAD

Giacomo was returning home after many years. He paused in a turn of the winding road that led up from the undulating plains of Etna, and looked up at the town of Santa Rosa, his native place, and at the castle on the height above the town, his ancestral home.

Santa Rosa, walled and fortified, rose compactly. Beneath the walls the rock, grown with cactus, sloped to the fertile valley and the broad plain that rolled to the foot of Etna.

The town, grey in colour, and with the streets climbing one above the other, was a sharp outline of roofs, cupolas, and towers against the autumn sky of blue, flushed with the first faint gold of sunset.

To the right of the road the grand and open landscape showed the great volcano in the distance, the base swathed in purple shadow, the summit veiled in wreaths of great clouds.

Giacomo took off his flat pilgrim’s hat and saluted the mountain and the town of Santa Rosa and his own castle rising on the crag above the city walls.

It was fifteen — sixteen — years since he had seen his home; it might have been longer, even much longer, for Giacomo had spent the time partly in an Algerian gaol, partly in a Turkish galley, and partly as a slave in Tunis, and he had lost count of the years.

At least they had wrought their change in him — of that he was grimly aware; at least they had taken from him all youth — though he had not yet reached middle age — all joy in the world, all pleasantness towards his fellow-men, all gaiety, all gladness of heart.

He stood looking at his native place and his home with nothing but hardness and bitterness in his soul towards all the universe. As he could recall no kindness, no tenderness from others, so he felt none; as all his life was shadowed, and ever must be shadowed, by the great wrong that had sent him into the unspeakable anguish of prison and slavery, so he looked at the world from the darkness of his soul, and it, too, was dark.

There was only one person he recalled with respect, perhaps with gratitude, and that person was his Excellency the Viceroy, who had listened to him, believed him, and furnished him with a perfect instrument of vengeance. He was coming home for that — not for any joy of the homecoming, but to be avenged on the man who had, all those years before, trapped, lured him, and delivered him to an African corsair sailing the Sicilian seas. This man had his own name, his own blood — his father’s brother.

Giacomo had learnt from the Viceroy that this man had been tranquilly enjoying castles and lands, and that no one had suspected that the young man had not been drowned, as he reported. Who was to guess that the pleasure journey on the blue summer waters had ended in a drugged boy being cast out in an open boat at the mouth of the great ocean where the Straits of Messina begin? Who was to guess that this boat had been picked up by a heathen pirate and the victim saved?

Not even the murderer himself, who believed his nephew dead, and who had cunningly saved himself, as he thought, from direct blood-guilt.

And Giacomo had suffered worse than death — suffered so that only the thought of future vengeance had kept him alive through the long agony of pain and humiliation, and most incredibly his chance had come. He had been a galley-slave in a Turkish ship captured by a Spanish vessel soon after the great battle of Lepanto; he had been landed at a Sicilian port, and he had gone to Palermo in rags, with the marks of the galley chains on wrists and ankles, and proved to the astonished Viceroy his identity, his wrong, his claim.

And now he returned to Santa Rosa with the official documents in his pockets for the deposition of his uncle and his own reinstatement in the honours of Bescemi. He might have come in state, with soldiers behind for the arrest of the usurper, but the instinct, cruel and cunning, to spring a deadly surprise on his enemy, to gloat and torture before striking, to lengthen his vengeance so that he might enjoy every moment of it, was strong in Giacomo. This discomfiture of his uncle, this complete vengeance, was the only dark pleasure he possessed, and he meant to enjoy it to the utmost.

Therefore he came secretly in the ragged guise of a pilgrim, he who was the Conte di Bescemi, and lord of Santa Rosa and all the lands around, hill and plain, as far as eye could see.

Slowly he proceeded up the winding road. It was All Saints’ Day. From the cupolas and towers of the convents the bronze bells were clanging steadily through the windy air. The wine harvest was over, and the olive harvest just, begun; mules laden with panniers full of the windfalls, the first-fruits of the gathering, continually passed Giacomo. On their heads swung feathers and blue and scarlet tassels of wool. The peasants walked beside them, carrying the long poles with which to knock the olives down. Giacomo remembered it all so well, but the familiar yet long lost sights of home did not move or soften him. He passed a flock of long-haired goats driven by children in gaudy petticoats, who were discussing the joys of the morrow, the Day of the Dead, when the souls of lost relatives made presents to the living — fruit and toys and new garments, and the delicious marmalade of quinces made by the nuns.

“My uncle will get his gift from the dead,” thought the pilgrim sternly, as he overheard the children’s excited talk, and he quickened his step.

At the foot of the rock on which the town stood were rows of mules with clay vases slung in their panniers, and water-carts collecting water from the slow streams that trickled from the fountains; near was a group of women, most wearing black shawls, though here and there was one with colours, dull red or orange or dark green.

They, too, were chattering about the morrow, and their fingers were busy weaving garlands of silk paper and wool flowers to be carried to the graveyards and laid on the tombs in return for the gifts of the dead.

Up, up climbed Giacomo. He chose the shorter way, straight up the face of the rock, where even the mules could scarcely find a footing, for the road wound round and round too slowly for his impatience. There was a light already in the tower. Perhaps his cousin Orsola, whom he remembered as a tiny child, was sitting there wearing her wreaths for her dead mother. He evoked the image without pity. When the Viceroy, slightly moved, had spoken of “your fair and innocent cousin,” Giacomo had been only moved to a bitter smile. Perhaps his Excellency thought a romantic end would be that he should love and wed this same fair cousin; but his Excellency did not know Giacomo, nor how love had been utterly spoilt, too, for him — no woman was likely to stir him now.

He gained the high ramparts and the long convent that faced him, he turned in at the low, arched gate of the town, and a few seconds brought him into the piazza, with the great Jesuit church, where the purple pigeons flew in and out of the old masonry. The ancient houses leaning together, with coloured pots of basil and parsley on the balcony; the few open shops, from the front of which the day’s stock of vegetables were being moved; the monastery with the barred windows, green door, and cupola of coloured stones; the garden at the angle of the church, where grew the pomegranate tree and the tall weeds — all these things were the same, unchanged. Their very sameness served to emphasise the change in Giacomo, who had last looked upon this scene as a careless youth.

A painted cart was standing before the church door. Standing within was a peasant from the mountains, exchanging chestnuts for measures of olives, dried beans, and oats. Men, women, and children were eagerly crowding round him, carrying away the chestnuts in measures, bowls, and handkerchiefs.

As Giacomo passed the piazza, the last chestnut had been exchanged and the crowd was hurrying home, many of them carrying little toys and sweets wrapped in their shawls, the gifts of the dead for the morrow.

The darkness deepened, casting all into uncertainty; the pedlars hurried across the piazza with covered packs; the town hall clock struck the hundred strokes that announced Ave Maria, a curious interlacing of sound, a repetition of two notes that Giacomo had often heard in the stifling prison and the blackness of the galley — heard with the dreadful ear of memory. He turned from the piazza and mounted the long, steep street which led to the castle. Thick yellow lights blinked in the windows of the houses and flickered from behind the curved bars of the convents.

On the crest of the hill Giacomo turned instinctively to look for the statue of the Virgin with the crown of blue stones who used to stand there. She was there still. The lamp was burning above her, and at her feet was sitting a little child in a scarlet frock, holding on her lap a rush basket full of the crimson cactus fruit. Asleep at her side was a little black pig tethered with a blue cord.

She gave a “Good night and sweet repose” to the pilgrim, which he answered briefly, his face set towards the castle.

Above the town was rising the first magnificence of the moon, which was approaching the full. When he reached the castle, he found all silent. Only in one turret window showed a light — the light he had seen from the road below.

The gate stood open, after the easy custom of the country, and Giacomo entered.

A porter came forward; he seemed to be treading softly.

“A night’s hospitality,” said the Conte, “the usual pilgrim’s boon.”

The man hesitated.

“You come at a strange time,” he answered. “But I doubt if Madonna Orsola will refuse on All Souls’ Day, the eve of All the Dead.”

He looked with some awe at the pilgrim, and turned slowly towards the dark entrance of the castle.

“Madonna Orsola, my cousin Orsola!” repeated Giacomo to himself. “Is she mistress in her father’s house so soon?”

He followed the porter, and stood waiting on the threshold — the threshold of his own home. A boy brought a light. Giacomo saw that the place was well, even handsomely, kept. He glanced up the stairs, gloating over the thought of the first sight of his enemy, grown sleek and fat, no doubt.

The porter returned. Madonna Orsola had offered the hospitality of the castle to the pilgrim. On hearing that he was from the East, she had asked to see him — at once, the porter said. Giacomo followed him up the stone stairway, so familiar and so strange, and into the first great hall.

He was not prepared to find his cousin here, but in her private apartments, and it was with some confusion that he found himself face to face with a tall lady, who rose from a black chair to greet him. Beside her a young man was seated on a low stool. Before them a bronze brazier on a wooden stand held a charcoal fire.

The room was lit by a hanging lamp close to the uncurtained window. Giacomo knew it for the light he had seen from the winding road below.

He looked closely at his cousin, forgetting, or regardless of, the usual courtesy of salutation.

She had no special beauty, but she was fine and rare in every line and movement, her dark hair curled round a small and delicate face, her eyes, grey-green and heavily lashed, were full of softness and fire.

She was dressed in black without ornament; a silk mantilla with a deep fringe wrapped her slender shoulders, her full skirts of brocaded damask billowed round the chair. So she sat, all in black in the black chair, her face as pale as pearl.

The pilgrim’s steady gaze and silence seemed to fill her with a kind of horror. She put out her hands as if to protect herself.

Giacomo was staring at her black attire.

“The Conte,” he asked — “where is the Conte?”

The expression of horror deepened on Madonna Orsola’s face. She turned to the young man, who said briefly, looking levelly at the pilgrim—

“The Conte Bescemi is two days dead; yesterday he was buried.”

Giacomo trembled. In one instant the entire fabric of his revenge was destroyed; it was a dead man he sought to triumph over, a dead man he hoped to degrade and humiliate!

Madonna Orsola spoke now, calmly as if she had recovered courage.

“Pilgrim, the shelter of this house of mourning is yours as long as you wish.”

He smiled grimly, bitterly.

“Ay, for as long as I wish!”

Again the girl looked at the young man.

“I fear I promise too much,” she added, “for I know not how long I may be mistress here.”

Giacomo roused from his bitter reverie to look at her sharply. She answered this look.

“I am not my father’s heiress,” she said.

“Belike he left the property to another,” answered Giacomo. He spoke dully, for he felt the life gone out of him with the shock of his disappointment. All the long years of waiting had been for nothing — his enemy had lived and died secure — and only by two days had he missed his revenge. That thought stunned him; he felt nothing but a desire to gain time to realise what had happened, to decide what he must do now, what the future held. At present all was confusion in his mind.

The young man rose with a movement almost of impatience. He, too, was in mourning. The gold clasp that held the long mantle on his heart and his gold sword-hilt glittered in the lamplight.

As he moved, he disclosed a table behind him covered with documents, parchments, and papers, sealed and signed.

At sight of them a sudden fire leapt into Giacomo’s eyes. Documents! He had some. His thin hand went to the heart of his ragged pilgrim’s habit, beneath which were concealed the papers given him by the Viceroy, papers that proved his claims to countship and lands.

His glance turned cruelly on Orsola. She was heiress to her father, she had inherited a legacy of hate — soon would inherit a legacy of shame when he exposed the dead man.

She was looking at him still with an expression of half horror, half interest.

“You come from the East?” she asked, and, with a little movement of the fine hand, constrained her companion to silence.

“From the East, madonna.”

“You are Sicilian?”

“Yes.”

“From what town, pilgrim?”

“From this town, madonna.”

“From Santa Rosa! Then you have been away a long time. I do not remember you, and I know everyone in Santa Rosa.”

“I left this town fifteen years ago, perhaps more.”

“Ah!” She gave a sound like a little sigh, and her head drooped.

The young man spoke almost sternly.

“You have had long travels, pilgrim.”

“And strange experiences,” said Giacomo. “Who are you, signor?” he added,

The girl answered quickly—

“It is Don Agatino, my promised husband. We are to be married very soon. Tonight he is here to help me in grave affairs.”

Her voice suddenly shook and her eyes veiled with tears.

“But we keep you,” said Don Agatino, as if anxious to be rid of the visitor. “You will need rest and food.”

“As you will,” smiled Giacomo. “I will speak further tomorrow. The Day of the Dead, is it not? A feast, when all find presents from the dead by their bedside? I have almost forgotten these Christian customs. Perhaps I, too, bring a gift from the dead.” And he again touched his habit on the heart.

“Have you any dead to remember you tomorrow?” asked Orsola gently. “Any graves to visit here? Have you come back for that, after all these years?”

Giacomo laughed.

“I have my dead in Santa Rosa, but my business is with the living.”

“Depart to your rest, pilgrim,” said the young man; “already it is dark.”

Giacomo was turning away, well content with the respite, when Donna Orsola spoke.

“Let him stay; let me speak to him tonight. Why not?”

Don Agatino frowned.

“It is so hopeless. How should he know? And to ask means to tell him everything.”

She shivered a little, but answered firmly—

“It must be told — sooner or later all must know. Let me speak, Agatino.”

He bent his head in silence and turned aside to move, with preoccupied gestures, the papers on the table beside him.

Orsola leant forward in her chair. The lamp was behind her, and she all in shadow and the blackness of her mourning draperies. Giacomo suddenly noticed her face as a tragic face.

“Perhaps she loved her father!” The thought gave him a curious sensation.

“I am searching for someone lost in the East,” said Donna Orsola, “therefore I speak to you, who have been there.”

With a bronze prong she absently stirred the ashes in the brazier, uncovering the red embers.

Giacomo lifted his shoulders.

“It is unlikely I can help you, madonna — I have met few Christians.”

She raised her wide, ardent eyes to his.

“The man for whom we must search, Don Agatino and I, may not be a Christian; he may be an Infidel — in the galleys, a slave, in prison!”

Giacomo looked at her intently.

“There are many such poor dogs of Christians in heathen chains!”

Again she shivered and stirred the glowing embers.

“There is one of them, if he is living, whom we must find — must rescue.”

“It will be difficult, madonna.”

“It must be done” — her eyes shot fire — “it shall be done!”

“This man — how long has he been missing?”

“Sixteen years this Christmastide.”

“And you hope to find him, madonna?”

Don Agatino spoke, turning round with great earnestness in face and voice.

“It is a sacred quest, and it will succeed, pilgrim — it is the task to which our lives will be given.”

“The task which God has put upon us,” said Donna Orsola gravely.

She pointed to a stool near her and sweetly bade Giacomo sit.

The Conte obeyed, and sat with his eyes fixed on the light hanging behind her — the light he had seen from the road when he was planning revenge against a man already in his grave.

“You have met such men — Christian captives?” pursued the girl anxiously.

“Many,” he answered laconically.

“Some of them you spoke to — heard their names and histories?”

“Some of them.”

“Tell me if you ever heard this story.” The tone of her voice was such that the Conte took his eyes from the lamp to look at her face. Her brows were wrinkled piteously, and her oval countenance seemed white as lawn above the cloudy blackness of her vesture.

“What story, madonna?” A sort of horror touched him; he shivered as she had shivered.

“The story of a man who was betrayed into slavery by his uncle, who was his heir.”

They gazed at each other.

“Where got you that story, madonna?”

“From my father on his deathbed, at the last minute, when the priest had gone,” she answered through stiff lips. “Sixteen years ago he delivered Giacomo Bescemi, the lawful Conte, into the hands of a Turkish rover, and let all believe that he was drowned. And this great sin he told me, and I vowed on the Cross to make restitution.”

“To save your father’s soul,” said Giacomo.

“And to right a great wrong,” she answered simply. “Don Agatino and I saw nothing else to do. My cousin must be found.”

“He shall be found,” added the young man.

Giacomo looked at him.

“She told you?”

“Naturally she told me. Why do you smile, pilgrim?”

“The Conte confessed to her alone.”

“To me alone,” said Orsola simply.

“And you might so easily have kept silence!” He still smiled.

“Ah, Maria Vergine,” she whispered, “should I make my father’s sin more hideous by such a sin of mine?”

“And if you find this man—”

“He is the Conte — as such he shall return to Santa Rosa.”

“And you would strip yourself for this stranger?”

“All is his,” she replied; “nothing is mine. I cannot strip myself of what I never possessed.”

She pointed a frail hand towards the documents her betrothed was turning over.

“From my mother’s property and what Agatino has, we strive to get together a treasure to cover the deficit for these sixteen years.”

The smile still lingered on the pilgrim’s thin lips.

“And you — what will you do, madonna?”

“Agatino will look after me,” she said.

Giacomo was silent; he felt tired and confused. To find this instead of what he had expected — to come with his heart full of bitterness, of hatred, lusting for vengeance, and to be met by this — his enemy dead, and this pale girl and earnest youth labouring to make restitution, made Dead Sea fruit of his long-cherished scheme, rendered his life void and pointless.

He laughed, feeling himself giddy and weak, feeling all a fatuity, a dream, a madness, and through the phantasmagoria that things had become he saw the resolute, pale face and the steady eyes of his cousin Orsola.

“You are ill,” said Don Agatino, with sudden pity. “You have come far, perhaps.”

“Far enough,” answered Giacomo.

“But tell me,” pleaded Donna Orsola, “have you heard of such a story as I have related to you? Can you help us?”

He rose, staring at her intently.

“Do you expect gifts from the dead tomorrow?” he asked.

“Alas, no longer! When I was a child, I found a basket of gay things sent me by my mother and the little brother who died, but that time is past. My father—”

“What gifts will he send, madonna?” asked the Conte grimly.

“I loved him and he loved me,” she responded simply. “And for his sin I will atone, and his wrong I will right, and so redeem his soul, so that, if he loses his name before the world, he regains his peace before God.”

“And you would sacrifice all you have for your father’s sin?”

“All my life I have enjoyed the fruits of this sin,” she answered; “it is only just that now I should pay.”

Giacomo was silent; he rested on his pilgrim’s staff, for his limbs felt feeble beneath him.

“But you have not answered me,” added Orsola, “if or no you have heard in your travels of Giacomo Bescemi?”

She rose and put out her hand as if feeling for support. Don Agatino took the trembling fingers in her grasp.

“What should this man know?” he asked.

Giacomo lifted his head suddenly.

“Nay, you are wrong,” he said. “I have heard such a story. Because of that story I am at Santa Rosa and here tonight.”

Donna Orsola flushed a lovely red.

“You — you know the man for whom we search! Ah, Agatino, my father’s prayer is answered! This is a miracle because of his repentance!”

Giacomo smiled, looking sternly from one eager young face to the other.

“In the East I knew the rightful Conte Bescemi; it was he who sent me here.”

Orsola was now pale again and clinging to her betrothed. The two slight figures in black showed indistinctly in the shadows of the large ill-lit room; there was something brave yet desolate in the look of them as they stood holding each other’s hands and waiting for the pilgrim’s story. As he spoke he continued to gaze at them keenly.

“It was in Algiers I met your cousin, madonna.”

“Ah, holy Heavens, in what misery?” she murmured.

“He had been sold as a slave,” continued Giacomo slowly, “and had been adopted by his master, who treated him as a son. His master was then dead, and he was his heir. He had great riches.”

“But he made no attempt to return to Europe to claim his own!” cried Don Agatino.

A sarcastic smile lifted the pilgrim’s lip.

“He found the life of the East too pleasant,” he replied. “Few knew that he had ever been a Christian — none knew his story.”

“Yet he told it to you?” said the young man.

“To me, yes. I was a prisoner of the Moors, and he bought me; and the night I came to his house he sent for me and told me his story.”

“Why was this, pilgrim?”

The Conte’s tired eyes glanced at Donna Orsola.

“Because he was dying.”

“Dying!” shuddered the girl.

“Dying of one of their quick, poisonous fevers — men die young in the East. And he gave me my freedom, and asked me, if ever I came to Europe, to come to Santa Rosa, in Sicily, and seek out the man who called himself Conte Bescemi; and then he told me his story, in a few words, as Donna Orsola has told it to me now.”

“He — he died?”

“That night, madonna, peacefully. And he gave me a message to your father, which I, after many years coming to Europe, have come here tonight to deliver, but too late.”

“Tell it to me,” said Orsola.

For a second Giacomo paused, then he said very clearly—

“It was a message of forgiveness, a message of good-will and kindness. ‘I have lived my life here,’ he said. ‘Tell him to keep the lands and dower my cousin Orsola with them; tell him I am so much Christian at heart, heathen though I am in name, that I can forgive freely.’”

Orsola leant her head on her lover’s heart, and the glad tears of relief welled from her eyes.

“He forgave! He forgave! If only my father had known! And he did not die miserably! Ah, I had pictured chains — the whip — the galleys!”

Again the bitter smile curled the Conte’s lips — he carried the marks of chains, whip, and the galley ropes on his body.

“Nay, your cousin died happy,” he answered. “You need have no remorse for him, madonna.”

The girl left the youth and, suddenly throwing herself on her knees before the pilgrim, kissed the hem of his rough sleeve.

“I cannot thank you for this good news you bring! I cannot bless you enough, pilgrim, for the comfort you have given me! I only would that my cousin was alive, that I might make restitution!”

With trembling hands the Conte raised her and restored her to her lover.

“You are your cousin’s heiress,” he said. “Did I not say I brought gifts from the dead? The dead Giacomo Bescemi sends you this gift, madonna.”

He turned abruptly away, though they both called after him earnestly.

“Tomorrow,” he murmured, “tomorrow we will talk of this again; tonight I am tired.”

He left them, weeping a little together, and descended into the hall.

There the porter was sitting over a brazier of almond shells which gave a feeble, perfumed heat.

“I am thirsty, friend,” said Giacomo.

The man rose instantly to fetch food and drink, and the Conte remained alone.

Quickly he drew the packet of papers from his heart and thrust them into the fire. As they scorched, curled, flared, and turned to ashes, he murmured to himself: “Gifts of the dead — gifts of the dead!”

Then, looking round the home he had renounced, he went slowly towards the door and out into the November night.

The moon was up and a cold wind blew from Mount Etna, so the night was white and bitter, and full of the noise of wind.

It was but a few minutes later that Madonna Orsola came down to offer hospitality to the pilgrim. But he had gone, nor in Santa Rosa nor in Sicily was he again seen.

“The Windsor Magazine” Jun. 1915

THE FAIR HAIR
OF AMBROSINE

Claude Boucher found himself awaiting with increasing dread the approach of the 12th of December.

He still called it December to himself; the new names of the divisions of the years of liberty had never taken root in his heart, which remained faithful to many of the old traditions.

Yet he was a good servant of the new Republic and had so far escaped peril during perilous times without sinking into servile insignificance. He was a clerk in the Chamber of Deputies, well paid and unmolested. From the safe vantage of a dignified obscurity he watched greater men come and go; and ate his supper and smoked his pipe in peace while the death-carts went to and from the prisons and the Place de la Revolution — which Boucher, in his mind, thought of as the Place du Louis XVI.

He had his ambitions, but he held them suspended till safer times: he was not the man for a brilliant, fiery career ending in the guillotine; he was not, either, pessimistic; a better epoch, he would declare, would certainly emerge from the present confusion (he refused to accept it as anything else), which could but be regarded as the birth-throes of a settled state.

Therefore, being young and calm and having lost nothing by the upheaval of society, he waited, as he felt he could afford to wait, until the order of things was once more stable and established. The horrors that had washed, like a sea of filth and blood, round his safety, had scarcely touched him; this terror he felt at looking forward to the 12th of December was the first fear that he had ever known.

A fear unreasonable and by no means to be explained.

The first and main cause of his dread was a trifle, an affair so slight that when he had first heard of it he had put it from his mind as a thing of no importance.

One of the Deputies of Lille had put his finger on a conspiracy in the Department of Béarn, involving several names that had hitherto passed as those of good friends of the Republic. The matter did not loom large, but required some delicacy in the handling. The Deputy for the Department concerned was away; no steps were to be taken until his return, which would be on the 12th of December; then Boucher, as a man reliable and trustworthy, was to carry all papers relating to the alleged conspiracy to his house at Saint-Cloud.

At first the young clerk had thought nothing of this; then he had been rather pleased at the slight importance the mission gave him. That night, over his supper in the little café in the Rue Saint-Germains, he began to think of Ambrosine, who had long been a forbidden memory.

She was a little actress in alight theatre that existed during the days of the Terror like a poisonous flower blooming on corruption.

She had lived in a little house on the way to Saint-Cloud, a house on the banks of the river, an innocent and modest-looking place to shelter Ambrosine, who was neither innocent nor modest.

Claude Boucher had loved her; and every night she had finished her part in the wild and indecent performance, he would drive her home in a little yellow cabriolet which had once belonged to a lady of fashion.

They had been quite happy; she was certainly fond of Claude and, he believed, faithful to him; he had rivals, and it flattered him to take her away from these and make her completely his, almost subservient to him; she was only a child of the gutters of Saint-Antoine, but she was graceful and charming, and endearing too in her simplicity and ardour, which she preserved despite her manifold deceits and vices.

She was not beautiful, but she had dark blue eyes and kept her skin lily pale, and her hair was wonderful, and untouched by bleach or powder; fair and thick and uncurling, yet full with a natural ripple, she kept it piled carelessly high with such fantastic combs as she could afford, and from these it fell continuously on to her thin bosom and slanting shoulders.

Claude, sitting in his café, remembered this fair hair, and how it would fly about her when she ran from the stage, flushed, panting, half naked from the dance by which she had amused men inflamed with blood.

He thought; “To take those papers I shall have to pass the house where she lived….”

He checked himself then his thought continued: “Where she died.” Ambrosine had been murdered three years ago.

One day in winter she had not appeared at the theatre. As there was a new topical song for her to learn, they had sent a messenger to the little house on the river.

He found her in her bed-gown on the floor of her bedchamber, stabbed through and through the fragile body. The house was in confusion and had been stripped of its few poor valuables.

No-one knew anything: the house was lonely, and Ambrosine lived alone; the old woman who worked for her came in for a portion of the day only. It was found that she had no friends or relatives and that no-one knew her real name — she was just a waif from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

That night Claude went to see her; they had quarrelled a little, and for two days he had kept away.

Rough care had disposed her decently on the tawdry silks of the canopied bed; she was covered to the chin, and her face, bruised and slightly distorted, had the aggrieved look of a startled child.

Her hair was smoothed and folded like a pillow beneath her head, her little peaked features looked insignificant beside this unchanged splendour of, her hair.

As Claude looked at her he wondered how he could have ever loved her — a creature so thin, so charmless; his one desire was to forget her, for she now seemed something malignant.

He paid what was needful to save her from a pauper’s burial and went back to Paris to forget. No-one found it difficult to forget Ambrosine; her obscure tragedy troubled no-one — there was too much else happening in France. Thieves had obviously murdered her for her few possessions: it was left at that, for no-one really cared. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine could provide plenty such as she.

For a while she held Claude at night; with the darkness would come her image, holding him off sleep.

Always he saw her dead, with the strained, half-open lips, the half-closed, fixed eyes, the thin nose, and the cheeks and chin of sharp delicacy outlined against the pillow of yellow hair.

Always dead. Again and again he tried to picture her living face, her moving form, but he could not capture them.

He could not recall the feel of her kisses or her warm caresses, but the sensation of her cold yet soft dead cheek as he had felt it beneath a furtive touch was long with him.

But after a while he escaped from Ambrosine; he forgot.

Now, as he remembered the way his route took him on the 12th of December, he remembered.

Not that he had any horror of the house or the locality — it simply had not happened that he had ever had occasion to go there since her death. Probably there were other people living there now, or the house might even be destroyed — in any case he would take a detour round the deserted park.

But it was absurd to suppose that he was afraid of that house or unwilling to pass the way he had last passed coming from her deathbed. It was all over and he had forgotten. So he assured himself; yet he began to recall Ambrosine, and always with a sensation of faint horror.

That night was the beginning of his fear.

He went home late to his lodging near the café and, on sleeping, dreamt very exactly this dream, which had the clearness and force of a vision.

He dreamt that it was the 12th of December and that he was riding towards Saint-Cloud carrying the papers he was to take to the Béarnais Deputy.

It was a cold, clear, melancholy afternoon, and the silence of dreams encompassed him as he rode.

When he reached the great iron gates of the dismantled park, his horse fell lame. He was not very far from his destination, and he decided to go on foot. Leaving his horse at a little inn, he struck out across the park.

He saw it all perfectly plainly — the great avenues of leafless trees, the stretches of greensward scattered with dead leaves, the carp ponds and fountains with their neglected statues and choked basins, the parterres where flowers had bloomed not so long ago, and that now looked as utterly decayed; and to his right, as he walked, always the pale glimpse of the river, shining between the trees.

Now, as he proceeded and the dusk began to fill the great park with shadows, he was aware of a companion walking at his side, step for step with him. He could not discern the head and face of this man, which seemed inextricably blended with the shadows, but he saw that he wore a green coat with dark blue frogs.

And he at once began to conceive of this companion a horror and dread unspeakable. He hastened his steps; but the other, with the silent precision of dreams, was ever beside him. The day had now faded to that fixed, colourless light which is the proper atmosphere of visions, and the trees and grass were still, the water without a ripple.

They came now, Claude and the figure that dogged him, to a flat carp-basin, dried and lined with green moss. A group of trees overshadowed it with bare branches; a straight stone figure rose behind, faceless and ominous. Claude could not remember this place, well known as was Saint-Cloud to him.

His companion stopped and bent down to adjust the buckles of his shoe. Claude longed to hasten on, but could not move; the other rose, took his hand, and led him hurriedly across the dry grass.

They approached the bank of a river and a house that stood there, on the confines of the park.

Claude knew the house. It was shuttered as when he had seen it on his last visit to Ambrosine. The garden was a mass of tangled weeds — he noticed a bramble that barred the door across and across.

“They did not find the place so easy to let,” he found himself saying.

His companion released him, and, wrenching off the rotting shutter of one of the lower windows, climbed into the house. Claude, impelled against his will, followed.

He saw, very distinctly (as, indeed, he had seen everything very distinctly in his dream), the dreadful, bare, disordered room of Ambrosine.

Then a deeper and more utter horror descended on him. He knew, suddenly, and with utter conviction, that he was with the murderer of Ambrosine.

And while he formed a shriek, the creature came at him with raised knife and had him by the throat, and he knew that he was being killed as she had been killed, that their two fates were bound together; and that her destiny, from which he had tried to free himself, had closed on him also.

This being the culmination of the dream, he woke; he slept no more till morning, and even in the daylight hours the dream haunted him with a great and invincible dread.

It was the more horrible that reality mingled with it — remembrance of days that had really existed were blended with remembrance of that dreadful day of the dream, recollections of Ambrosine were blended with that vision of her deserted home.

The past and the dream became one, rendering the dead woman an object of horror, hateful and repellent. He could not without a shudder recall her gayest moments or think of the little theatre where she used to act.

So three days passed, and then he dreamt the dream again.

In every detail he went through it as he had been through it before, and by no effort could he awake until the dream was accomplished and he was in the grip of the murderer of Ambrosine, with the steel descending into his side.

And the day of his journey was now only a week off he hardly thought of trying to evade it, of pleading illness or asking another to take his place; it was part of the horror of the thing that he felt that it was inevitable that he should go — that his journey was not to be evaded by any effort, however frantic, that he might make.

Besides, he had his sane, reasonable moments when he was able to see the folly of being troubled by a dream which had recalled a little dancer with whom he had once been in love, and involved her with a certain journey near her dwelling that he was bound to make.

That was what it came to — just a dream and a recollection.

He argued in these quiet moments that it was not strange that his proposed journey to Saint-Cloud should arouse memories of Ambrosine and that the two should combine in a dream.

He distracted himself by taking a deeper interest in the wild, fierce life of Paris, by listening to all the tragedies daily recounted, by visiting all the quarters most lawless and most distressed. One day he even went, for the first time, to watch the executions. The real horror would check, he thought, the fanciful horror that haunted him.

But the first victim he saw was a young girl with hands red from the cold, a strained mouth and fair hair turned up on her small head; her eyes, over which the dullness of death seemed to have already passed, stared in the direction of Claude. He turned away with a movement so rough that the crowd, pressing round him, protested fiercely.

Claude strode through the chill and windy streets of Paris and thought of the approaching 12th of December as of the day of his death. So intense became his agitation that he turned instinctively towards his one friend, as one being enclosed in darkness will turn towards the one light.

René Legarais was his fellow clerk and his first confidant and counsellor — a man a few years older than himself, and, like himself, sober, quiet, industrious, and well balanced.

Claude found his lodging near the Pre-aux-Clercs empty; René was yet at the Chamber.

Claude waited; he found himself encouraged even by the sight of the cheerful, familiar room, with books, and lamp, and fire, and the coffee-service waiting for his friend’s return.

He now tried hard to reason himself out of his folly.

He would tell René, and with the telling he would see the absurdity of the whole thing and they would laugh it away together over a glass of wine.

René, he remembered, had also been in love with Ambrosine, but in a foolish, sentimental fashion — Claude smiled to think of it, but he believed that René had been ready to marry the little creature. She had even favoured his respectful wooing (so gossip said) until Claude had appeared, with bolder methods and his vivid good looks and his lavish purse.

René had retired with the best of grace, and that was all long ago and forgotten by both; Claude wondered why he thought of it now, sitting here in the warmth and light. Only because he was unnerved and unstrung and obsessed by that weird dream.

René came home at his usual hour, flushed by the sharp wind and shaking the raindrops from his frieze coat. He was a pale young man with heavy brown hair, insignificant features, and a mole on his upper lip. He looked unhealthy and pensive, and wore horn-rimmed glasses when he worked.

“Where were you this afternoon?” he asked. “Your desk was empty.”

“I was not well,” said Claude.

René gave him a quick glance.

Claude looked well enough now, a colour from the fire in his handsome brown face, his slim figure stretched at ease in the deep-armed leather chair and a half-mocking smile on his lips.

“I went to see the executions,” he added.

“Bah!” said René.

He came to the fire and warmed his hands, which were stiff and red with cold; they reminded Claude of the hands of the girl whom he had seen on the platform of the guillotine.

“It is the first time,” replied Claude, “and I shall not go again.”

“I have never been,” said René.

“There was a girl there.” Claude could not keep it off his tongue. “There always are girls, I believe.”

“She was quite young.”

“Yes?” René looked up, aware that interest was expected of him.

“And then — like Ambrosine.”

“Ambrosine?”

“You remember,” said Claude impatiently, “the little dancer… at Saint-Cloud.”

“Oh, whatever made you think of her?” René looked relieved, as if he had expected something more portentous and terrible.

“That is what I wish to know — what has made me think of her? I believed that I had forgotten.”

“I had, certainly.”

“So had I.”

“What has reminded you?”

Claude struggled with his trouble, which now seemed to him ridiculous.

“I have to go to Saint-Cloud,” he said at last.

“When?”

“The 12th.”

“On business of the Chamber?”

“Yes.”

“And this reminded you?”

“Yes — you see,” explained Claude slowly, “I have not been there since.”

“Not since?” René pondered, and seemed to understand. “And lately I have had a dream.”

“Oh, dreams,” said René; he lifted his shoulders lightly and turned to the fire.

“Do you dream?” asked Claude, reluctant to enter on the subject, yet driven to seek the relief of speech.

“Who does not dream — now — in Paris?”

Claude thought of the thin girl on the steps of the guillotine. “There is good matter for dreams in Paris,” he admitted, adding gloomily; “I wish that I had not been to the executions.”

René was making the coffee; he laughed good-naturedly.

“Come, Claude, what is the matter with you? What have you on your conscience?”

“Ambrosine.”

René lifted his brows. “Have you not found, in Paris, in three years, a woman to make you forget Ambrosine, poor little fool?”

“I had forgotten,” said Claude fiercely, “but this cursed journey — and this cursed dream — made me remember.”

“You are nervous, overworked,” replied his friend; it was quite true that in these few weeks Claude had been working with a desperate energy; he snatched eagerly at the excuse.

“Yes, yes, that is it… but the times… enough to unnerve any man — death and ruin on either side and the toils closing on so many one knew.”

René poured out the coffee, took his cup, and settled himself comfortably in the armchair opposite Claude. He drank and stretched his limbs with the satisfaction of a man pleasantly tired.

“After all, you need not take this journey,” he said thoughtfully; “there are a dozen would do it for you.”

“That is just it — I feel impelled to go, as if no effort of mine would release me.” He hesitated a moment, then added: “That is part of the horror of it.”

“The horror?”

“Of the whole thing — do you not see the horror?” asked Claude impatiently.

“My dear fellow, how can I — when you have not told me what this wonderful dream is about?”

Claude flushed, and looked into the fire; after all, he thought, René was too commonplace to understand his ghostly terrors — and the thing did seem ridiculous when he was sitting there warm and comfortable and safe.

Yet it could not be dismissed from his mind — he had to speak, even if to a listener probably unsympathetic.

“It is like a vision,” he said. “I have had it three times it is a prevision of the journey to Saint-Cloud.”

René, attentive, waited.

“It is so very exact,” continued Claude, “and each time the same.”

“Tell me.”

“Oh, it is only that — the ride to the gate, the leaving of the lame horse, the walk through the park, and then—”

“Well?”

“The appearance of a man walking beside me.”

“You know him?”

“I hardly saw the face.”

“Well?” René continued to urge Claude’s manifest reluctance. “We went, finally, to the house of Ambrosine.”

“Ah yes, she lived there on the banks of the river—”

“Surely you remember—”

“We were never intimate,” smiled René. “I do not believe that I ever went to her house. Of course, it was familiar to you?”

“I saw it again exactly — it was shut up; deserted and in decay. My companion broke the window shutters and stepped in. I followed. The room was in disrepair, unfurnished. As I looked round the place—”

He shuddered, in spite of his strong control.

“The fiend with me revealed himself. I knew that he was the murderer of Ambrosine, and he fell on me as he had fallen on her.” René was silent a moment.

“Why should the murderer of Ambrosine wish to murder you?” he asked at length.

“How do I know? I tell you my dream.”

“An extraordinary dream.”

“Would you take it as a warning?”

“A warning?”

“Of what will happen?”

“It is obviously absurd,” said René quietly.

“Yes, absurd — yet I feel as if the 12th of December would be the day of my death.”

“You have brooded over it — you must put it out of your mind.”

“I cannot,” said Claude wildly. “I cannot!”

“Then don’t go.”

“I tell you it is out of my power to stay away.”

René looked at him keenly. “Then how can I help you?”

Claude took this glance to mean that he doubted his wits. “Only by listening to my fool’s talk,” he said, smiling.

“Does that help?”

“I hope it may. You see, the whole thing — that wretched girl — has become an obsession, waking and sleeping.”

“Strange.”

“Strange indeed.”

“After you had forgotten.”

“Yes, I had forgotten,” said Claude.

“So had I, to tell the truth.”

“Why should one remember? It was a curious affair.”

“Her death?”

“Her murder, yes.”

“I do not see that it was so curious. A little wanton, living alone with some spoils foolishly displayed — she courted her fate.”

“But she had so little — a few bits of imitation jewellery, a few coins; and who should have known of them?”

René shrugged and put down his empty coffee-cup.

“And they said she was liked by the few poor folk about—”

“There are always ruffians on the tramp on the watch for these chances.”

“Yes; yet it was strange—”

René interrupted with an expression of distaste. “Why go back to this?”

Claude stared, as if amazed at himself. “Why, indeed?”

“You become morbid, unreasonable, Claude; rouse yourself, forget this thing.”

The other laughed; it did not have a pleasant sound.

“I suppose I am haunted.”

“Why should you be? You did not do her any wrong.”

“She cared for me.”

René laughed now.

“By God!” said Claude fiercely. “She cared for me — I believe she still cares. That is why she will not let me go….”

René rose and took a step or two away from him.

“What are you talking of?” he asked.

“I say, she cares — that is why she is trying to warn me.”

“You think it is she?”

“Ambrosine — yes.”

“You must not allow yourself these fancies, my poor fellow.”

“You may well pity me. I never cared for her; I think I hated her when she was dead. I hate her now. Why won’t she keep quiet in her grave and leave me alone?”

He rose and walked across the room with a lurching step. René, leaning against the table, watched him.

“What was the house like — in your dreams?”

“I told you.”

“Decayed — deserted?”

“And tainted. It had a taint of death — like a smell of stale blood.”

“It is not likely,” said René, “that the place is empty. Now, if it was inhabited, would not that shake your faith in your vision?” Claude stopped short in his walk; he had not thought of that.

“Now,” smiled René, “send someone to look at the place.”

“Who could live there — after that?”

“Bah! Do you think people stop for that nowadays? If they did, half the city would be uninhabited. The place is cheap, I presume, and someone’s property. I do not suppose it has been allowed to fall into disrepair. That was your fancy.”

“I might send someone to see,” reflected Claude.

“That is what I suggest — find out before the 12th, and if the house is inhabited, as I am sure it is, all this moonshine will clear away from your brain and you will undertake your journey with a good heart.”

“I will do that,” answered Claude gratefully. “I knew that you would help me — forgive me for having wearied you, René.”

His friend smiled.

“I want you to be reasonable — nothing is going to happen. After all, these papers to the Béarnais are not of such importance; no-one would murder you to get them.”

“Oh, it had nothing to do with the Béarnais, but with Ambrosine.”

“You must forget Ambrosine,” said René decidedly. “She has ceased to exist and there are no such things as ghosts.”

Claude smiled; he was thinking that once René had been quite sentimental over Ambrosine; certainly he was cured of that fancy. Why could not he too completely put the little dancer from his mind?

He also had long ceased to care.

But he was ashamed to refer further to his fears and imaginings.

“You have done me good,” he declared. “I shall think no more of the matter. After all, the 12th will soon come and go, and then the thing will cease to have any meaning.”

René smiled, seemingly relieved by his returned cheerfulness. “Still, send someone to look at the house,” he said; “that will send you on your journey with a lighter heart.”

“At once — tomorrow.” They parted, and Claude went home through the cold streets.

As soon as he had left the lighted room and the company of his friend, the old dreary terror returned.

He hastened to his chamber, hoping to gain relief amid his own surroundings, and lit every candle he could find.

He would not go to bed, as he dreaded the return of the dream, yet he was sleepy and had nothing to do.

Presently, he went to a bottom drawer in the modest bureau that served him as a wardrobe and took out a small parcel wrapped in silver paper. He unfolded it and brought forth a chicken-skin fan, wreathed with figures of flying loves in rose and silver tones that surrounded a delicate pastoral river scene, the banks trailing with eglantine, the azure sky veiled in soft clouds, and a blue, satin-lined boat fastened by a gold cord to an alabaster pillar in readiness for amorous passengers.

The fan was not new: there were the marks of some spots that had been cleaned away, spots of blood perhaps, and the fine ivory sticks were stained in places.

Claude had bought it at a bric-à-brac shop filled with the plunder of château and hôtel; it had been cheap and valuable, and at the time he had not cared that it had probably been stolen from some scene of murder and violence and that its one-time owner had almost certainly bowed her neck to a bitter fate — no, it had rather amused him to buy for the little dancer of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine the property of some great lady.

Now it seemed a sinister and horrid omen, this toy with the bloodspots scarcely erased. It had been meant as a peace-offering for Ambrosine — after their little quarrel, which was never to be mended this side of the grave.

He had had it in his pocket when he had gone to look at her for the last time.

Since then it had lain in the drawer forgotten, it had never occurred to him to give it to another woman — it was doubly the property of the dead. Now he handled it carefully, opening and shutting it in the candlelight and staring at those cupids who brought no thoughts of love and that faery scene that brought no thoughts of peace.

And as he looked he seemed to see the delicate thing in the small hands of Ambrosine as she sat up in the big bed with the gaudy draperies, and her fair hair fell down and obscured the fan.

Her fair hair…

How plainly he could see her fair hair as he had last seen it, folded into a neat pillow for her head.

He put the fan away and built up a big fire, feeding it with pine knots; he was possessed by the certainty that if he slept he would again dream of the journey to Saint-Cloud.

It seemed as if Ambrosine was in the room, trying to speak to him, to tell him something; but he would not let her, he would not put himself in her power; he would not sleep.

Among the neglected books on the little shelf by his bed was an old copy of Pascal. Claude took this down and began reading it with painful exactitude and attention. With this and strong coffee he kept himself awake till morning.

Before he left for the Chamber, he paid his landlord’s son to go to Saint-Cloud and look at the house of Ambrosine, which he very carefully described, adding the excuse that he had been told of the place as a desirable house for the summer heat; above all things, the boy must notice whether it was inhabited or not.

All that day he was languid and heavy-eyed, weary from lack of sleep, with his nerves on the rack.

Through the dreary, monotonous hours he was picturing his messenger, treading unconsciously the way that had become so terrible to him, approaching the fatal house and finding it, as he had found it, three times in his dreams, deserted and decayed.

René made no reference to their conversation of the previous night, but he was more than ever friendly and pleasant.

When the intolerable day was at last over, he asked Claude to dine with him, but the other declined; his reason, which he did not give, was that he was desperately anxious to hear the news the boy had brought from Saint-Cloud.

When he reached home the fellow had returned; a boat had given him a lift each way.

Claude was foolishly relieved to see his calm cheerfulness. “Well?” he asked, with the best indifference he could assume.

“Well, Citizen Boucher, I should not take that house at Saint-Cloud.”

“Why?” The words came mechanically.

“First of all, there has been a bad murder there.”

“How did you find that out?”

“The people on the boat told me — they go past every day.” So the thing was known — remembered.

“Never mind that, boy. What of the house?”

“It is in ruins, decay—”

“Ruins — decay?”

“Well, all shuttered up—”

“Shuttered?”

“Yes, citizen,” he began, staring at Claude, whose manner was certainly startling, “and the garden full of weeds.”

Claude made an effort to speak rationally.

“So you did not see the house inside, eh?” he asked.

“No-one knew who had the key — the landlord lived in Paris, they said, and never came there. The place had a bad reputation because of the horrid murder done there.”

“In these times,” muttered Claude, “are they so sensitive?”

“They are just ignorant people, citizen — those on the boat and those I met in the forest.”

“And the house was impossible?”

“It would need a good deal of repairing.”

“Ah—”

“And the weeds in the garden were monstrous — there was one great bramble across and across the door.”

Claude gave him a terrible look and dismissed him.

So it was all there, exactly like his dream.

There were only three days to the 12th — only three days perhaps to live.

When he reached his room he looked at the calendar, hoping he had made some mistake in the date.

No; in three days it would be the 12th.

He could not go to bed, but no coffee could keep him awake.

As soon as he was asleep he dreamed his dream of the journey to Saint-Cloud, nor could he rouse himself until the horrid sequence of events was complete.

He awoke shivering, unnerved and cold with sweat. He had to take brandy before he could fit himself to make his toilet and go to the Chamber.

As he hurried along the street fresh with the transient morning freshness of the city, the burden of his misery was lightened by a sudden thought. He would take a companion with him, he would take René.

That would defeat the dream.

The warning would have saved him; no-one would attack two of them and they could go armed; they need not go near the house, and they could proceed by water and not walk through the Park.

Claude felt almost himself again as he thought out this plan.

No sooner had he reached the Chamber than he found his friend and broached the scheme to him. René was agreeable, and readily accorded his company.

“I thought of it myself,” he said. “I can easily get permission to come with you, and we will lay this ghost once and forever.”

Claude was so relieved that he almost lost his old foreboding.

But the night before the journey he again dreamed that he was being murdered by the murderer of Ambrosine, who wore a green coat with dark blue frogs.

At the appointed hour they set out, René endeavouring to cheer Claude, who was gloomy and taciturn, but as the journey proceeded, his spirits rose; the charm had been proved wrong in the first instance, he was not going on horseback to Saint-Cloud.

But when they reached the gates of the park, he was disappointed to find the boat stopped at the little quay and began unloading.

René had arranged with the captain; and René, it seemed, had misunderstood.

The boat went no farther.

But it was only a short walk across the park to Saint-Cloud and the Deputy’s house — the captain could not understand Claude’s discomfiture.

Well, they must walk — here again the dream was wrong.

He had a companion. René laughed at him; the walk would do them good this cold evening, and they would be at their destination long before dusk — as for the return, if they were not offered hospitality, well, there were good inns at Saint-Cloud.

They entered the magnificent iron gates, now always open, and started briskly across the grass.

Here it was, exactly as he had seen it in his dreams, the huge bare trees, the dead leaves underfoot, the pallid gleam of the river to the right, the expanse of forest to the left, through which now and then a fountain or a statue showed.

It was bitterly cold, the sky veiled, and presently a thin mist rose off the river, dimming everything with fog. Like the dim light of his dream.

“We shall lose our way,” he said.

“No; I know this way well.”

“You know it?”

“When I was a boy I used to live at Saint-Cloud,” said René.

They proceeded more slowly, muffled to the throats in their greatcoats, which they had worn all the journey, for it had been cold on the river also.

Claude thought of Ambrosine till his senses reeled round that one image.

Here she had walked, he with her, often enough — near was her house, near her grave.

He seemed to see her in every dimness between the trees — Ambrosine, with her fair hair mingling with the mist.

Suddenly before him a huge fountain arose with a dried basin and a featureless statue behind. And René stopped to latch up his shoe.

He was not thinking of his dream now, but he had the sensation that this had all happened before. As he looked at René, he muttered to himself, half stupidly: “What an extraordinary coincidence!”

Then René straightened himself and slipped his hand through his friend’s arm.

His mantle had fallen back a little, and Claude saw that he wore a new suit, dark green, frogged with dark blue, and again he muttered: “What an extraordinary coincidence!”

“I know the way,” said René, and led him, as if he had been a blind man, through the shifting mist.

In a few moments they stood on the outskirts of the park and before the decayed and deserted house of Ambrosine — as he had seen it, with the weeds in the garden and the bramble across the door.

They entered the little patch of ground.

“Now we are here,” said René, “we may as well look inside.”

So saying, he wrenched off one of the rotting shutters and climbed into the room.

Claude followed him, like a creature deprived of wits.

They stood together in the damp, dull, bare room — as they had stood together in the dream.

Claude looked at René’s face, which had quite changed. “So you murdered her?” he said in a sick voice.

“You never guessed?” asked René. “I loved her, you see, and she loved me till you came. And then I hated both of you. I was mad from then, I think, as mad as you with your infernal dreams.”

“You murdered Ambrosine!” whimpered Claude.

“And your dream showed me the way to murder you. I have been waiting so long to find how to do it.”

Claude began laughing.

“Her fair hair — if one could open her grave one might see it again — like a pillow for her head….” He looked at René, whose pale and distorted face seemed to grow larger, until it bore down on him like an evil thing blotting out hope.

Claude did not put a hand .to any of the weapons he had brought; he fell on his knees and held up his hands in an attitude of prayer, while he began to gabble senseless words.

And René fell on him with the knife that had killed Ambrosine.

Shadows of Yesterday, Stories from an Old Catalogue (1916)

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949)

GIUDETTA’S
WEDDING NIGHT

The wedding feast was nearly over.

The bride sat apart in her own chamber, even her maids dismissed, and listened to the last harps and violins whose sad music echoed through the old palazzo and quivered across the lagoon.

She sat in the dusk which obscured her splendour; her brocaded gown was unlaced and showed her shoulders and bosom rising from loose lace and lawn; her shoes were off and her stockings were of silk so fine as to show every line in her feet — which were crossed on a footstool of rose-coloured damask.

Most of the powder had been shaken from her hair which fell over her shoulders in fine curls of gold; she wore a chaplet, and necklace and earrings of pearls; the dimly seen furniture showed richly in the shadows, bouquets of roses, lilies, and carnations were on the dressing-table, on the chairs and on the floor.

On the bride’s lap were trails of syringa, verbena, and orange and lemon, from her hair fell the blooms of the bridal coronal and mingled with these.

Once or twice she stretched herself and yawned, her body moving softly in the silken clothes.

Could anyone have flashed a candle or a lamp through the gloom and revealed that head and face adorned with flowers and jewels, he would have seen a wicked countenance look up at him from the shadows, a countenance as firm in outline and as soft in colour as tinted alabaster, a low, smooth brow, beautiful, hard eyes, scornful nostrils to a straight, small nose, a beautiful curved, greedy mouth, a smooth white chin.

So she sat, Giudetta Grimaldi, while her bridegroom entertained the last guests, sat and mused in the darkness.

And waited for her lover.

Waited patiently with languid self-composure, and did not trouble to listen for the chiming of the little silver clock out of the darkness.

Men had never kept Giudetta waiting; she was so sure of all of them; this security made her disdainful; she had never cared for any of her lovers save for this man for whom she waited on her wedding night.

When she heard the splash of oars beneath her window she did not move, when she heard his feet on the stone façade, climbing up to her, she did not turn her head.

Only when his figure appeared on the balcony did she move, and gathering all her blossoms to her bosom, come, breathing sweetness, to the open window.

Darkness concealed him; the infant moon was but enough to cast a sparkle on the dark waters of the canal and show the dark outlines of the crowded, silent palaces against the pale darkness of the sky.

“So Giudetta is married,” he said.

She leant on his heart; her flowers, falling through careless fingers, fell on the balcony and through the iron railings on to the waters below.

“They would marry me,” she said, “as well he as another. How silent the city is tonight.”

“The plague is spreading.”

“It is not near us?”

“Nay, the other end of Venice, but the mere name frightens people.”

He did not offer to caress her; his cold love-making had always served to increase her passion, she took him by the shoulder and drawing his head down, almost roughly kissed his cheek.

“Listen,” her words came quickly, yet softly, like an accompaniment to the harp and violins, “we have never had more than a few moments together, you and I — I have played with you long enough, I love you, Astorre, I love you — I can be free tonight — take me, take me away—”

Her surrender was almost fierce; the man who held her shuddered.

“I meant to ask you for tonight — your wedding night,” he said, whispering through her hair that curtained his ear, “tonight I will show you how I love you, Giudetta, Giudetta—”

She smiled; she hated her husband and his family, it pleased her to insult them; voluptuously, playing with her own pleasure, she passed her little hand slowly over the face of her lover and let it rest on his lips to receive his kiss.

“You will come with me in my gondola tonight?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“But he?”

“Leave that to me — how shall I get down to you?”

“I have a rope ladder — you will be safe with me.”

“And before dawn you will bring me back?”

“You shall come back,” he said, “when you wish.”

The music ceased.

Giudetta drew softly away and tiptoed back into the room.

Feeling her way to the dressing-table she found a box that she knew by the silk surface and the raised design of seed pearls.

Opening this she drew out a little package.

Swiftly and with a delicate touch she found a goblet of wine, which she had placed carefully on the little table by the window.

Into this she dropped the contents of the package, a white powder that fell heavily and quickly dissolved.

With this still in her hand she unlocked the door, listened, and hearing footsteps retreated behind the heavy folds of the silk bed curtain.

Her husband entered.

“Dark — dark?” he said.

“I am abed,” answered Giudetta from the curtains, “I was weary.”

The Marchese paused; he was not sure of his bride nor of his own fortune in having married a great beauty; the feast had left him depressed, a heavy weight hung about his heart.

“Where are your candles, Giudetta?” he asked.

She put her head down so that the sound of her voice came from the pillow.

“Leave the candles, my eyes are tired.”

Carefully in the darkness she was holding upright the goblet, holding it steadily so that the liquid should not spill.

She heard him coming towards her; he moved the curtains and she saw his dark shape between her and the dimness of the window.

She laughed, and the laughter enticed him; he bent down, peering for her through the dark.

Noiselessly she sat erect on the bed, gently and accurately she held the glass to his lips.

“Drink this to our wedding — it is fine Greek wine; I have been waiting for you to drink with me.”

He took the glass from her, she heard the rim clink against his teeth.

“Giudetta—”

His hand felt for her blindly; she evaded him, slipping easily into the room.

The Marchese sat on the edge of the bed.

“Giudetta—”

His voice was low and held a dull note of accusation; she watched the dark bulk of his figure slip sideways.

She turned and supported him so that he should make no noise in falling.

Gently she let him slide to the ground.

He lay there motionless.

She could see the white patches made by his wrist ruffles and the lace at his bosom.

Cautiously she waited, standing over the drugged man, then she went again to her dressing-table and the blue silk box, and took out strings of jewels which she fastened round her neck and waist and wrists.

Then she found her slippers by the chair where she had been sitting, and feeling along the couch found a cloak which she cast over her shoulders.

Laughing under her breath, she came out on to the balcony.

The night was serene and melancholy.

Black were the palaces rising against the sky, black the shadows they cast into the waters of the canals, remote were the stars, and as remote seemed the little yellow lights that flamed up here and there in distant windows.

Giudetta clung to her lover.

He turned from where he had been leaning over the iron railing.

“Ah, you are ready?”

“He sleeps — the poppy-seed is swift.”

“Sleeps he already? You have used more than poppy-seed.”

“That other drug they gave me, too — he fell like a dead man.”

“Would you have cared if he had been dead, my Giudetta?”

She laughed again.

“Why should I care?”

“You care for me?”

“I have told you.”

“Will you come now?”

“Take me away.”

She shivered when he showed her the rope ladder hanging over the balcony, but she climbed over the iron work without assistance.

With her shoes under one arm and her skirts gathered under the other, the beautiful Giudetta descended into the darkness.

The rope ladder was held taut, the gondolier received her in his arms and she sank into the cushions of the light, swaying boat.

Breathing heavily, she sat silent, watching the dark ripples the feeble lamp at the prow showed beating on the rocking gondola.

The palazzo towered so far above her it seemed as if she was at the bottom of a well; all these great buildings overwhelmed the frail boat with their heavy shadows.

When he joined her she gave a little sigh of gladness; the boat shot away out on to the canal.

Giudetta looked up at the open window of her bridal chamber, and a sense of danger touched her hard heart.

But she had managed intrigues as perilous as this before — only the fact that this time she was in love unnerved her courage.

She leant forward.

“Where are we going?”

“Home.”

He said the word quickly and quietly out of the darkness.

“Your home?”

“Yes.”

She moved luxuriously on the cushions and looked up at the stars which were so low and brilliant it seemed as if every minute they would fall in a shower on the dark city.

The gondola sped out into the Grand Canal; there were few lights in the windows and those few were dim, not the bright flame of festivals.

Only here and there lanterns hung on the mooring poles outside the palaces.

The state barges rocked at anchor by the broad stone steps; in this city of music there was no music tonight.

“How melancholy,” said Giudetta.

It was a melancholy that pleased her, as it rendered the more exquisite the contrast of her own happiness in being with the man whom she loved, her pleasure in being engaged on this delicious adventure on her wedding night.

They turned from the sea and the islands and towards the Rialto.

“How silent,” said Giudetta.

She liked this silence which seemed to make the world hers to fill with her own thoughts of love, not a breath intruded on her reveries; her passion could dominate the night undisturbed; she wished that they might move indefinitely between these dark palaces over the dark water and under the vivid stars.

They passed a shrine near the bridge; the Madonna holding the Child in an alcove in the wall of a palace.

A feeble lamp showed her dull blue and pink gown and the placid face of the Child.

Giudetta felt sorry for the Madonna who sat holding her Babe all day and all night, and never came down to row over the lagoons.

“How still it is,” she whispered.

“The plague,” said Astorre.

They were passing under the Rialto, in complete darkness.

Giudetta wished that he had not used that word — “the plague”.

“This morning I saw many houses marked with the red cross,” continued Astorre, “and many pale faces looking from upper windows for assistance.”

“And no one went?”

“The priests or the nuns. But there are not enough. The people die so fast, the black gondolas are laden to the water edge, and there are no more coffins in the city.”

“Why do you tell me this?” asked Giudetta. “We should not be abroad.”

“Where I take you is safe from infection. You are not afraid?”

She laughed.

“Have I proved myself a coward?”

She took his right hand in both of hers and drew it down to her bosom.

He looked at her; she could see the pale oval of his face, nothing more; the darkness began to tease her, it was like a veil between them.

“Take me into the light,” she whispered, “and you will see how I am adorned for you.”

“For me!” he repeated the words in a strange tone. “Do you remember when you loved Rosario?” he added abruptly.

“Rosario,” she murmured the name lazily, playing with the memory it evoked.

“My brother.”

“Oh, I remember — did you think I had forgotten? But you are mistaken, I never cared for him.”

“He loved you.”

“I know.”

She laughed, not vexed at this conversation; it pleased her to remember the men who had loved her, and it pleased her to think Astorre was jealous.

“He loved you,” repeated the man thoughtfully.

“Well?”

“He broke his heart for you.”

“Did he?”

“You know it.”

“There have been so many,” smiled Giudetta. “And this was — last year. I sent him away after I met you.”

“You played with him for three months.”

“He was a pretty gentleman and adored me in good faith.”

“He forsook Rosina for you.”

“Yes?”

“You know that, also.”

“I had forgotten.”

“She loved him.”

“But he loved only me. Poor Rosina!” Giudetta laughed again.

“And he forsook her for you. They were betrothed.”

“Were they?”

“The marriage day fixed.”

“Yes?”

“I suppose it amused you to part them and then fling him aside?”

She released his hand and caressed it softly as she answered.

“I suppose so. But that is in the past, nothing amuses me now but to be with you. Is it not as if we had wings and flew between water and sky?”

“To what goal do we travel, you and I, O Giudetta?”

“To what goal! The future is dark, like the night!”

“Dark indeed.”

“I cannot dream what my life will be. I have never loved before.”

“Love is powerful.”

“Too powerful,” she shuddered; “it disturbs me. I wish I did not love.”

“Why, Giudetta, why?”

“Because I know not where it will lead me — I feel as if it would ruin my life and even cause my death.”

“Love is like that. I also am in the talons of love which drives me to anything — even perhaps to crime.”

She shivered with joy to hear him say this.

“You think of my husband?”

Astorre was silent.

They had turned off the Grand Canal and entered one smaller and almost totally dark, where the water lapped at weed-hung steps and the rust of gratings of lower windows.

“Suppose you killed him,” murmured Giudetta; “such things have been done for a woman.”

“Yes, murder has been done for a woman.”

She pressed close to him.

“You — could you do that?”

He answered strongly.

“Yes, Giudetta.”

The warm arms from which cloak and sleeves had fallen, encircled him.

She laid her cheek on his shoulder.

“You would kill for love?”

“Yes.”

“Without pity or hesitation?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, you know how to love! You are like what a lover should be.”

“I know how to love, Giudetta — I have given my life for love.”

“We shall be happy, my dearest, we shall be happy!”

They passed a church now; either side was a wall covered with roses; the yellow light from the wide open door showed these flowers and the circular wet steps and the bowed forms of the worshippers; for a second, too, it showed the small flushed face of Giudetta and the jewels on her bosom.

The darkness engulfed them again.

“Do you ever pray, Giudetta?”

“I prayed once.”

“For what boon?”

“After I had first seen you, beloved, I prayed you might love me.”

He answered fiercely.

“I prayed for that too, on my knees, fasting I prayed you might love me!”

“Some kind saint listened — I have burnt many candles at many shrines.” Her arms slipped from his neck, she sat upright, adjusting her thrown-back hair which lay in coils inside her hood.

The gondola stopped.

For a moment it shook to and fro as the man fastened it to the post, then rocked steadily at the moorings.

“We are there?” asked Giudetta.

She felt that all this had happened before in a dream; the narrow doorway with the steep steps rising out of the water, the two grated windows and the high-placed iron lamp that shed a dismal light over the masonry were all familiar to her.

“This is not your house?” she whispered.

“No, the house of one of my friends — empty for the moment. But I have all ready for this night’s feast.”

“It looks gloomy,” said Giudetta. She stood up, drawing her cloak about her shoulders.

Astorre laid a plank from the gondola to the steps and handed her ashore.

She entered.

A long passage was before her, damp and narrow, the house seemed mean and neglected.

Giudetta turned to her lover who was quickly beside her.

“You said you were bringing me to your home — here I would not have come.”

“This is my true home — not in the great palace, I have prepared it for you—”

She was unconvinced, and hesitated.

“You cannot turn back now,” he said, gently taking her arm, “here it is safe — no one will come to seek you here.”

“That is true,” she admitted.

“And you are with me.”

“Lead me,” she said, “and light! light! We have been in the dark so long!”

He took her hand and led her down the passage which was high and dark and damp and narrow — the entrance of a poor and neglected house, Giudetta thought.

Resentment touched her heart like a little flame; her adventure was spoilt by these sordid surroundings, her love was no longer what it had been on the balcony of her own beautiful chamber or in the gondola under the stars.

“Where are you leading me?” she asked, and her hand stiffened in his grasp.

The passage seemed endless.

Now they reached some steps, he guided her up, opened a door and ushered her into a lit room. It was a fair-sized apartment with painted walls and ceiling; the two windows were open; a chandelier of coloured glass gave the soft yellow light.

Beneath stood a table elegantly laid with two covers and two purple velvet chairs; for the rest the furniture was of a bedroom; a bed draped with purple and rose-coloured hangings stood on a dais, there were coffers, mirrors and a dressing-table.

Giudetta did not like the room.

It was not the setting she had imagined or wished for her love.

The chamber seemed to her unpleasant, even fearful, yet there was nothing strange about the place, it was like so many other Venetian rooms, rich, sombre, a little heavy in furnishing.

Astorre handed her into one of the velvet chairs and turned to leave her.

“Prince,” she said imperiously, “I do not like this house.”

He stood, with his hand on the open door, looking at her intently.

Now at last he was revealed to her, after the long concealment of the dark; she forgot her vexation as she looked at him.

His was the extreme handsomeness of face and body that is the passport to all worldly pleasures, handsomeness of dark warm colouring, of beautiful eyes, masculine and passionate, of a haughty mouth, curved and sensitive, handsomeness of movement and gestures, bearing and pose.

His curled black hair was only slightly powdered and he wore no hat; a double caped cloak hung open to show his suit of dark crimson; he wore diamonds in his cravat that twinkled under the clasp of his mantle.

Giudetta, looking at him, smiled.

She loved him, she was proud of him — they were together.

What did the background matter?

She put her fair head back against the velvet back of the chair.

“Why do you leave me, Astorre?” she asked in a gentler tone.

He had been fixing her with an intense scrutiny, drinking in her jewelled beauty as she was his, she believed.

At her words he drew himself together with a little start, as if awakened out of some dream or reverie.

“I go to fetch your supper, Giudetta,” he answered. “Tonight I wait on you.”

Without waiting for her consent, he left her quickly.

Giudetta sat still awhile playing with the pearls on her bosom and the sweet thoughts in her mind.

Then she rose and went to the window as people always will in a strange room.

She was at the back of the house and the stagnant waters of a little-used canal sucked at the bricks two feet below the windows, opposite the blank walls of crowded houses blocked out the night.

It was silent and desolate — Giudetta did not find this silence soft and pleasing as had been that on the canals, but rather dreary and sinister.

She moved back into the room, went to one of the mirrors and surveyed her own gorgeous fairness, pearl and diamond bedecked, to give her courage.

She was beautiful, no doubts could obscure that fact — she was beautiful, and what had beauty to fear? — in her experience, nothing.

Now she moved to the door and opened it — without the utter darkness of the corridor.

Quickly she closed it; horror, like a palpable presence, rose and confronted her.

“What is the matter with this room?” she asked herself.

Fear suddenly rose from all sides, engulfing her like waves.

She seemed to stand in isolation assailed by a thousand phantoms of horror, terror, and wrath; deeper fear and dismay than she had imagined possible to experience were now poured into her heart as water into a cup.

She had a glimpse into regions of infernal melancholy and unclean blackness, which was as if she peered suddenly into a chasm darker and deeper than eternity.

She seemed to be sinking down the steep walls of hell into an abyss where she would be forever lost, lost to all she had ever loved or enjoyed.

Buried through long aeons with the sins of a hundred million years lying heavy on her heart… Then the great horror passed; she fell on her knees beside the chair from which she had risen sick and shivering.

Clasping her hands tightly she called on her love.

“Astorre, why do you leave me?”

Now she had no desire for love, no appetite for pleasure, but she called on the only human being whom she thought to be near.

What was the matter with the room — what had happened here, why was she imprisoned here between the open windows with the lapping black waters beneath and the open door with the black passage without?

She turned round about like one confined, and though she was free of action and surrounded by space, her movement was as if she beat against bars.

Her straining ears heard a step and she moved to her feet, stumbling in her long gown and shaking the pearls and diamonds on her bosom.

Astorre entered.

She scarcely saw him with gladness; he seemed to have changed since they had entered the house; even his beauty was no longer pleasant, but had in it something horrible; as a handsome face will look from a design of hideous forms and partake of their terror, so he seemed to have been absorbed into the atmosphere of the house, robbed of charm and invested with horror.

“Prince,” said Giudetta feebly, “take me away from here.”

He pointed to the untouched table.

“We have not supped.”

“I could not eat.”

“What has happened, Giudetta?”

She made a great effort over her fears, but the earlier joyousness of the evening was not to be recaptured.

“Nothing has happened — but I feel as if I was going to lose all I cared for.”

He seated himself at the table, and taking his face in his hands looked at her.

“All you ever cared for? What have you ever cared for?”

She could not answer — what, in truth, was there she was afraid to lose?

To escape from this house she would have gladly forgone Astorre and found herself at home beside the drugged husband, for at the touch of personal fear, passion had died, and other days would bring another love.

“Myself,” she said at last. “I fear to lose myself, my life, my existence—”

“That in truth,” answered Astorre, “is all that you have to lose.”

She noticed now the difference in his tone; not with this had he spoken to her in the gondola.

Another and dreadful fear possessed her now.

“Astorre, why have you brought me here?”

“You ask me that now? Was it not for your sweet company?”

She supported herself by the chair and looked from him to the two open windows.

“I do not like this place,” she said almost as if to herself.

“Why?”

“Close the windows,” she continued, “the air from the water is damp.”

“The night is warm, Giudetta.”

“But I feel the house chill.”

She looked round for the cloak she had brought with her; it was brocade, the colour of faded red roses, lined with lemon-coloured satin, her marriage cloak…

She thought of her husband… she pictured him, very vividly, lying beside the bed in the dark room, with the bridal flowers scattered near.

Her fingers trembled as she fingered the mantle; what a perverse fool she was — she might as well have loved the Marchese, he was as personable a man as the one she had chosen — why had she risked so much for Astorre? — if she was not back before the palace was awake she was lost, lost before all Venice.

Why had she done this foolish thing, she asked herself dully — she could not now understand the passion that had prompted her to this adventure.

Thinking only of her own safety and her own terrors, she sank huddled into the chair and stared at Astorre.

The door was pushed open gently and a woman entered bearing a salver on which were various dishes.

She wore a plain cloth dress that might have been that of any servant, but over her face was a thick mask with slits for the mouth and eyes; made of grey silk and spotted with scarlet, it was one of the fantastic vizards of carnival.

“What is your jest?” asked Giudetta.

The woman put the dishes on the table: meat, pastries, and fruit on carved silver, and tall bottles of wine in cases of filigree.

“What jest?” repeated Giudetta.

“There is no jest,” said Astorre.

Giudetta rose in wild terror.

“A plot, there is some plot — this food is poisoned, I can swear it!”

“You shall not eat if you do not wish,” he showed no surprise at her fears.

The masked woman remained standing inside the door, the salver in her hands.

Giudetta lowered at both of them.

“Take me home,” she said between her teeth, “or on my soul you shall pay for it!”

“Certainly I shall pay for this night’s work,” he replied; he began unconcernedly to drink his wine and eat his supper.

Now she trembled with supplication.

“What harm have I ever done to you? You loved me, did you not? But a little while ago.”

Astorre laughed.

“Prince,” she continued desperately, “what is this you have against me?”

“What should I have against you?”

Another thought came to her.

“You are mad, mad,” she pointed to the silent third, “that woman is mad also!”

“Not mad, Giudetta.”

“Then take me home.”

All her energy was now concentrated on that, to get away, to escape, to be free of them both, to be back in her own place.

Astorre rose, his glass in his hand.

“To your good health, Giudetta.”

He drank to her gravely, mockingly, she thought, his fine hand flushed red from the reflection of the wine cast by the candles above his head, which filtered their light through sparkling glass.

She waited, helpless.

“Why are you frightened?” asked Astorre. “I swear I shall never touch you.”

“Why should you, what have you against me?” through all her terrors she fumbled with the wonder of it all… a little while ago they had been lovers.

The woman now came forward to remove the plates.

“Take off your mask,” said Astorre.

She did so and looked at Giudetta with a pale, mournful face.

“You know her?” asked Astorre.

“No!”

“It is Rosina.”

“Rosina! Changed, oh, Heaven, changed!” cried Giudetta.

“You remember her?” smiled Astorre. “She was betrothed to Rosario — he left her for you — he amused you — and she—”

“You never thought of me, did you?” asked Rosina, “nor of all the other women whose hearts you rifled?”

“Is this a vendetta?” asked Giudetta swiftly.

“I swear that we shall not touch you,” repeated Astorre.

This did not reassure her nor lift the black cloud of terror that hung over her soul; the sight of the woman whom she had so wantonly and maliciously and contemptuously wronged, filled her with unavailing rage and deeper dread.

She turned to Astorre, something of her beauty, blanched and withered through fear, returned in the flush of her anger.

“Why do you champion her,” she demanded, “was your brother so much to you?”

“He was much and she was more. I always loved Rosina, as she loved Rosario.”

Giudetta flung her head back and looked at him out of half closed eyes from which gleamed hatred.

“How I loathe you,” she said.

His beauty was now to her like the gorgeous skin of the serpent, a thing to be detested and destroyed.

She would gladly have killed him and stepped over his dead body to freedom.

Her helplessness made her sick with fury.

“Come away,” said Rosina.

She slipped her hand inside Astorre’s.

“Good-night, Giudetta,” said Astorre.

Relief soothed her when they were gone; she thought they meant to ruin her by leaving her there so that she could not return in time.

But she believed her wits were equal to this dilemma.

They locked the door after them as she had expected.

But there were the windows.

Mounting on a chair she detached one of the candles from the chandelier, and hurrying to the first window, thrust the light out and stared about her.

She had enough jewels to bribe half Venice — there must be someone who would come to her rescue.

The flame burned straight in the still air, it showed the waters below — the walls of the house; nothing else.

No boat, no passing gondola, no light in an opposite window encouraged her to hope.

The place was deserted.

Still she moved the candle to and fro and peered to right and left.

Suddenly she ceased this movement of her arm, she continued to stare and her face became as lifeless as the stone window that framed her terror.

She had seen between the two windows, coarsely marked on the rough wall, the scarlet cross, the warning and the sign of a plague-stricken house.

The candle dropped through her fingers, the little flame hissed to extinction in the sucking black waters.

Slowly she moved back into the room; physical nausea seized her; her jewels galled her like ropes of lead.

She tottered to the bed to stretch her fainting limbs there.

When her shaking hands had contrived to draw the curtains, shriek after shriek left her lips and echoed through the doomed house.

There lay Rosario, stiff and awful on the neat pillows; his livid, mottled face showing the manner of his death.

The plague.

Shadows of Yesterday, Stories from an Old Catalogue(1916)

PEARLS

No. 891 . — A small crucifix of ebony with portion of a rosary with silver chain and sandal wood beads. Italian, early eighteenth century.

Pia della Testanegra lay in her great carved bed and looked between the drawn curtains at a portrait of herself painted on the wall.

The figure was a portion of a fresco of flat pale colours showing nymphs and unicorns, cupids and satyrs intertwined with arabesques and delicate wreaths of roses; it ran round the big chamber in lines of grace and beauty. The Contessa Pia raised herself a little in the bed in order to obtain a better view of the likeness of herself which was in the centre of the wall at the foot of the bed and full in the light of the big window to the left which looked on to the lake.

It was the representation of a young woman with a pointed, beautiful pale face, dark eyes and bleached fair hair, gathered into elaborate ringlets on the top of her delicate head.

She wore a lemon-coloured gown, and held high a golden salver piled with dusky purple grapes. The Contessa Pia stared at the fair painted face with an impassive look.

The picture was but a faint reflection of what the original had been; but the woman’s sunken eyes were calm.

Her beauty had been over so long ago that she had ceased to regret the loss.

It was sixty years since the fresco had been painted, fifty years since her radiant loveliness had begun to wane.

And now she was so old that her age had become a legend.

They said she was a hundred, so far back did her story go — but no one knew exactly because all her contemporaries were dead.

And now she was dying in this lonely castle outside Rome, the gift of her third husband.

Dying penitent and blessed by the Holy Church.

She leant back on the cushions and folded her hands on the high embroidered sheets. Her dim eyes turned to the view from the window — a great expanse of stormy lake, grey beneath a great sky, sloping woods of pine on the opposite distant bank, and the heavy lines of the Certosa which stood straightly opposite the castle with the sweep of lake between.

Pia had had many residences to choose from when she finally retired from the world, and everyone wondered why she had chosen this ancient castle set on the edge of the brooding lake and shut away from Rome and the Campagna by the Saline Hills. But she had been obstinate about her choice, as she had been obstinate in the renunciation of all the titles and honours left her by her four husbands, and would be called only by her own name, Pia della Testanegra

Perhaps she had no reason for either caprice: if she had few cared to ask it now.

She was quite forgotten by the great world she had once dominated. Another generation had taken the places of her friends and lovers; those she remembered as children were now old men and women; there was no human being left in whom she took any interest.

For years she had seen no one but the brethren from the Certosa opposite — the good monks who were so busily engaged in saving her soul; for the Contessa, having tasted all the perilous sweets of earth, did not intend to forgo the holy joys of Heaven.

Nor did the Certosini intend to forgo the building of the new church which was to be Pia’s price for absolution.

They had to be very patient, for she was cunning and avaricious, and would not part with anything while she lived; but she had promised them all at her death, and the plans for the new church were already drawn, and the Prior had seen many an architect and artist.

Now at last the valiant old woman had confessed defeat.

She could fight no more against death, and, lest he should take her unawares, she had that morning signed a deed conveying all her property to the Certosini. All except her jewels — these she could not bring herself to part with.

They were the only things she still loved — the price and symbol of her long-vanished beauty — the homage, the adoration of her lovers, all her memories, splendid and tender, all her pride and triumph — these things she saw in her jewels.

And while she could draw a breath she would not part with them.

She would have ordered them to be buried with her, but she knew there was no one whom she could trust.

As she looked out at the distant lines of the Certosa, she drew her thin lips back off her toothless gums in a slow smile.

The Prior wanted the jewels, and was angry because they had not been promised with the other property; he or one of the brethren would be at her side presently, urging her to part with her treasures. The greed of the monks amused the withered heart of the old woman.

In her day she had been greedy also; she could sympathise with lust for gain; her favours she had once sold as high as the monks were now selling theirs.

She sucked her lips at the thought, and felt a faint impatience that those times were past, and that she was now old.

But the feeling quickly passed, and she lay tranquilly watching the distant Certosa and nodding her palsied head at it as if she defied the Prior and all the brethren.

The door was timidly opened, and Stefanina entered.

She was always frightened at this great room with the huge window looking on to the lake, the black chests and chairs against the light-painted walls, the four-poster bed with the heavy curtains of blue Venetian velvet, and the old, old woman sunk into her pillows.

The Contessa turned and looked at the girl; her own children had died long ago; Stefanina was her brother’s grandchild.

Pia had hardly known of her existence; but the girl’s mother had heard that the Contessa approached her end, and Stefanina had been sent to wait on her grand-aunt, and to see if her grace and youth could not charm some of the treasures of the old castle into the fair young hands of this last of the Testanegra, who was poor and as fond of the world as ever her grand-aunt had been.

The Contessa had suffered her to come; she knew the object of mother and daughter, and it amused her as the greed of the monks amused her.

“You are alone,” said Stefanina, treading softly to the bedside — “why are you always alone? It is not right.”

The old woman glanced at the Certosa and then at the girl.

She smiled.

Stefanina flushed.

She was desperately ill at ease with the Contessa, desperately lonely and frightened in the dreary, half-empty castle.

She had very little hope of gaining anything by her self-imposed visit, and a great terror of seeing this awful old woman die.

But she controlled her longing to fly back to Rome because of the vexation and disappointment of her mother, which she knew she would have to face if she abandoned her post.

And at the bottom of her own heart was a half fierce, half timid resolution not to let these monks have everything — not to allow them the entire treasure when a little would mean so much to her poor fortunes.

She stood, hesitant, at the bedside.

The grey light from the window touched her with a cold illumination.

“You should not be alone,” she repeated uneasily. “Will you not have the doctor or old Philomela?”

“Neither,” said the Contessa.

“Then I will sit with you.”

“As you please, Stefanina.”

And the old woman smiled again.

The girl seated herself on the bed step, and clasped her hands in her lap.

She was not beautiful as Pia had been, but she was graceful, brown-haired, brown-eyed, clear-skinned and very young.

Something like a flower of early spring was Stefanina, a white hyacinth or a snowdrop, with her air of remote cool fragrance.

But in her heart she was a true Testanegra, ambitious, ardent, passionate.

The Contessa eyed her; then, stretching out a thin, mottled hand, touched her shoulder.

“Would you like to see my jewels?” she whispered hoarsely.

The girl’s eyes flashed as if she had heard the voice of a lover.

“You would?”

“Ah, if I might!”

The old woman drew a small key from under her pillow.

“The third drawer in the black bureau,” she muttered.

Stefanina trembled.

She took the key and hastened to the great bureau at the end of the room.

“It is nothing much,” said Pia.

She looked at the Certosa and dragged herself up in bed.

Stefanina, opening the drawer, saw several plain caskets.

“Bring them,” commanded Pia.

The girl carried the caskets, two or three at a time, and placed them on the thick blue and gold cover that lay smoothly over Pia’s shrunken limbs.

The old woman sat upright with sudden strength; her shoulders were covered by a scarf of silver and lace; lace was round her head and fastened under her chin.

Her face, fleshless, wrinkled and colourless, with the powerful features prominent and sharp, was like a grotesque carved out of stained ivory.

She took from a thin chain round her neck a master key of filigree, and opened rapidly one casket after another.

Her swollen-veined, hard hands, shaking and twitching, hurriedly cast the contents of each case on to the bed.

“Nothing much,” she muttered. “As you see, nothing much.”

She shook her head at Stefanina.

“Only pearls,” she jerked out.

“Pearls!” gasped the girl.

They covered the bed from one side to another; mostly chains and necklets, with a few brooches and earrings, all very simply set, and of every size, shape and kind, rope on rope, cluster on cluster, soft, lustrous and gleaming.

“I never cared for anything but pearls,” said Pia, grinning.

“Pearls!” exclaimed Stefanina again; she hung over the bed, breathless.

On the hideous old face and the soft young face was the same look of absorbed eagerness, the look of woman gazing at her adornment.

“Everyone gave me pearls,” muttered the Contessa. “I have the finest pearls in Italy. I used to have the madness for pearls — pearls round my ankles when I was abed, child, a cross of pearls hidden in my bosom — pearls — always pearls!”

Stefanina took up some of the chains and braids and let them slip through her fingers; the feel of them, their softness and lightness, gave her exquisite pleasure.

She imagined herself arrayed in them, and shuddered with excitement.

“They must not be sold,” added Pia. “No — they must be left as they are — to adorn the Madonna.”

She blinked maliciously at the girl.

“Will they not look well on the new statue of the Madonna, baby, in the new church of the Certosini?”

“You — you have given them to the monks?” asked Stefanina faintly.

“Not yet.”

“But you will do so?”

The old woman nodded. “To whom else, child?”

Stefanina trembled. “The Madonna does not need them.”

“Oh, she will be very pleased,” returned the old woman sharply. “And in return she will keep me a snug place in Paradise.”

“The monks have had so much,” murmured Stefanina.

“They must have all . I have been very wicked wicked,” she repeated the word with a chuckle. “And now I must pay.”

The girl was silent with longing and mortification.

Pia looked at her with sudden sharpness. “You would like them? Earn them, then, wring them out of men like I did. Make men love you so that they will buy a kiss with this.” She held up a string of yellow pearls. “You start as I started — a Testanegra — young — poor. But no, you have not got it—”

She paused, struggling with her breath.

“No man would go mad for you,” she added viciously.

Stefanina flushed, and eyed the pearls.

“You have no power.”

Stefanina bit her lip.

“If you cannot get your spoils for yourself,” concluded the Contessa, “you shall have none of mine.”

“You think I am a fool, Contessa,” said the girl quietly.

“Yes. I have no kindness for your sort of woman.”

“I am not beautiful, as you were,” answered Stefanina.

“No,” grinned Pia.

“But I might do something for myself,” added Stefanina.

The old woman glanced over the long-limbed slight figure in the green gown, at the delicate, rather expressionless face.

“You will never do anything,” she snapped, and dropped back on her pillows.

Stefanina bent her head.

“Will you give me one of these necklets — for my mother?” she asked meekly. “To have as a remembrance.”

“No.”

The girl’s long brown eyes gleamed; she folded her hands in her lap.

The old woman seemed to doze, her hands outspread over the coverlet and across the masses of pearls.

Stefanina looked out of the window and across the stormy waters of the lake to the distant building of the Certosa.

The silence of a few moments passed in the big chamber.

Then Philomela, the old, old waiting-woman who remembered Pia in her glory, entered.

“One of the Certosini to see the Contessa.”

Pia opened her eyes immediately; she liked the attentions of the monks.

She knew they came for her sole remaining possessions, the pearls, and the sense of power pleased her. Stefanina made no movement to go; the Contessa seemed to have forgotten her.

Philomela shrieked on seeing the pearls, and swept them into a heap with clutching fingers, but the monk was already in the room, and had seen them.

Pia smiled as he uttered his blessing, for his eyes were on the pearls. “You are a new face,” she said.

“Brother Florio,” said the monk. “Brother Roberts was sick, Signora Contessa.”

This was not true; the monk had been sent because the Prior believed in his address and eloquence; they had heard that a relative of the Contessa was at the castle, and had become alarmed, for fear they should, after all, lose some of the spoils of Pia della Testanegra.

“You have come for the jewels,” sneered the old Contessa.

“I have come to tell you your duty,” replied the monk.

Pia laughed. “Have you not enough?”

“Are you not penitent?” he demanded sternly, approaching the bed.

“You have all,” she said, goading him.

Stefanina looked at the monk; he was young, and his face was dark above his white habit.

“Leave me, child,” said the Contessa; “the holy monk wishes to speak to me.”

Stefanina rose. As she passed the monk her gown brushed his habit — very lightly.

“She will give you the pearls,” she whispered, “but they belong to me.”

Brother Florio flushed.

“What is that?” shrieked the Contessa.

The monk looked at the girl.

But Stefanina left the room.

She wandered out of the castle and on to the sloping sides of the lake.

The solitude made her shiver.

It was autumn, and the trees almost bare, only the distant chestnuts behind the Certosa still glowed with colour.

The heavy, close-packed sky threatened rain; the air was warm and close.

Stefanina wandered along the narrow paths worn in the banks.

The sharp thorns of the low acacia bushes caught her gown, which was ruffled by the breeze from the lake.

Her hair was blown across her face and shoulders; a colour came into her face.

She turned back towards the entrance to the castle and waited.

When Brother Florio left the Contessa and came down to the lake for his boat, he found Stefanina in his path.

She said nothing.

But she looked at him, putting back the long tendrils of hair from her long eyes.

The monk stopped.

“What did you mean by saying the pearls were yours?” he asked.

“Did she promise them to you?”

“To the Holy Church.”

“Ah!”

“But she will not give them up till she is dead.”

“They are mine.”

“How yours?”

He regarded her narrowly.

“Yes, look at me,” said Stefanina.

“I am looking.”

“What do you see?”

Again the monk flushed.

“A woman,” he answered sternly.

“More than that,” said the girl. “A young, a fair woman.”

She came nearer.

“Would not the pearls suit me better than the Madonna?”

Don Florio looked at her intently — indeed, she forced him to look at her — as he had perhaps looked at no human being, certainly at no woman before. Her fine lineaments, the blown-back wave of her hair and gown against the background of the lake and the bare bushes disturbed the monk.

He put his hand to his waist, where hung a small ebony crucifix on a rosary of ebony and silver beads.

Stefanina noticed the gesture.

“The crucifix for you and the pearls for me,” she said.

She held out her soft warm hand and put it on his, which was cold and thin, and had never known a woman’s touch before.

“You blaspheme bitterly,” he said.

Stefanina laughed in a way that made his words seem ridiculous.

“But you will give me the pearls?”

Her hand tightened on his.

“The pearls of the Contessa!” cried the monk, amazed and like one roused from speechless confession. “Do you not see that I am one of the Certosini?”

“But a man,” smiled Stefanina.

“The boat waits,” said Don Florio.

He drew his hand abruptly from hers and turned away down the winding path that led to the edge of the gloomy lake.

The girl watched him, but he never looked back. She returned to the castle and to the Contessa ’s bedchamber.

The old woman was asleep, the pearls piled on the coverlet.

The ancient Philomela sat watching them with tireless eyes.

“Philomela,” said Stefanina gently, “do you think I am a fool?”

“I think you are not clever enough to get the pearls of my mistress,” answered the old waiting-woman. “They are safely in the keeping of the Holy Church, Signorina, and my mistress’s soul will soon be safe in Heaven.”

The girl looked at the ugly sunken face of the sleeping woman.

“Was she so very beautiful?” she asked curiously and doubtfully.

Philomela pointed a crooked finger at the lovely heap of pearls.

“Beautiful enough to win that, and houses and lands — and four husbands, Signorina.”

“Beautiful enough and clever enough,” said Stefanina.

“Clever?” laughed Philomela. “Yes, she was very clever indeed.”

“Why did not the monk take the pearls?” asked Stefanina.

“She will never let them go till she is quite dead,” nodded the old woman. “Then the Church will have them, and they will go to the new statue of the Madonna.”

“There are too many for her to wear at once,” said Stefanina dreamily.

“The others will be locked away in a scented chest of holy wood. Don Florio told us the statue would be taken from the likeness of the Contessa in the fresco; it will be wax, life-size and painted, and will have gold dust in the hair — it will stand on a velvet altar cloth and wear the Contessa’s most gorgeous robes and the pearls. So the Signora can look from Paradise and see a likeness of herself in the new church. And so, the monk says, she will feel that she has not lost the pearls she could not take to Heaven.”

“He is cunning, that monk,” said Stefanina thoughtfully.

After this the days grew chilly, and a copper pan of charcoal was brought into the chamber of the dying woman.

She hardly ever spoke now, and never raised her head from the great soft pillow.

A shawl of white wool took the place of that of silver lace.

She seemed unconscious even when awake, and what little she muttered could be understood by none but Philomela, who declared that her words referred to the splendid orgies of the past.

She was always in the room now, this old Philomela, always watching her mistress and watching the pearls.

Stefanina came in and out of the room in her plain green gown and a little tippet of fox fur over her shoulders, for it was very cold now in the great bare, empty castle.

And Don Florio came to and fro from the Certosa. Since he had been so successful the Prior sent him and no other.

He tried never to look at Stefanina, and she saw that he was troubled when in her presence. She passed him often in the corridors; she never spoke to him, but she looked, and smiled, and once she laughed.

She knew that Don Florio was comparing her in his mind with the Madonnas in the Certosa and the peasant girls who lived in the villages round the lake.

These and the old Contessa and the old waiting-woman were the only women he had seen since he could remember, for he had been brought to the Certosa a little boy, and had never left it, save for a few hours — never been further than the castle across the lake.

Stefanina did not know this; but she knew that she was different both from the Madonnas and the peasant girls, and that the young monk had noticed this difference.

And was disturbed.

Long the Contessa lingered; daily Stefanina saw the monk, who came constantly to the castle that he might be there when the old woman died, and take the pearls away.

While she lived her feebleness defied him to touch them.

“Not yours yet,” she would whisper. “And perhaps they never will be, eh?”

For she still loved to withhold her last gift. Once, when she had a little more strength, she told Philomela as much.

“If I give him the pearls he will never come again, and I shall lack prayers, and who knows,” she added, blinking at the pale girl by the bedside, “but that I may give them to Stefanina after all — after all?”

Philomela laughed.

Stefanina also knew that it was a gibe.

That night the patient monk stayed late, watching and praying.

The Contessa had long since confessed and received the Viaticum.

Still she lingered.

The doctor said she would not die yet, no, not for several days perhaps.

Weary and disheartened, the monk left the bedchamber where the dozing Philomela kept a still watchful eye on the pearls heaped over her mistress’s coverlet.

In the long, lonely and cold corridor, lit only by an ancient lamp which dimly showed the damp, discoloured, peeling, painted walls, he met Stefanina.

She wore a gown of rose-coloured and white brocade which she had found in the Contessa’s wardrobe; it was heavy with ancient perfume. Her hair was dressed high in the manner of Pia’s locks in the fresco; her little fingers only just showed beneath the rich heavy stuff of her tight sleeves, across her slender bust the gown was cut straightly with a thick band of gold.

Don Florio looked, turned away his eyes, and looked again.

Stefanina bent slightly towards him as he passed; she was under the lamp, and in the rays of it gleamed softly from head to foot in the warm shadows.

“Have you got the pearls?” she asked.

“I am very tired,” said the monk wearily — “very tired.”

“The pearls are mine,” said Stefanina. “You know that—”

He made a movement as if to pass her, then paused.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because they belong to the world, and I am of the world.”

Her lustrous eyes looked deep into his.

“You know nothing of the world, do you?” she asked softly.

He stood silent, with bent head.

“Nothing of beauty and joy, nothing of what my aunt really was?”

“That knowledge is not for us,” he answered slowly.

“The pearls are not for you.”

“Signorina, the Contessa gives them to the Church in expiation of her sins.”

“They are my heritage.”

“She will not give them to you, Signorina.”

“But you will, Don Florio.”

“I?”

Stefanina smiled.

“Will you not?”

He wavered, stood bewildered, tortured.

“Come,” said Stefanina.

She beckoned to him and turned towards the Contessa’s chamber.

With weak feet he followed her.

Softly she entered.

A single oil lamp burnt on the little table by the bedside; old Philomela was asleep in the deep armchair beside it — uncovered, gleaming from one end of the bed to the other, were the pearls.

Stefanina and the monk stood side by side looking at them.

Neither had any memories — yet as they gazed each felt the strange pangs of memory. The girl was thinking of all that she meant to enjoy — all the vague rosy future that was before her — the monk was thinking of all that he had forgone.

Neither had any reality on which to base their dreams, which were wonderful and formless and drawn from their own souls.

Stefanina bent forward and put her hands over the pearls.

The rich dress brushed against the rough habit of the monk.

With fascinated eyes he watched her. She was all shining in the light of the solitary little lamp all shining, her hair, her eyes, her gown.

Visions of things he had never seen filled the monk’s brain.

Dancing, and soft colours, and things made of gold, diamonds in the hair of women, bare limbs and wine goblets, music and song — festival beneath the trees and beneath the moon.

What did he know of these things — why should he think of them?

Frightened at himself, he turned with a violent movement.

The crucifix on his rosary caught on the heavy post of the bed, and was snapped off and fell on the heap of pearls.

Stefanina looked up.

Her glowing glance met the wild glance of the monk.

“Can you defy me any more?” she said.

He moved his lips, but did not speak.

Stefanina bent again over the bed; she looked from the pearls to the old woman.

“Ah, Don Florio,” she said softly, “the Contessa is dead.”

“Dead?”

She laid her fresh cheek above the withered breast; she put her fair hand above the shrivelled lips.

“Dead — and cold — the doctor knew so little after all.”

“Wake the woman,” said the monk hoarsely; he stared at the dead as a child might stare.

Philomela sat with her head fallen forward and her hands dropped in her lap; she looked as if she, too, was dead.

Stefanina made no effort to rouse her; she turned to the monk and put her arm about his shoulder.

“The pearls are mine?” she whispered with her lips very close to his ear.

He shuddered under her touch.

“Are they not mine?”

He looked at her desperately; his young face was distorted.

“Take them,” he said — “take them, let me go” — he muttered some words of supplication.

Stefanina loosened her arm at once.

Don Florio fled from the chamber and the castle, and took the boat across the black lake to the quiet Certosa to tell the Prior that he had lost the pearls after all — after all — and to do penance for certain wild thoughts and wicked desires.

Stefanina gathered up the pearls by the armful from the brocade that covered the dead woman. She smiled into the old, old face of the Contessa.

“Am I such a fool, great-aunt? I have won from one man what it took you years to win from many.”

Shadows of Yesterday, Stories from an Old Catalogue (1916)

A VENETIAN EVENING

The Marchese Barbetta had left his palace for the last time. In front of his doors the State barge which had borne his coffin rocked on the slow tide of the canal, which swelled between the blue and white striped posts showing his gorgeous armories. The crimson damask pall still lay over the gilt seats, and as the barge gently rose and fell with the waves, the corners dipped and lifted from the water.

It was August, midday, and the heat intense.

Venice, so gay last night, to be again so gay tonight, slept. No deserted city could have been more quiet; the sun ruled over lonely piazzas, silent canals, churches where the beggars lay huddled like heaps of rags in the shadows of the stone cornices and saints, empty gondolas, line on line, and palaces with the shutters closed, fainting flowers trailing over the terraces and balconies.

Towards the Lido, San Giorgio showed through a mist of heat against the background of a blaze of open sea, across which sometimes passed a faint gold sail — some Eastern ship looking like the argosy of another world. The Lion, the Campanile, the rose-coloured palace and pearl-coloured prison gleamed against a sky dazzlingly pale with heat.

Don Duilio, the heir of the Marchese Barbetta, sat at a window and peered through the shutters at the barge rocking on the water.

So intense was the heat that the very water gave no idea of coolness; when the new Marchese put his hand out of the window, it was as if put it into a fire.

The flies were still; where the sunlight slipped between the shutters lay on the tessellated floor of a pool of gold, of strength fierce enough to burn Don Duilio’s foot through the velvet shoe.

Over him was the languor of the great heat. He had much to occupy him; he had, in brief, to face disaster complete and immediate, yet sat there lazily, looking with idle eyes at the barge which had carried away his uncle that morning.

Then the palace had been full: cousins, friends, dependants had hurried to and from the painted chambers, fingering the handsome furniture, criticising the pictures, whispering scandalous stories of the old Marchese.

All had manifold expectations. Then the will was read: one sentence only. The lawyer laughed as the document fluttered onto a malachite table and a dozen eager hands snatched at it. Duilio caught it and read aloud:

“I leave no money, prodigious debts, and the rest to Holy Church.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

The relatives, the friends, the servants fled like a company of butterflies when the flower on which they have been resting has been cut beneath them. Don Duilio was alone with his bare title. his mortgaged palace, a handful of scudi, a mountain of debts, and his memory of the dead.

He had always lived as one who someday, any day, be rich. His uncle had never stinted him; together they had been two of the most extravagant cavaliers in Venice, and Duilio been quite content. He had never wanted his uncle’s death, nor expected it; the old man had been always robust.

Who would have guessed that one night he would fall from his seat in the lamp-hung gondola and die without a word among the glasses and fruit, the sweets and wine of the floating supper table?

As little could any have guessed that the lawyer, on breaking the seals of the Marchese’s will, would have nothing to give anyone but that mocking sentence.

Duilio felt more surprise than resentment; he saw that if his uncle had lived there would have been ruin soon just the same. The lawyer had left him a bundle of papers; flicking them over, he saw that vast sums were owing to a certain Jew whom he had often seen on the Rialto.

The very place was not his — nay. nor : was anything in it. He had cast the papers into the canal and wondered why the crows had not yet gathered round their prey. As for himself, life without money was clearly impossible — at least in Venice.

No one was more careless than he of the actual scudi; he despised those who earned and those who hoarded them. Yet how to do without them?

They were necessary to secure those reverent servants who all his life had ministered to his needs; to procure the silks and satins with which he went clothed, the food and wine with which he was fed; necessary for the flowers and for the suppers with Caterina and Giovanna, the serenades beneath the high, white balcony of Anna; necessary for the play, the comedy, the music the balls, the fêtes, the carnivals!

There were no more of them, and he utterly incapable of procuring any. How could a young Venetian noble hope to earn money?

He never entertained the shameful idea. The problem admitted of only one solution: if life was not worth living without money and without Venice, then one must cease living.

One of the relations that morning had held out a half-hearted offer of a home in Tuscany. Tuscany! Don Duilio could not even contemplate life anywhere but in Venice.

Well, he must do what what the old Marchese had done — depart as comfortably and gracefully as possible, from a life which had suddenly become intolerable, from a world which had failed him signally.

He envied the old Marchese who had died so easily and pleasantly amid the song and laughter, with the purple night about him and a lady’s white hand in his, and who now lay quietly in the cool marble church.

And how was he to follow to that same repose? Now he could not think; presently, when the grateful dark came, when the gondolas slipped out from the lagoons, lights flashed from the windows and music came over the water, then he would be alive again, like all the others. Then he could decide.

He rose and turned from the window. The shadowed room was large and lofty, yet hot and close. Blonde and rosy goddesses smiled from the walls, from the gilt bosses of the rich dark ceiling hung lamps fashioned in myriads of glass flowers. Eastern tapestries were on the floor, on chairs were piled Eastern cushions.

The Marchese stretched himself and yawned. He was a fitting figure for the gorgeous chamber; even in his black his appearance was luxurious. He was very slight, dark as a Moor, with a Moor’s arched nose, and his large black eyes were well used to express all the shades of passion and all the niceties of the language of love. His black hair showed through the powder in front and the curls resisted the pomade.

He had a mole on his chin which seemed to call attention to the fact that he was not in any way handsome, but he was as bright, as graceful, and as elegant as a hawk.

He looked at himself in one of the mirrors as he passed, looked at his reflection curiously as if he saw it for the first time. The first time? Nay, the last.

The door was ajar onto the stairs, and he passed out. The house was usually silent during the heat of the day; but he remembered that this was not the silence of repose, but of desertion.

Not a single page, maid, or servant remained; he could imagine that they had not gone empty-handed — the Jew had certainly been cheated of some of his spoils.

The Marchese had felt no resentment; were they not doing as he meant to do, fleeing from failure?

It was cooler on the head of the great staircase. He leaned on the heavy gilt balustrade, looked down the well of stairway.

The silence was as the silence of oblivion. On one of the marble steps lay a crimson flower which had fallen from the old Marchese’s damask pall, a thing which would live and die under the sun of one day, yet it looked as if it had lain there and would lay there for all eternity.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Duilio conjured ghosts out of the shadows which filled the enclosed stairs; ghosts of all the pretty women in mask and domino, swinging hoops and satin slippers, who had fluttered up and down; the cavaliers with cane and glass; the priests, the dancing girls, the figures of carnival, the mourners, and. lastly, the Marchese in his coffin with the gilt nails and the crimson pall, and the troop of pretenders who had fled so soon after in gay disgust.

As the Marchese imagined these figures filling the empty stairway, one of them gathered substance and took on the semblance of flesh and blood; it was a dark woman.

She moved slowly through the floating wraiths of his fancy and seemed to be mounting the stairs towards him; her hair and her figure merged into the shadow, he could see only her face, grave and pale, and her neck, white as a magnolia leaf.

He rubbed his eyes and leaned lower over the rail; she was looking at him and seemed frightened — her lips were parted, one hand trembled along the painted wall as she advanced.

The figures of his fancy vanished, leaving her alone on the great stairway. He could see her dusky hair and her dark dress now. she was alive and coming to him. He waited; to speak would be to break the spell.

She came nearer, slowly mounting the stairs with timid steps and looking at him the while.

He had once seen in the studio of a great artist a piece of dark paper pinned to a board; the artist, while the light talk was passing, idly took up a white chalk and a black, and sketched on the grey paper a girl’s head — a few strokes, a few minutes, and a lovelier face than any in the room was looking from the easel.

The Marchese was reminded of this as he watched this pale creature blossom from the darkness of the deserted stairs. She turned and came up the last flight; he saw now that she was poorly dressed in worn, ugly garments.

She stopped by the red funeral rose.

“Signor Marchese.” she said, and held her heart as if in fear.

“Ah.” he answered. “You have broken a very pretty dream. Who are you, my dear?”

She did not reply.

“How did you come here?”

“I have been here a long while,” she murmured.

“But I have never seen you.”

“How should you? I was one of the kitchen girls. Signor Marchese.”

“Why have you stayed?” he asked, amused. She looked down at the rose, and then up at him.

“Because I had nowhere to go, Signor. I came here from the convent. I know no one in Venice.”

“You can,” he said, “go back to the convent, eh?”

“No,” she replied. “Never. I like this palace better. I am very sorry you are ruined. Signor Marchese.”

“Why.” he said, “you are the first who has expressed that sentiment the only one who has felt it — if you have felt it.”

“I have cried. Signor Marchese,” she answered simply. “for the late Marchese and for you.”

He glanced away.

“Where are the others?” he asked.

“Gone. Signor. All gone. I stayed below till I was afraid — it was so big and dark. Then I thought to come up. Forgive me.”

“Thank you. child,” he smiled.

She came two steps higher.

“Where are the great ladies?” she asked timidly. “Will they ever come again?”

“Nay, never,” and this time he sighed. She sighed, too.

“I used to peep sometimes at the great ladies, such ladies! All in silk.”

He looked at her quizzically. She was fair and young, fresh and graceful, her hands were scarcely coarsened nor her body bowed by work.

Emboldened by his look she came to the top of the stairs.

“What are you going to do. Signor?” Her eyes were soft as velvet; her comeliness was enveloped in her coarse clothes as a butterfly is in a cocoon. He noted it mournfully.

“Venice will always be kind to such as you.” he said, thinking of the life he now regarded as past. “I will give you a few scudi — the last! — and the name of a lady who would take a maid. I think.”

“I will not go.” she answered. “Tell me,” she clasped her hands, “what are you going to do?”

“It is too hot now.” he replied. “When it is cooler I will think.”

“Will you leave Venice?”

“Ah, no.”

“But the Jews will have this palace? All that is in it? Everything?”

“Everything; but why are you so interested?” he asked, smiling again now and regarding her. The rosy blood stormed her face.

“Oh. Signor Marchese, the great ladies have gone — none of them cares. But I care; let me stay.

“I have been unhappy. No one was kind to me, for I would not work. I used to go to the kitchen grating and watch the gondolas and the lights, and hear the music and the soft voices, and smell the perfumes of the wine and fruit, the jasmine and the roses.

“And I meant to die. but the water was always so dark.”

“What is your name?” he said.

“Musetta.” she answered meekly. “Well, Musetta, I will give you a silk gown, a bouquet of rose and jasmine, a supper of fruit and cakes, with red wine in a milk-white goblet. But afterwards—”

“Yes?”

“Afterwards, I shall go away. I shall take the gondola and — and—”

“And go to sea. Never to come back,” she said.

He started at the way in which she had divined his thoughts.

“And I will come, too,” smiled Musetta.

He looked at her long and thoughtfully. “Why,. if you like you shall come, too,” he agreed at last.

She clasped her hands like a happy child.

“Now, the silk dress!” she cried.

They both laughed, and the sound of their laughter went upwards like a slow mounting bird through the empty palace.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

He took her to a chamber used by many fair guests; his sister had been the last. Her clothes and even her jewels awaited her return.

He unshuttered the window which looked on to a shadowed canal, and she stood timidly in the beautiful little room which was perfumed like a bouquet of flowers.

“The sun is beginning to set.” he said; he bowed to her. “I shall await you below.”

He went, and she listened until the last echo of his footsteps had died away.

A distant melody lifted on the silence. Venice was beginning to awake.

“Now fall the shining leaves apart

And do their wealth disclose;

And I may kiss the golden heart

That lies within the rose!”

Musetta pulled open the drawers and caskets, and cast on to the silk couches the gowns and laces, shawls and shoes. She laughed with pleasure as she handled them, and her knees shook with joy.

“Now comes the perfect day at last.

When I may know my dreaming true.

Delays and doubtings both are past

And I have found the soul of you.”

Musetta took off her rough garments; she washed herself in the basin of rosy alabaster with scented unguents she found in a silver bottle; she combed out her hair with an ivory comb; she powdered and painted her face as she had seen the great ladies powdered and painted.

The sun was sinking behind the palaces; green shadows began to fill the canals, shutters were opened and people moved to and fro.

From her high window Musetta could see a star, clear as crystal, in the bright, paling sky.

She robed herself in lace with over all a grey silk dress embroidered with thousands of roses; she fastened a pink feather in her hair and a braid of pearls round her neck. She put on little white shoes with high scarlet heels.

She stood before the long mirror regarding herself.

The shadows increased and the star grew brighter; at last it was the only light she had, for the sun had set.

She left the chamber. The shoes felt strange to her feet and the flounces filled the doorway. She had put on a grey mantle and drawn the hood over her hair.

As she hastened down the stair her silks filled the silence with a mysterious and pleasant rustling.

The palace door was open and she stepped out. holding up her skirts. The gondola rocked at the steps. A rosy lantern hung at the prow, the blue silk curtain fluttered in the evening breeze. Against the cushions leaned the Marchese.

He had changed his mourning; beneath his scarlet cape showed the gold and white of his festival dress, and a gold plume waved in his hat.

She stood half in the luminous twilight of the outer air, half in the shadow of the doorway, and she looked unreal in her pearl colour and grey and rose, so strangely did the light play over her and her swinging hoops and gleaming embroideries.

“You are a great lady now,” he smiled. He rose and helped her into the gondola. Her eyes sought the damask-covered barge on which the old Marchese’s coffin had rested.

She stepped into the gondola, fair and light as a lily, and sank back among the velvet cushions. He laid on her lap a bouquet of jasmine and lilies, roses and carnations.

“For one night,” she said.

Other stars were out now; the sky glittered like a velvet robe on which diamonds have been flung. Lamplight streamed from the windows of the palaces; over the dark waters went the gondolas and the barges hung with flowers and lanterns.

Voices and music arose from the parties of pleasure; the night moths were abroad, and towards the Lido the sea darkened into the sky.

Musetta saw a luxurious supper before her: the Marchese had prepared with his own hands the repast of her dreams, one such as she had often seen in the kitchens, but never yet beheld on the table.

It was the remains of the funeral feast he had arranged, but she did not think of that nor of how truly it was a feast of death.

She saw only the white lace cloth, the silver-gilt tazzas, the glasses with the milk-white lines and the opal coloured dragons for stems, the delicate jellies of quince and orange, the dewy fruit in porcelain dishes, the creams decorated with almonds and violets, the meats fastened with skewers, the birds on gilt dishes with their feathers rising through delicate pastries, the wine in glamorous bottles — wine white as crystal, gold as amber, warm-coloured as a ripe peach, red as a summer rose.

They ate and drank beneath the canopy of the violet sky, the moored gondola close to the steps of the palace, about them the carnival of the Venetian summer night.

After all, Musetta ate very little and took but one glass of the amber-coloured wine. Nor did she speak much; she continually looked at her satin lap and the flowers resting there, and the Marchese looked continuously at her — his glance was amused. They laughed together like children. When at last she had finished toying with her fruit and cakes, he gathered up the supper equipment and placed it on the palace steps.

“Tonight I am my own page.” he said, and then unmoored the gondola. “I am my own gondolier,” he added, as he took the long oar; then he glanced at her gravely.

“Will you go back, Musetta?”

“To what? To face tomorrow? No. I will never be a kitchen girl again. I shall always be a lady in silk.”

She leaned back in her seat and drew the blue curtains aside so that she could look out. He pushed off the gondola. The steel prow with the gilt horses flashed in the light of the swinging lantern. He doffed his cloak and hat.

She looked back once at the State barge rocking in the swell of their departure, then she kept her face towards the sea.

Towards the sea he steered; they passed gay palaces, the great Piazza with the Campanile, the quays, the long front of the Doge’s Palace, the canal that divides it from the prison and the enclosed bridge by which prisoners pass, the island of San Giorgio, and so on into the broadening waters.

The lights were now few; they saw few pleasure boats; the music and the laughter began to be behind them.

They passed merchant barges and anchored ships with sails furled; the waters spread and encompassed them; they had left behind all the other gondolas.

Musetta drew the grey silk mantle round her shoulders, for the air began to blow cold from the sea. There was no moon, the stars were intensely bright and seemed to hang within touch. Venice slipped away behind them, a scattered cluster of lights like loose-flung gems.

Here and there a gleam showed the lamp before a shrine rising from the shores of the low lagoons where the scraggy reeds and bushes dipped to the salt tide and often served as nets to catch the bodies of drowned or murdered men which drifted down from Venice, the dreadful fruit of some gay flower of carnival.

The waves began to rock the gondola, and presently seized it and bore it out to sea as a leaf is seized by a stream and borne swiftly onwards out of sight.

Then the Marchese drew up the oar and put on his cloak and came and sat beside Musetta.

She smiled happily; it was so much better than the kitchens of the Palazza Barbetta.

He smiled, too; it was so much better than seeing the Jews in possession of his home and finding himself in the streets without a white piece in his pocket.

The night was warm yet fresh; the boat drifted beyond sight of the lights of Venice, and the stars seemed to crowd down on them.

They sat close together; now the open sea was all about them and the stars were flung nearer, nearer like a veil. The waves were larger now, and presently began to overwhelm them; the splashing sounded to them like the music of flutes and guitars, and the starlight seemed like the lights of the great Piazza in carnival time.

The evening slipped into the night. Venice slept after the feast and the merry-making; the Marchese and Musetta slept, too.

Curious Happenings (1917)

SCOURED SILK
aka
“THE ORFORD MYSTERY”

This is a tale that might be told in many ways and from various points of view; it has to be gathered from here and there — a letter, a report, a diary, a casual reference; in its day the thing was more than a passing wonder, and it left a mark of abiding horror on the neighbourhood.

The house in which Mr. Orford lived has finally been destroyed, the mural tablet in St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, may be sought for in vain by the curious, but little remains of the old piazza where the quiet scholar passed on his daily walks, the very records of what was once so real have become blurred, almost incoherent in their pleadings with things forgotten; but this thing happened to real people, in a real London, not so long ago that the generation had not spoken with those who remembered some of the actors in this terrible drama.

It is round the person of Humphrey Orford that this tale turns, as, at the time, all the mystery and horror centred; yet until his personality was brought thus tragically into fame, he had not been an object of much interest to many; he had, perhaps, a mild reputation for eccentricity, but this was founded merely on the fact that he refused to partake of the amusements of his neighbours, and showed a dislike for much company.

But this was excused on the ground of his scholarly predilections; he was known to be translating, in a leisurely fashion, as became a gentleman, Ariosto’s great romance into English couplets, and to be writing essays on recondite subjects connected with grammar and language, which were not the less esteemed because they had never been published.

His most authentic portrait, taken in 1733 and intended for a frontispiece for the Ariosto when this should come to print, shows a slender man with reddish hair, rather severely clubbed, a brown coat, and a muslin cravat; he looks straight out of the picture, and the face is long, finely shaped, and refined, with eyebrows rather heavier than one would expect from such delicacy of feature.

When this picture was painted Mr. Orford was living near Covent Garden, close to the mansion once occupied by the famous Dr. Radcliffe, a straight-fronted, dark house of obvious gentility, with a little architrave portico over the door and a few steps leading up to it; a house with neat windows and a gloomy air, like every other residence in that street and most other streets of the same status in London.

And if there was nothing remarkable about Mr. Orford’s dwelling place or person there was nothing, as far as his neighbours knew, remarkable about his history.

He came from a good Suffolk family, in which county he was believed to have considerable estates (though it was a known fact that he never visited them), and he had no relations, being the only child of an only child, and his parents dead; his father had purchased this town house in the reign of King William, when the neighbourhood was very fashionable, and up to it he had come, twenty years ago — nor had he left it since.

He had brought with him an ailing wife, a house-keeper, and a manservant, and to the few families of his acquaintance near, who waited on him, he explained that he wished to give young Mrs. Orford, who was of a mopish disposition, the diversion of a few months in town.

But soon there was no longer this motive for remaining in London, for the wife, hardly seen by anyone, fell into a short illness and died — just a few weeks after her husband had brought her up from Suffolk. She was buried very simply in St. Paul’s, and the mural tablet set up with a draped urn in marble, and just her name and the date, ran thus:

Flora, Wife of
Humphrey Orford, Esq.,
of this Parish,
Died November, 1713,
Aged 27 Years.

Mr. Orford made no effort to leave the house; he remained, people thought, rather stunned by his loss, kept himself close in the house, and for a considerable time wore deep mourning.

But this was twenty years ago, and all had forgotten the shadowy figure of the young wife, whom so few had seen and whom no one had known anything about or been interested in, and all trace of her seemed to have passed out of the quiet, regular, and easy life of Mr. Orford, when an event that gave rise to some gossip caused the one-time existence of Flora Orford to be recalled and discussed among the curious. This event was none other than the sudden betrothal of Mr. Orford and the announcement of his almost immediate marriage.

The bride was one who had been a prattling child when the groom had first come to London: one old lady who was forever at her window watching the little humours of the street recollected and related how she had seen Flora Orford, alighting from the coach that had brought her from the country, turn to this child, who was gazing from the railing of the neighbouring house, and touch her bare curls lovingly and yet with a sad gesture.

And that was about the only time anyone ever did see Flora Orford, she so soon became ailing; and the next the inquisitive old lady saw of her was the slender brown coffin being carried through the dusk towards St. Paul’s Church.

But that was twenty years ago, and here was the baby grown up into Miss Elisa Minden, a very personable young woman, soon to be the second Mrs. Humphrey Orford. Of course there was nothing very remarkable about the match; Elisa’s father, Dr. Minden, had been Mr. Orford’s best friend (as far as he could be said to have a best friend, or indeed any friend at all) for many a long year, both belonged to the same quiet set, both knew all about each other. Mr. Orford was not much above forty-five or so, an elegant, well-looking man, wealthy, with no vices and a calm, equable temper; while Miss Elisa, though pretty and well-mannered, had an insufficient dowry, no mother to fend for her, and the younger sisters to share her slender advantages. So what could anyone say save that the good doctor had done very well for his daughter, and that Mr. Orford had been fortunate enough to secure such a fresh, capable maiden for his wife?

It was said that the scholar intended giving up his bookish ways — that he even spoke of going abroad a while, to Italy, for preference; he was of course, anxious to see Italy, as all his life had been devoted to preparing the translation of an Italian classic.

The quiet betrothal was nearing its decorous conclusion when one day Mr. Orford took Miss Minden for a walk and brought her home round the piazza of Covent Garden, then took her across the cobbled street, past the stalls banked up with the first spring flowers (it was the end of March), under the portico built by the great Inigo Jones, and so into the church.

“I want to show you where my wife Flora lies buried,” said Mr. Orford.

And that is really the beginning of the story.

Now, Miss Minden had been in this church every Sunday of her life and many weekdays, and had been used since a child to see that tablet to Flora Orford; but when she heard these words in the quiet voice of her lover and felt him draw her out of the sunlight into the darkness of the church, she experienced a great distaste that was almost fear.

It seemed to her both a curious and a disagreeable thing for him to do, and she slipped her arm out of his as she replied.

“Oh, please let us go home!” she said. “Father will be waiting for us, and your good Mrs. Boyd vexed if the tea is over-brewed.”

“But first I must show this,” he insisted, and took her arm again and led her down the church, past his seat, until they stood between his pew end and the marble tablet in the wall which was just a hand’s space above their heads.

“That is to her memory,” said Mr. Orford. “And you see there is nothing said as to her virtues.”

Now, Elisa Minden knew absolutely nothing of her predecessor, and could not tell if these words were spoken in reverence or irony, so she said nothing but looked up rather timidly from under the shade of her Leghorn straw at the tall figure of her lover, who was staring sternly at the square of marble.

“And what have you to say to Flora Orford?” he asked sharply, looking down at her quickly.

“Why, sir, she was a stranger to me,” replied Miss Minden. Mr. Orford pressed her arm.

“But to me she was a wife,” he said. “She is buried under your feet. Quite close to where you are standing. Why, think of that, Lizzie, if she could stand up and put out her hand she could catch hold of your dress — she is as near as that!”

The words and his manner of saying them filled Miss Minden with shuddering terror, for she was a sensitive and fanciful girl, and it seemed to her a dreadful thing to be thus standing over the bones of the poor creature who had loved the man who was now to be her husband, and horrible to think that the handful of decay so near them had once clung to this man and loved him.

“Do not tremble, my dear girl,” said Mr. Orford. “She is dead.”

Tears were in Elisa Minden’s eyes, and she answered coldly:

“Sir, how can you speak so?”

“She was a wicked woman,” he replied, “a very wicked woman.”

The girl could not reply as to that; this sudden disclosing of a painful secret abashed her simple mind.

“Need we talk of this?” she asked; then, under her breath — “Need we be married in this church, sir?”

“Of course,” he answered shortly, “everything is arranged. Tomorrow week.”

Miss Minden did not respond; hitherto she had been fond of the church, now it seemed spoilt for her — tarnished by the thought of Flora Orford.

Her companion seemed to divine what reflection lay behind her silence.

“You need not be afraid,” he said rather harshly. “She is dead. Dead.”

And he reached out the light cane he wore and tapped on the stone above his wife’s grave, and slowly smiled as the sound rang hollow in the vaults beneath.

Then he allowed Elisa to draw him away, and they returned to Mr. Orford’s comfortable house, where in the upper parlour Dr. Minden was awaiting them together with his sister and her son, a soldier cousin whom the quick perceptions of youthful friends had believed to be devoted to Elisa Minden. They made a pleasant little party with the red curtains drawn, and the fire burning up between the polished andirons and all the service for tea laid out with scones and Naples cake, and Mrs. Boyd coming to and fro with plates and dishes. And everyone was cheerful and friendly and glad to be indoors together, with a snowstorm coming up and people hurrying home with heads bent before a cutting wind.

But to Elisa’s mind had come an unbidden thought:

“I do not like this house — it is where Flora Orford died.”

And she wondered in which room, and also why this had never occurred to her before, and glanced rather thoughtfully at the fresh young face of the soldier cousin as he stood by the fire in his scarlet and white, with his glance on the flames.

But it was a cheerful party, and Elisa smiled and jested with the rest as she reserved the dishes at tea.

There is a miniature of her painted about this time, and one may see how she looked with her bright brown hair and bright brown eyes, rosy complexion, pretty nose and mouth, and her best gown of lavender blue tabinet with a lawn tucker and a lawn cap fastened under the chin with frilled lappets, showing now the big Leghorn hat with the velvet strings was put aside.

Mr. Orford also looked well tonight; he did not look his full age in the ruddy candle glow, the grey did not show in his abundant hair nor the lines in his fine face, but the elegance of his figure, the grace of his bearing, the richness of his simple clothes, were displayed to full advantage; Captain Hoare looked stiff and almost clumsy by contrast.

But now and then Elisa Minden’s eyes would rest rather wistfully on the fresh face of this young man who had no dead wife in his life. And something was roused in her meek youth and passive innocence, and she wondered why she had so quietly accepted her father’s arrangement of a marriage with this elderly scholar, and why Philip Hoare had let her do it. Her thoughts were quite vague and amounted to no more than a confused sense that something was wrong, but she lost her satisfaction in the tea-drinking and the pleasant company, and the warm room with the drawn curtains, and the bright fire, and rose up saying they must be returning, as there was a great store of mending she had promised to help her aunt with; but Mrs. Hoare would not help her out, but protested, laughing, that there was time enough for that, and the good doctor, who was in a fine humour and in no mood to go out into the bleak streets even as far as his own door, declared that now was the time they must be shown over the house.

“Do you know, Humphrey,” he said, “you have often promised us this, but never done it, and, all the years that I have known you, I have never seen but this room and the dining-room below; and as to your own particular cabinet—”

“Well,” said Mr. Orford, interrupting in a leisurely fashion, “no one has been in there, save Mrs. Boyd now and then, to announce a visitor.”

“Oh, you scholars!” smiled the doctor. “A secretive tribe — and a fortunate one; why, in my poor room I have had three girls running to and fro!”

The soldier spoke, not so pleasantly as his uncle.

“What have you so mysterious, sir, in this same cabinet, that it must be so jealously guarded?” he asked.

“Why, nothing mysterious,” smiled the scholar; “only my books, and papers, and pictures.”

“You will show them to me?” asked Elisa Minden, and her lover gave graceful consent; there was further amiable talk, and then the whole party, guided by Mr. Orford holding a candle, made a tour of the house and looked over the fine rooms.

Mrs. Hoare took occasion to whisper to the bride-to-be that there were many alterations needed before the place was ready for a lady’s use, and that it was time these were put in hand — why, the wedding was less than a fortnight off!

And Elisa Minden, who had not had a mother to advise her in these matters, suddenly felt that the house was dreary and old-fashioned, and an impossible place to live in; the very rooms that had so pleased her good father — a set of apartments for a lady — were to her the most hateful in the house, for they, her lover told her, had been furnished and prepared for Flora Orford, twenty years ago.

She was telling herself that when she was married she must at once go away and that the house must be altered before she could return to it, when the party came crowding to the threshold of the library or private cabinet, and Mr. Orford, holding the candle aloft, led them in. Then as this illumination was not sufficient, he went very quickly and lit the two candles on the mantelpiece.

It was a pleasant apartment, lined with books from floor to ceiling, old, valuable, and richly bound books, save only in the space above the chimney piece, which was occupied by a portrait of a lady and the panel behind the desk; this was situated in a strange position, in the farthest corner of the room fronting the wall, so that anyone seated there would be facing the door with the space of the room between; the desk was quite close to the wall, so that there was only just space for the chair at which the writer would sit, and to accommodate this there were no bookshelves behind it, but a smooth panel of wood on which hung a small picture; this was a rough, dark painting, and represented a man hanging on a gallows on a wild heath; it was a subject out of keeping with the luxurious room with its air of ease and learning, and while Mr. Orford was showing his first editions, his Elzevirs and Aldines, Elisa Minden was staring at this ugly little picture.

As she looked she was conscious of such a chill of horror and dismay as nearly caused her to shriek aloud. The room seemed to her to be full of an atmosphere of terror and evil beyond expression. Never had such a thing happened to her before; her visit to the tomb in the afternoon had been as nothing to this. She moved away, barely able to disguise an open panic. As she turned, she half-stumbled against a chair, caught at it, and noticed, hanging over the back, a skirt of peach-coloured silk. Elisa, not being mistress of herself, caught at this garment.

“Why, sir,” cried she hysterically, “what is this?”

All turned to look at her; her tone, her obvious fright, were out of proportion to her discovery.

“Why, child,” said Mrs. Hoare, “it is a silk petticoat, as all can see.”

“A gift for you, my dear,” said the cheerful doctor.

“A gift for me?” cried Elisa. “Why, this has been scoured, and turned, and mended, and patched a hundred times!”

And she held up the skirt, which had indeed become like tinder and seemed ready to drop to pieces.

The scholar now spoke.

“It belongs to Mrs. Boyd,” he said quietly. “I suppose she had been in here to clean up, and has left some of her mending.”

Now, two things about this speech made a strange impression on everyone; first, it was manifestly impossible that the good housekeeper would ever have owned such a garment as this, that was a lady’s dress and such as would be worn for a ball; secondly, Mr. Orford had only a short while before declared that Mrs. Boyd only entered his room when he was in it, and then of a necessity and for a few minutes.

All had the same impression, that this was some garment belonging to his dead wife and as such cherished by him; all, that is, but Elisa, who had heard him call Flora Orford a wicked woman.

She put the silk down quickly (there was a needle sticking into it and a spool of cotton lying on the chair beneath) and looked up at the portrait above the mantelpiece.

“Is that Mrs. Orford?” she asked.

He gave her a queer look.

“Yes,” he said.

In a strange silence all glanced up at the picture.

It showed a young woman in a white gown, holding a crystal heart that hung round her neck; she had dark hair and a pretty face; as Elisa looked at the pointed fingers holding the pretty toy, she thought of the tablet in St. Paul’s Church and Mr. Orford’s words — “She is so near to you that if she could stretch out her hand she could touch you,” and without any remark about the portrait or the sitter, she advised her aunt that it was time to go home. So the four of them left, and Mr. Orford saw them out, standing framed in the warm light of the corridor and watching them disappear into the grey darkness of the street.

It was a little more than an hour afterwards when Elisa Minden came creeping down the stairway of her home and accosted her cousin, who was just leaving the house.

“Oh, Philip,” said she, clasping her hands, “if your errand be not a very important one, I beg you to give me an hour of your time. I have been watching for you to go out, that I might follow and speak to you privately.”

The young soldier looked at her keenly as she stood in the light of the hall lamp, and he saw that she was very agitated.

“Of course, Lizzie,” he answered kindly, and led her into the little parlour off the hall where there was neither candles or fire, but leisure and quiet to talk.

Elisa, being a housekeeper, found a lamp and lit it, and apologized for the cold, but she would not return upstairs, she said, for Mrs. Hoare and the two girls and the doctor were all quiet in the great parlour, and she had no mind to disturb them.

“You are in trouble,” said Captain Hoare quietly.

“Yes,” replied she in a frightened way, “I want you to come with me now to Mr. Orford’s house — I want to speak to his housekeeper.”

“Why, what is this, Lizzie?”

She had no very good explanation; there was only the visit to the church that afternoon, her impression of horror in the cabinet, the discovery of the scoured silk.

“But I must know something of his first wife, Philip,” she concluded. “I could never go on with it — if I did not — something has happened today — I hate that house, I almost hate — him.”

“Why did you do it, Lizzie?” demanded the young soldier sternly. “This was a nice homecoming for me… a man who might be your father… a solitary… one who frightens you.”

Miss Minden stared at her cousin; she did not know why she had done it; the whole thing seemed suddenly impossible.

“Please, you must come with me now,” she said.

So overwrought was she that he had no heart to refuse her, and they took their warm cloaks from the hall and went out into the dark streets.

It was snowing now and the ground slippery under foot, and Elisa clung to her cousin’s arm. She did not want to see Mr. Orford or his house ever again, and by the time they reached the doorstep she was in a tremble; but she rang the bell boldly.

It was Mrs. Boyd herself who came to the door; she began explaining that the master was shut up in his cabinet, but the soldier cut her short.

“Miss Minden wishes to see you,” he said, “and I will wait in the hall till she is ready.”

So Elisa followed the housekeeper down to her basement sitting-room; the manservant was out, and the two maids were quickly dismissed to the kitchen.

Mrs. Boyd, a placid soul, near seventy-years, waited for the young lady to explain herself, and Elisa Minden, flushing and paling by turns, and feeling foolish and timid, put forth the object of her coming.

She wanted to hear the story of Flora Orford — there was no one else whom she could ask — and she thought that she had a right to know.

“And I suppose you have, my dear,” said Mrs. Boyd, gazing into the fire, “though it is not a pretty story for you to hear — and I never thought I should be telling it to Mr. Orford’s second wife!”

“Not his wife yet.” said Miss Minden.

“There, there, you had better ask the master yourself,” replied Mrs. Boyd placidly; “not but that he would be fierce at your speaking of it, for I do not think a mention of it has passed his lips, and it’s twenty years ago and best forgotten, my dear.”

“Tell it me and then I will forget,” begged Miss Minden.

So then Mrs. Boyd, who was a quiet, harmless soul with no dislike to telling a tale (though no gossip, as events had proved, she having kept her tongue still on this matter for so long), told her story of Humphrey Orford’s wife; it was told in very few words.

“She was the daughter of his gamekeeper, my dear, and he married her out of hand, just for her pretty face. But they were not very happy together that I could ever see; she was afraid of him and that made her cringe, and he hated that, and she shamed him with her ignorant ways. And then one day he found her with a lover, saving your presence, mistress, one of her own people, just a common man. And he was just like a creature possessed; he shut up the house and sent away all the servants but me, and brought his lady up to town, to this house here. And what passed between her and him no one will know, but she ever looked like one dying of terror. And then the doctor began to come, Dr. Thursby, it was, that is dead now, and then she died, and no one was able to see her even she was in her coffin, nor to send a flower. ’Tis likely she died of grief, poor, fond wretch. But, of course, she was a wicked woman, and there was nothing to do but pity the master.”

And this was the story of Flora Orford.

“And the man?” asked Miss Minden, after a little.

“The man she loved, my dear? Well, Mr. Orford had him arrested as a thief for breaking into his house, he was wild, that fellow, with not the best of characters — well, he would not say why he was in the house, and Mr. Orford, being a Justice of the Peace, had some power, so he was just condemned as a common thief. And there are few to this day know the truth of the tale, for he kept his counsel to the last, and no one knew from him why he had been found in the Squire’s house.”

“What was his end?” asked Miss Minden in a still voice.

“Well he was hanged,” said Mrs. Boyd; “being caught red-handed, what could he hope for?”

“Then that is a picture of him in the cabinet!” cried Elisa, shivering for all the great fire; then she added desperately, “Tell me, did Flora Orford die in that cabinet?”

“Oh, no, my dear, but in a great room at the back of the house that has been shut up ever since.”

“But the cabinet is horrible,” said Elisa; “perhaps it is her portrait and that picture.”

“I have hardly been in there,” admitted Mrs. Boyd, “but the master lives there — he has always had his supper there, and he talks to that portrait my dear — ‘Flora, Flora’ he says, ‘how are you tonight?’ and then he imitates her voice, answering.”

Elisa Minden clapped her hand to her heart.

“Do not tell me these things or I shall think that you are hateful too, to have stayed in this dreadful house and endured them!” Mrs. Boyd was surprised.

“Now, my dear, do not be put out,” she protested.

“They were wicked people both of them and got their deserts, and it is an old story best forgotten; and as for the master, he has been just a good creature ever since we have been here, and he will not go talking to any picture when he has a sweet young wife to keep him company.”

But Elisa Minden had risen and had her fingers on the handle of the door.

“One thing more,” said she breathlessly; “that scoured silk — of a peach colour—”

“Why, has he got that still? Mrs. Orford wore it the night he found her with her sweetheart. I mind I was with her when she bought it — fine silk at forty shillings the yard. If I were you, my dear, I should burn that when I was mistress here.”

But Miss Minden had run upstairs to the cold hall.

Her cousin was not there; she heard angry voices overhead and saw the two maidservants affrighted on the stairs; a disturbance was unknown in this household.

While Elisa stood bewildered, a door banged, and Captain Hoare came down red in the face and fuming; he caught his cousin’s arm and hurried her out of the house.

In an angry voice he told her of the unwarrantable behaviour of Mr. Orford, who had found him in the hall and called him “intruder” and “spy” without waiting for an explanation; the soldier had followed the scholar up to his cabinet and there had been an angry scene about nothing at all, as Captain Hoare said.

“Oh, Philip,” broke out poor Elisa as they hastened through the cold darkness, “I can never, never marry him!”

And she told him the story of Flora Orford. The young man pressed her arm through the heavy cloak.

“And how came such a one to entangle thee?” he asked tenderly. “Nay, thou shalt not marry him.”

They spoke no more, but Elisa, happy in the protecting and wholesome presence of her kinsman, sobbed with a sense of relief and gratitude. When they reached home they found they had been missed and there had to be explanations; Elisa said there was something that she had wished to say to Mrs. Boyd, and Philip told of Mr. Orford’s rudeness and the quarrel that had followed.

The two elder people were disturbed and considered Elisa’s behaviour strange, but her manifest agitation caused them to forbear pressing her for an explanation; nor was it any use addressing themselves to Philip, for he went out to his delayed meeting with companions at a coffee-house.

That night Elisa Minden went to bed feeling more emotion than she had ever done in her life; fear and disgust of the man whom hitherto she had placidly regarded as her future husband, and a yearning for the kindly presence of her childhood’s companion united in the resolute words she whispered into her pillow during that bitter night.

“I can never marry him now!”

The next day it snowed heavily, yet a strange elation was in Elisa’s heart as she descended to the warm parlour, bright from the fire and light from the glow of the snow without.

She was going to tell her father that she could not carry out her engagement with Mr. Orford, and that she did not want ever to go into his house again.

They were all gathered round the breakfast-table when Captain Hoare came in late (he had been out to get a newsletter) and brought the news that was the most unlooked for they could conceive, and that was soon to startle all London.

Mr. Orford had been found murdered in his cabinet.

These tidings, though broken as carefully as possible, threw the little household into the deepest consternation and agitation; there were shrieks, and cryings, and running to and fro.

Only Miss Minden, though of a ghastly colour, made no especial display of grief; she was thinking of Flora Orford.

When the doctor could get away from his agitated womenfolk, he went with his nephew to the house of Mr. Orford.

The story of the murder was a mystery. The scholar had been found in his chair in front of his desk with one of his own bread-knives sticking through his shoulders; and there was nothing to throw any light as to how or through whom he had met his death.

The story, sifted from the mazed incoherency of Mrs. Boyd, the hysterics of the maids, the commentaries of the constables, and the chatter of the neighbours, ran thus:

At half-past nine the night before, Mrs. Boyd had sent one of the maids up with her master’s supper; it was his whim to have it always thus, served on a tray in the cabinet. There had been wine and meat, bread and cheese, fruit and cakes — the usual plates and silver — among these the knife that had killed Mr. Orford.

When the servant left, the scholar had followed her to the door and locked it after her; this was also a common practice of his, a precaution against any possible interruption, for, he said, he did the best part of his work in the evening.

It was found next morning that his bed had not been slept in, and that the library door was still locked; as the alarmed Mrs. Boyd could get no answer to her knocks, the manservant had sent for someone to force the lock, and Humphrey Orford had been found in his chair, leaning forward over his papers with the knife thrust up to the hilt between his shoulders; he must have died instantly, for there was no sign of any struggle, nor any disarrangement of his person or his papers. The first doctor to see him, a passer-by, attracted by the commotion about the house, said he must have been dead some hours — probably since the night before; the candles had all burnt down to the socket, and there were spillings of grease on the desk; the supper tray stood at the other end of the room, most of the food had been eaten, most of the wine drunk, the articles were all there in order excepting only the knife sticking between Mr. Orford’s shoulder-blades.

When Captain Hoare had passed the house on his return from buying the newsletter he had seen the crowd and gone in and been able to say that he had been the last person to see the murdered man alive, as he had had his sharp encounter with Mr. Orford about ten o’clock, and he remembered seeing the supper things in the room. The scholar had heard him below, unlocked the door, and called out such impatient resentment of his presence that Philip had come angrily up the stairs and followed him into the cabinet; a few angry words had passed, when Mr. Orford had practically pushed his visitor out, locking the door in his face and bidding him take Miss Minden home.

This threw no light at all on the murder; it only went to prove that at ten o’clock Mr. Orford had been alive in his cabinet.

Now here was the mystery; in the morning the door was still locked, on the inside, the window was, as it had been since early evening, shuttered and fastened across with an iron bar, on the inside, and, the room being on an upper floor, access would have been in any case almost impossible by the window which gave on to the smooth brickwork of the front of the house.

Neither was there any possible place in the room where anyone might be hidden — it was just the square lined with the shallow bookshelves, the two pictures (that sombre little one looking strange now above the bent back of the dead man), the desk, one or two chairs and side tables; there was not so much as a cupboard or bureau — not a hiding-place for a cat.

How, then, had the murderer entered and left the room?

Suicide, of course, was out of the question, owing to the nature of the wound — but murder seemed equally out of the question; Mr. Orford sat so close to the wall that the handle of the knife touched the panel behind him. For anyone to have stood between him and the wall would have been impossible; behind the back of his chair was not space enough to push a walking-stick.

How, then, had the blow been delivered with such deadly precision and force?

Not by anyone standing in front of Mr. Orford, first because he must have seen him and sprung up; and secondly, because, even had he been asleep with his head down, no one, not even a very tall man, could have leaned over the top of the desk and driven in the knife, for experiment was made, and it was found that no arm could possibly reach such a distance.

The only theory that remained was that Mr. Orford had been murdered in some other part of the room and afterwards dragged to his present position.

But this seemed more than unlikely, as it would have meant moving the desk, a heavy piece of furniture that did not look as if it had been touched, and also became there was a paper under the dead man’s hand, a pen in his fingers, a splutter of ink where it had fallen, and a sentence unfinished. The thing remained a complete and horrid mystery, one that seized the imagination of men; the thing was the talk of all the coffee-houses and clubs.

The murder seemed absolutely motiveless, the dead man was not known to have an enemy in the world, yet robbery was out of the question, for nothing had been even touched.

The early tragedy was opened out. Mrs. Boyd told all she knew, which was just what she had told Elisa Minden — the affair was twenty years ago, and the gallows bird had no kith or kin left.

Elisa Minden fell into a desperate state of agitation, a swift change from her first stricken calm; she wanted Mr. Orford’s house pulled down — the library and all its contents burnt; her own wedding-dress did she burn, in frenzied silence, and none dare stop her; she resisted her father’s entreaties that she should go away directly after the inquest; she would stay on the spot, she said, until the mystery was solved.

Nothing would content her but a visit to Mr. Orford’s cabinet; she was resolved, she said wildly, to come to the bottom of this mystery and in that room, which she had entered once and which had affected her so terribly, she believed she might find some clue.

The doctor thought it best to allow her to go; he and her cousin escorted her to the house that now no one passed without a shudder and into the chamber that all dreaded to enter.

Good Mrs. Boyd was sobbing behind them; the poor soul was quite mated with this sudden and ghastly ending to her orderly life; she spoke all incoherently, explaining, excusing, and lamenting in a breath; yet through all her trouble she showed plainly and artlessly that she had had no affection for her master, and that it was custom and habit that had been wounded, not love.

Indeed, it seemed that there was no one who did love Humphrey Orford; the lawyers were already busy looking for a next-of-kin; it seemed likely that this property and the estates in Suffolk would go into Chancery.

“You should not go in, my dear, you should not go in,” sobbed the old woman, catching at Miss Minden’s black gown (she was in mourning for the murdered man) and yet peering with a fearful curiosity into the cabinet.

Elisa looked ill and distraught but also resolute.

“Tell me, Mrs. Boyd,” said she, pausing on the threshold, “what became of the scoured silk?”

The startled housekeeper protested that she had never seen it again; and here was another touch of mystery — the old peach-coloured silk skirt that four persons had observed in Mr. Orford’s cabinet the night of his murder, had completely disappeared.

“He must have burnt it,” said Captain Hoare, and though it seemed unlikely that he could have consumed so many yards of stuff without leaving traces in the grate, still it was the only possible solution.

“I cannot think why he kept it so long,” murmured Mrs. Boyd, “for it could have been no other than Mrs. Orford’s best gown.”

“A ghastly relic,” remarked the young soldier grimly.

Elisa Minden went into the middle of the room and stared about her; nothing in the place was changed, nothing disordered; the desk had been moved round to allow of the scholar being carried away, his chair stood back, so that the long panel on which hung the picture of the gallows, was fuller exposed to view.

To Elisa’s agitated imagination this portion of the wall sunk in the surrounding bookshelves, long and narrow, looked like the lid of a coffin.

“It is time that picture came down,” she said; “it cannot interest anyone any longer.”

“Lizzie, dear,” suggested her father gently, “had you not better come away? — this is a sad and awful place.”

“No,” replied she. “I must find out about it — we must know.”

And she turned about and stared at the portrait of Flora Orford.

“He hated her, Mrs. Boyd, did he not? And she must have died of fear — think of that! — died of fear, thinking all the while of that poor body on the gallows. He was a wicked man and whoever killed him must have done it to revenge Flora Orford.”

“My dear,” said the doctor hastily, “all that was twenty years ago, and the man was quite justified in what he did, though I cannot say I should have been so pleased with the match if I had known this story.”

“How did we ever like him?” muttered Elisa Minden. “If I had entered this room before I should never have been promised to him — there is something terrible in it.”

“And what else can you look for, my dear,” snivelled Mrs. Boyd, “in a room where a man has been murdered.”

“But it was like this before,” replied Miss Minden; “it frightened me.”

She looked round at her father and cousin, and her face quite distorted.

“There is something here now,” she said, “something in this room.”

They hastened towards her, thinking that her over-strained nerves had given way; but she took a step forward.

Shriek after shriek left her lips.

With a quivering finger she pointed before her at the long panel behind the desk.

At first they could not tell at what she pointed; then Captain Hoare saw the cause of her desperate terror.

It was a small portion of faded, peach-coloured silk showing above the ribbed line of the wainscot, protruding from the wall, like a garment of stuff shut in a door.

“She is in there!” cried Miss Minden. “In there!”

A certain frenzy fell on all of them; they were in a confusion, hardly knowing what they said or did. Only Captain Hoare kept some presence of mind and, going up to the panel, discerned a fine crack all round.

“I believe it is a door,” he said, “and that explains how the murderer must have struck — from the wall.”

He lifted the picture of the hanged man and found a small knob or button, which, as he expected, on being pressed sent the panel back into the wall, disclosing a secret chamber no larger than a cupboard.

And directly inside this hidden room that was dark to the sight and noisome to the nostrils, was the body of a woman, leaning against the inner wall with a white kerchief knotted tightly round her throat, showing how she had died; she wore the scoured silk skirt, the end of which had been shut in the panel, and an old ragged bodice of linen that was like a dirty parchment; her hair was grey and scanty, her face past any likeness to humanity, her body thin and dry.

The room, which was lit only by a window a few inches square looking onto the garden, was furnished with a filthy bed of rags and a stool with a few tattered clothes; a basket of broken bits was on the floor.

Elisa Minden crept closer.

“It is Flora Orford,” she said, speaking like one in a dream.

They brought the poor body down into the room, and then it was clear that this faded and terrible creature had a likeness to the pictured girl who smiled from the canvas over the mantelpiece.

And another thing was clear and, for a moment, they did not dare speak to each other.

For twenty years this woman had endured her punishment in the wall chamber in that library that no one but her husband entered; for twenty years he had kept her there, behind the picture of her lover, feeding her on scraps, letting her out only when the household was abed, amusing himself with her torture — she mending the scoured silk she had worn for twenty years, sitting there, cramped in the almost complete dark, a few feet from where he wrote his elegant poetry.

“Of course she was crazy,” said Captain Hoare at length, “but why did she never cry out?”

“For a good reason,” whispered Dr. Minden, when he had signed to Mrs. Boyd to take his fainting daughter away. “He saw to that — she has got no tongue.”

The coffin bearing the nameplate “Flora Orford” was exhumed, and found to contain only lead; it was substituted by another containing the wasted body of a woman who died by her own hand twenty years after the date on the mural tablet to her memory.

Why or how this creature, certainly become idiotic and dominated entirely by the man who kept her prisoner, had suddenly found the resolution and skill to slay her tyrant and afterwards take her own life (a thing she might have done any time before) was a question never solved.

It was supposed that he had formed the hideous scheme to complete his revenge by leaving her in the wall to die of starvation while he left with his new bride for abroad, and that she knew this and had forestalled him; or else that her poor, lunatic brain had been roused by the sound of a woman’s voice as she handled the scoured silk which the captive was allowed to creep out and mend when the library door was locked. But over these matters and the details of her twenty years’ suffering, it is but decent to be silent.

Lizzie Minden married her cousin, but not at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. Nor did they ever return to the neighbourhood of Humphrey Orford’s house.

“All-Story Weekly” 08 Jun. 1918

Crimes of Old London (1919)

Old Patch’s Medley (1930)

BRENT’S FOLLY

They said each Brent had his folly, a horse, a woman, a building, an idea, but the present Brent outshone his ancestors by the blatant coarseness of his particular caprice.

When his father had seriously encumbered the estates to build on another wing with a massive ballroom that accorded ill with the Tudor Manor house, the county had remarked that the historic folly of the Brents had passed the limits of the picturesque and romantic and become very like stupidity.

The next Brent, however, excelled the foolish action of his father, for his folly took the form of flesh and blood; to make a mistake about a woman, said the county, was worse than to make a mistake about a building, though there were some cynics who declared that the latter error was worse because the woman passed with her generation and was easily forgotten, whereas the stone and brick remained a lasting annoyance till someone had the courage, time, and money to remove it.

But while she was there, certainly the woman was the greater cause for marvel, the greater shame to the good taste and intelligence of the Brents.

If she had been outrageous, impossible, an actress, a foreigner, a milkmaid, it might have been a folly forgiven and even admired.

If she had been ugly and very rich, or beautiful and very poor, it would have been a thing condoned — an action with at least a motive, some reason to explain the extravagance, the departure from the usual which was more or less expected of the Brents.

But here there was nothing of wonderful, nothing of romantic — nothing to make people startle and stare.

She was the younger daughter of a dull, middle-class family of correct education and morals, neither plain nor pretty, with bad health and a lethargic temperament, and most dismal dull in company.

She excelled in nothing, her taste was of the worst, she could not manage her servants nor her acquaintances, she was jealous and sullen and entirely indifferent to all that makes the fire and colour of life.

And she was five years older than her husband, and after many years of marriage was still childless.

And this was the folly of the last Brent, Sir Roger, handsome, accomplished, brilliant, wealthy.

People asked each other what hidden motive had induced him to offer all to this woman who could not even appreciate what he gave.

Of all the follies of the Brents this was the most inexplicable.

If she had been only wicked, the thing might have been understood, if she had shown the least sign of any of the arts and graces of an enchantress he would have stood excused.

But she was neutral, she was nothing, she had not a single charm that would have induced an ordinary man to choose her for the love of a season, and instead Roger Brent had chosen her for his wife — this was what was neither understood nor forgiven.

The county disapproved and showed its disapproval; Sir Roger lost many friends; he became a gloomy self-absorbed man, withdrawn slightly from his fellows.

He rarely left Brent Manor; he was a good landlord, a good neighbour, a fine figure among the country gentry — if it had not been for his marriage.

But that had ruined all; Sir Roger at forty was considered as a man with no longer any possibilities before him; he would live and die the squire of Brent Manor, nothing more.

For, like damp ashes on fire, his wife seemed to have choked and stifled all that was eager, ambitious and ardent in Sir Roger; he had sacrificed to this nullity all that a man could sacrifice to beauty and worth.

When Charles Denton, who had known and envied Sir Roger in the days of their common youth, returned to England from Spain, where he had been fulfilling honourable and profitable duties for His Majesty’s Government, he heard from several the story of the folly of the last of the Brents.

The last of the Brents and the last of the follies it appeared, since there was no one of the name to carry on the family and the family traditions.

Denton was sorry; he had almost loved Sir Roger, they had been constantly together until Denton’s foreign appointment had separated them.

He wrote to Sir Roger and asked if he might spend some of his leave at Brent Manor; Sir Roger responded cordially, and Denton went down to Brent with a little ache of regret at his heart for the fate of his friend.

He found him as much changed as the reports in London had led him to believe he would be, and despite his preparation he was shocked, almost startled.

Sir Roger, for whom “brilliant” had always seemed the most fitting epithet, had become almost dull; he was silent, almost shy, even with the old friend whom he had seemed so glad to welcome.

His clothes were of an ancient pattern, he was listless in his manner, the unpowdered hair was plentifully sprinkled with grey, the handsome face hard and lined.

The Manor house, too, seemed ill-kept and gloomy.

Denton had an impression of gloom from all his surroundings.

At supper he saw the lady of the house. She was neatly dressed in a gay sacque; her manner was dull and civil.

Denton eyed her in vain for a single merit; her figure was ill-shaped and slightly stooping, her hands and feet were large, her complexion was of an ugly pallor, her features soft and heavy, eyes and hair of a colourless brown, her movements without meaning, her words without grace.

Denton inwardly sighed and the supper hour passed heavily.

She left them early and Denton, spurred by a deep impulse, turned swiftly to his host and asked:

“Why did you marry her?”

Sir Roger was sitting in a dejected attitude with his head a little lowered.

As his friend spoke he looked up, and a smile touched his sombre features.

“You are the first who has had the courage to demand that question,” he responded.

“Or the bad taste,” apologized Denton.

Sir Roger shrugged his shoulders.

“The others were silent and stayed away, you speak and come,” he said.

Denton was indignant for his friend.

“Why should they stay away? The lady is well enough.”

“She blights,” said Sir Roger decisively.

Denton wondered that such a mediocrity should have that power — but it was what he had heard in London.

“A woman,” he replied, “can keep in a woman’s place — why should she interfere with your friends?”

Sir Roger smiled again.

“She is so dull, she deadens, so stupid she frightens, so unlovely she depresses.”

“And yet you married her!”

“Yes, I married her.”

“Why, Roger, why?”

“You wonder?”

“Who would not wonder, you who had everything, might have married a Princess, you might have had the best of life — instead—”

“This!” finished Sir Roger.

“There must be a reason.”

“You think so?”

“Assuredly.”

“Would you like to hear it?”

“Certainly — I came here to hear it,” smiled Denton.

Sir Roger for a while was silent; he was turning over the incidents of his past as one turns the leaves of a long closed book, with wonder and a little sadness at ancient things that once meant so much and now mean so little.

“Is it worth while?” he asked at length.

He rested his elbows on the table and looked rather drearily at his friend.

“What?”

“To tell you — to tell anyone how it happened,” replied Sir Roger.

Denton looked with profound compassion at his lined face, his bowed figure, his grey sprinkled hair, his careless dress.

And Brent looked with a dull envy at the neat elegance of his friend, who, powdered, fashionable, alert, seemed indeed to come from another world than that duty circle which comprised the life of Brent Manor.

“Tell me,” said Denton quietly.

Sir Roger laughed.

“Tell you why I married Lily Walters?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Sir Roger shrugged his shoulders.

“Why not?” he answered.

He turned his eyes, still handsome but lustreless, towards the log fire which flickered in the sculptured chimney place, and his fine hands dropped and clasped slackly on the dark surface of the sombre oak table, where stood the glasses and the fruit and the bottles of old wine.

Then, like one who reads aloud slowly, and with a certain difficulty, he began his strange relation.

“I greatly loved my life. I had everything to make existence pleasant. Health, name, money — wits — you know what I had, my friend.”

“Everything.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Everything. But I wished for more. I had a lust for knowledge, for power, for experience — I wished to reach the limits of every sensation.

For me there was no wine powerful enough, no woman beautiful enough, no gold bright enough—

I wished to prove everything — to see everything — to know everything.

For five years I travelled from one country to another; I had enough money to obtain all my desires.

I had friends, lovers, horses, houses, ships, I travelled sometimes in a coach and six, sometimes on foot, sometimes I lodged in palaces, sometimes I slept in a ditch. I kissed princesses by the light of a hundred candles, and peasant girls by the dewy light of dawn, I stayed at the most dissolute courts in Italy, and I shut myself for months in the austerity of a Spanish convent.

I experienced poverty, luxury, every day I gained knowledge.

I practised in music, poetry, botany, medicine, painting, sculpture, astronomy — I sat at the feet of wise men and drew crude knowledge from the unlettered of all countries.

Still I was not satisfied.

My health remained vigorous and my mind restless.

So far I had not found one woman whom I could not replace, one friend whose company was a necessity, one art or science to which I wished to devote my life.

Then at The Hague I met a certain Doctor Strass, and under his guidance I began to seriously study alchemy and occultism.

In this I found at last something that absorbed my whole being.

Here was the love, the passion that should absorb my life.

For three years I lived for nothing else. I resolved to find the elixir of life.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Denton moved back out of the candlelight, so that he might more clearly see his friend’s face, but Sir Roger was absolutely grave.

He spoke as a man who, with quiet deliberation, relates sober sense.

“The elixir of life,” he repeated. “The magic powder that should confer on me eternal youth and eternal enjoyment.”

“A strange whim,” said Denton quietly. “You who had everything.”

“I wished to keep everything,” responded Sir Roger, “but more than that even, I wished for power.”

“The last temptation of the Devil!” smiled his friend.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I wished for power, repeated Brent, but I cannot explain. Enough that the thing took hold of me.

I lived for that alone. Occult studies absorbed my time and largely my fortune and my health.

I seemed ever on the verge of a discovery; but I attained nothing.

He paused, and a bitter sadness darkened his sensitive face.

Nothing, he repeated. I but underlined the failures of others, but repeated once more the tale of delusion and disappointment.

But in this I had more strength than some, in that I resolved to cease the fruitless and perilous study that had fascinated my entire soul.

I determined to free myself from what was becoming an incubus.

I was frightened by the fate of others whom I saw as half mad, half idiotic old men fumbling with their philtres and muttering over their furnaces; in short, I vowed to free myself from what I at last saw as but a net or device of the devil to draw me away from a useful and enjoyable life.

With this resolve strong within me I returned to England, and my desire for the normal desires of my former life was increased by the sight of familiar faces and sights.

I made up my mind to enter politics, and was on the point of taking steps in this direction, when an event occurred which again altered everything.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

He paused and pressed the palms of his hands to his brows. Denton was regarding him curiously.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

One day a sober-looking person came to see me. He seemed a doctor or a lawyer of the better sort.

He was not English; I took him to be a Dutchman or of the Low German nationality — he was habited very neatly and very precise in his speech.

“I hear,” said he without preamble, “that you have studied alchemy.”

“For a while,” said I, “but I have left that business.”

Whereat he smiled quietly and drew from his pocket a little box of tortoiseshell like a gentleman’s box for snuff, and opening it, he drew out, wrapped in two foldings of scarlet silk, a piece of stone the size of a walnut and the colour of amber. “This is what you have been looking for,” he said calmly; “this is what the vulgar called the Philosopher’s Stone.”

At these words all the blood went back on my heart, and I begged for a portion with tears in my eyes.

Whereupon he very comfortably took off a paring with his nail, for the stone was soft like soap, and laid it in the palm of my hand.

And while I was yet too amazed to speak he left me.

I had yet with me my retorts and crucibles, and that night I very eagerly tested the portion of the stone on a piece of lead, and when in the morning I poured it forth it was pure rich gold. When this was set I took it round to the jeweller who worked for the court, and asked him what it was, and he told me that it was indeed gold of a finer quality than he had ever handled before.

I was like a madman, for I had no means of finding my stranger, but that day he came again, and without preamble asked me if I was satisfied, and what I would do to possess the secret which, he declared, had become indifferent to him, as he had passed on to higher studies.

And he told me about the wonders of this stone, how a few drops of it dissolved in water, if allowed to stand, would leave great rubies and pearls at the bottom, and if taken would confer youth and beauty on him who drank.

And presently he showed me this experiment, and we sat up all night talking, and in the morning there were the jewels hard and glistening in our hands.

And then he propounded to me what he would have me do — take some poor mean creature to wife, and with the elixir make her into a goddess.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Brent paused thoughtfully; Denton was still looking at him with intent eyes.

Sir Roger continued:

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I was to marry her first, to show my trust. I was to present her to the town, and afterwards transform her. The idea pleased me beyond words; it was what no man had ever done before.

I agreed.

My stranger presented me to Lily Walters. I easily obtained the consent of her family — in brief, I made a match that confounded all my friends.

My Dutchman was at the church, and afterwards presented me with a packet, which he said contained the recipe for the famous stone.

Such was my impatience that I opened it in the coach ere we had reached home.

It was blank paper.

I left my bride to run to the stranger’s lodging, but he had left.

I never saw him again.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Sir Roger ended abruptly and turned his straight gaze on his friend’s serious face.

“And that is why I married Lily Walters,” he concluded.

“And the rubies?” asked Denton, quietly.

“She wears them now and then, set in the gold I made with the paring of stone.”

Denton was silent.

“I have searched Europe for that man,” continued Sir Roger sullenly. “I hope yet to kill him before I die.”

“You would be justified,” said Denton, easily. He rose and crossed to the fire, still looking covertly and intently at his friend.

Sir Roger muttered to himself a little, and presently fell asleep with his head bowed on his heart.

Denton softly left the room.

He was startled to see Lady Brent waiting in the shadows of the great hall.

“I don’t think Sir Roger is very well,” said Denton, quietly.

Her plain face quivered and her short-sighted eyes narrowed.

“I always wait up when there is anyone here,” she said simply. “I never know what he will do.”

They looked at each other.

“He had a strange life before I married him,” continued Lady Brent. “He brought me a ruby necklace, and told me it had been made by the Philosopher’s Stone.”

“Those studies turn a man’s brain,” said Denton.

“Oh!” answered Lady Brent in her thin ugly voice. “Roger has been mad a long time; no one knows the life I lead with him.”

Crimes of Old London (1919)

THE HOUSEKEEPER
aka
“THE CONFESSION
OF BEAU SEKFORDE”

Mr Robert Sekforde, a rather damaged man of fashion, entered with a lurching step his mansion near the tavern of the “Black Bull”, High Holborn. He was still known as “Beau Sekforde” and was still dressed in the extreme of the fashion of this year 1710, with wide brocade skirts, an immense peruke, and a quantity of lace and paste ornaments that were nearly as brilliant as diamonds.

About Mr Sekforde himself was a good deal of this spurious gorgeousness; from a little distance he still looked the magnificent man he once had been, but a closer view showed him ruddled with powder and rouge like a woman, heavy about the eyes and jaw, livid in the cheeks — a handsome man yet, but one deeply marked by years of idleness, good living, and the cheap dissipations of a nature at once brutal and effeminate. In the well-shaped features and dark eyes there was not a contour or a shadow that did not help towards the presentment of a type vicious and worthless; yet he had an air of breeding, of gallantry and grace that had hitherto never failed to win him facile admiration and help him over awkward places in his career. This air was also spurious — spurious as the diamonds at his throat and in his shoe-buckles; he was not even of gentle birth; the obscurity that hung round his origin was proof of the shame he felt at the dismal beginning of a career that had been so brilliant.

He entered his mansion that was modest but elegant, and called for candles to be brought into his study.

Taking off slowly his white, scented gloves, he stared thoughtfully at his plump, smooth hands and then at the walnut desk, scattered with silver and ebony stand dishes, pens and taper-holders, and a great number of little notes on gilt-edged and perfumed papers.

There were a great many others, neither gilt-edged nor perfumed; Mr Sekforde knew that these last were bills as surely as he knew the first were insipid invitations to rather third-rate balls and routs.

Everything in Mr Sekforde’s world was becoming rather third-rate now.

He looked round the room desperately, with that ugly glance of defiance which is not courage but cowardice brought to bay.

Nothing in the house was paid for and his credit would not last much longer; this had been a last venture to float his shaky raft on the waters of London society; he could foresee himself going very comfortably to the bottom.

Unless…

Unless he could again carry off some successful “coup” at cards; and this was unlikely; he was too well known now.

Every resource that could, at any pinch, afford means of livelihood to an unscrupulous rogue and yet permit him to move among the people on whom he preyed, had already been played by Mr Sekforde.

The sound of the opening door caused him to look up; he dreaded duns and was not sure of the unpaid servants.

But it was his wife who entered; at sight of her, Beau Sekforde cursed in a fashion that would have surprised his genteel admirers, over whose tea-tables he languished so prettily.

“Oh, pray keep civil,” said the lady, in a mincing tone.

She trailed to the fireplace and looked discontentedly at the logs that were falling into ashes.

“The upholsterer came,” she added, “with a bill for near a thousand guineas — I had difficulty in sending him away. Is nothing in the house paid for?”

“Nothing.”

She looked at him with a contempt that was more for herself than for him; she was quite callous and heartless; a sense of humour, a nice appreciation of men and things alone prevented her from being odious.

“Lord!” she smiled. “To live to be fooled by Beau Sekforde!”

She was a Countess in her own right; her patent was from Charles II and explained her career; she still had the air of a beauty and wore the gowns usually affected by loveliness, but she was old with the terrible old age of a wanton, soulless woman.

Her reputation was bad even for her type; she had cheated at everything from love to cards, and no tenderness or regret had ever softened her ugly actions. At the end of her career as presiding goddess of a gambling saloon she had married Robert Sekforde, thinking he had money or at least the wits to get it, and a little betrayed by his glib tongue, that had flattered her into thinking her beauty not lost, her charm not dead; only to find him an adventurer worse off than herself, who had not even paid for the clothes in which he had come to woo her. Her sole satisfaction was that he had also been deceived.

He had thought her the prudent guardian of the spoils of a lifetime; instead, selfishness had caused her to scatter what greed had gained, and for her too this marriage had been seized as a chance to avert ruin.

Haggard and painted, a dark wig on her head, false pearls round her throat, and a dirty satin gown hanging gracefully round a figure still upright and elegant, she stared at the fire.

“We shall have to disappear,” she remarked drily.

He looked at her with eyes of hate.

“You must have some money,” he said bluntly.

Avarice, the vice of old age, flashed in her glance as jealousy would have gleamed in that of a younger woman.

“What little I have I need,” she retorted. “The man has turned simple.” She grinned at her reflection in the glass above the fireplace.

“Well, leave me, then,” he said bitterly; could he be rid of her, he felt it would gild his misfortune.

But my lady had come to the end of all her admirers; she could not even any longer dazzle boys with the wicked glory of her past; she had no-one save Mr Sekforde, and she meant to cling to him; he was a man and twenty years younger than herself — he ought, she thought, to be useful.

Besides, this woman who had never had a friend of her own sex shuddered to think of the utter loneliness it would be to live without a man attached to her — better the grave; and of that she had all the horror of the true atheist.

“You talk folly,” she said with a dreadful ogle. “I shall remain.”

“Then you will starve, my lady!” he flung out violently.

“Oh, fie, sir; one does not starve.”

He could not endure to look at her, but stating ??? at the desk began to tear up the notes before him.

“Will you not go to a mask tonight?” she asked querulously.

“I have no money to pay for a chair,” he sneered.

“We might win something at cards.”

“People are very wary.”

“You were very clever at tricking me,” remarked the Countess, “cannot you trick someone else, Mr Sekforde?”

He wheeled round on her with concentrated venom.

“Ah, madam, if I were a bachelor—”

She quailed a little before his wrath, but rallied to reply with the spirit of a woman who had been spoilt by a king: “You think you are so charming? Wealthy matches are particular. Look in the glass, sir; your face is as ruined as your reputation!”

He advanced on her and she began to shriek in a dreadful fashion; the town woman showed through the airs of a great lady.

“I’ll call the watch!” she shrilled.

He fell back with a heavy step and stood glaring at her.

“A pair of fools,” said my lady bitterly. Then her cynical humour triumphed over her disgust. “Your first wife would smile to see us now,” she remarked.

Beau Sekforde turned to her a face suddenly livid.

“What do you know about my first wife?” he demanded fiercely.

“Nothing at all,” replied my lady. “You kept her rather in the background, did you not? But one can guess.”

Mr Sekforde raged; he loathed any reference to the woman whom he had married in his obscurity, and who had been his drudge in the background through all his shifting fortunes — her worn face, her wagging tongue, her rude manners had combined to make the thorn in the rose bed of his softest days.

He had hated her and believed that she had hated him; she was a Scotswoman, a shrew, thrifty, honest, plain, and a good housekeeper; she had always made him very comfortable at home, though she had shamed him on the rare occasions when she had forced him to take her abroad.

She had died only a few months before his present marriage. “One can guess,” repeated the Countess, showing teeth dark behind her rouged lips in a ghastly grin, “that you made her life very pleasant.”

He sprang up and faced her, a big, heavy bully for all his satins and French peruke.

“Oh,” she shrilled, frightened but defiant, “you look like murder.”

He turned away sharply and muttered some hideous words under his breath.

“What are you going to do?” asked my lady, with a quizzical glance round the tawdry splendour that had been hired to lure her into marriage and that now would so shortly be rent away.

Beau Sekforde controlled his wrath against the terrible woman who had deceived him into losing his last chance of retrieving ruin. “Where are the servants?” he asked.

“All gone. I think they have taken some of the plate and all of the wine. There is some food downstairs.”

Mr Sekforde had seen it as he came up — a hacked piece of fat ham on a dirty dish, a stained cloth, and a jagged loaf had been laid out on the dining-room table.

“I have had my dinner,” remarked the Countess.

Her husband rudely left the room; he was hungry and forced to search for food, but the remembrance of the meal waiting nauseated him. He was delicate in his habits, and as he descended the stairs he thought of his late wife — she had been a wonderful housekeeper — even in poverty she had never failed to secure comfort.

As he opened the door of the dining-room he was agreeably surprised. Evidently one of the servants had remained after all.

The hearth had been swept and a neat fire burnt pleasantly; a clean cloth was on the table, and the service was set out exactly; a fresh loaf, butter, wine, fruit, a dish of hot meat, of cheese, of eggs stood ready; there was wine and brightly polished glasses.

“I did not know,” Mr Sekforde muttered, “that any of the hussies in the house could work like this.”

He admired the spotless linen, the brilliant china, the gleaming glasses, the fresh and appetising food; and ate and drank with a pleasure that made him forget for the moment his troubles.

One thing only slightly disturbed his meal: among the dishes was a plate of goblin scones; they were of a peculiar shape and taste, and he had never known anyone make them but the late Jane Sekforde.

When he had finished he rang the bell for candles, for the short November day was closing in.

There was no answer. Surprised and slightly curious to see the servant who had been so deft, Mr Sekforde went to the head of the basement stairs and shouted lustily; still there was no reply.

He returned to the dining-room; the candles were lit and set precisely on the table.

Mr Sekforde ran upstairs to his wife. “Who is in this house?” he asked in a tone of some agitation. The Countess was by the fire, seated on a low chair; before her on the floor was a wheel of playing cards from which she was telling her fortune.

“Who is in the house?” she sneered. “A drunken ruffian.”

Misery was wearing thin the courtier-like manner from both of them.

“You old, wicked jade,” he replied, “there is someone hiding in this house.”

She rose; scattering the cards with the worn toe of her little satin shoe. “There is no-one in the house,” she said, “not a baggage of them all would stay. I am going out. I want lights and amusement. Your house is to too dull, Mr Sekforde.”

With this speech and an air that was a caricature of the graces of a young and beautiful woman, she swept out of the room.

Even her own maid, a disreputable Frenchwoman, had left her, having moved out of the impending crash; but my lady had never lacked spirit; she attired herself, put all the money she had in her bosom, and left the house to pass the evening with one of her cronies, who kept an establishment similar to that which she had been forced to abandon.

Even the departure of her vindictive presence did not sweeten for Beau Sekforde the house that was the temple of his failure.

He glared at the furniture that should have been paid for by bills on his wife’s fortune, and went to his chamber.

He too knew haunts, dark and gleaming, where health and money, wits and time might be steadily consumed, and where one who was bankrupt in all these things might be for the time tolerated if he had a flattering and servile tongue and an appearance that lent some dignity to mean vices and ignoble sins.

He found a fire in his bedchamber, the curtains drawn, his cloak, evening rapier, and gloves put ready for him, the candles lit on his dressing-table. He dressed himself rather soberly and went downstairs.

The meal was cleared away in the dining-room, the fire covered, the chairs put back in their places.

Beau Sekforde swore. “If I had not seen her fastened down in her coffin I should have sworn that Jane was in this house,” he muttered, and his bloodshot eyes winced a little from the gloom of the empty house.

Again he went to the head of the basement stairs and listened. He could hear faintly yet distinctly the sound of someone moving about — the sound of dishes, of brisk footsteps, of clattering irons.

“Some wench has remained,” he said uneasily, but he did not offer to investigate those concealed kitchen premises.

That evening his companions found him changed — a quiet, sullen, dangerous mood was on him; they could easily understand this, as tales of the disaster of his marriage had already leaked abroad.

But something deeper and more terrible even than his almost accomplished ruin was troubling Robert Sekforde.

He returned very late to the mansion in High Holborn; he had drunk as much wine as his friends would pay for, and there was little of the elegant gallant about the heavy figure in the stained coat, with wig awry and the flushed, sullen face, who stumbled into the wretched place he named home with unconscious sarcasm.

A light stood ready for him in the hall; he took this up and staggered upstairs, spilling the candle-grease over his lace ruffles.

Halfway up he paused, suddenly wondering who had thought to leave the light.

“Not my lady wife — not my royal Countess,” he grinned.

Then a sudden pang of horror almost sobered him. Jane had never forgotten to put a candle in the hall.

He paused, as if expecting to hear her shrill, nagging voice. “You’re drunk,” he said to himself fiercely; “she is dead, dead, dead.” He went upstairs.

The fire in his room was bright, the bed stood ready, his slippers and bed-gown were warming, a cup of posset stood steaming on the side table.

Mr Sekforde snatched up his candle and hurried to the room of the Countess. He violently entered and stood confronting her great bed with the red damask hangings.

With a shriek she sat up; her cheeks were still rouged, the false pearls dangled in her ears, the laced gown was open on her skinny throat; a cap with pink ribbons concealed her scant grey hair.

She flung herself, with claw-like hands, on an embroidered purse on the quilt and thrust it under her pillow; it contained her night’s winnings at cards.

“Have you come to rob me?” she screamed.

Terror robbed her of all dignity; she crouched in the shadows of the huge bed, away from the red light cast on her dreadful face by the candle her husband held.

Beau Sekforde was not thinking of money now, and her words passed unheeded.

“Who is in this house?” he demanded.

“You are mad,” she said, a little recovering her composure, but keeping her hands very firmly on the purse beneath the pillow. “There is no-one in this house.”

“Did you put a candle for me, and prepare my room and light the fire and place the posset?”

He spoke thickly and leant against the bedpost; the candle, now almost guttered away, sent a spill of grease on the heavy quilt.

“You are drunk, you monstrous man!” screamed my lady. “If you are not away instantly I’ll put my head out of the window and screech the neighbourhood up.”

Beau Sekforde, regarding her with dull eyes, remained at his original point.

“There was someone in the kitchen this afternoon,” he insisted. “I heard sounds—”

“Rats,” said my lady; “the house is full of ’em.”

A look of relief passed over the man’s sodden features. “Of course, rats,” he muttered.

“What else could it be?” asked the Countess, sufficiently impressed by his strange manner momentarily to forget her grievance against him.

“What else?” he repeated; then suddenly turned on her with fury, lurching the candle into her face.

“Could rats have set this for me?” he shouted.

The Countess shrank back; when agitated her head trembled with incipient palsy, and now it trembled so that the false pearls rattled hollow against her bony neck.

“You will fire the bed-curtains!” she shrilled desperately.

He trembled with a loathing of her that was like a panic fear of fury. “You time-foundered creature!” he cried. “You bitter horror! And ’twas for you I did it!”

She sprang to her knees in the bed, her hands crooked as if ready for his face; there was nothing left now of the fine dame nurtured in courts, the beauty nursed in the laps of princes. She had reverted to the wench of Drury Lane, screaming abuse from alley to alley.

“If you are disappointed, what about me?” she shrieked. “Have I not tied myself to a low, ugly fool?”

He stepped back from her as if he did not understand her, and, muttering, staggered back into his own room.

There he lit all the candles, piled up the fire with more fuel, glanced with horror at the bed, flung off his coat and wig, and settled himself in the chair with arms before the fire to sleep.

The Countess, roused and angered, could sleep no more.

She rose, flung on a chamber-robe, of yellow satin lined with marten’s fur, that was a relic of her court days, and threadbare and moth-eaten in places though giving the effect of much splendour.

Without striking a light she went cautiously out into the corridor, saw the door of her husband’s room ajar, a bright glow from it falling across the darkness, and crept steadily in.

He was, as she had supposed, in an intoxicated stupor of sleep by the fire.

His head had sunk forward on the stained and untied lace cravat on his breast; his wigless head showed fat and shaven and grey over the temples, his face was a dull purple and his mouth hung open. His great frame was almost as loose as that of a man newly dead, his hands hung slack and his chest heaved with his noisy breathing. My lady was herself a horrid object, but that did not prevent her from giving him a glance of genuine disgust.

“Beau Sekforde indeed!” she muttered.

She put out all the candles save two on the dressing-table, found the coat her husband had flung off, and began going swiftly through the pockets.

He had been, as she had hoped, fortunate at cards that night; he was indeed, like herself, of a type who seldom was unfortunate, since he only played with fools or honest men, neither of whom had any chance against the peculiar talents of the sharper.

The Countess found sundry pieces of gold and silver, which she knotted up in her handkerchief with much satisfaction. She knew that nothing but money would ever be able to be of any service to her in this world.

Pleased with her success, she looked round to see if there were anything else of which she could despoil her husband.

Keeping her cunning old eyes constantly on him, she crept to the dressing-table and went over the drawers and boxes. Most of the ornaments that she turned out glittered and gleamed heavily in the candlelight. But she knew that they were as false as the pearls trembling in her own ears; one or two things, however, she added to the money in the handkerchief, and she was about to investigate further when a little sound, like a cough, caused her to look sharply round.

The room was full of warm shadows, the fire was sinking low and only cast a dim light on the heavy, sleeping figure on the hearth, while the candlesticks on the dressing-table served only to illuminate the bent figure of the Countess in her brilliant wrap.

As she looked round she found herself staring straight at the figure of a woman, who was observing her from the other side of the bed.

This woman was dressed in a grey tabinet fashioned like the dress of an upper servant. Her hair was smoothly banded and her features were pale and sharp; her hands, that she held rather awkwardly in front of her, were rough and work-worn.

Across one cheek was a long scratch.

The Countess dropped her spoils; she remembered her husband’s words that she had taken for the babbling of a drunkard.

So there was someone in the house.

“How dare you?” she quavered, in a low voice, for she did not wish to rouse her husband. “How dare you come here?”

Without replying the woman moved across to the sleeping man and looked down at him with an extraordinary expression of mingled malice and protection, as if she would defend him from any evil save that she chose to deal herself.

So sinister was this expression and the woman’s whole attitude that the Countess was frightened as she never had been in the course of her wicked life.

She stood staring; the handkerchief, full of money and ornaments, dropped on the dressing-table unheeded.

Beau Sekforde moved in his sleep and fetched a deep groan.

“You impertinent creature!” whispered the Countess, taking courage. “Will you not go before I wake my husband?”

At these last words the woman raised her head; she did not seem to speak, yet, as if there were an echo in the room, the Countess distinctly heard the words “My husband!” repeated after her in a tone of bitter mockery.

A sense of unreality such as she had never known before touched the Countess; she felt as if her sight were growing dim and her hearing failing her; she made a movement as if to brush something from before her eyes.

When she looked again at Beau Sekforde he was alone; no-one was beside him.

In dreaming, tortured sleep he groaned and tossed.

“The baggage has slipped off,” muttered the Countess; “belike it is some ancient dear of his own. I will send her away in the morning.”

She crept back to her own room, forgetting her spoils. She did not sleep, and Mr Sekforde did not wake till the pale winter dawn showed between the curtains.

The Countess looked round on a chamber in disorder, but for Beau Sekforde everything was arranged, shaving water ready, his breakfast hot and tempting on a tray, his clothes laid out.

When he had dressed and come downstairs he found his wife yawning over a copy of the Gazette.

She remembered last night quite clearly, and considerably regretted what she had left behind in Beau Sekforde’s room in her confusion. She gave him a glance, vicious with the sense of an opportunity lost.

He flung at her the question he had asked last night.

“Who is in this house?”

“Some woman has stayed,” she answered. “I think it was Joanna — the housekeeper, but I did not see very clearly. She must be out now, as I have rung the bell and there has been no answer.”

“My breakfast was brought up to me,” said Mr Sekforde. “So it is Joanna Mills, is it?”

The Countess was angry; she had had to go to the kitchen and pick among yesterday’s scraps for her own food.

“And who is she?”

“You said, madam, the housekeeper.”

“She must be very fond of you,” sneered the lady.

He stared at that and turned on her a ghastly look.

“Oh, don’t think I am jealous!” she grinned cynically.

“It was the word you used,” he muttered. “I do not think anyone has been fond of me save one—”

He paused and passed his hand over his weary, heavy eyes. “I dreamt of her last night.”

“Who?”

“Jane, my wife.”

The Countess remembered the ugly echo of her words last night. “Your wife — do you forget that I and no other am your wife?”

“I do,” he replied sullenly; “to me Jane is always my wife.”

“A pity,” said my lady sarcastically, “that she did not live longer.” He gave her a queer look.

“And now we have got to think of ourselves,” he said abruptly. “I cannot keep these things much longer — you had better go.”

“Where?”

“What do I care!” he answered cruelly.

“I stay here,” she replied. “Is the rent paid?”

“No.”

“Well, they will not disturb us till quarter-day,” said my lady calmly. “You do not want to be parted from your loving wife, do you, dear?”

He stared at her as if her words had a double meaning.

“Cannot you be quiet about my wife?” he exclaimed.

“La! The man is off his head!” shrilled my lady. “Jane Sekforde is dead.”

“That is why I think about her,” he retorted grimly.

“A model husband,” jeered the Countess, eyeing him viciously. “I am sorry I never knew the sweet creature you regret so keenly and so touchingly.”

He raged at her like a man whose nerves are overwrought. “Will you not let the matter be? Think of yourself, you monstrous horror! You will soon be in the Fleet!”

This picture was sufficiently realistic to make the Countess shiver. “What are you going to do?” she asked with sudden feebleness.

He did not know; brooding and black-browed, he withdrew to the window-place and stared out at the leaden November sky that hung so heavily over the London streets.

“I suppose if you were free of me you would take your handsome face to market again?” added my lady, with a sudden flash of new fury.

He gave her a red look, at which she shrank away. “Well, still we do not decide on anything,” she quavered.

He would not answer her, but flung out of the house. His unsteady steps were directed to St. Andrew’s Church. It was a long time since Beau Sekforde had been near a church. Even when his wife had been buried here, he had not attended the service.

He stood now in the porch, biting his thumb; then presently he entered. Hesitating and furtive, he went round the walls until he came to the new, cheap tablet with the badly cut draped urn and the florid Latin setting forth the virtues of Jane Sekforde.

“They don’t say anything about her being a good housekeeper,” he found himself saying aloud. “Why, she told me once she would come back from the grave to set her house in order.”

He looked round as if to seek the answer of some companion, then laughed sullenly, drew his hat over his eyes, and left the church. Towards dusk he wandered home.

The dining-room was neat and clean, the fire attended to, the dinner on the table. He managed to eat some of the food, but without appetite. The Countess was out; there was no trace anywhere of her slovenly splendour.

The whole house was as clean and precise as it had been when that neglected drudge Jane Sekforde had ruled over it.

When the Countess returned he was almost glad to see her — he had been thinking so much, too much, of Jane. He had thought of her as he had seen her last, cold in her bed, clothed in her best grey gown, and how he had stared at her and hung over her and drawn suddenly away, so sharply that the button of cut steel on his cuff had left a scratch on her dead cheek.

“Where is Joanna Mills?” he abruptly asked his wife.

She stared at him. In such a moment as this could he think of nothing but the housekeeper? Was he losing his wits?

But she did not now much care; she had found a crony willing to shelter her and exploit her ancient glories.

“I am going away,” she said. “I do not know who is in the house — I have seen no-one.”

He seemed to pay no attention at all to her first remark. “What was that woman you saw last night like?”

“A very plain, shrewish-looking creature,” replied my lady, with some bitterness, as she recalled how she had been startled into dropping the filched money.

“Are you sure it was a woman?” asked Beau Sekforde with a ghastly grin.

“Why, what else could it have been?” she replied curiously.

“I do not think it has been a woman for — some months,” he said.

“Why, do you imagine there is a spectre in the place?”

He would not, could not answer; he left her, and went from room to room throwing everything into disorder, taking a horrid pleasure in making a confusion in the neatness of the house. And then he flung himself away from the dreary mansion, leaving the Countess, like an old, weary bird of prey, wandering among the untidy rooms to see if there were anything worth taking away.

When he returned in the dark hours before the dawn he found the candle on the hall table.

“Curse you!” he screamed. “Cannot you let me alone?”

He hastened upstairs; everything was neat, his bed, his fire, his posset ready, his shoes warming, his candles lit. His terrified eyes cast a horrid glance round the room.

“The medicine cupboard — has she tidied that?” he muttered.

He crossed to where it hung in one corner, opened the door, and looked at the rows of pots and bottles. One he knew well had been stained — had been left with a broken stopper… a bottle of a peculiar, ugly look, holding a yellow liquid that stained linen purple.

Such a stain, very tiny, had been on Jane Sekforde’s pillow.

As he stared into the cupboard he saw that the bottle had been cleaned and set in its place, while a new, neat label had been pasted on the front.

The writing was the writing of Jane Sekforde — it said in clear letters, “Poison.”

Beau Sekforde dropped the candle and ran into the Countess’s room.

“Wake up!” he shouted. “Wake up and hear me! She has come back.

I want to confess. I murdered her! Let them take me away… somewhere where — where she cannot tidy for me.”

The room was empty of the Countess, who had fled; an unnatural light came from the unshuttered windows and showed a woman sitting up in the great bed.

She had a pale, shrewish face, a grey garment on, and a scratch across her cheek.

As the shrieks of Beau Sekforde’s confession echoed into the night and drew the watch to thunder on the door, the woman smiled.

Crimes of Old London (1919)

Old Patch’s Medley (1930)

The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949)

THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURE
OF MR JOHN PROUDIE
aka
“THE MYSTERY OF
DR. FRANCIS VALLETORT”

Mr John Proudie kept a chemist’s shop in Soho Fields, Monmouth Square; it was a very famous shop, situated at the corner, so that there were two fine windows of leaded glass, one looking on Dean Street and one on the Square, and at the corner the door, with a wooden portico by which two steps descended into the shop.

A wooden counter, polished and old, ran round this shop, and was bare of everything save a pair of gleaming brass scales; behind, the walls were covered from floor to ceiling by shelves which held jars of Delft pottery, blue and white, and Italian majolica, red and yellow, on which were painted the names of the various drugs; in the centre the shelves were broken by a door that led into an inner room.

On a certain night in November when the shop was shut, the old housekeeper abed, and the fire burning brightly in the parlour, Mr John Proudie was busy in his little laboratory compounding some medicines, in particular a mixture of the milky juice of blue flag root and pepper which he had found very popular for indigestion.

He was beginning to feel cold, and, not being a young man (at this time, the year 1690, Mr Proudie was nearly sixty), a little tired, and to think with pleasure of his easy chair, his hot drink of mulled wine on the hearth, his Gazette with its exciting news of the war and the Commons and the plots, when a loud peal at the bell caused him to drop the strainer he was holding — not that it was so unusual for Mr Proudie’s bell to ring after dark, but his thoughts had been full of these same troubles of plots and counter-plots of the late Revolution, and the house seemed very lonely and quiet.

“Fine times,” thought Mr Proudie indignantly, “when an honest tradesman feels uneasy in his own home!”

The bell went again, impatiently, and the apothecary wiped his hands, took up a candle, and went through to the dark shop. As he passed through the parlour he glanced up at the clock and was surprised to see that it was nearly midnight. He set the candle in its great pewter stick on the counter, whence the light threw glistening reflections on the rows of jars and their riches, and opened the door. A gust of wind blew thin cold sleet across the, polished floor, and the apothecary shivered as he cried out: “Who is there?”

Without replying a tall gentleman stepped down into the shop, closing the door behind him.

“Well, sir?” asked Mr Proudie a little sharply.

“I want a doctor,” said the stranger, “at once.”

He glanced round the shop impatiently, taking no more notice of Mr Proudie than if he had been a servant.

“And why did you come here for a doctor?” demanded the apothecary, not liking his manner and hurt at the insinuation that his own professional services were not good enough.

“I was told,” replied the stranger, speaking in tolerable English, but with a marked foreign accent, “that a doctor lodged over your shop.”

“So he does,” admitted Mr Proudie grudgingly; “but he is abed.”

The stranger approached the counter and leant against it in the attitude of a man exhausted; the candlelight was now full on him, but revealed nothing of his features, for he wore a black mask such as was used for travelling on doubtful rendezvous; a black lace fringe concealed the lower part of his face.

Mr Proudie did not like this; he scented mystery and underhand intrigue, and he stared at the stranger very doubtfully.

He was a tall, graceful man, certainly young, wrapped in a dark blue mantle lined with fur and wearing riding gloves and top boots; the skirts of a blue velvet coat showed where the mantle was drawn up by. his sword, and there was a great deal of fine lace and a diamond brooch at his throat.

“Well,” he said impatiently, and his black eyes flashed through the mask holes, “how long are you going to keep me waiting? I want Dr Valletort at once.”

“Oh, you know his name?”

“Yes, I was told his name. Now, for God’s sake, sir, fetch him — tell him it is a woman who requires his services!”

Mr Proudie turned reluctantly away and picked up the candle, leaving the gentleman in the dark, mounted the stairs to the two rooms above the shop, and roused his lodger.

“You are wanted, Dr Valletort,” he said through the door; “there is a man downstairs come to fetch you to a lady — a bitter night and he a foreign creature in a mask,” finished the old apothecary in a grumble.

Dr Francis Valletort at once opened the door; he was not in bed, but had been reading by the light of a small lamp. Tall and elegant, with the pallor of a scholar and the grace of a gentleman, the young doctor stood as if startled, holding his open book in his hand.

“Do not go,” said Mr Proudie on a sudden impulse; “these are troubled times and it is a bitter night to be abroad.”

The doctor smiled.

“I cannot afford to decline patients, Mr Proudie — remember how much I am in your debt for food and lodging,” he added with some bitterness.

“Tut, tut!” replied Mr Proudie, who had a real affection for the young man. “But no doubt I am an old fool — come down and see this fellow.”

The doctor took up his shabby hat and cloak and followed the apothecary down into the parlour and from there into the shop.

“I hope you are ready,” said the voice of the stranger from the dark; “the patient may be dead through this delay.”

Mr Proudie again placed the candle on the counter; the red flame of it illuminated the tall, dark figure of the stranger and the shabby figure of the doctor against the background of the dark shop and the jars — labelled “Gum Camphor”, “Mandrake Root”, “Dogwood Bark”, “Blue Vervain”, “Tansy”, “Hemlock”, and many other drugs, written in blue and red lettering under the glazing.

“Where am I to go and what is the case?” asked Francis Valletort, eyeing the stranger intently.

“Sir, I will tell you all these questions on the way; the matter is urgent.”

“What must I take with me?”

The stranger hesitated.

“First, Dr Valletort,” he said, “are you skilled in the Italian?”

The young doctor looked at the stranger very steadily. “I studied medicine at the University of Padua,” he replied.

“Ah! Well, then, you will be able to talk to the patient, an Italian lady who speaks no English. Bring your instruments and some antidotes for poisoning, and make haste.”

The doctor caught the apothecary by the arm and drew him into the parlour. He appeared in considerable agitation.

“Get me my sword and pistols,” he said swiftly, “while I prepare my case.”

He spoke in a whisper, for the door was open behind them into the shop, and the apothecary, alarmed by his pale look, answered in the same fashion: “Why are you going? Do you know this man?”

“I cannot tell if I know him or not — what shall I do? God help me!”

He spoke in such a tone of despair and looked so white and ill that Mr Proudie pushed him into a chair by the fire and bade him drink some of the wine that was warming.

“You will not go out tonight,” he said firmly.

“No,” replied the doctor, wiping the damp from his brow, “I cannot go.”

John Proudie returned to the shop to take this message to the stranger, who, on hearing it, broke into a passionate ejaculation in a foreign language, then thrust his hand into his coat pocket.

“Take this to Francis Valletort,” he answered, “and then see if he will come.”

He flung on the counter, between the scales and candle, a ring of white enamel, curiously set with alternate pearls and diamonds very close together, and having suspended from it a fine chain from which hung a large and pure pearl.

Before the apothecary could reply Francis Valletort, who had heard the stranger’s words, came from the parlour and snatched at the ring. While he was holding it under the candle flame and gazing at the whiteness of diamond, pearl, and enamel, the masked man repeated his words.

“Now will you come?”

The doctor straightened his thin shoulders, his hollow face was flushed into a strange beauty.

“I will come,” he said; he pushed back the brown locks that had slipped from the black ribbon on to his cheek and turned to pick up his hat and cloak, while he asked Mr Proudie to go up to his room and fetch his case of instruments.

The apothecary obeyed; there was something in the manner of Francis Valletort that told him that he was now as resolute in undertaking this errand as hitherto he had been anxious to avoid it; but he did not care for the adventure. When the stranger had thrust his hand into his pocket to find the ring that had produced such an effect on the doctor, Mr Proudie had noticed something that he considered very unpleasant. The soft doeskin glove had fallen back, caught in the folds of the heavy mantle as the hand was withdrawn, and Mr Proudie had observed a black wrist through the lace ruffles: the masked cavalier was a negro. Mr Proudie had seen few coloured men and regarded them with suspicion and aversion; and what seemed to him so strange was that what he styled a “blackamoor” should be thus habited in fashionable vestures and speaking with an air of authority.

However, evidently Francis Valletort knew the man or at least his errand — doubtless from some days of student adventure in Italy; and the apothecary did not feel called upon to interfere. He returned with the case of instruments to find the stranger and the doctor both gone, the parlour and the shop both empty, and the candle on the counter guttering furiously in the fierce draught from the half-open door.

Mr Proudie was angry; there had been no need to slip away like that, sending him away by a trick, and still further no need to leave the door open at the mercy of any passing vagabond.

The apothecary went and peered up and down the street; all was wet darkness; a north wind flung the stinging rain in his face; a distant street lamp cast a fluttering flame but no light on the blackness.

Mr Proudie closed the door with a shudder and went back to his fire and his Gazette.

“Let him,” he said to himself, still vexed, “go on his fool’s errand.”

He knew very little of Francis Valletort, whose acquaintance he had made a year ago when the young doctor had come to him to buy drugs. The apothecary had found his customer earnest, intelligent, and learned, and a friendship had sprung up between the two men which had ended in the doctor renting the two rooms above the shop, and, under the wing of the apothecary, picking up what he could of the crumbs let fall by the fashionable physicians of this fashionable neighbourhood.

“I hope he will get his fee tonight,” thought Mr Proudie, as he stirred the fire into a blaze; then, to satisfy his curiosity as to whether this were really a medical case or only an excuse, he went to the dispensary to see if the doctor had taken any drugs. He soon discovered that two bottles, one containing an antidote against arsenic poisoning, composed of oxide of iron and flax seed, the other a mixture for use against lead poisoning, containing oak bark and green tea, were missing.

“So there was someone ill?” cried Mr Proudie aloud, and at that moment the door bell rang again.

“He is soon back,” thought the apothecary, and hastened to undo the door; “perhaps le was really hurried away and forgot his case.” He opened the door with some curiosity, being eager to question the doctor, but it was another stranger who stumbled down the two steps into the dark shop — a woman, whose head was wrapped in a cloudy black shawl.

The wind had blown out the candle on the counter and the shop was only lit by the illumination, faint and dull, from the parlour; therefore, Mr Proudie could not see his second visitor clearly, but only sufficiently to observe that she was richly dressed and young; the door blew open, and wind and rain were over both of them; Mr Proudie had to clap his hand to his wig to keep it on his head.

“Heaven help us!” he exclaimed querulously. “What do you want, madam?”

For answer she clasped his free hand with fingers so chill that they struck a shudder to the apothecary’s heart, and broke out into a torrent of words in what was to Mr Proudie an incomprehensible language; she was obviously in the wildest distress and grief, and perceiving that the apothecary did not understand her, she flung herself on her knees, wringing her hands and uttering exclamations of despair.

The disturbed Mr Proudie closed the door and drew the lady into the parlour; she continued to speak, rapidly and with many gestures, but all he could distinguish was the name of Francis Valletort.

She was a pretty creature, fair and slight, with braids of seed pearls in her blonde hair showing through the dark net of her lace shawl, an apple-green silk gown embroidered with multitudes of tiny roses, and over all a black Venetian velvet mantle; long corals were in her ears, and a chain of amber round her throat; her piteously gesticulating hands were weighted with large and strange rings.

“If you cannot speak English, madam,” said Mr Proudie, who was sorry for her distress, but disliked her for her outlandish appearance and because he associated her with the blackamoor, “I am afraid I cannot help you.”

While he spoke she searched his face with eager haggard brown eyes, and when he finished she sadly shook her head to show that she did not understand. She glanced round the homely room impatiently, then, with a little cry of despair and almost stumbling in her long silken skirts, which she was too absorbed in her secret passion to gather up, she turned back into the shop, making a gesture that Mr Proudie took to mean she wished to leave. The apothecary was not ill-pleased at this; since they could not understand each other her presence was but an embarrassment. He would have liked to have asked her to wait the doctor’s return, but saw that she understood no word of English; he thought it was Italian she spoke, but he could not be even sure of that.

As swiftly as she had come she had gone, unbolting the door herself and disappearing into the dark; as far as Mr Proudie could see, she had neither chair nor coach; in which case she must have come from nearby, for there was but little wet on her clothes.

Once more the apothecary returned to his fire, noticing the faint perfume of iris the lady had left on the air to mingle with the odours of Peruvian bark and camomile, rosemary and saffron, beeswax and turpentine, myrrh and cinnamon that rendered heavy the air of the chemist’s shop.

“Well, she knows her own business, I have no doubt,” thought Mr Proudie, “and as I cannot help her I had better stay quietly here till Francis Valletort returns and elucidates the mystery.”

But he found that he could not fix his thoughts on the Gazette, nor, indeed, on anything whatever but the mysterious events of the evening.

He took up an old book of medicine and passed over the pages, trying to interest himself in old prescriptions of blood root, mandrake and valerian, gentian, flax seed and hyssop, alum, poke root and black cherry, which he knew by heart, and which did not now distract him at all from the thought of the woman in her rich foreign finery, her distress and distraction, who had come so swiftly out of the night.

Now she had gone, uneasiness assailed him — where had she disappeared? Was she safe? Ought he not forcibly to have kept her till the return of Francis Valletort, who spoke both French and Italian? Certainly he had been the cause of the lady’s visit; she had said, again and again, “Valletort — Francis Valletort.” The apothecary drank his spiced wine, trimmed and snuffed his candles, warmed his feet on the hearth and his hands over the blaze, and listened for the bell that should tell of the doctor’s return.

He began to get sleepy, almost dozed off in his chair, and was becoming angry with these adventures that kept him out of his bed when the bell rang a third time, and he sat up with that start that a bell rung suddenly in the silence of the night never fails to give.

“Of course it will be Francis Valletort back again,” he said, rising and taking up the candle that had now nearly burnt down to the socket; it was half an hour since the doctor had left the house.

Once again the apothecary opened the door on to the wet, windy night; the candle was blown out in his hand.

“You — must come,” said a woman’s voice out of the darkness; he could just distinguish the figure of his former visitor, standing in the doorway and looking down on him; she spoke the three English words with care and difficulty, and with such a foreign accent that the apothecary stared stupidly, not understanding, at which she broke out into her foreign ejaculations, caught at his coat, and dragged at him passionately.

Mr Proudie, quite bewildered, stepped into the street, and stood there hatless and cloakless, the candlestick in his hand.

“If you could only explain yourself, madam!” he exclaimed in despair.

While he was protesting she drew the door to behind him and, seizing his arm, hurried along down Dean Street.

Mr Proudie did not wish to refuse to accompany her, but the adventure was not pleasing to him; he shivered in the night air and felt apprehensive of the darkness; he wished he had had time to bring his hat and cloak.

“Madam,” he said, as he hurried along, “unless you have someone who can speak English, I fear I shall be no good at all, whatever your plight.”

She made no answer; he could hear her teeth chattering and feel her shivering; now and then she stumbled over the rough stones of the roadway. They had not gone far up the street when she stopped at the door of one of the mansions and pushed it gently open, guiding Mr Proudie into a hall in absolute silence and darkness. Mr Proudie thought that he knew all the houses in Dean Street, but he could not place this; the darkness had completely confused him.

The lady opened another door and pushed Mr Proudie into a chamber where a faint light burned.

The room was unfurnished, covered with dust and in disrepair; only in front of the shuttered windows hung long, dark blue silk curtains. Against the wall was hung a silver lamp of beautiful workmanship, which gave a gloomy glow over the desolate chamber.

The apothecary was about to speak when the lady, who had been standing in an attitude of listening, suddenly put her hand over his mouth and pushed him desperately behind the curtains. Mr Proudie would have protested, not liking this false position, but there was no mistaking the terrified entreaty in the foreign woman’s blanched face, and the apothecary, altogether unnerved, suffered himself to be concealed behind the flowing folds of the voluminous curtains that showed so strangely in the unfurnished room.

A firm step sounded outside and Mr Proudie, venturing in the shadow to peer from behind the curtain, saw his first visitor of the evening enter the room. He was now without mask, hat, or wig, and his appearance caused Mr Proudie an inward shudder.

Tall and superb in carriage, graceful, and richly dressed, the face and head were those of a full-blooded negro; his rolling eyes, his twitching lips, and an extraordinary pallor that rendered greenish his dusky skin showed him to be in some fierce passion. His powerful black hands grasped a martingale of elegant leather, ornamented with silver studs.

With a fierce gesture he pointed to the lady’s draggled skirts and wet shawl, and in the foreign language that she had used questioned her with a flood of invective — or such it seemed to the terrified ears of Mr Proudie.

She seemed to plead, weep, lament, and defy all at once, sweeping up and down the room and wringing her hands, and now and then, it seemed, calling on God and his saints to help her, for she cast up her eyes and pressed her palms together. To the amazed apothecary, to whom nothing exciting had ever happened before, this was like a scene in a stage play; the two brilliant, fantastic figures, the negro and the fair woman, going through this scene of incomprehensible passion in the empty room, lit only by the solitary lamp.

Mr Proudie hoped that there might be no violence in which he would be called upon to interfere on behalf of the lady: neither his age nor his strength would give him any chance with the terrible blackamoor — he was, moreover, totally unarmed.

His anxieties on this score were ended; the drama being enacted before his horrified yet fascinated gaze was suddenly cut short. The negro seized the lady by the wrist and dragged her from the room.

Complete silence fell; the shivering apothecary was staining his ears for some sound, perhaps some call for help, some shriek or cry.

But nothing broke the stillness of the mansion, and presently Mr Proudie ventured forth from his hiding-place.

He left the room and proceeded cautiously to the foot of the stairs. Such utter silence prevailed that he began to think he was alone in the house and that anyhow he might now return — the front door was ajar, as his conductress had left it; the way of escape was easy.

To the end of his days Mr Proudie regretted that he had not taken it; he never could tell what motives induced him to return to the room, take down the lamp, and begin exploring the house. He rather thought, he would say afterwards, that he wanted to find Francis Valletort; he felt sure that he must be in the house somewhere and he had a horrid premonition of foul play; he was sure, in some way, that the house was empty and the lady and the blackamoor had fled, and an intense curiosity got the better of his fear, his bewilderment, and his fatigue.

He walked very softly, for he was startled by the creaking of the boards beneath his feet; the lamp shook in his hand so that the fitful light ran wavering over walls and ceiling; every moment he paused and listened, fearful to hear the voice or step of the blackamoor.

On the first floor all the doors were open, the rooms all empty, shuttered, desolate, covered with dust and damp.

“There is certainly no-one in the house,” thought Mr Proudie, with a certain measure of comfort. “Perhaps Valletort has gone home while I have been here on this fool’s errand.”

He remembered with satisfaction his fire and his bed, the safe, comfortable shop with the rows of jars, the shining counter, and the gleaming scales, and the snug little parlour beyond, with everything to his hand, just as he liked to find it. Yet he went on up the stairs, continuing to explore the desolate, empty house, the chill atmosphere of which caused him to shiver as if he was cold to the marrow.

On the next landing he was brought up short by a gleam of light from one of the back rooms. In a panic of terror he put out his own lamp and stood silent and motionless, staring at the long, faint ray of yellow that fell through the door that was ajar.

“There is someone in the house, then,” thought Mr Proudie. “I wonder if it is the doctor.”

He crept close to the door, but dared not look in; yet could not go away. The silence was complete; he could only hear the thump of his own heart.

Curiosity, a horrible, fated curiosity, urged him nearer, drove him to put his eye to the crack. His gaze fell on a man leaning against the wall; he was dressed in a rich travelling dress and wore neither peruke nor hat; his superb head was bare to the throat, and he was so dark as to appear almost of African blood; his features, however, were handsome and regular, though pallid and distorted by an expression of despair and ferocity.

A candle stuck into the neck of an empty bottle stood on the bare floor beside him and illuminated his sombre and magnificent figure, casting a grotesque shadow on the dark, panelled wall.

At his feet lay a heap of white linen and saffron-coloured brocade, with here and there the gleam of a red jewel. Mr Proudie stared at this; as his sight became accustomed to the waving lights and shades, he saw that he was gazing at a woman.

A dead woman.

She lay all dishevelled, her clothes torn and her black hair fallen in a tangle — the man had his foot on the end of it; her head was twisted to one side and there were dreadful marks on her throat.

Mr John Proudie gave one sob and fled, with the swiftness and silence of utter terror, down the stairs, out into the street, and never ceased running until he reached home.

He had his key in his pocket, and let himself into his house, panting and sighing, utterly spent. He lit every light in the place and sat down over the dying fire, his teeth chattering and his knees knocking together. Like a man bewitched he sat staring into the fire, raking the embers together, rubbing his hands and shivering, with his mind a blank for everything but that picture he had seen through the crack of the door in the empty house in Dean Street.

When his lamp and candles burnt out he drew the curtains and let in the colourless light of the November dawn; he began to move about the shop in a dazed, aimless way, staring at his jars and scales and pestle and mortar as if they were strange things he had never seen before.

Now came a young apprentice with a muffler round his neck, whistling and red with the cold; and as he took down the shutters and opened the dispensary, as the housekeeper came down and bustled about the breakfast and there was a pleasant smell of coffee and bacon in the place, Mr Proudie began to feel that the happenings of last night were a nightmare indeed that had no place in reality; he felt a cowardly and strong desire to say nothing about any of it, but to try to forget the blackamoor, the foreign lady, and that horrible scene in the upper chamber as figments of his imagination.

It was, however, useless for him to take cover in the refuge of silence — old Emily’s first remark went to the root of the matter. “Why, where is the doctor? He has never been out so late before.”

Where, indeed, was Francis Valletort?

With a groan Mr Proudie dragged himself together; his body was stiff with fatigue, his mind amazed, and he wished that he could have got into bed and slept off all memories of the previous night.

Bur he knew the thing must be faced and, snatching up his hat and coat, staggered out into the air, looking by ten years an older man than the comfortable, quiet tradesman of last night.

He went to the nearest magistrate and told his story; he could see that he was scarcely believed, but a couple of watchmen were sent with him to investigate the scene of last night’s adventure, which, remarked the magistrate, should be easily found, since there was, it seemed, but one empty house in Dean Street.

The house was reached, the lock forced, and the place searched, room by room.

To Mr Proudie’s intense disappointment and amazement absolutely nothing was found: the blue silk curtains had gone, as had the silver lamp the apothecary had dropped on the stairs in his headlong flight; in the upper chamber where he had stared through the crack of the door nothing was to be found — not a stain on the boards, not a mark on the wall. Dusty, neglected, desolate, the place seemed as if it had not been entered for years.

Mr Proudie began to think that he had been the victim of a company of ghosts or truly bewitched. Then, inside the door, was found the pewter candlestick he had held mechanically in his hand when hurried from his shop and as mechanically let fall here as he had afterwards let fall the lamp.

This proved nothing beyond the fact that he had been in the house last night; but it a little reassured him that he was not altogether losing his wits.

The fullest inquiries were made in the neighbourhood, but without result. No-one had seen the foreigners, no-one had heard any noise in the house, and it would have been generally believed that Mr Proudie had really lost his senses but for one fact—Francis Valletort never returned!

There was, then, some mystery, but the solving of it seemed hopeless, No search or inquiries led to the discovery of the whereabouts of the young doctor, and as he was of very little importance and had no friends but the old apothecary, his disappearance was soon forgotten.

But Mr Proudie, who seemed very aged and, the neighbours said, strange since that November night, was not satisfied with any such reasoning. Day and night he brooded over the mystery, and hardly ever out of his mind was the figure of the young scholar in his shabby clothes, with the strange face of one doomed as he stood putting his heavy hair back from his face and staring at the little white ring on the old, polished counter.

As the years went by the rooms over the chemist’s shop were occupied by another lodger and Mr Proudie took possession of the poor effects of Francis Valletort — a few shabby clothes, a few shabby books; nothing of value or even of interest. But to the apothecary these insignificant articles had an intense if horrid fascination.

He locked them away in his cabinet and when he was alone he would take them out and turn them over. In between the thick, yellow leaves of a Latin book on medicine he found the thin leaves of what seemed to be the remains of a diary — fragments torn violently from the cover — mostly half-effaced and one torn across and completely blotted with ink.

There was no name, but Mr Proudie recognised the handwriting of Francis Valletort. With pain and difficulty the dim old eyes of the apothecary made out the following entries:

July 15th, 1687 — I saw her in the church today — Santa Maria Maggiore. He is her husband, a Calabrere.

Several lines were blotted out, then came these words—

a man of great power; some mystery — his half-brother is an African… children of a slave… that such a woman…

July 27th — I cannot see how this is going to end; her sister is married to the brother — Vittoria, the name—hers Elena della Cxxxxxx.

August 3rd — She showed me the ring today. I think she has worn it since she was a child; it only fits her little finger.”

Again the manuscript was indecipherable; then followed some words scratched out, but readable—

As if I would not come to her without this token! But she is afraid of a trick. He is capable of anything — they, I mean; the brother is as his shadow. I think she trusts her sister. My little love!

On another page were found further entries:

October 10th — She says that if he discovered us he would kill her — us together. He told her he would kill her if she angered him; showed her a martingale and said they would strangle her. My God, why do I not murder him? Carlo Fxxxxxx warned me today.

October 29th — I must leave Padua. For her sake — while she is safe — if she is in trouble she will send me the ring. I wonder why we go on living — it is over, the farewells.

Mr Proudie could make out nothing more; he put down the pages with a shudder. To what dark and secret tale of wrong and passion did they not refer? Did they not hold the key to the events of that awful night?

Mr Proudie believed that he had seen the husband and brother-in-law of some woman Francis Valletort had loved, who had followed him to England after the lapse of years; having wrung the secret and the meaning of the white ring from the wretched wife, the husband had used it to lure the lover to his fate; in his other visitor the apothecary believed he had seen the sister Vittoria, who, somehow, had escaped and endeavoured to gain help from the house where she knew Francis Valletort lived, only to be silenced again by her husband. And the other woman — and the martingale?

“I saw her, too,” muttered Mr Proudie to himself, shivering over the fire, “but what did they do with Frank?”

He never knew, and died a very old man with all the details of this mystery unrevealed; the fragments of diary were burnt by some careless hand for whom they had no interest; the adventure of Mr Proudie passed into the realms of forgotten mystery, and there was no-one to tell of them when, a century later, repairs to the foundations of an old house in Dean Street revealed two skeletons buried deep beneath the bricks. One was that of a man, the other that of a woman, round whose bones still hung a few shreds of saffron-coloured brocade; and between them was a little ring of white enamel and white stones

Crimes of Old London (1919)

Old Patch’s Medley (1930)

The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949)

THE PLEASANT HUSBAND

The lover felt uncomfortable; not all the perfume of oleander and myrtle could sweeten his sense of moral nausea.

And yet there was nothing wrong, at least with the setting; the Italian night, the mountains, the sea, the pinewood, the scented stillness, the moon rising behind a bar of dark purple clouds… the woman waiting for him.

“Just like a stage set,” he thought and knew that that was the last thing that ought to have occurred to him.

He looked at the dark villa and leant against the little gate, trying to reason himself into a better mood.

Whatever was wrong must be with himself; there was nothing the matter with the situation; he was in love with Olivia, and she was going to run away with him, leave her stupid, indifferent, tyrannical husband, who thought of nothing but his collection of shells, and really enjoy, for the first time, all those good things that should have been her heritage.

He, the lover, had money; it would all be done very well indeed; there need be nothing sordid or unpleasant about any of it, all would be a matter of fast trains, good hotels, plenty of pocket money and an assured future — surely an ideal elopement.

What then was the matter?

Perhaps Olivia’s romantic notion that he should come for her like this in the evening, meet him by the little gate and slip through the quiet fields to catch the Genoa express… of course, he ought to have liked it, as Olivia had planned it, and it certainly was very suitable…

He glanced up at the moon, hoping to find consolation there; but the moon looked very conventional, like a worn-out stage property.

“It’s the twentieth century,” muttered the lad, “that is what is wrong. One oughtn’t to do these things now… there is something… silly… about it.”

That was it, something silly; what in the name of Heaven had induced him to come to this particular spot and wait for this particular woman?

Of course he was in love — but, well, there was something silly about it.

“I expect it is the newspapers,” he thought. “Cleopatra’s suicide and the Romeo and Juliet affair would have been just cheap and sordid reported in the Press… the world’s got over that sort of thing like schoolboys get over the measles and the mumps…. Olivia ought not to have asked me and I ought not to have come.”

Besides, she was late; he heard the clock strike from the church of the neighbouring village; it would mean a brisk walk to the railway station, and the lanes were heavy walking.

He pushed open the gate cautiously and peered through the gloom for a glimpse of Olivia.

Tiresome of her to be late; he was sure that she was “dressing the part” — a white dress, a cloak, a case of jewels… he was sure of it; his sense of the touch of ridicule over the whole thing deepened; he hoped they would not look fools in the train, he wished that he had told her to come suitably dressed.

When she still delayed, he began to wonder if he could not send her back when she did come; really, they ought to think it over longer, far better turn in now and sleep on it… that Genoa train was atrociously uncomfortable, the spring night was cool and induced to sleep — he even yawned.

A light flickered among the oleander bushes; that was rather rash of her and really the mood was quite strong, like limelight; he stepped inside the gate in his eagerness to meet her and tell her to put her lantern out.

He stepped towards the wavering circle of light that showed up the waxy cluster of blossoms and the long grey green leaves of the oleanders.

“Is that you, Creed?” asked a cheerful masculine voice.

The lover stood still, curbing a childish desire to take to his heels, and then the light discovered, engulfed him, displayed him from head to foot and delivered him to the gaze of Olivia’s husband.

“I thought I heard you,” said that person, pleasantly, “but I was not quite sure, the waves make such a noise.”

“Just going past — back to the hotel after a ramble,” said Creed, steadily — “thought I heard someone in your garden, so stepped in—”

“Never mind about all that,” interrupted the other, “come into the house.”

He held his little storm lantern leaving the bushes, and in the glow of it stood, picked out from the background of the dark masses of the villa and the dark outline of the house.

The lover, looking at his familiar, rather stupid face, the bold forehead, the spectacled eyes, the rather ragged fair beard, the slightly stooping figure in the rubbed shantung — he never would trouble to change for dinner — felt more than ever foolish.

“I can’t stop,” he said quickly, “thanks awfully, but there are a couple of letters I want to catch tomorrow’s mail — must get them in before midnight—”

“But you really must come in,” insisted the other, in his high, rather querulous, voice, “there is something important I want to say—”

“Well, tomorrow—”

“No, now—”

Creed had to submit: something had evidently gone very much amiss with the whole plan; he did not really very much regret the postponement of the elopement, but he did not want to go into the house and play out some sort of a comedy before Olivia; she would be sure to look tragic and to have Chopin open on the piano; of course, the mistake of the whole affair was that this was the twentieth century, and people didn’t do these things… if you tried, you looked and felt a fool…

He followed his host through the low window which had often proved so effective a frame for Olivia’s charms when she stood there to welcome him into the thrice familiar room that the Lauries had made so English, and so pleasant.

Olivia had always had her carpets and her draperies, her lamps and her tea from London, the “antique” furniture, the basso-relievos and the pictures from Florence; it was all very pleasant.

The white glare of the acetylene was veiled by rosy silk, the fireplace was banked with boughs of camellias, red and white; the last books from London and Paris lay half unwrapped near the Italian lace-work Olivia was learning; the chairs were very comfortable, whisky and glasses, syphon and cigars were ready; all as usual; how really crazy it all made the idea of an elopement seem!

Creed began to tell himself that, of course, he would never have thought of it had it not been for Olivia’s extremely romantic disposition…

He seated himself on the long box ottoman he and his love had turned into a couch by means of draperies of rose-red damask and piles of cushions of different tapestries; they had “picked up” all these pieces wandering together in the streets of Florence; it was such a favourite seat of theirs that he took it almost mechanically as Laurie seated himself in a long comfortable chair and drew the pink shade farther over the lamp so that the rosy glow of the room was deepened.

The lover took off his hat and loosened his light overcoat, the husband leant back comfortably and crossed his legs; he had rather fine ankles and always wore silk socks.

Creed was glad that Olivia was not there; this was bad enough, but if she had been there he would have felt quite a fool.

Laurie looked at him from behind the thick pebbles of his glasses that magnified his rather full brown eyes.

“My dear fellow, I know exactly how you are feeling, exactly. And really there is no need. Above everything — nothing ridiculous. You agree?”

“Of course,” said Creed, quickly. “I don’t know quite what you mean—”

“Let me make my point clear. Now, you came here tonight to run away with my wife, which was silly.”

Creed coloured; it was so precisely his own thought that he did not know how to gather together the rags of his tattered romance.

“Please don’t say anything,” continued Laurie, in a leisurely tone, leaning well back among his cushions. “This is the twentieth century. And, well, we’ve rather cut these things out.”

“That is exactly,” said Creed, with some eagerness and relief, “what I have been thinking.”

“People don’t run away with other men’s wives nowadays without being ridiculous — especially in this childish way — a moon and all that sort of thing—”

Creed felt most uncomfortable and bound to defend his thwarted action.

“We aren’t unique,” he said; “look at the papers—”

“Exactly. Look at them. They show you the futility of the whole thing. Just why it is impossible for people like yourself and Olivia to do such things. My dear fellow, it is so stupid.”

“Quite,” agreed the lover, dismally. “I suppose I lost my head—”

“No. It was Olivia. I had to talk seriously to her just now, she was becoming quite hysterical and undignified. However, I soon induced her to see reason.”

“She has given the idea up?” asked Creed, beginning to feel more comfortable; after all, by the rosy light of the familiar lamp it could surely all be regarded as just a wildish sort of joke.

“Entirely,” said Laurie, who was now quietly smoking. “Olivia has entirely given up the idea. She did so, as a matter of fact, as soon as I spoke to her.”

“How did you find out?” asked Creed, feeling extremely fatuous.

“I had been observing you for some time — the slippered pantaloon, you know, with plenty of leisure on his hands! I saw where your flirtation was leading you — Olivia’s agitation today betrayed her — I did not have much difficulty in getting at the truth.”

“It is very decent of you to have taken it like this,” said Creed.

“What did you expect, my dear fellow? You hardly thought to see me, with my glasses and knock knees and absent-mindedness, and all those other little trials that annoy Olivia so — playing the Othello? Imagine me as the jealous husband! Absurd.”

“Quite,” agreed the lover, hastily. “Naturally, we knew you would be sensible about it — this — this running away was well, really just to please Olivia—”

“Just to please Olivia,” interrupted Laurie. “Like you might give a child a sweet — I understand so well! The moon, the oleanders, the flight! hah! hah!”

“That was precisely the situation,” answered Creed, warming to his subject. “Of course I’m very fond of Olivia and all that, but, well, I had that feeling all along—these things are not done nowadays.”

“Exactly — for a dilettante like yourself, my dear Creed, the whole thing must have been distressingly crude.”

He had now finished his cigarette, and as he leant back in his easy chair he put the tips of his long fingers together; he had fine hands, polished and delicate as one of his own prized shells.

“I know you think that I know more about conchology than human nature, but this little tangle has come my way, and I must try to adjust it,” he continued. “I have dealt with Olivia — she will hardly refer to the matter again — she is so entirely convinced of the force of my arguments — there only remains yourself, my dear Creed.”

“But if Olivia is satisfied, so am I,” said the lover, “really, there is nothing now to be said — it was just an escapade—”

Laurie waved one of his hands.

“I want to be quite fair,” he interrupted. “I want you to see Olivia — and if you, after seeing her, are still of the same mind, why, then I shall take steps, rational, sane steps, to give her to you—”

But Creed did not care at all for this proposed interview; he had had enough agitation for tonight; he wanted to go back to his comfortable bed in the hotel… he hoped they would all meet in the morning as if nothing had happened.

“No, no,” he said, hastily. “You’ve put everything on such a sane basis, Laurie, that I couldn’t think of reviving — any — any such foolishness; as you say, this is the twentieth century.”

The door opened with a suddenness that caused both men to start.

Lucia, the Lauries’ maid, stood in the doorway.

Laurie rose with a quick sound of annoyance. “I didn’t expect you back tonight, Lucia, I told you to stay with your mother tonight — how strange you never understand!”

The girl smiled cheerfully.

“But I did understand, signor! I was to go for the eggs, to Camoldi, and to bring them back in the morning — because it is so far—”

“Yes, yes,” said Laurie, testily, “why did you come back tonight?”

The girl triumphantly lifted a corner of her shawl and showed a basket on her arm.

“I did not need to go as far as Mother Podeva for the eggs, old Cecco had some, fresh as fresh, so I came back — can I get anything for the signor?”

Laurie did not answer, he seemed unaccountably vexed; he stood staring at the girl through his thick glasses and stroking his sparse beard.

Creed could not understand at first; how strange, he thought, for Laurie to send the girl on such an errand, so late, and tell her to stay away the night, then, gazing at his host’s embarrassment, he saw the reason; of course, the servant had been sent away while Laurie had his little scene with Olivia and while he dealt with himself, Creed; she was not to overhear nor to see — she was to stay away all night to give Olivia a chance to recover herself; it was really very thoughtful and tactful of Laurie — one knew what gossips these women were, and here she was, blundering back into the middle of it; no wonder that Laurie looked vexed.

Creed made an effort to help the situation. “I really must be going,” he said, taking up his hat and rising. “I am late already.”

“My dear fellow!” interrupted Laurie, quickly. “You must forgive me! This foolishness, about the eggs! They are so scarce, so very scarce. I cannot do without one in the morning, egg in marsala! How foolish! Quite an anti-climax, my dear Creed!” He was talking rather loudly, no doubt, thought Creed, to give Olivia, presumably recovering herself upstairs, warning that the servant had returned.

“Yes, the eggs are very, very difficult to get,” smiled Lucia. “But I thought I should get them nearer than Camoldi!”

“Yes, yes,” answered Laurie. “A moment, Creed, excuse me a moment—”

He followed the servant out of the room and closed the door.

“I’ll slip away,” thought the other man. “And get back before they shut the hotel up — old Laurie is getting agitated. I’ll see him tomorrow — though really everything is settled—”

He opened the window and looked up at the sky, carelessly, to see if the moon held. And then a rather remarkable thing happened.

The moon, that had seemed so conventional and stagy, had now a very distinct face in it, and, as Creed looked, this face seemed to snarl at him and lean out of the sky and snap like a vicious animal.

Creed felt the perspiration break out round his forehead and nose… the whole affair had been affecting his nerves after all… he stepped back into the room to mix himself a drink… a stiff drink.

Strange he hadn’t noticed before how perfectly horrible the room was; and the rose-coloured ottoman he had been sitting on, why, it was a ghastly piece of furniture… he stood looking at it, instead of mixing himself that drink.

A scrap of white stuff had been shut in one corner…. So Olivia kept things in it… what things?

He pushed off the cushions and lifted the ottoman lid.

Olivia herself lay inside, slightly doubled up, with a neat bullet wound in her temple.

As the ottoman lid banged down the door opened.

Creed, running with incredible speed through the shadowed garden, heard John Laurie beating after him, through the oleander bushes, howling because he had been cheated of his second victim.

The Pleasant Husband and Other Stories (1921)

ANN MELLOR’S LOVER

I have always been interested in clairvoyance — after all, I hardly know anyone who isn’t; but my interest has always been rather overwhelming — a kind of haunting preoccupation, wholly pleasant but teasing, like something you can’t place or explain or reason about always must be.

I’ve never gone in for it scientifically, never had the time or the money — or perhaps, the courage.

But I’ve studied — well, all that kind of thing, half-furtively, and thought about it a great deal.

Of course, it hasn’t helped really — I mean not in explaining the queer things that have happened to me.

This is one of them.

I feel bound to put it down while it is clear in my mind. I find that unless I put these things into words I lose them. They become faded, then confused, and finally disappear altogether. It’s a great diversion to me, a great interest, and sometimes a queer sort of pain too.

I haven’t very much else in my life. Just an old bookshop that I keep myself and that keeps me quite comfortably. My father kept the shop before me, and I’ve hardly ever left it — it was through the books that the clairvoyance began, when I was quite a youth.

I say clairvoyance, but that is merely because I don’t know the right word or the exact word or a better word — I don’t mean crystal-gazing or raising spirits or anything of that kind.

I mean my peculiar affinity with the past. It is like a kind of second sight; but instead of seeing into the future, I can see into the past. Only now and then, of course, and fitfully and not at will.

Little glimpses are offered me now and then — tantalising, sometimes no use at all, sometimes startlingly complete, as this was.

I can’t explain it. I’ve heard it called race memory and cited as proof of reincarnation. I don’t know what to believe.

This is the tale.

One day I was undoing a parcel of second-hand books; they had lain in the shop some time, and I rather forgot where they had come from. I buy a great many books and from many strange places. There wasn’t much in the parcel, though some of the bindings were good — calf and vellum.

I picked up one of these — a fat volume of an enticing brown colour faintly traced with gold — and was looking for the half-effaced title when a loose sheet fluttered from between the covers on to the floor.

I picked it up and found it was a rubbed pencil drawing of a girl’s head. Nothing much in that, yet from that first second I set eyes on the thing I knew it was significant and vital. I knew that it was a clue that I was bound to follow through the labyrinth of the past. The feeling really was that I knew all about it — the whole story, but could not for the moment remember it.

Just a small pencil drawing on a neat square of yellowed paper; no signature or initials or date.

No help in the book, which was merely a volume of outrageously dull Nonconformist sermons printed a hundred and seventy years ago.

No help in the costume (I think I am an expert in that, and can place a period by a bow or ringlet), for the girl’s hair flowed unconfined in a perfectly natural fashion, and the sketch stopped at the curve of the bare throat.

She was dark and lively, looked at once wild and weak, and her eyes sought mine with a direct appeal.

“Now who are you?” I asked myself. “Who are you?”

I felt sure that I knew her and should soon know all about her — not at once and suddenly, but slowly, by the following up of small clues, as had happened to me before.

There was an old gilt frame in the shop among my lumber of fine old odds and ends, and I put the sketch into this, adjusting it carefully behind the glass, the frame being much too large, and then took it upstairs and hung it in my little parlour.

I was filled with the greatest curiosity and excitement. I felt that what I was going to find out affected me very closely and personally. I was entirely absorbed by this thought as I went about my business that day, and when evening came and the shop was shut I hastened upstairs to make myself comfortable in my old leather chair, fill my pipe, and stare at the pencilled head that hung above my mantelpiece.

I imagined that as I sat and gazed at her the whole thing would come back to me — as it sometimes did, a clear glimpse, a scene flashing out of the darkness of the past.

But this evening nothing came but two words that leapt into my mind and would not go — one was “Norway” and the other “Nightingale”.

I was very disappointed, for the words meant nothing to me — no possible clue whatever; I knew nothing of Norway and had never even been attracted to the country; and “Nightingale” was a mere word to me also, devoid of every association.

Yet I knew they must be connected in some way with my pencil sketch — the first feeble beginnings, as it were, of my fumblings into the past.

For two days nothing happened. For two days that face looked at me — no pencil lines on a bit of yellow paper, but now a warm-coloured human face; she lived before my inner eye, a complete creature. Her hair was dark brown and it hung in rather fine curls; the carnation of her face was glowing and warm; her expression flashed from resentment to appeal, and was always, bewildered.

In my mind I could not quite see her dress — but I thought that she wore something white, frilled, and that her background had water in it; that is, that she moved or lived in some place where there was water.

On the third day after my discovery of the pencil sketch that had affected me so powerfully, I attended a sale at an old house in rather on out-of-the-way part of London.

There were some fine old books there that I bought very cheaply, and I was quite pleased with my afternoon’s work. This satisfaction did not, however, interfere with my absorption in the unknown, dark, troubled creature about whom I felt such excitement. I discovered no further clues to her identity nor anything that explained the words, so persistently in my mind, of “Norway” and “Nightingale.”

I turned for home very briskly. It was late December and brightly cold. I took the shortest cut I could to the nearest Tube station, asking my direction as I went, for I was not sure of my way in this neighbourhood, which was one of those fallen from substantial splendour into a kind of gloomy respectability. Heavy stone houses, built about fifty years ago, darkened the streets, and, hemmed in by these, I suddenly came upon an old church and churchyard, railed round neatly and divided by a paved path, which I knew to be my short cut through. I saw at a glance that the restored church was uninteresting and the rows of grey and white tombstones affected me with a sense of mere futile ugliness. I was hurrying on with a sense of the uncomfortable nip in the air and the grey dullness of my surroundings when something brought me to a sudden stop.

I found myself clinging to the railings of the churchyard, staring at a heavy square stone tomb, which was again surrounded by an iron railing, through which some patches of recent snow had drifted and now lay soiled and frozen.

There was one simple inscription on the flat side of the tomb:

ANN MELLOR
Who died in the 23rd year of her age, 1750
“A broken and contrite heart, O Lord,
Thou wilt not despise.”

There was nothing strange in this, save that no names of relationship or residence were given. The text I had seen before on gravestones, but not often; it had always seemed to me too obvious an appeal to sentiment to be taken quite seriously.

But now I trembled with excitement and curiosity. I knew and felt that this was she.

I managed with some difficulty to mount the railings and examine the tomb all round. There was no further inscription — nothing whatever.

Still, I now knew her name, her age, the year she died. Ann Mellor! It was so familiar that I wondered how it was I had not recalled it before. I made my way through the tombs and found a gate near the church door.

It took me very little time to get hold of the verger and receive permission to look at the registers — but there was little reward for my pains. The entry was there accurately enough: “Ann Mellor, spinster, of this parish, aged twenty-two years.”

The date of the entry was December 24th, 1750.

So she had died in December and been buried on Christmas Eve.

I knew this much more about her, and I went on my way quite elated and shivering with a desperate kind of excitement.

In about another ten minutes in the colourless twilight I wandered round the neighbourhood, knowing quite well how useless it was. How could there be any relics of 1750 — a hundred and seventy years ago — among these massive Victorian houses, these wide modern streets?

“Why,” I reflected, “the place must have been in the country then — that church stood among fields — she used to come here by coach — yes, a small yellow-and-black coach. I can see her in it, with a wide hat and a black lace scarf tied under it, and—”

The picture was blurred again: I only knew that she used to come to this church by coach, a small black-and-yellow coach.

I remembered that the book from which the pencil sketch had fallen had borne the date 1749 — probably it had been in Ann Mellor’s possession during the last year of her life.

The thought of this book allured me. I was about to decide to get home to scrutinise it further when I found Myself almost running into a wooden hoarding, which in my absorption and the now encroaching darkness I had not noticed, stretched directly across the street, which was one of mean, drab, low-windowed villas that appeared to be mostly untenanted. I perceived that the fence enclosed a piece of waste ground; I placed my eye to a knothole in the wood and saw by the dismal white of the electric light given from the street lamp that the ground was covered with builders’ rubbish and the skeletons of half-demolished houses.

The sight was very dreary, yet as had the churchyard, it gave me no effect of depression. I stood quite a long time, regardless of the cold, staring at the heaps of fallen masonry, the scaffolding poles, the patches of shadow, the splotches of bleached light from the electric standard.

At last I turned and retraced my steps down the cul-de-sac.

At the corner I glanced up at the name of the street — “Palmyra Villas.” There was a policeman passing, and I asked him if this atrocious name was also that of the last portion of the street which was being demolished.

“No,” he said; “they used to call that Nightingale Lane. A nice old slum it was, too. Condemned it, they did, and time too.”

“It wasn’t always a slum,” I said.

“Not likely. Fine old houses some of them was; quite a lot of chaps came over here buying knockers and fanlights and other bits. All gone now, though,” he replied.

He evidently took me for a prowling and mercenary antique dealer. I fostered the idea and got from him the name of the firm doing the housebreaking.

Nightingale Lane—she had lived there — but not always, because she used to come to church by coach. “Of this parish” — not lived, but died there. Nightingale Lane — perhaps the nightingales had sung near here in 1750 — one hundred and seventy years ago.

After that I went home and wrote neatly on the edge of my pencil sketch: “Ann Mellor, who died in Nightingale Lane on Christmas Eve, 1750.”

Though I had found out so much, there seemed no opening for further investigation; yet I was not at all troubled — I knew that soon everything would be made clear to me.

It was not, of course, a question of coincidence (personally I do believe that there is such a thing), but of finding out, through this peculiar faculty of mine, the story of Ann Mellor.

I knew that this story had something to do with me; I felt such an extraordinary intimacy and interest, such an excitement, nay, palpitation at the thought of Ann Mellor.

I was not in the least distracted by the fact that I had looked at her tomb and read the entry of her death one hundred and seventy years ago. This death seemed to me a mere incident that we, she and I, had long left behind. A visit to the housebreakers of Nightingale Lane, a patient research among the purchasers of the oddments from the old tenements procured little result.

But there was a silver shoe-buckle found buried in the cellar of one of the houses. That I bought at once.

“Why, that was her house, the house at the corner,” I said. “And I remember going down to the cellar, when…”

It was all blurred again — only just that glimpse when I recalled the house, and going down to the cellar, and losing a shoe-buckle in the dark, and searching a little for it, then giving it up impatiently. This connected me personally with Ann Mellor. I began to feel that we had been together in curious scenes — it was all blurred, dark, troubled, but I knew that I should understand very soon.

The haunting of the word “Norway” puzzled me very much — it did not seem to fit into the story at all.

That evening I took the pencil sketch, the book from which it had fallen, the silver buckle, and holding all of them tightly in my hand, concentrated on an effort to find out more of the person or persons to whom they had belonged.

Usually when I did this my second sight, or clairvoyance or whatever you called the faculty I had, rewarded me with distinct visions or pictures.

This time there was nothing.

Instead, I felt there was somewhere I ought to go — impelled as it were, to get up and walk to some given point.

I put on my hat and coat, placed my treasures in my pocket, and hurried out. It was evening, wet and cold, and just at the hour when the theatres are full and the streets empty. Quite automatically and without knowing in the least where I was going, I walked rapidly to Oxford Street, then turned sharply to the left in the direction of the Marble Arch.

I was rather surprised and disappointed, for I thought I had been guided in the direction of Ann Mellor’s tomb and the ruins of Nightingale Lane. This part of the world appeared to have no association whatever with the story I was trying to discover.

The great closed opulent shops with the expanses of shining glass looked blank and alien, as did the long glimmer of the polished road, along which the huge and gaudy motor-buses rolled through the murky night splashed with artificial light.

I crossed Park Lane to the Marble Arch, crossed again, and walked along by the Park railings.

“My God!” I said suddenly, “I’ve been here before.” A sudden pang of rage and terror possessed me, and I had a distinct vision of pine forests, mountains, and a large lake or bay — flashed, like a photo picture on the screen, across the dark fronts of the heavy houses fronting me.

The road was empty, and I swung across impulsively. In the centre I stopped and put my hand to my throat. I knew that I had reached the end of my journey.

Under my feet was the metal triangle let into the pavement to mark the site of Tyburn gallows.

I turned away very quickly, shuddering under the drizzling rain.

How did this sinister place enter into the story of Ann Mellor? And what was the meaning of that clear-cut little vision of pines and mountains and lake?

I fell into an extreme agitation, and the material objects about me became unreal; they seemed to wane and roll away as if they were painted on a curtain that was being pulled aside.

I thought of what I had heard and read of the fourth dimension. That night when I went to bed I put the book, the buckle and the sketch under my pillow.

I knew what was going to happen and half dreaded it, yet deliberately prepared for it.

I was going to meet Ann Mellor. As I closed my eyes and lost all sensation of time and space, there seemed a second’s black unconsciousness. When I opened my eyes, I was standing at a little window that looked down from some height on to the Thames. There were ice-floes on the grey water, and the air was chill. By looking up the river I could see a vast amount of shipping; great masted vessels crowding together in the broad reach of the river.

A few seagulls swooped and swerved in front of me — gleaming, yet white and grey, like the river and the ice-floes.

I turned to face the room, which was completely panelled in plain wood. The floor sloped a little and the door was low; a tea equipage stood on the table; the fireplace had Dutch tiles with little figures in blue.

The room affected me with a delicious sense of home, and yet — something poignant and heart-searching.

The low door opened. And she entered.

She wore a white muslin dress all frilled, and carried a calf-bound book.

“You like to keep me waiting,” I said, speaking English awkwardly. Ann Mellor went to the tea-table.

“Mrs Briscoe says you come too often,” she said. “Do you come too often, Eric — do you?”

I faced her. “You are a hussy and lead me on. You will not let me stay away.”

She gave me a looks half smile, half frown, of wayward passion. “Ay, bully me,” she said. “That is my thanks and my reward. My aunt scolds because you come — and this is your gratitude.”

“You’ll marry me, you pretty little wretch, and then there will be an end of these quarrels,” I said.

“God helping me, no,” she answered; “I’ll not marry you.”

“You will,” I swore.

I was close to her now, only the table between us, and her provoking face was a short space from mine.

The delicious magic of that moment seemed intolerable; when I held and kissed her, the joy of it seemed unbearable. It was supreme, but more a supreme pain than a supreme satisfaction. She had played fast and loose with me for so long — now yes, now no, denying, provoking — and I looked back on a life that had held very little denial or provocation.

“You have got to marry me,” I said. “You are nothing but a girl, and I’ll make you.”

“I’ll not marry a foreigner,” she pouted.

“A penniless jade like you to choose! I am a rich man,” I boasted. “I could put three thousand pounds into your English bank tomorrow.”

An elderly woman joined us and my chance was over. She looked on me with disfavour, and scolded Ann for trifles.

I was bored, but would not go for fear of missing another opportunity of talking to Ann alone. I picked up the book she had brought in and took it to the window. It was a dull volume of sermons, very new and stiff in the binding.

I yawned.

I took out my pocket-book and pencil and under cover of the open book made a pencil sketch of Ann as she sat at the tea-table bickering with Mrs Briscoe. When I had finished the sketch I idly shut it up in the book and put the book on the windowsill. For another half-hour I sat there listening to the women gossiping and scolding, then I rose.

I looked at Ann insolently, tormented by the thought of her crushed in my arms, angry with her for ignoring me.

“Will you come to church this Sunday, as usual, Ann?” I asked.

“Leave her at peace in church, do, Mr Ericson!” cried the aunt. “And we will not go to the Nightingale Lane Church tomorrow — it is too far.”

“Yes, we will go,” said Ann. “Hike the preacher and the coach ride.”

She looked at me as she spoke, and I went straight up to her and took her by the shoulders, regardless of the other woman.

“My little love,” I said, “do not deny me any more. Have you ever thought of death? We might be dead and cold — think how cold, these hearts of ours — before the spring is in flower—”

“Dead,” she laughed — “dead!”

“Dead and love frustrate.”

Mrs Briscoe drew her away from me. “God save us from these foreign manners,” she shrilled. “You are nothing but a North Sea rover—”

I laughed very heartily at this, for I was one of the richest timber merchants in Kristiansund, and I swaggered away, fingering the sword on my hip.

As I walked through the streets of Wapping I was making plans to abduct the girl and marry her by force.

First I went to Nightingale Lane, looking for lodgings, and found them at the house of Mrs Porter. Then I went to the Black Bull in Holborn and picked up with some town bullies of my acquaintance, and arranged matters with them over a bottle of Tokay.

Two sham bailiffs were to arrest her for an imaginary debt on her way to church — to bring her to me at the Black Bull, where we should be married, I having my clergyman ready, and then I would take her to Nightingale Lane, near the church she so loved.

Here I cannot very well remember sequences — all is blurred, as by the haste and excitement of violent action.

I knew that for several hours I was moving about hastily in great agitation and temper from one place to another, chiefly between Wapping, the Black Bull, and Nightingale Lane.

Always was the cold, the rain, the scatters of snow, the iron-coloured river, the lead-coloured sky.

My schemes succeeded perfectly.

The sham bailiffs stopped the coach and forced out Ann Mellor, leaving Mrs Briscoe shrieking vainly in the grey silence of the wet Sunday morning, and brought her to me where I waited in the private room at the Black Bull.

My darling was brought in, not without indignity. I did not wish to spare her; I felt all the cruelty that passionate love will often show towards the beloved object.

“I knew that it was you,” she said.

“Of course you knew it was I,” I replied — what other man was there who would so dare to mishandle her?

I thought that she would appeal to my rascal clergyman or my ruffian witnesses, but she did not.

And we were married and left alone.

“Take me away from here,” she said; “anywhere from this vile tavern.”

“I’ve lodgings,” I said, “in Nightingale Lane.”

She turned her head away when I came near her, only repeating, “Take me away.”

“You must watch your temper now, madam,” I smiled. “You are my wife.”

At that she broke into violent weeping, like a little child, and gave me a deal of trouble to get her away into the coach.

When we reached our lodgings, which seemed the dearest place in the world to me, my wife fell from tears to abuse and railed incoherently. I tried to humour her.

“Why, Ann,” I said, “you know this is the best manner in which to deal with your tiresome relatives — come, look up and kiss me. You know that you love me.”

“And if I do,” she answered, with the foolish inconsistency of women, “does not that make it worse?”

So we quarrelled, she tragic, I smiling, till the landlady brought up the supper.

I asked her for some of the wine I had had sent in from the Black Bull yesterday, and she, grumbling, said it was in the cellar and had no mind to go there in the dark. So I took the key and the candle and went myself.

One of the buckles was loose and slipped on my shoe. I smiled to see it, thinking of Ann sewing it on for me, and laughing over the thread.

I stood awhile in the cellar, forgetful of my errand, thinking that this was my wedding night and how I loved my darling.

I thought of my own home, and how I would take her there, and the great joy and contentment we should have together.

When I had selected my wine, I noticed, in stooping, that the loose buckle was lost. As I searched for it, a draught blew my candle out, and being in the dark I gave up the business and went upstairs.

I found the house full of strangers; Mrs Briscoe was there with two of my wife’s uncles and four constables. I understood amid the noise and confusion (I could not understand the English so very well) that I was to be arrested on a charge of abduction.

I laughed in their faces. I was so sure of Ann. “The lady will tell you herself,” I said, “that she is very willingly my wife.”

“Swagger away, my fine young man,” sneered Mrs Briscoe; “you are nowt but a foreign bully.”

“Ann will tell you what she thinks of me,” I answered.

We all went into the little room where she was. She must have heard us coming, for she stood ready, against the table. She still wore her hat with the black lace under it round her chin, and her dark cape over her white dress.

When she saw her relatives and the constables crowding in, she crossed instantly over to me and put her hand in mine.

I felt as if I should suffocate with the glad leap my heart gave. I placed my bottle of wine on the table.

“You see,” I said, “my wife stands by me.”

Ann took her hand away. They asked her formally if she was a willing party to her elopement and marriage.

“Cannot you see,” she cried, “by the way you find me that I am here by outrage and deceit?”

“Girl,” I asked aghast, “do you deny your husband?”

“Had I had my will you would have been no husband of mine,” she said bitterly.

I could afford to laugh at this, knowing how she loved me, but the others seized on her statement and made her swear to it, which the passionate girl did.

“I’ll hurt you as you hurt me,” she cried. “This shall be a black day’s work for you.”

I let them disarm and arrest me; I did not know much of the English laws, and I asked what my punishment would be.

One of the uncles answered me. “The girl’s an heiress. In stealing her you’ve stolen property.”

“Twenty pounds a year and a thousand in the Government!” I answered. “What is that to me? I am a rich man.”

“No matter. You’ve committed a felony. We look after property in this country. If you are found guilty, it is the gallows.”

Ann and I looked at each other. “See how you frustrate love,” I said. “I did not mean what I said,” she stammered; “I married him willingly—”

“The girl speaks in pity,” said Mrs Briscoe; “I can prove how she was forced away—”

The girl tried to get at me now, but was forced back.

“This is a bitter marriage night,” I said. As they took me away, I heard her laughing like a maniac.

So I last saw her, down on her knees, holding them all at bay, laughing like a maniac.

I woke up in my little bedroom above the bookshop, and took from under the pillow the pencil sketch I had made so long ago, the book Ann was reading that day, and the buckle I had lost on my marriage day in the cellar in Nightingale Lane. It was all absolutely clear now; I remembered the trial, the walk to Tyburn, that devastating vision of my own land that had come upon me as I reached the fatal spot.

Two sentences of my dying speech stuck in my mind. I said, “I die for transgressing a law I knew not of;” and again, “I am so much in charity with my wife, that I believe she had no hand in this.”

I was rather curious to see what history had said of my case, so, that day being a Saturday, I went to the British Museum as soon as the shop was shut and looked up the trials for the year 1750. I could not find any full report here, nor did I trouble to search for it. The brief record was sufficient.

At Tyburn, in December 1750, was hanged Eric Ericson, a wealthy young Norwegian of good family, for the abduction and marriage of Ann Mellor, heiress of the late William Mellor, a merchant, of Wapping. He pleaded the complicity of the girl, but she denied him at first, retracting too late. Her relatives obtained permission to annul the marriage and for the girl to retain the name of Mellor.

I felt very exultant and triumphant.

“She died of it,” I said, as I closed the book, “in Christmas week my darling died. She went back to the lodgings I had taken for her. They could not do anything with her. She turned away from them all and died.”

I hurried home through the iron December twilight as I had hurried before to Nightingale Lane. At last I was going to be happy with Ann Mellor.

“The Sketch” 25 Dec. 1922

Seeing Life! And Other Stories (1923)

THE AVENGING
OF ANN LEETE

This is a queer story, the more queer for the interpretation of passions of strong human heat that have been put upon it, and for glimpses of other motives and doings, not, it would seem, human at all.

The whole thing is seen vaguely, brokenly, a snatch here and there; one tells the tale, strangely another exclaims amaze, a third points out a scene, a fourth has a dim memory of a circumstance, a nine-days’ (or less) wonder, an old print helps, the name on a mural tablet in a deserted church pinches the heart with a sense of confirmation, and so you have your story. When all is said it remains a queer tale.

It is seventy years odd ago, so dating back from this present year of 1845 you come to nearly midway in the last century when conditions were vastly different from what they are now.

The scene is in Glasgow, and there are three points from which we start, all leading us to the heart of our tale.

The first is the portrait of a woman that hangs in the parlour of a respectable banker. He believes it to be the likeness of some connection of his wife’s, dead this many a year, but he does not know much about it. Some while ago it was discovered in a lumber-room, and he keeps it for the pallid beauty of the canvas, which is much faded and rubbed.

Since, as a young man, I first had the privilege of my Worthy friend’s acquaintance, I have always felt a strange interest in this picture; and, in that peculiar way that the imagination will seize on trifles, I was always fascinated by the dress of the lady. This is of dark-green very fine silk, an uncommon colour to use in a portrait, and, perhaps, in a lady’s dress. It is very plain, with a little scarf of a striped Roman pattern, and her hair is drawn up over a pillow in the antique mode. Her face is expressionless, yet strange, the upper lip very thin, the lower very full, the light brown eyes set under brows that slant. I cannot tell why this picture was always to me full of such a great attraction, but I used to think of it a vast deal, and often to note, secretly, that never had I chanced to meet in real life, or in any other painting, a lady in a dark-green silk dress.

In the corner of the canvas is a little device, put in a diamond, as a gentlewoman might bear arms, yet with no pretensions to heraldry, just three little birds, the topmost with a flower in its beak.

It was not so long ago that I came upon the second clue that leads into the story, and that was a mural tablet in an old church near the Rutherglen Road, a church that has lately fallen into disrepute or neglect, for it was deserted and impoverished. But I was assured that a generation ago it had been a most famous place of worship, fashionable and well frequented by the better sort.

The mural tablet was to one “Ann Leete,” and there was just the date (seventy-odd years old) given with what seemed a sinister brevity. And underneath the lettering, lightly cut on the time-stained marble, was the same device as that on the portrait of the lady in the green silk dress.

I was curious enough to make enquiries, but no one seemed to know anything of, or wished to talk about, Ann Leete.

It was all so long ago, I was told, and there was no one now in the parish of the name of Leete.

And all who had been acquainted with the family of Leete seemed to be dead or gone away. The parish register (my curiosity went so far as an inspection of this) yielded me no more information than the mural tablet.

I spoke to my friend the banker, and he said he thought that his wife had had some cousins by the name of Leete, and that there was some tale of a scandal or great misfortune attached to them which was the reason of a sort of ban on their name so that it had never been mentioned.

When I told him I thought the portrait of the lady in the dark-green silk might picture a certain Ann Leete he appeared uneasy and even desirous of having the likeness removed, which roused in me the suspicion that he knew something of the name, and that not pleasant. But it seemed to me indelicate and perhaps useless to question him. It was a year or so after this incident that my business, which was that of silversmith and jeweller, put into my hands a third clue. One of my apprentices came to me with a rare piece of work which had been left at the shop for repair.

It was a thin medal of the purest gold, on which was set in fresh-water pearls, rubies and cairngorms the device of the three birds, the plumage being most skilfully wrought in the bright jewels and the flower held by the topmost creature accurately designed in pearls.

It was one of these pearls that was missing, and I had some difficulty in matching its soft lustre.

An elderly lady called for the ornament, the same person who had left it. I saw her myself, and ventured to admire and praise the workmanship of the medal.

“Oh,” she said, “it was worked by a very famous jeweller, my great-uncle, and he has a peculiar regard for it — indeed I believe it has never before been out of his possession, but he was so greatly grieved by the loss of the pearl that he would not rest until I offered to take it to be repaired. He is, you will understand,” she added, with a smile, “a very old man. He must have made that jewellery — why — seventy-odd years ago.”

Seventy-odd years ago — that would bring one back to the date on the tablet to Ann Leete, to the period of the portrait.

“I have seen this device before,” I remarked, “on the likeness of a lady and on the mural inscription in memory of a certain Ann Leete.” Again this name appeared to make an unpleasant impression.

My customer took her packet hastily.

“It is associated with something dreadful,” she said quickly. “We do not speak of it — a very old story. I did not know anyone had heard of it—”

“I certainly have not,” I assured her. “I came to Glasgow not so long ago, as apprentice to this business of my uncle’s which now I own.”

“But you have seen a portrait?” she asked.

“Yes, in the house of a friend of mine.”

“This is queer. We did not know that any existed. Yet my great-uncle does speak of one — in a green silk dress.”

“In a green silk dress,” I confirmed.

The lady appeared amazed.

“But it is better to let the matter rest,” she decided. “My relative, you will realize, is very old — nearly, sir, a hundred years old, and his wits wander and he tells queer tales. It was all very strange and horrible, but one cannot tell how much my old uncle dreams.”

“I should not think to disturb him,” I replied.

But my customer hesitated.

“If you know of this portrait — perhaps he should be told; he laments after it so much, and we have always believed it an hallucination—”

She returned the packet containing the medal.

“Perhaps,” she added dubiously, “you are interested enough to take this back to my relative yourself and judge what you shall or shall not tell him?”

I eagerly accepted the offer, and the lady gave me the name and residence of the old man who, although possessed of considerable means, had lived for the past fifty years in the greatest seclusion in that lonely part of the town beyond the Rutherglen Road and near to the Green, the once pretty and fashionable resort for youth and pleasure, but now a deserted and desolate region. Here, on the first opportunity, I took my way, and found myself well out into the country, nearly at the river, before I reached the lonely mansion of Eneas Bretton, as the ancient jeweller was called.

A ferocious dog troubled my entrance in the dark overgrown garden where the black glossy laurels and bays strangled the few flowers, and a grim woman, in an old-fashioned mutch or cap, at length answered my repeated peals at the rusty chain bell.

It was not without considerable trouble that I was admitted into the presence of Mr. Bretton, and only, I think, by the display of the jewel and the refusal to give it into any hands but those of its owner.

The ancient jeweller was seated on a southern terrace that received the faint and fitful rays of the September sun. He was wrapped in shawls that disguised his natural form, and a fur and leather cap was fastened under his chin.

I had the impression that he had been a fine man, of a vigorous and handsome appearance; even now, in the extreme of decay, he showed a certain grandeur of line and carriage, a certain majestic power in his personality. Though extremely feeble, I did not take him to be imbecile nor greatly wanting in his faculties.

He received me courteously, though obviously ill-used to strangers.

I had, he said, a claim on him as a fellow-craftsman, and he was good enough to commend the fashion in which I had repaired his medal.

This, as soon as he had unwrapped, he fastened to a fine gold chain he drew from his breast, and slipped inside his heavy clothing. “A pretty trinket,” I said, “and of an unusual design.”

“I fashioned it myself,” he answered, “over seventy years ago. The year before, sir, she died.”

“Ann Leete?” I ventured.

The ancient man was not in the least surprised at the use of this name.

“It is a long time since I heard those words with any but my inner ear,” he murmured; “to be sure, I grow very old. You’ll not remember Ann Leete?” he added wistfully.

“I take it she died before I was born,” I answered.

He peered at me.

“Ah, yes, you are still a young man, though your hair is grey.” I noticed now that he wore a small tartan scarf inside his coat and shawl: this fact gave me a peculiar, almost unpleasant shudder. “I know this about Ann Leete — she had a dark-green silk dress. And a Roman or tartan scarf.”

He touched the wisp of bright-coloured silk across his chest. “That is it. She had her likeness taken so — but it was lost.”

“It is preserved,” I answered. “And I know where it is. I might, if you desired, bring you to a sight of it.”

He turned his grand old face to me with a civil inclination of his massive head.

“That would be very courteous of you, sir, and a pleasure to me. You must not think,” he added with dignity, “that the lady has forsaken me or that I do not often see her. Indeed, she comes to me more frequently than before. But it would delight me to have the painting of her to console the hours of her absence.”

I reflected what his relative had said about the weakness of his wits, and recalled his great age, which one was apt to forget in face of his composure and reasonableness.

He appeared now to doze and to take no further notice of my presence, so I left him.

He had a strange look of lifelessness as he slumbered there in the faintest rays of the cloudy autumn sun.

I reflected how lightly the spirit must dwell in this ancient frame, how easily it must take flight into the past, how soon into eternity. It did not cost me much persuasion to induce my friend, the banker, to lend me the portrait of Ann Leete, particularly as the canvas had been again sent up to the attics.

“Do you know the story?” I asked him.

He replied that he had heard something; that the case had made a great stir at the time; that it was all very confused and amazing, and that he did not desire to discuss the matter.

I hired a carriage and took the canvas to the house of Eneas Bretton.

He was again on the terrace, enjoying with a sort of calm eagerness the last warmth of the failing sun.

His two servants brought in the picture and placed it on a chair at his side.

He gazed at the painted face with the greatest serenity.

“That is she,” he said, “but I am glad to think that she looks happier now, sir. She still wears that dark-green silk. I never see her in any other garment.”

“A beautiful woman,” I remarked quietly, not wishing to agitate or disturb his reflections, which were clearly detached from any considerations of time and space.

“I have always thought so,” he answered gently, “but I, sir, have peculiar faculties. I saw her, and see her still as a spirit. I loved her as a spirit. Yet our bodily union was necessary for our complete happiness. And in that my darling and I were baulked.”

“By death?” I suggested, for I knew that the word had no terrors for him.

“By death,” he agreed, “who will soon be forced to unite us again.”

“But not in the body,” I said.

“How, sir, do you know that?” he smiled. “We have but finite minds. I think we have but little conception of the marvellous future.”

“Tell me,” I urged, “how you lost Ann Leete.”

His dim, heavy-lidded, many-wrinkled eyes flickered a glance over me.

“She was murdered,” he said.

I could not forbear a shudder.

“That fragile girl!” I exclaimed. My blood had always run cool and thin, and I detested deeds of violence; my even mind could not grasp the idea of the murder of women save as a monstrous enormity. I looked at the portrait, and it seemed to me that I had always known that it was the likeness of a creature doomed.

“Seventy years ago and more,” continued Eneas Bretton, “since when she has wandered lonely betwixt time and eternity, waiting for me. But very soon I shall join her, and then, sir, we shall go where there is no recollection of the evil things of this earth.”

By degrees he told me the story, not in any clear sequence, nor at any one time, nor without intervals of sleep and pauses of dreaming, nor without assistance from his servants and his great-niece and her husband, who were his frequent visitors.

Yet it was from his own lips and when we were alone together that I learned all that was really vital in the tale.

He required very frequent attendance; although all human passion was at the utmost ebb with him, he had, he said, a kind of regard for me in that I had brought him his lady’s portrait, and he told me things of which he had never spoken to any human being before. I say human on purpose because of his intense belief that he was, and always had been, in communication with powers not of this earth. In these words I put together his tale.

As a young man, said Eneas Bretton, I was healthy, prosperous and happy.

My family had been goldsmiths as long as there was any record of their existence, and I was an enthusiast in this craft, grave, withal, and studious, over-fond of books and meditation. I do not know how or when I first met Ann Leete.

To me she was always there like the sun; I think I have known her all my life, but perhaps my memory fails.

Her father was a lawyer and she an only child, and though her social station was considered superior to mine, I had far more in the way of worldly goods, so there was no earthly obstacle to our union.

The powers of evil, however, fought against us; I had feared this from the first, as our happiness was the complete circle ever hateful to fiends and devils who try to break the mystic symbol.

The mistress of my soul attracted the lustful attention of a young doctor, Rob Patterson, who had a certain false charm of person, not real comeliness, but a trick of colour, of carriage and a fine taste in clothes.

His admiration was whetted by her coldness and his intense dislike of me.

We came to scenes in which he derided me as no gentleman, but a beggarly tradesman, and I scorned him as an idle voluptuary designing a woman’s ruin for the crude pleasure of the gratification of fleeting passions.

For the fellow made not even any pretence of being able to support a wife, and was of that rake-helly temperament that made an open mock of matrimony.

Although he was but a medical student, he was of what they call noble birth, and his family, though decayed, possessed considerable social power, so that his bold pursuit of Ann Leete and his insolent flaunting of me had some licence, the more so that he did not lack tact and address in his manner and conduct.

Our marriage could have stopped this persecution, or given the right to publicly resent it, but my darling would not leave her father, who was of a melancholy and querulous disposition.

It was shortly before her twenty-first birthday, for which I had made her the jewel I now wear (the device being the crest of her mother’s family and one for which she had a great affection), that her father died suddenly. His last thoughts were of her, for he had this very picture painted for her birthday gift. Finding herself thus unprotected and her affairs in some confusion, she declared her intention of retiring to some distant relative in the Highlands until decorum permitted of our marriage.

And upon my opposing myself to this scheme of separation and delay she was pleased to fall out with me, declaring that I was as importunate as Dr. Patterson, and that I, as well as he, should be kept in ignorance of her retreat.

I had, however, great hopes of inducing her to change this resolution, and, it being then fair spring weather, engaged her to walk with me on the Green, beyond the city, to discuss our future. I was an orphan like herself, and we had now no common meeting-place suitable to her reputation and my respect.

By reason of a pressure of work, to which by temperament and training I was ever attentive, I was a few moments late at the tryst on the Green, which I found, as usual, empty; but it was a lovely afternoon of May, very still and serene, like the smile of satisfied love. I paced about, looking for my darling.

Although she was in mourning, she had promised me to wear the dark-green silk I so admired under her black cloak, and I looked for this colour among the brighter greens of the trees and bushes. She did not appear, and my heart was chilled with the fear that she was offended with me and therefore would not come, and an even deeper dread that she might, in vexation, have fled to her unknown retreat.

This thought was sending me hot-foot to seek her at her house, when I saw Rob Patterson coming across the close-shaven grass of the Green.

I remembered that the cheerful sun seemed to me to be at this moment darkened, not by any natural clouds or mists, but as it is during an eclipse, and that the fresh trees and innocent flowers took on a ghastly and withered look.

It may appear a trivial detail, but I recall so clearly his habit, which was of a luxury beyond his means — fine grey broadcloth with a deep edging of embroidery in gold thread, little suited to his profession.

As he saw me he cocked his hat over his eyes, but took no other notice of my appearance, and I turned away, not being wishful of any encounter with this gentleman while my spirit was in a tumult.

I went at once to my darling’s house, and learnt from her maid that she had left home two hours previously.

I do not wish to dwell on this part of my tale — indeed, I could not, it becomes very confused to me.

The salient facts are these — that no one saw Ann Leete in bodily form again.

And no one could account for her disappearance; yet no great comment was aroused by this, because there was no one to take much interest in her, and it was commonly believed that she had disappeared from the importunity of her lovers, the more so as Rob Patterson swore that the day of her disappearance he had had an interview with her in which she had avowed her intention of going where no one could discover her. This, in a fashion, was confirmed by what she had told me, and I was the more inclined to believe it, as my inner senses told me that she was not dead.

Six months of bitter search, of sad uneasiness, that remain in my memory blurred to one pain, and then, one autumn evening, as I came home late and dispirited, I saw her before me in the gloaming, tripping up the street, wearing her dark-green silk dress and tartan or Roman scarf.

I did not see her face as she disappeared before I could gain on her, but she held to her side one hand, and between the long fingers I saw the haft of a surgeon’s knife.

I knew then that she was dead.

And I knew that Rob Patterson had killed her.

Although it was well known that my family were all ghost-seers, to speak in this case was to be laughed at and reprimanded.

I had no single shred of evidence against Dr. Patterson.

But I resolved that I would use what powers I possessed to make him disclose his crime.

And this is how it befell.

In those days, in Glasgow, it was compulsory to attend some place of worship on the Sabbath, the observation of the holy day being enforced with peculiar strictness, and none being allowed to show themselves in any public place during the hours of the church services, and to this end inspectors and overseers were employed to patrol the streets on a Sabbath and take down the names of those who might be found loitering there.

But few were the defaulters, Glasgow on a Sunday being as bare as the Arabian desert.

Rob Patterson and I both attended the church in Rutherglen Road, towards the Green and the river.

And the Sunday after I had seen the phantom of Ann Leete, I changed my usual place and seated myself behind this young man. My intention was to so work on his spirit as to cause him to make public confession of his crime. And I crouched there behind him with a concentration of hate and fury, forcing my will on his during the whole of the long service.

I noticed he was pale, and that he glanced several times behind him, but he did not change his place or open his lips; but presently his head fell forward on his arms as if he was praying, and I took him to be in a kind of swoon brought on by the resistance of his spirit against mine.

I did not for this cease to pursue him. I was, indeed, as if in an exaltation, and I thought my soul had his soul by the throat, somewhere above our heads, and was shouting out: “Confess! Confess!”

One o’clock struck and he rose with the rest of the congregation, but in a dazed kind of fashion. It was almost side by side that we issued from the church door.

As the stream of people came into the street they were stopped by a little procession that came down the road.

All immediately recognized two of the inspectors employed to search the Sunday streets for defaulters from church attendance, followed by several citizens who appeared to have left their homes in haste and confusion.

These people carried between them a rude bundle which some compassionate hand had covered with a white linen cloth. Below this fell a swathe of dark-green silk and the end of a Roman scarf. I stepped up to the rough bier.

“You have found Ann Leete,” I said.

“It is a dead woman,” one answered me. “We know not her name.”

I did not need to raise the cloth. The congregation was gathering round us, amongst them was Rob Patterson.

“Tell me, who was her promised husband, how you found her,” I said.

And one of the inspectors answered:

“Near here, on the Green, where the wall bounds the grass, we saw, just now, the young surgeon, Rob Patterson, lying on the sward, and put his name in our books, besides approaching him to enquire the reason of his absence from church. But he, without excuse for his offence, rose from the ground, exclaiming: ‘I am a miserable man! Look in the water!’”

“With that he crossed a stile that leads to the river and disappeared, and we, going down to the water, found the dead woman, deep tangled between the willows and the weeds—”

“And,” added the other inspector gravely, “tangled in her clothes is a surgeon’s knife.”

“Which,” said the former speaker, “perhaps Dr. Patterson can explain, since I perceive he is among this congregation — he must have found some quick way round to have got here before us.”

Upon this all eyes turned on the surgeon, but more with amaze than reproach.

And he, with a confident air, said:

“It is known to all these good people that I have been in the church the whole of the morning, especially to Eneas Bretton, who sat behind me, and, I dare swear, never took his eyes from me during the whole of the service.”

“Ay, your body was there,” I said.

With that he laughed angrily, and mingling with the crowd passed on his way.

You may believe there was a great stir; the theory put abroad was that Ann Leete had been kept a prisoner in a solitary, mined hut there was by the river, and then, fury or fear, slain by her jailer and cast into the river.

To me all this is black. I only know that she was murdered by Rob Patterson.

He was arrested and tried on the circuit.

He there proved, beyond all cavil, that he had been in the church from the beginning of the service to the end of it; his alibi was perfect. But the two inspectors never wavered in their tale of seeing him on the Green, of his self-accusation in his exclamation; he was very well known to them; and they showed his name written in their books.

He was acquitted by the tribunal of man, but a higher power condemned him.

Shortly after he died by his own hand, which God armed and turned against him.

This mystery, as it was called, was never solved to the public satisfaction, but I know that I sent Rob Patterson’s soul out of his body to betray his guilt, and to procure my darling Christian burial.

This was the tale Eneas Bretton, that ancient man, told me, on the old terrace, as he sat opposite the picture of Ann Leete.

“You must think what you will,” he concluded. “They will tell you that the shock unsettled my wits, or even that I was always crazed. As they would tell you that I dream when I say that I see Ann Leete now, and babble when I talk of my happiness with her for fifty years.”

He smiled faintly; a deeper glory than that of the autumn sunshine seemed to rest on him.

“Explain it yourself, sir. What was it those inspectors saw on the Green?”

He slightly raised himself in his chair and peered over my shoulder.

“And what is this,” he asked triumphantly, in the voice of a young man, “coming towards us now?”

I rose; I looked over my shoulder.

Through the gloom I saw a dark-green silk gown, a woman’s form, a pale hand beckoning.

My impulse was to fly from the spot, but a happy sigh from my companion reproved my cowardice. I looked at the ancient man whose whole figure appeared lapped in warm light, and as the apparition of the woman moved into this glow, which seemed too glorious for the fading sunshine, I heard his last breath flow from his body with a glad cry. I had not answered his questions; I never can.

“The New Magazine” (UK) Dec. 1923

Seeing Life! And Other Stories (1923)

The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949)

DECAY

I want to write it down at once, to get it “out of my head” as they say, though why one should suppose these things are in one’s head, I don’t know — they seem to me all about us, flavouring the food we eat, colouring the sky.

Of course I’ve got the journalist’s habit of scribbling too, it is so much easier to jot things down than explain them by speech.

To us, at least.

And you are so far away it is a good excuse to send “newsy” letters. Only, I’ve got a feeling that in Lima this will read, well, queer.

Still you must be interested and I must write, no, I forestall your objection, it won’t do for “copy”. I’m not spoiling a good “scoop”.

What I have got to say can never be published.

Nor written to anyone but yourself — and you won’t speak of it, I know.

Good Lord, you won’t want to.

You’ll remember the people as they would you — we were all in the same “set” together for so long — I think you were the first to break away when you got this Lima job, weren’t you?

And soon after that came the marriage of Cedric Halston.

You heard all about it, I sent you the “cuttings” written by our own colleagues — you were rather fond of Halston, I think.

So was I.

Of course we were rather prejudiced by his being called Cedric and writing poetry, but it was such good stuff and he was such a decent sort and, of course, being so palpably ruined in Fleet Street! Much too good for what was too good for the rest of us, wasn’t he?

And rather more poverty-stricken than anyone ought to be it seemed to me.

Lord! The sheer sordidness of Halston, “hard-upishness”!

He couldn’t write his stuff for grind and worry and despair — but the little bits that struggled through as it were, were jolly fine.

Even the old Die-hards that “slam the door in the face of youth”, etc., etc., said he was — well, the right stuff.

None of your crazy, mazy, jig-saw, jazzy poets, poison green and liver yellow, but the “real thing”.

Like Keats.

Of course there ought to have been money in a stunt like that, being the real thing, I mean, and starving, but poor old Halston never could work it, could he? He just — starved.

Not very picturesquely.

Till he met Jennifer Harden.

(Did you ever think how wrong that “Jennifer” was? I’d never seen the name before except signing one of those articles that begin, “It’s ever so crowded on the Riviera now, and oh my dear” — you know the patter — and the people who write it!)

You know they married — one rather wanted to jeer, but couldn’t — we all sat back and looked humble.

It was so tremendous you could only describe it in terms of claptrap, “Abelard and Heloise” a “grande passion” and “immortal love”, “eternal devotion”, “twin souls” and all the rest of the good old frayed symbols, old chap, but they are getting worn — I’m thinking.

You remember I sent you her photo? One of those misty affairs looking like — well, not like Jennifer Harden.

Still, she was beautiful, but out of drawing — lots of money, lots of taste, not too young, by any means — and then the “love of a lifetime” thrown in.

She didn’t mind using that phrase about him — publicly, in the woman’s club she ran, and where she had met him — lured to gas on “Truth in relation to Modesty” by the bribe of a good dinner. She also said she worshipped him — I admired her for that — you know they take a bit of saying, those sort of things now-a-days!

And he raved about her — got the rose-coloured spectacles firmly fixed and took her on as she was, “Jennifer” and all — dashed into poetry and spread himself out over ivory pomegranates, roses, and all the rest of the irrelevant stuff we drag in to say a woman’s a woman. Do you remember the old Italian who saw his beloved at the fountain and said:

“She alone of all the world is worthy to be called a woman?”

That is the prettiest compliment I know of.

Well, to return to the Halstons, they were married and I don’t suppose you ever heard any more of them.

It is three years ago.

You know how lucky we all thought him — she really had such a lot of money.

And money had always been just what Halston wanted.

Of course they were very wonderful about it: he was “so humble in his great happiness, he could not let paltry pride stand in the way”, and she only “valued her fortune in that it could minister to his genius” — a pity how all these fine sentiments slip into “clichés”.

I suppose someone believes them, or means them, sometimes.

I wonder?

Well, they cleared out. She bought a place in Herts and called it “Enchantment”. Why not, after all? You might really feel that, I suppose.

Well, they shut themselves in this Paradise — never came to town, hardly ever wrote — sometimes a few “choice” poems from him, the kind that goes with handmade paper and silk ties and you keep reading over feeling sure that it means much more than it possibly could — and sometimes letters from her to “privileged” friends (they really thought they were) letters that are like screams of happiness.

Of course we all thought it rather wonderful that they could stay shut up like that and enjoy it — it was quite a blow for the real cynics.

“A case in a million” was all they could say.

He never wrote to anyone and there was not one of us who would not have thought it cheek to write to him, we even sank to seriously thinking of him as “a God-sent genius”.

Well, here comes what I must set down — only to you, Lorimer.

Halston and I knew you best of all in the old days and you are the only person I can tell.

Forgive the preamble, but I have a sense of your being so far away — I imagine you saying: “Who is Halston?”

I haven’t mentioned him for so long — there was nothing to mention — “Happy nations”, etc. Here is the story.

I was sent down to Hertford town a few weeks ago to investigate some ghost story, you know what a rage that sort of thing is with us just now, all of us shouting things you can hardly say in a whisper and trying to disprove what no one can prove.

The case was interesting and kept me some time — the day before I was due back in London I met Halston in the High Street. He seemed very cordial and prosperous, had a good car waiting, was rather too well dressed in uncommon kind of clothes — sort of peasant handicraft and Savile Row combined. But I did not think he looked well, strained, aged and thin — but this he explained by the fact that he was writing an Epic.

(Why do you smile, Lorimer, people have written Epics, you know.)

That was why he had been shut away all the time — that great work might grow under the beautiful ministrations of his wife… Jennifer, I gathered, was really running a little Paradise for his special benefit… she had just snatched him away from all that was ugly or crude or mean or distressing and lapped him in Love and Beauty and Service…

Of course I grinned… but I was ashamed of grinning.

Halston did not seem to notice; he actually asked me over to “Enchantment” to stay a few days.

Being a free lance I could accept and did — you can imagine my curiosity — a vulgar thing to admit to, but don’t you think it will be our first emotion if we ever step into Heaven?

Imagine the relish of being able to settle those questions — “What is God really like?” and “those robes and crowns?” and the “many mansions?” — and little private pet queries of your own.

That was how I felt as I motored over to “Enchantment” which was known to the outsider as a very delightful Tudor Farm House, completely brought up to date, that had formerly been called Eversley Lodge and run by a city gentleman, whose reputation was more noted for lustre than solidity. I found the place (which was isolated, a great way from the station, a good way from the road) perfect.

Rather like the “Ideal Homes” they make so much of just now, still they are ideal, aren’t they?

Well, here it all was, “pleasance”, “pleached walk”, sunk ponds, statues, peacock, arbours, box hedges, astrolabes, sundials — all the bag of tricks and inside everything done by electricity and servants so efficient you forgot they were there. Wonderfully comfortable.

Everything right — flowers, pictures, furniture, food — the last word in little contrivances for ease and luxury — three cars, I think, electric bells disguised as lanthorns and telephones concealed in sedan chairs, wood fires to “look nice” and steam heating. Elzivirs to tone with the walls and modern books slipped into brocade covers to read, you know the kind of thing!

But really perfect!

Halston had a wing built on specially for himself — specially for the epic, I ought to say, perhaps.

The most marvellous writing-room and library. I don’t know what he hadn’t got.

It was all “choice”; I hate the word but no other will do.

All really “choice” and as I was gaping round, in came Jennifer.

And she was “choice” too.

Just a rough silk dress, a girdle of queer stones no one else would have liked, leather shoes simply asserting they were handmade — and a manner.

She was gracious — sweeter than anyone need or ought to be, I thought, but I hadn’t quite got the atmosphere.

“Our first guest,” she murmured, holding out both hands. “How strange Cedric should meet you. He so seldom goes to the town, or ever leaves the house. He doesn’t care to,” she added with a thrill in her voice.

She looked at him and he looked at her and murmured, “Jennifer.”

While we had dinner — all excellent — that evening I observed her; she absolutely fascinated me and I want to describe her to you, Lorimer.

She is tall, with wide shoulders and a full Rosetti sort of neck, and a head rather nicely set, dark waved hair gathered in a knot at her nape and good forehead and dark rather flat eyes — then the nose tight, the lips hard and crooked, the complexion harsh and grained with red and the chin too small, running with a bad line into the Rosetti throat.

She lisped a little and showed more of her teeth than her lips when she talked.

Graceful enough she somehow gave an impression as I have said of beauty; she had a still yet enthusiastic manner and an air of almost incredible fastidiousness and refinement.

The conversation was delicately “high-brow”, and afterwards she played to us (yes, it was a Scriabine, and someone else, unknown to me who makes even Scriabine seem old-fashioned!) then he played and she stood behind him and rested her hands on his shoulders, and when it was over raised his face with slow fingers and kissed him.

There was a lot of this sort of thing; she, Jennifer, looked through me, with a sort of “divine pity” — but she was kind, very kind.

I soon learnt that Halston’s “sanctum” was “just for writing” upstairs they shared the same room; he hadn’t a corner, not even in the “sanctum” for she would glide in there and sit in place of the banal secretary who could not have been tolerated in “Enchantment”.

Not a corner — the woman pervaded the whole house — but why not?

You don’t want corners in Paradise.

There was a day or two of this; I don’t know why I stayed save that I was really rather fascinated.

Wanting to pick holes and not able to — you know.

I’m not sneering when I say again that it was really perfect.

Comfort, beauty, ease, leisure — every book, picture, magazine you could think of, the exquisite garden, the marvellous service (the servants were all in some quarters of their own, I believe, so seldom did one see them). And always Jennifer in tasteful gowns, in pretty poses moving lightly about doing useless beautiful things.

And always Cedric in his good quiet clothes with his fountain pen and his smile, and his running his fingers through his hair and his one or two dropped words that she understood so perfectly and took up with that bright brave smile “one soul signalling to another along the ramparts of eternity” — that was Jennifer’s smile.

She knew it and so did I; but I wished she had prettier teeth.

Of course, I should not have been noticing teeth, or the way she whitened her rather red throat, or the quick glitter of her eyes so out of harmony with her slow speech… but I still had not quite got the atmosphere.

Of course also there were no callers or callings, the mere thought was like a blasphemy, the isolation was as complete as the rarefied air… it was really rather wonderful how they did it.

You will have guessed there were no children, what an intrusion children would have been in such a life!

One rather wondered… it is always the important things one mustn’t touch on isn’t it? The things that matter most, that fill our souls, our minds, even our eyes… I’m always amazed at our eternal reticences… well, there were no children and I am queer in my views on marriage without children, it is a tricky business this mating… one knows too much… you’ve got to be jolly careful the people you marry to each other or, well, sometimes I’ve felt nauseated.

Anyhow, here were two carrying it off beautifully — all grossness purged away, they would tell you, the souls in perfect communion — all lovely and delicate, serving Art — beauty, nature, God. Yes, but why didn’t she give the poor devil a corner to himself?

I don’t believe he was alone for five minutes of the day or night — she used to speak of “our bedroom” and carry up flowers and fountain pens and biscuits, for the table beside their bed… ugh! I became uneasy at meeting his glance, I don’t know why.

Then… I was coming in from the garden the fourth evening she was playing as usual, in a white gown that didn’t suit her, and he was seated on his pure coloured chair with a Danish book of poetry.

As I entered the room I was assailed by a smell, so creeping, so foetid I could hardly forbear an exclamation — yet this was so obviously bad manners that I was silent.

I thought of course of drains or even dead birds in the chimney and that the discomfortable thing would be marked and removed. But neither of them noticed it and it died away presently.

Still, though it hung round us the whole evening now faint, now stronger… always indescribably awful.

It was not in my own room, yet I woke up in the night drenched with it, sick and shuddering with the horror of it… potent as a live thing it filled the lovely chamber. Lord! what a smell… I was retching as I staggered out to shut the window.

But it was in the house for the closed window made no difference… I passed a night of torment… by the morning it was gone.

I won’t bore you with my next day’s work, which was to trace that smell.

Quite fruitless.

The garden, the drains, the kitchens, all furtively examined were in perfect order.

How could one suspect anything else in such a house?

Yet with evening… that loathsome terror again.

It so saturated the rooms that everything seemed tainted with it, like a fog dirties and dims, so this smell blighted and smeared every lovely thing in the place.

And there were lovely things, I’d envied some of them really.

But it was all spoilt for me now — even when the ghastly odour wasn’t there everything reminded me of it… I was in a state of perpetual nausea.

Naturally I resolved to clear out.

But it couldn’t be done at less than a couple of days’ notice, for I had come for a fortnight.

I mentioned the smell, actually dared to Jennifer (I shall always think of her as that, never as “Mrs Halston”, I know) and she was so distantly sweet about it that I felt I had been very impertinent.

“Of course there is nothing,” she said kindly. “Cedric is so particular about — perfumes — sensitive people are, are they not? Perhaps you have fancies? Cedric used to… that is where I was able to… help him.”

Again the little thrill on the last two words: “help him!” poor brute. Yes she has helped him all right… but where to.

I could do nothing but agree.

Jennifer gazed at me and I could see she meant to be very soothing.

“I banished everything ugly out of Cedric’s life… Someday you will meet a woman who will do that for you—” then, with that natural brightness she used to mask her sacred emotions, “Will you come and look at the rose bushes? I think I have got some teeny weeny buds for you to see—”

Yes, she had and must needs pick me one and give it me gravely… as a symbol of something or other, I’m sure. But it was no good; her “teeny weeny” buds stank, my God, Lorimer, that is the only word for it stank to Heaven.

That day it was awful, the smell I mean. I took two long walks to get rid of it, the countryside was sweet and clean enough… the abomination was in the house, clinging to everything.

After dinner I asked them if they meant to live this life always, asked it bluntly, I suppose.

“Dear friend,” said Jennifer, “you don’t quite understand, does he, Cedric? This is… just home… ours…”

“Home?” I was worse than blunt, but the smell was torturing me. “What have you got in it?”

They both looked at me.

“Each other, haven’t we, Cedric?” her smile was transcendent.

“Oh, yes,” I echoed, “you’ve got each other — one can see that — feel it — sm—”

I stopped; what was I going to say? — what was slipping out?

I bit my tongue; but now I knew and it rather frightened me.

I cleared… I remember she said: “And the Epic”, but I just cleared out into the garden like a lunatic and walked as I was into Hertford to the hotel where they knew me.

Do you see it, Lorimer? It was all dead, love, ambition, kindness, the souls themselves, shut in, stagnant, he sold for money, his comforts, she sold for her satisfied lusts, each exacting the price… each hating the other — no children, nothing let in, nothing going on — putrid, rotten… each caged and caught by the other — and, Lorimer, stinking themselves to Hell.

Seeing Life! And Other Stories (1923)

KECKSIES

Two young esquires were riding from Canterbury, jolly and drunk, they shouted and trolled and rolled in their saddles as they followed the winding road across the downs.

A dim sky was overhead and shut in the wide expanse of open country that one side stretched to the sea and the other to the Kentish Weald.

The primroses grew in thick posies in the ditches, the hedges were full of fresh hawthorn green, and the new grey leaves of eglantine and honeysuckle, the long boughs of ash with the hard black buds, and the wand-like shoots of sallow willow hung with catkins and the smaller red tassels of the nut and birch; little the two young men heeded of any of these things, for they were in their own country that was thrice familiar; but Nick Bateup blinked across to the distant purple hills, and cursed the gathering rain. “Ten miles more of the open,” he muttered, “and a great storm blackening upon us.”

Young Crediton who was more full of wine, laughed drowsily. “We’ll lie at a cottage on the way, Nick — think you I’ve never a tenant who’ll let me share board and bed?”

He maundered into singing,

“There’s a light in the old mill, Where the witch weaves her charms; But dark is the chamber, Where you sleep in my arms. Now came you by magic, by trick or by spell, I have you and hold you, And love you right well!”

The clouds overtook them like an advancing army; the wayside green looked livid under the purplish threat of the heavens, and the birds were all still and silent.

“Split me if I’ll be soaked,” muttered young Bateup. “Knock up one of these boors of thine, Ned — but damn me if I see as much as hut or barn!”

“We come to Banells farm soon, or have we passed it?” answered the other confusedly. “What’s the pother? A bold bird as thou art, and scared of a drop of rain?”

“My lungs are not as lusty as thine,” replied Bateup, who was indeed of a delicate build and more carefully dressed in greatcoat and muffler.

“But thy throat is as wide!” laughed Crediton, “and God help you, you are muffled like an old woman — and as drunk as a shorn parrot.”

“Tra la la, my sweeting, Tra la la, my May, If now I miss the meeting I’ll come some other day.”

His companion took no notice of this nonsense, but with as much keenness as his muddled faculties would allow, was looking out for some shelter, for he retained sufficient perception to enable him to mark the violence of the approaching storm and the loneliness of the vast stretch of country where the only human habitations appeared to be some few poor cottages, far distant in the fields.

He lost his good-humour, and as the first drops of stinging cold rain began to fall, he cursed freely, using the terms common to the pot-houses where he had intoxicated himself on the way from Canterbury.

Urging their tired horses, they came on to the top of the little hill they ascended; immediately before them was the silver ashen skeleton of a blasted oak, polished like worn bone standing over a small pool of stagnant water (for there had been little rain and much east wind), where a few shivering ewes crouched together from the oncoming storm.

Just beyond this, rising out of the bare field, was a humble cottage of black timber and white plaster with a deep thatched roof. For the rest, the crest of the hill was covered by a hazel copse and then dipped lonely again to the clouded lower levels that now began to slope into the marsh.

“This will shelter us, Nick,” cried Crediton.

“’Tis a foul place and the boors have a foul reputation,” objected the lord of the manor. “There are those who swear to seeing the Devil’s own phiz leer from Goody Boyle’s windows — but anything to please thee and thy weak chest.”

They staggered from their horses, knocked open the rotting gate and leading the beasts across the hard dry grazing field, knocked with their whips at the small door of the cottage.

The grey sheep under the grey tree looked at them and bleated faintly; the rain began to fall, like straight yet broken darts out of the sombre clouds.

The door was opened by a woman very neatly dressed, with large scrubbed hands, who looked at them with fear and displeasure; for if her reputation was bad, theirs was no better; the lord of the manor was a known roisterer and wild liver, and spent his idleness in rakish expeditions with Sir Nicholas Bateup from Bodiam, who was easily squandering a fine property.

Neither was believed to be free of bloodshed, and as for honour, they were as stripped of that as the blasted tree by the lonely pool was stripped of leaves.

Besides, they were both, now, as usual, drunk.

“We want shelter, Goody Boyle,” cried Crediton, pushing his way in as he threw her his reins. “Get the horses into the barn.”

The woman could not deny the man who could make her homeless in a second; she shouted hoarsely an inarticulate name, and a loutish boy came and took the horses, while the two young men stumbled into the cottage which they filled and dwarfed with their splendour.

Edward Crediton had been a fine young man, and though he was marred with insolence and excess, he still made a magnificent appearance, with his full blunt features, his warm colouring, the fair hair rolled and curled and all his bravery of blue broadcloth, buckskin breeches, foreign lace, top boots, French sword and gold rings and watch chains.

Sir Nicholas Bateup was darker and more effeminate, having a cast of weakness in his constitution that betrayed itself in his face; but his dress was splendid to the point of foppishness and his manners even more arrogant and imposing.

Of the two he had the more evil repute; he was unwed and therefore there was no check upon his mischief, whereas Crediton had a young wife whom he loved after his fashion, who checked some of his doings, softened others, and stayed very faithful to him and adored him still, after five years of a wretched marriage, as is the manner of some women.

The rain came down with slashing severity; the little cottage panes were blotted with water.

Goody Boyle put logs on the fire and urged them with the bellows. It was a gaunt white room with nothing in it but a few wooden stools, a table and an eel-catcher’s prong.

On the table were two large fair wax candles.

“What are these for, Goody?” asked Crediton.

“For the dead, sir.”

“You’ve dead in the house?” cried Sir Nicholas, who was leaning by the fireplace and warming his hands. “What do you want with dead men in the house, you trollop?”

“It is no dead of mine, my lord,” answered the woman with evil civility, “but one who took shelter here and died.”

“A curst witch!” roared Crediton. “You hear that, Nick! Came here — died — and now you’ll put spells on us, you ugly slut—”

“No spells of mine,” answered the woman quietly, rubbing her large clean hands together. “He had been long ailing and died here of an ague.”

“And who sent the ague?” asked Crediton with drunken gravity. “And who sent him here?”

“Perhaps the same hand that sent us,” laughed Sir Nicholas. “Where is your corpse, Goody?”

“In the next room — I have but two.”

“And two too many — you need but a bundle of faggots and a tuft of tow to light it — an arrant witch, a contest witch,” muttered Crediton; he staggered up from the stool. “Where is your corpse? I’ve a mind to see if he looks as if he died a natural death.”

“Will you not ask first who it is?” asked the woman, unlatching the inner door.

“Why should I care?”

“Who is it?” asked Sir Nicholas, who had the clearer wits, drunk or sober.

“Richard Horne,” said Goody Boyle.

Ned Crediton looked at her with the eyes of a sober man.

“Richard Horne,” said Sir Nicholas. “So he is dead at last — your wife will be glad of that, Ned.”

Crediton gave a sullen laugh.

“I’d broken him — she wasn’t afraid any longer of a lost wretch, cast out to die of ague on the marsh.”

But Sir Nicholas had heard differently; he had been told, even by Ned himself, how Anne Crediton shivered before the terror of Richard Horne’s pursuit, and would wake up in the dark crying out for fear of him, like a lost child; for he had wooed her before her marriage, and persisted in loving her afterwards with mad boldness and insolent confidence, so that justice had been set on him and he had been banished to the marsh, a ruined man.

“Well, sirs,” said Goody Boyle, in her thin voice that had the pinched accent of other parts, “my lady can sleep o’ nights now — for Robert Horne will never disturb her again.”

“Do you think he ever troubled us?” asked Crediton with a coarse oath. “I flung him out like an adder that had writhed across the threshold—”

“A wonder he did not put a murrain on thee, Ned. He had fearful ways and a deep knowledge of unholy things.”

“A warlock. God help us,” added the woman.

“The Devil’s proved an ill master then,” laughed Crediton. “He could not help Richard Horne into Anne’s favour — nor prevent him lying in a cold bed in the flower of his age.”

“The Devil,” smiled Sir Nicholas, “was over busy, Ned, helping you to the lady’s favour and a warm bed. You were the dearer disciple.”

“Oh, good lords, will you talk less wildly with a lost man’s corpse in the house, and his soul riding the storm without?” begged Goody Boyle; and she latched again the inner door.

Murk filled the cottage now; waves of shadow flowed over the landscape without the rain-blotted window, and drowned the valley. In the bitter field, the melancholy ewes huddled beneath the blasted oak beside the bare pool, the stagnant surface of which was now broken by the quick raindrops; a low thunder grumbled from the horizon and all the young greenery looked livid in the ghastly light of heaven.

“I’ll see him,” said Ned Crediton, swaggering. “I’ll look at this gay gallant in his last smock! — so that I can swear to Anne he has taken his amorous smile to the earthworms — surely.”

“Look as you like,” answered Sir Nicholas, “glut your eyes with looking—”

“But you’ll remember, sirs, that he was a queer man and died queerly, and there was no parson or priest to take the edge off his going, or challenge the fiends who stood at his head and feet.”

“Saw you the fiends?” asked Ned curiously.

“Question not what I saw,” muttered the woman. “You’ll have your own familiars, Esquire Crediton.”

She unlatched the inner door again and Ned passed in, bowing low on the threshold.

“Good day, Robert Horne,” he jeered. “We parted in anger, but my debts are paid now and I greet you well.”

The dead man lay on a pallet bed with a coarse white sheet over him that showed his shape but roughly; the window was by his head and looked blankly on to the rain-bitten fields and dismal sky; the light was cold and colourless on the white sheet and the miserable room.

Sir Nicholas lounged in the doorway; he feared no death but his own, and that he set so far away it was but a dim dread.

“Look and see if it is Robert Horne,” he urged, “or if the beldam lies.”

And Crediton turned down the sheet.

“’Tis Robert Horne,” he said.

The dead man had his chin uptilted, his features sharp and horrible in the setting of the spilled fair hair, on the coarse pillow. Ned Crediton triumphed over him, making lewd jests of love and death, and sneering at this great gallant, who had been crazed for love and driven by desire, and who now lay impotent.

And Sir Nicholas in the doorway listened and laughed and had his own wicked jeers to add; for both of them had hated Robert Horne as a man who had defied them.

But Goody Boyle stole away with her fingers in her ears.

When these two were weary of their insults they returned the flap of the sheet over the dead face and returned to the outer room. And Ned asked for drink, declaring that Goody Boyle was a known smuggler and had cellars of rare stuff.

So the lout brought up glasses of cognac and a bottle of French wine, and these two drank grossly, sitting over the fire; and Goody Boyle made excuse for the drink, by saying that Robert Horne had given her two gold pieces before he died (not thin pared coins but thick and heavy) for his funeral, and the entertainment of those who should come to his burying.

“What mourners could he hope for?” laughed Ned Crediton. “The crow and the beetle and the death-watch spider!”

But Goody Boyle told him that Robert Horne had made friends while he had lived an outcast on the marshes; they were, no doubt, queer and even monstrous people, but they were coming tonight to sit with Robert Horne before he was put in the ground.

“And who, Goody, have warned this Devil’s congregation of the death of Robert Horne?” asked Sir Nicholas.

She answered him — that Robert Horne was not ill an hour or a day but for a long space struggled with fits of the marsh fever, and in between these bouts of the ague, he went abroad like a well man, and his friends would come up and see him and the messenger who came up to enquire after him was Tora, the Egyptian girl who walked with her bosom full of violets.

The storm was in full fury now, muttering low and sullen round the cottage with great power of beating rain.

“Robert Horne was slow in dying,” said Sir Nicholas. “Of what did he speak in those days?”

“Of a woman, good sir.”

“Of my wife!” cried Ned.

Goody Boyle shook her head with a look of stupidity.

“I know nothing of that. Though for certain he called her Anne, sweet Anne, and swore he would possess her yet — in so many words and very roundly.”

“But he died baulked,” said Ned, swaying on his stool, “and he’ll rot outside holy ground.”

“They’ll lay him in Deadman’s Field, which is full of old bones none can plough and no sheep will graze,” answered the woman, “and I must set out to see lame Jonas who promised to have the grave ready — but maybe the rain has hindered him.”

She looked at them shrewdly as she added,

“That is, gentles, if you care to remain alone with the body of Robert Horne.”

“I think of him as a dead dog,” replied Ned Crediton.

And when the woman had gone, he, being loosened with the French brandy, suggested a gross jest.

“Why should Robert Horne have all this honour, even from rogues and Egyptians? Let us fool them — throwing his corpse out into the byre, and I will lie under the sheet and presently sit up and fright them all, with the thought it is the Devil!”

Sir Nicholas warmly cheered this proposal and they lurched into the inner chamber which was dark enough now by reason of a great northern cloud that blocked the light from the window.

They pulled the sheet off Robert Horne and found him wrapped in another that was furled up under his chin, and so they carried him to the back door and peered through the storm for some secret place where they might throw him.

And Ned Crediton saw a dark bed of rank hemlock and cried, “Cast him into the kecksies,” that being the rustic name for the weed.

So they flung the dead man into the hemlocks which were scarce high enough to cover him, and to hide the whiteness of the sheet, broke off boughs from the hazel copse and put over him, and went back laughing to the cottage, and there kept a watch out from the front window and when they saw Goody Boyle toiling along through the rain, Ned took off his hat and coat and sword and folded them away under the bed, then Sir Nicholas wrapped him in the under sheet, so that he was shrouded to the chin, and he lay on the pillow, and drew the other sheet over him.

“If thou sleepst do not snore,” said Sir Nicholas, and went back to the fire and lit his long clay full of Virginian tobacco.

When Goody Boyle entered with her wet shawl over her head, she had two ragged creatures behind her who stared malevolently at the fine gentleman with his bright clothes and dark curls, lolling by the fire and watching the smoke rings rise from his pipe.

“Esquire Crediton has ridden for home,” he said, “but I am not minded to risk the ague.”

And he sipped more brandy and laughed at them, and they muttering, for they knew his fame, went into the death-chamber and crouched round the couch where Sir Nicholas had just laid Ned Crediton under the sheet.

And presently others came up, Egyptians, eel-catchers and the like, outcasts and vagrants who crept in to watch by the corpse. Sir Nicholas presently rolled after them to see the horror and shriekings for grace there would be, when the dead man threw aside his shroud and sat up.

But the vigil went on till the night closed in and the two wax candles were lit, and still Ned Crediton gave no sign, nor did he snore or heave beneath the sheet, and Sir Nicholas became impatient, for the rain was over and he was weary of the foul air and the grotesque company.

“The fool,” he thought (for he kept his wits well even in his cups), “has gone into a drunken sleep and forgot the joke.”

So he pushed his way to the bed and turned down the sheet, whispering,

“This jest will grow stale with keeping.”

But the words withered on his lips, for he looked into the face of a dead man. At the cry he gave they all came babbling about him and he told them of the trick that had been put upon them.

“But there’s Devil’s work here,” he added. “For here is the body back again — or Ned Crediton dead and frozen into a likeness of the other” — and he flung the sheet end quickly over the pinched face and fair hair.

“And what did ye do with Robert Horne, outrageous dare fiend that ye be?” demanded an old vagrant; and the young lord passed the ill words and answered with whitened lips.

“We cast him into yon bed of kecksies.”

And they all beat out into the night, the lout with a lantern. And there was nothing at all in the bed of kecksies… and Ned Crediton’s horse was gone from the stable.

“He was drunk,” said Sir Nicholas, “and forgot his part — and fled that moment I was in the outer room.”

“And in that minute did he carry Robert Horne in alone and wrap him up so neatly?” queried Goody Boyle.

“Well go in,” said another hag, “and strip the body and see which man it be—”

But Sir Nicholas was in the saddle.

“Let be,” he cried wildly, “there’s been gruesome work enough for tonight — it’s Robert Horne you have there — let be — Ill back to Crediton Manor—”

And he rode his horse out of the field, then more quickly down the darkling road, for the fumes of the brandy were out of his brain and he saw clearly and dreaded many things.

At the cross-roads when the ghastly moon had suddenly struck free of the retreating clouds he saw Ned Crediton ahead of him riding sharply, and he called out:

“Eh, Ned, what have you made of this jest? This way it is but a mangled folly.”

“What matter now for jest or earnest?” answered the other. “I ride home at last.”

Sir Nicholas kept pace with him; he was hatless and wore a shabby cloak that was twisted about him with the wind of his riding.

“Why did not you take your own garments?” asked Sir Nicholas. “Belike that rag you’ve snatched up belonged to Robert Horne—”

“If Crediton could steal his shroud he can steal his cloak,” replied Ned, and his companion said no more, thinking him wrought into a frenzy with the brandy and the evil nature of the joke.

The moon shone clear and cold with a faint stain like old blood in the halo, and the trees, bending in a seaward wind, cast the recent rain that loaded them heavily to the ground, as the two rode into the gates of Crediton Manor.

The hour was later than even Sir Nicholas knew (time had been blurred for him since the coming of the storm) and there was no light save a dim lamp in an upper window.

Ned Crediton dropped out of the saddle, not waiting for the mounting block, and rang the iron bell till it clattered through the house like a madman’s fury.

“Why, Ned, why this panic homecoming?” asked Sir Nicholas; but the other answered him not, but rang again.

There were footsteps within and the rattle of chains, and a voice asked from the side window:

“Who goes there?”

And Crediton dragged at the bell and screamed:

“I! The Master!”

The door was opened and an old servant stood there, pale in his bed-gown.

Ned Crediton passed him and stood by the newel post, like a man spent, yet alert.

“Send someone for the horses,” said Nick Bateup, “for your master is crazy drunk — I tell you, Mathews, he has seen Robert Horne dead tonight—”

Crediton laughed; the long rays of the lamp light showed him pale, haggard, distorted with tumbled fair hair and a torn shirt under the mantle, and at his waist a ragged bunch of hemlock thrust into his sash.

“A posy of kecksies for Anne,” he said; and the sleepy servants now up, began to come into the hall, looked at him with dismay. “I’ll lie here tonight,” said Sir Nicholas; “bring me lights into the parlour. I’ve no mind to sleep.”

He took off his hat and fingered his sword and glanced uneasily at the figure by the newel post with the posy of kecksies.

Another figure appeared at the head of the stairs, Anne Crediton holding her candle, wearing a grey lute-string robe and a lace cap with long ribbons that hung on to her bosom; she peered over the baluster and some of the hot wax from her taper fell on to the oak treads.

“I’ve a beau pot for you, Anne,” said Crediton, looking up and holding out the hemlocks. “I’ve long been dispossessed, Anne, but I’ve come home at last.”

She drew back without a word and her light flickered away across the landing; Crediton went up after her and they heard a door shut.

In the parlour the embers had been blown to flames and fresh logs put on and Sir Nicholas warmed his cold hands and told old Mathews (in a sober manner for him) the story of the jest they had striven to put on Goody Boyle and the queer, monstrous people from the marsh, and the monstrous ending of it, and the strangeness of Ned Crediton; it was not his usual humour to discourse with servants or to discuss his vagrant debaucheries with any, but tonight he seemed to need company and endeavoured to retain the old man, who was not reluctant to stay though usually he hated to see the dark face and bright clothes of Nick Bateup before the hearth of Crediton Manor.

And as these two talked, disconnectedly, as if they would fill the gap of any silence that might fall in the quiet house, there came the wail of a woman, desperate yet sunken.

“It is Mistress Crediton,” said Mathews with a downcast look. “He ill-uses her?”

“God help us, he will use buckles and straps to her, Sir Nicholas.” A quivering shriek came brokenly down the stairs and seemed to form the word “mercy.”

Sir Nicholas was an evil man who died unrepentant; but he was not of a temper to relish raw cruelty or crude brutalities to women; he would break their souls but never their bodies.

So he went to the door and listened, and old Mathews had never liked him so well as now when he saw the look on the thin dark face. For the third time she shrieked and they marvelled that any human being could hold her breath so long; yet it was muffled as if someone held a hand over her mouth.

The sweat stood out on the old man’s forehead.

“I’ve never before known her complain sir,” he whispered. “She is a very dog to her lord and takes her whip mutely—”

“I know, I know — she adores his hand when it caresses or when it strikes — but tonight — if I know anything of a woman’s accents, that is a note of abhorrence—”

He ran up the stairs, the old man panting after him with the snatched-up lantern.

“Where is her chamber?”

“Here, Sir Nicholas.”

The young man struck on the heavy oak panels with the hilt of his sword.

“Madam, Madam Crediton, why are you so ill at ease?” She moaned from within.

“Open to me, Ill call some of your women — come out—” Their blood curdled to hear her wails.

“Damn you to Hell,” cried Sir Nicholas in a fury. “Come out, Ned Crediton, or I’ll have the door down and run you through.” The answer was a little break of maniac laughter.

“She has run mad or he,” cried Mathews, backing from the room. “And surely there is another clamour at the door—”

Again the bell clanged and there were voices and tumult at the door; Mathews went and opened, and Sir Nicholas looking down the stairs saw in the moonlight a dirty farm cart, a sweating horse and some of the patched and rusty crew who had been keeping vigil in Goody Boyle’s cottage.

“We’ve brought Esquire Crediton home,” said one; and the others lifted a body from the cart and carried it through the murky moonlight.

Sir Nicholas came downstairs, for old Mathews could do nothing but cry for mercy.

“It was Edward Crediton,” repeated the eel-catcher, shuffling into the hall, “clothed all but his coat and hat and that was under the bed — there be his watches and chains, his seals and the papers in his pockets — and for his visage now there is no mistakening it.”

They had laid the body on the table where it had so often sat and larked and ate and drunk and cursed; Sir Nicholas gazed, holding up the lantern.

Edward Crediton — never any doubt of that now, though his face was distorted as by the anguish of a sudden and ugly death. “We never found Robert Horne,” muttered one of the mourners, trailing his foul muddy rags nearer the fire, and thrusting his crooked hands to the blaze.

And Mathews fell on his knees and tried to pray, but could think of no words.

“Who is upstairs?” demanded Sir Nicholas in a terrible voice. “Who is with that wretched woman?”

And he stared at the body of her husband.

Mathews, who had loved her as a little child, began gibbering and moaning.

“Did he not say he’d have her? And did not yon fool change places with him? Oh God, oh God, and has he not come to take his place—”

“But Robert Horne was dead. I saw him dead,” stammered Sir Nicholas, and set the lantern down, for his hand shook so the flame waved in the gusts.

“Eh,” shrieked old Mathews, grovelling on his hands and knees in his bed-gown. “Might not the Devil have lent him his body back for his own pitchy purposes?”

They looked at him a little, seeing he was suddenly crazed; then Sir Nicholas ran up the stairs with the others at his heels and thundered with his sword, and kicked and shouted outside Anne Crediton’s chamber door.

All the foul, muddy, earthy crew cowered on the stairs and chittered together, and in the parlour before the embers old Mathews crouched huddled, and whimpered.

The bedroom door opened and Robert Horne came out and stood and smiled at them, and the young man in his fury fell back and his sword rattled from his hand to the floor.

Robert Horne was a white death, nude to the waist and from there swathed in grave clothes; under the tattered dark cloak he had ridden in, was his shroud knotted round his neck; his naked chest gleamed with ghastly dews and under the waxen polish of his sunken face the decayed blood showed in discoloured patches; he went down the stairs and they hid their faces while his foul whiteness passed.

Sir Nicholas stumbled into the bedchamber. The moonlight showed Anne Crediton tumbled on the bed, dead, and staring with the posy of kecksies on her bare breast, and her mouth hung open and her hands clutching at the curtains.

The mourners rode back and picked up Robert Horne’s body whence it had returned from the kecksie patch and buried it in unholy ground with great respect, as one to whom the Devil had given his great desire.

“Regent Magazine” Jan. 1925

Seeing Life! And Other Stories (1923)

“HE MADE A WOMAN—”

“For many circumstances lead me to suspect that all these phenomena may depend upon certain forces, in virtue of which the particles of bodies, by causes not yet known, are either mutually impelled against one another and cohere into regular figures, or repel and recede from one another; which forces, being unknown, philosophers have as yet explored nature in vain.”

—Sir Isaac Newton,
preface to the “Principia.”

Edmund Charnock had reached that mental state when he could no longer endure even the worn comfort, the practical austerity of his favourite club; nerves and brain were too fine drawn, too weary of subtleties of thought and feeling; he was gorged with knowledge, disgusted with study, sick of his own personality.

Fame and wealth, luxury and amusement, seemed to him, not only paltry things — they even found some secret sense into agony.

Charnock was rather desperately aware that he must “get away”; but where?

The whole earth was so well known to him, and he could think of no spot remote enough, free enough from all association with threadbare human thoughts, inventions and emotions.

It was while he pondered this in the shabby, serene refuge of the favourite club that he met Blantyre, that wise, terrible, old scientist, whose intellect showed above that of the great ones of the world as the lofty pine shows above a clearing of weeds and bracken.

He was newly arrived from Roumania and was going to Wales; he had always been interested, in his cold, serene fashion, in Charnock, at one time a pupil of his, and he sat beside him now on the glossy, faded leather seat and let him talk, while he swung his eyeglasses at the end of the frayed black ribbon.

“I can’t get hold of the reality of anything,” said Charnock. “It’s awful. Last night I dreamt I was handling a square heavy glass bottle — I felt it, saw the polish, the gleam, put my fingers up and down it — it was real — and all the time my hands were folded under my cheek. I dreamt I saw a bird, like a flying peacock, white in the air, grey when it descended — it was more real to me than anything I have seen since — I could draw it from memory — and all the while my eyes were closed. Now what is reality?”

“Perhaps there is no such thing,” said Blantyre.

“But I must have something to hold to,” answered Charnock.

“Why? — let yourself go.”

“I dare not.”

“Afraid? How strange.” Blantyre smiled, increasing his myriad wrinkles. “I never could understand fear—”

“Not — fear of madness?”

“No.”

Charnock sighed.

“I should like,” he said, “to cease thinking, to cease knowing, to cease experiencing. My mind goes round and round like a squirrel in a cage — I am tired of the squirrel, irritated with the cage.”

He stretched his long limbs and added—

“I must get hold of simplicity or become insane.”

Blantyre glanced at him curiously.

“You are too young for what you have accomplished,” he remarked.

“If only,” said Charnock, “everything was not marked on a map — has that ever vexed you? — to think that there is no getting away from charts and maps?”

“They mean nothing,” said Blantyre. “A few toys, that’s all. Each generation has new toys, new jargon, new idols, new manners, that are all old toys, jargons and idols and manners rediscovered — what we call miracles are only unfamiliar happenings. We have forgotten so much. The Chaldeans would have found us provincial.”

He paused; then added abruptly:

“Come with me to Wales. I think you would like my place.”

Charnock accepted; he knew that Blantyre lived in scenes of complete isolation in a remote valley, among the hills haunted by many a mysterious legend, the setting of some of the oldest tales of Europe, and this disturbed him, for he was very sensitive to the influences of the past; yet for Blantyre’s sake he went.

It was October; the strangest month in the year, Blantyre always said, culminating in the awful vigil of the last day which has some mystic meaning now lost.

As Charnock drove from the station through the wild ways and the thin wash of autumn sunshine he did feel a certain lift of the spirit, though faint and momentary. Blantyre told him that they were driving through the ancient Feryllwg, or Forest of Dean, which lies between the Wye and the Severn, and is full of oaks for ships and yews for archers; the part through which they turned was still unspoiled, he said, and he told Charnock tales of Llew Llaw Gyffes, one of the makers of gold-coloured shoes, and one of the crimson stained ones of the Island. And then the old man, as the quick pale dusk closed over them, said:

“I think I have not told you that I have my ward staying with me. She will not trouble you at all. She is a Welsh girl and has a Welsh name — Blodeuwedd—”

He looked at Charnock and added:

“The name means nothing to you if you do not know the bardic verses.”

And Charnock replied that he had read these curious old fragments, but forgotten them, as he wished that he could forget his other cumbrous and vexing knowledge.

Blantyre went on describing the country, using the Welsh names and calling the forest Gwent Coch yn y Dena, in the country of Gwent, and he added that he had found no place in the world (and he had tried many) more soothing and reposeful than this odd corner of Wales; but Charnock could not agree, for already his restless imagination was peopling the autumn forest with old, far-off, grotesque figures, Arthur’s fantastic knights, and Bran who went as hostage to Rome, and Lleufer Mawr, who built the first church in Britain, for he remembered these vaguely from readings long ago.

But Blantyre had made this ancient lore his recreation; his information was annoyingly exhaustive; he knew the crude old British tongue intimately, and he spoke much of a certain Gwydion ap Don, an older and more mighty magician than Merlin.

“Fairy tales,” said Charnock peevishly.

“Well,” smiled the old man, “isn’t that what you want? Peace and simplicity?”

But to Charnock there was neither peace nor simplicity in all this, but the mere repetition of book wisdom, the jargon of the schools. Blantyre, thought the younger man with intense irritation, must have got into the way of it, and he had been a fool to think that he would find any real repose in the company of a pedant like Blantyre.

They reached the house when the moon was high amid light whirling clouds tossed by a frosty wind; it stood the far end of the forest on broken land surrounded by oak trees that swung and creaked in the gale.

“Remote enough,” smiled Blantyre, “and crude enough for you to be able to forget your hothouse fancies.”

Charnock felt the isolation and the roughness with a pang of relief; the icy air that blew sharply on him as he descended from the car, the moon so high and cold, the rude, square house of heavy stone set on the high piled rocks, the swift sound of an unseen stream, leaping from ledge to ledge until it gurgled into a forest pool — all this combined with one effect of wildness without fierceness, solitude without melancholy and strangeness without grotesqueness raised in Charnock a sense of quiet pleasure.

In the low, narrow doorway stood an old man holding a torch, the tawny glare of which was in rich contrast to the blue brilliance of the night; he stood aside to permit the two men to pass; the big car turned and sped back to civilisation.

Charnock gazed eagerly round a square room hung with coarse tapestry; there was a long oak table down the middle set with platters of wood, bottles and jugs of leather and knives of horn.

In an iron circlet held by iron chains to the beamed ceiling were stuck thick yellow candles all alight; on the huge open hearth burnt logs to a clear heart of fire, over which an elderly woman in a gown of black and white plaid, a heavy linen apron and ’kerchief, was standing and stirring the contents of an iron pot.

Blantyre spoke to his two servants in Welsh, and the woman left her cooking to show Charnock up the dark stairs to a large square room, with straw mattress and rugs, an ewer of water, a bowl and a stool, and a great window that looked on to the bright darkness of the night, the forest, the moon and the racing clouds.

As he gazed out on this noble prospect he was aware of what appeared to be a light female figure, that gave him an impression of a misty green and silver, moving rapidly over the rocks at the foot of the house; and he remembered with vexation that Blantyre had spoken of a woman — a ward.

When he went downstairs he saw her; she was seated at the table while the servant served out the supper, and Charnock saw her in the dim, wavering light of the circle of fat yellow candles.

She was of an almost nebulous fairness, her small face of a pale golden pallor, her gown of some archaic fashion, in hue changing tints of green.

Blantyre was reading aloud out of a book:

“Hast thou heard what Llewlleaweg of Gwyddel sang,

The noble chief wearing the golden tongues?

‘The grave is better than a life of want.’

Hast thou heard what Dremhidydd sang,

An ancient watchman on the Castle walls?

‘A refusal is better than a promise unperformed.’

Hast thou heard what Beduini sang?

A gifted Bishop of exalted rank?

‘Consider thy word before it is given.’”

“This is Blodeuwedd,” said Blantyre. “And you must promise me not to fall in love with her.”

Charnock, the tall dark, cynical, thin man, smiled acridly; yet the old man spoke earnestly and with no offensiveness in his manner; he now wore a long, dark, tattered robe and a skull cap, and while they ate the primitive meal and drank the strong ale, he read aloud out of the big, soiled, worn book. Charnock watched the girl; she seldom moved and never spoke, her expression did not change, but she gave out life as light is given out from a clear, steady flame. To Charnock’s weary mind she was symbolic of all the rest and serenity that he was in search of; he could not take his gaze from the hyacinth-white hues of her face, the knot of her pale gold hair, the soft, flowing, fluid lines of her body under her gown with the queer shifting shades of green.

After supper she left them; but Charnock continued to see her, even in his dreams.

Blantyre had a large laboratory built on to the ancient house, and there he spent most of his time, leaving the younger man full leisure to flavour the sharp, sweet, crude peace of the place, the cool, fresh presence of Blodeuwedd. Not that he often saw the girl, but her personality seemed to pervade the ancient house, the wild landscape, the changeful October weather.

Once or twice she spoke to him, but low and hesitating, like a child, and in the ancient language that he could not understand; and she never altered her gown, or her smile, or her bright still fragrance, her silent coming and going, her delicate, cheerful air of peace.

It was not what she was herself that so particularly pleased him as the manner in which she appeared to transform the entire world, as the sun will lighten the landscape, or the clear sky tint the ocean, or the perfume of flowers render every breeze a palpable thing.

She reminded him of some clouds he had seen once on a still winter night, so faint in the moonlight that they appeared but a wisp of lighter blue on the deep azure of the sky. Yet to them was all the magic of the night due. He spoke of her to Blantyre, and the old man reminded him of his dream of the square glass bottle and the grey, white peacock.

“Remember reality,” he smiled. “You must not love this girl.”

Charnock thought that he spoke foolishly, and wondered maliciously if the great brain was at last tottering into senility; he spent a great deal of time in his laboratory, and Charnock was content to be without his company, though he loathed the laboratory, this crude and ugly symbol of a dry search for bitter knowledge. At his warning about love Charnock always laughed; such talk was to the younger man a babble in an unknown tongue.

Love — any emotion any man could put such a man to — would never disturb his cold heart or soothe his restless mind… but what if the girl became necessary to him?

Supposing he felt he must always have her there, as some must always have a drug — a secret soporific?

His apprehension crept over him with an increasing dread; he could not, now, easily deny himself the girl’s company, the pleasure of watching her, of being lulled in the elemental peace that enfolded her like a silver light.

She appeared to have no occupations, no cares, no arts, even no wits; she merely moved and smiled and made the day radiant.

To see her fold her gown about her long limbs, to knot up the yellow strings of her pallid hair, to watch her glimmer under the oak trees, spring from rock to rock beside the waterfall, lean over the rude board at meal times, bent above the ruddy fire in the evening — all these actions of hers were as draughts of Lethe to Charnock, his soul was lulled to a delicious drowsiness; he felt as if nothing had yet been and that he slept in a dim cavern while the world was created; he no longer dreaded nor feared civilisation, he ceased to be aware of it; he was no longer hag ridden by his learning, his experience; he began to forget all he had ever known. Once or twice he caught Blantyre’s grin — wide, stretched, malevolent.

“Whatever are you doing in the laboratory?” he asked suddenly.

“Making experiments — experiments,” smiled Blantyre. “My old experiments, too. Trying over again some of those of Gwydion ap Don ——— ”

“Insane,” thought Charnock with dislike.

“You should be here in the spring,” continued Blantyre, “when the oaks are covered with bloom, the broom is in flower, and there bursts the first clusters of the meadowsweet.”

As he spoke Blodeuwedd entered and stood by the rude window looking out on to the wide moonlight, which coloured her from head to foot with a pale greenish golden silver.

“Have you ever touched her?” asked Blantyre. “I wonder if she would bear the test of your dream, the square bottle?”

Charnock smiled; yet the old man’s imbecility irritated him deeply.

“I must tell you about Gwydion,” went on Blantyre; “he was a great magician; there is this rhyme about him; I have translated it thus—

“Gwydion, the son of Don, of toil serene,

He made a woman out of flowers

Blossoms of broom, of oak, of meadowsweet.”

Charnock interrupted with two sharp words, that leapt unbidden from some forgotten childhood.

“Jesu Christ!” he cried; he caught in a frantic grasp the green silver robe of Blodeuwedd. She vanished; there was a heavy coil of perfume in the air, and Charnock’s thin hand grasped a spray of oak flower, a twig of broom, a cluster of meadowsweet.

Seeing Life! And Other Stories (1923)

I WILL
NEVER LEAVE YOU

In the year 1780 a slave vessel left the Indies for Liverpool with a cargo of negroes on board; the captain was man of an uncertain temper, who had conceived a great dislike to one of the crew, an old man named Bill Jones, who was inclined to be fat and lazy. On one occasion, when the captain was abusing this seaman for a fat, lubberly rascal, the old man returned an insolent answer, on which the captain, in an imperious fury, snatched up a blunderbuss loaded with slugs, fired and mortally wounded Jones.

“Sir,” said the old man as he was stretched on the deck, “you have done for me, but I will never leave you.”

The captain, in a mounting passion, swore at the dying man, and said he would have him put into the slave kettle where they made food for the negroes, and see how much fat he had preserved through his laziness; this was done; the man was thrown into the hot-pot for the slaves, and even the captain was obliged to admit “that there was not so much fat about him, after all.”

The dead sailor appeared again at once among his mates and worked silently among them; there was now no reason to complain of his sloth, as he was the foremost in every task, and in the wildest weather was always to be seen on the yard where he had met his death.

The crew endured this as they might, not daring to call the captain’s attention to the apparition, so greatly did they dread his temper, and the homeward voyage went fearfully, with the howling of the slaves below and the silence of the men above, companioning a ghost.

At length the captain called the mate into his cabin, and with a terrible look said: “You know what sort of a hand we have on board with us; and as for me, I cannot well bear it; you only see him now and then, but he has kept his word and I am never free from him . I therefore,” added the miserable man, “have resolved to leave you.”

The mate suggested they should run for the coast of France or Ireland, and that there the murderer should go ashore.

But at this instant the ghost entered the cabin and grinned into the face of the captain, who ran up on deck.

The mate followed, but only in time to hear a splash. The captain had thrown himself from the quarter gallery.

As the mate stared over the ship’s side he saw that the ghost of the sailor was clinging to the drowning man, who was endeavouring to spring out of the water, calling: “By God, Bill has got me now!”

They saw no more of the captain, but all the way to Liverpool the ship was followed by trails of greasy fat on the water.

“T.P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly” 08 Dec. 1923

RED CHAMPAGNE

When Marco Gherardi pledged his troth to Geva Gradenigo at her villa on the Brenta the oranges showed jade-green beneath the dark, glossy leaves and the July grapes, hard and bloomless, spilled from the plates of gleaming lustre ware.

Geva leant on the table with chequered light and shade of vine leaves moving over the smooth chestnut locks into which a last white rose was negligently pinned; her face was pallid as a seawater pearl, and her two long hands lay in the warm clasp of her dark lover.

Her dress gleamed the colour of moonlight; in her heavy-lidded eyes lay tears for the beauty of the purple haze and the air drowsy with the scent of ripening fruit.

“Pledge me till death,” she said, “and past death?”

“Till death and past death,” he whispered, and kissed her frail fingers with long kisses, like a bee lingering by a flower.

Geva drew away her right hand and took a silver bodkin from her hair; the drooping rose fell from her locks to the table of pale marble. Delicately she raised the slim, amber-hued bottle of white wine and poured the clear drink into the two glasses of milky lines that stood beside the platters of piled grapes, then she pricked her arm and let the blood run into the glasses, drop by drop, sliding into the fragrant liquid.

Marco also lightly stabbed his wrist veins, and the mingled blood floated together as they drank the flushed wine, swearing eternal fidelity in the warm, sleepy hot, hot afternoon; yea, eternal, for their vows reached beyond death into the still blue distances of the unknown.

That night a poisonous fly from the marshes stung Geva on the opened skin and the burning malaria ran through all her limbs. After another day and night of palpitating heat Geva died in the great bed of chestnut wood with the Gradenigo coat of arms on the headboard and Marco along the bed-step with buried face; till they took away the four painted candles and the long, narrow, gilt coffin.

Then Marco wandered through the mellow autumn wooing melancholy in leafless groves, till October found him in Venice amid the first glare and clatter of Carnival.

He was caught into the stream of gaiety, of riot, of licence; beneath yellow moon and yellow lanterns, Arlequino whispered his immortal jests, Spavento rattled his sword and Tartaglia grinned. Columbina shook her gauzy plumes, and lisping murmurs from the folds of black and white beauta asked when the Duca Gherardi was likely to wed.

Men who had forgotten Geva Gradenigo, and women who had never known her, mocked him for his sad face and sullen movements, till the music and the light balloons, the pennons against the autumn sky, the fantastic crowd on the Piazza, the languorous couples passing in the cushioned gondolas, the doves flying above the bronze horses of San Marco into the wine-purple air filled with the powdered gold of Carnival dust, worked their way with him. When the first shuddering chill of winter sent the freezing waves over the sun-withered seaweed of the palace steps Marco was betrothed to Camilla Andreini, and in Carnival time the marriage feasts began.

Scaramouche, with his guitar, danced behind the wedding procession, and the music of Furlanetto was played in the rococo ballroom, where the Murano candelabra glanced with rainbow colours and the masquers ran in and mingled with the guests.

Brilliant as a pearl in cloth of silver, with flowing veils of black lace and a bouquet of diamonds, the bride danced a gavotte with the bridegroom; the violins played the “Devil’s Sonata,” that inhuman music that Tartini heard in a dream; the blonde and happy light illuminated a company gay as sunshine on a stream, only Camilla whispered to her husband during the measures of the dance: “Who is the mask clothed like me in cloth of silver and priceless lace?”

Marco glanced where this lady sat alone and did not know who she might be.

“See,” added Camilla, “she, too, has a bouquet of diamonds, and I did not know that there was another in Venice!”

Marco was also amazed to see the second bouquet of diamonds lying before the masked lady on her table, but when the dance was over he drew from his saffron waistcoat a single eight-sided sapphire.

“This is unique,” he said, “the heirloom of our house. Ask her who she is!” he cried; but before they could reach the mask she had disappeared, and in the voluptuous melodies of the violins, in the tender smiles of the women, the murmurs of the men, the feast danced through the limpid, frosty hours of night.

Now the bride was led to the doors of the nuptial chamber, and guests and masks alike charged their glasses with bubbling champagne of France. The doors closed behind the bridal couple and the glasses were raised…

“But my wine is red!” cried one. “And mine!” another. “And mine!” a third. “The colour of blood!” screamed a woman.

And as they gazed Camilla ran in from the balcony.

“Did you not go with Marco into the bridal chamber?” asked the pale mother.

“Nay, I was on the balcony listening to the concert over the water—”

“Who went into the bedchamber with the Duca Gherardi?” asked the guests, and pale as snow they looked at each other above the goblets of red champagne.

The air blew very chill from the sea and they all were silent as if something passed through the room and out by the grand entrance, then they rushed and broke open the bedchamber door; there was no bride, but on the bridal couch lay Marco Gherardi dead, and staining the white velvet coverlet was blood, for all his wrist veins had been opened by a silver bodkin, such as women use to pin their hair.

“Cassell’s Weekly” 05 Sep. 1923

The Knot Garden (1933)

FLORENCE FLANNERY

AN ORNAMENT IN REGENCY PASTE

She who had been Florence Flannery noted with a careless eye the stains of wet on the dusty stairs, and with a glance ill used to observance of domesticities looked up for damp or dripping ceilings. The dim-walled staircase revealed nothing but more dust, yet this would serve as a peg for ill-humour to hang on, so Florence pouted. “An ill, muddy place,” said she, who loved gilding and gimcracks and mirrors reflecting velvet chairs, and flounced away to the upper chamber, lifting frilled skirts contemptuously high. Her husband followed; they had been married a week and there had never been any happiness in their wilful passion. Daniel Shute did not now look for any; in the disgust of this draggled homecoming he wondered what had induced him to marry the woman and how soon he would come to hate her.

As she stood in the big bedroom he watched her with dislike; her tawdry charms of vulgar prettiness had once been delightful to his dazed senses and muddled wits, but here, in his old home, washed by the fine Devon air, his sight was clearer and she appeared coarse as a poppy at the far end of August.

“Of course you hate it,” he said cynically, lounging with his big shoulders against one of the bedposts, his big hands in the pockets of his tight nankeen trousers, and his fair hair, tousled from the journey, hanging over his mottled face.

“It is not the place you boasted to have,” replied Florence, but idly, for she stood by the window and looked at the tiny leaded panes; the autumn sun gleaming sideways on this glass, picked out a name scratched there:

Florence Flannery.
Borne 1500.

“Look here,” cried the woman, excited, “this should be my ancestress!”

She slipped off a huge diamond ring she wore and scratched underneath the writing the present year, “1800.” Daniel Shute came and looked over her shoulder.

“That reads strange — ‘Born 1500’ — as if you would say died 1800,” he remarked. “Well, I don’t suppose she had anything to do with you, my charmer, yet she brought you luck, for it was remembering this name here made me notice you when I heard what you were called.”

He spoke uncivilly, and she responded in the same tone. “Undervalue what is your own, Mr. Shute. There was enough for me to choose from, I can swear!”

“Enough likely gallants,” he grinned, “not so many likely husbands, eh?”

He slouched away, for, fallen as he was, it stung him that he had married a corybante of the opera, an unplaced, homeless, nameless creature for all he knew, for he could never quite believe that “Florence Flannery” was her real name.

Yet that name had always attracted; it was so queer that he should meet a real woman called Florence Flannery when one of the earliest of his recollections was tracing that name over with a curious finger in the old diamond pane.

“You have never told me who she was,” said Mrs. Shute.

“Who knows? Three hundred years ago, m’dear. There are some old wives’ tales, of course.”

He left the great bedroom and she followed him doggedly downstairs.

“Is this your fine manor, Mr. Shute? And these your noble grounds? And how am Ito live here, Mr. Shute, who left the gaieties of London for you?”

Her voice, shrill and edged, followed him down the stairs and into the vast dismantled drawing-room where they paused, facing each other like things caught in a trap, which is what they were.

For he had married her because he was a ruined man, driven from London by duns, and a drunken man who dreaded lonely hours and needed a boon companion to pledge him glass for glass, and a man of coarse desires who had bought with marriage what he was not rich enough to buy with money, and she had married him because she was past her meridian and saw no more conquests ahead and also was in love with the idea of being a gentlewoman and ruling in the great grand house by the sea — which was how she had thought of Shute Manor.

And a great grand house it had been, but for twenty years it had been abandoned by Daniel Shute, and stripped and mortgaged to pay for his vices, so that now it stood barren and desolate, empty and tarnished, and only a woman with love in her heart could have made a home of it; never had there been love in Florence Flannery’s heart, only greed and meanness.

Thus these two faced each other in the gaunt room with the monstrous chandelier hanging above them wrapped in a dusty brown holland bag, the walls festooned with cobwebs, the pale wintry sunshine showing the thick dust on the unpolished boards.

“I can never live here!” cried Mrs. Shute. There was a touch of panic in her voice and she lifted her hands to her heart with a womanly gesture of grief.

The man was touched by a throb of pity; he did not himself expect the place to be so dilapidated. Some kind of a rascally agent had been looking after it for him, and he supposed some effort would have been made for his reception.

Florence saw his look of half-sullen shame and urged her point.

“We can go back, cannot we?” she said, with the rich drop in her voice, so useful for coaxing; “back to London and the house in Baker Street? All the old friends and old pleasures, Mr. Shute, and a dashing little cabriolet to go round the park?”

“Curse it!” he answered, chagrined. “I haven’t the money. Flo; I haven’t the damned money!” She heard the ring of bitter truth in his voice and the atrocious nature of the deception he had practised on her overwhelmed her shallow understanding.

“You mean you’ve got no money, Mr. Shute?” she screamed. “Not enough for London, m’dear.”

“And I’ve to live in this filthy barn?”

“It has been good enough for my people, Mrs. Shute,” he answered grimly. “For all the women of my family, gentlewomen, all of ’em with quarterings, and it will be good enough for you, m’dear, so none of your Bartholomew Fair airs and graces.”

She was cornered, and a little afraid of him; he had been drinking at the last place where they stopped to water the horses and she knew how he could be when he was drunk; she remembered that she was alone with him and what a huge man he was.

So she crept away and went down into the vast kitchens where an old woman and a girl were preparing a meal.

The sight of this a little heartened Mrs. Shute; in her frilled taffetas and long ringlets she sat down by the great open hearth, moving her hands to show the firelight flashing in her rings and shifting her petticoats so that the girl might admire her kid shoes.

“I’ll take a cordial to stay my strength,” she said, “for I’ve come a long way and find a sour welcome at the end of it, and that’ll turn any woman’s blood.”

The old dame smiled, knowing her type well enough; for even in a village you may find women like this.

So she brought Mrs. Shute some damson wine and a plate of biscuits, and the two women became friendly enough and gossiped in the dim candlelit kitchen while Daniel Shute wandered about his old home, even his corrupt heart feeling many a pang to see the places of his childhood desolate, the walks overgrown, the trees felled, the arbours closed, the fountains dried, and all the spreading fields about fenced by strangers.

The November moon was high in a misted space of open heaven by the time he reached the old carp pond.

Dead weeds tangled over the crumbling, moss-grown stone, trumpery and slime coated the dark waters.

“I suppose the carp are all dead?” said Mr. Shute.

He had not been aware that he spoke aloud, and was surprised to hear himself answered.

“I believe there are some left, esquire.”

Mr. Shute turned sharply and could faintly discern the figure of a man sitting on the edge of the pond so that it seemed as if his legs half dangled in the black water.

“Who are you?” asked Daniel Shute quickly.

“I’m Paley, sir, who looks after the grounds.”

“You do your work damned badly,” replied the other, irritated. “It is a big place, esquire, for one man to work.”

He seemed to stoop lower and lower as if at any moment he would slip into the pond; indeed, in the half dark, it seemed to Mr. Shute as if he was already half in the water; yet, on this speech, he moved and showed that he was but bending over the sombre depths of the carp pond.

The moonlight displayed him as a drab man of middling proportions with slow movements and a large languid eye which glittered feebly in the pale light; Mr. Shute had an impression that this eye looked at him sideways as if it was set at the side of the man’s head, but soon saw that this was an illusion.

“Who engaged you?” he asked acidly, hating the creature.

“Mr. Tregaskis, the agent,” replied the man in what appeared to be a thick foreign accent or with some defect of speech, and walked away into the wintry undergrowth.

Mr. Shute returned home grumbling; in the grim parlour Mr. Tregaskis was waiting for him — a red Cornishman, who grinned at his employer’s railings. He knew the vices of Mr. Shute, and the difficulties of Mr. Shute, and he had seen Mrs. Shute in the kitchen deep in maudlin gossip with old Dame Chase and the idiot-faced girl, drinking the alcoholic country wine till it spilled from her shaking fingers on to her taffeta skirt.

So he assumed a tone of noisy familiarity that Mr. Shute was too sunken to resent; the last of the old squire’s Oporto was sent for and the men drank themselves on to terms of easy good-fellowship.

At the last, when the candles were guttering, the bottles empty, and the last log’s ashes on the hearth, Mr. Shute asked who was the creature Paley he had found hanging over the carp pond.

Mr. Tregaskis told him, but the next morning Mr. Shute could not recollect what he had said; the whole evening had, in his recollection, an atmosphere of phantasmagoria; but he thought that the agent had said that Paley was a deserted sailor who had wandered up from Plymouth and taken the work without pay, a peculiar individual who lived in a wattled hut that he had made himself, and on food he caught with his own hands.

His sole explanation of himself was that he had waited for something a long time and was still waiting for it; useful he was, Mr. Tregaskis had said, and it was better to leave him alone.

All this Mr. Shute remembered vaguely, lying in the great bed staring at the pale sun glittering on the name “Florence Flannery” scratched on the window with the two dates.

It was late in the autumnal morning, but his wife still lay beside him, heavily asleep, with her thick heavy chestnut hair tossed over the pillow and her full bosom panting, the carnation of her rounded face flushed and stained, the coarse diamonds glowing on her plump hands, the false pearls slipping round her curved throat.

Daniel Shute sat up in bed and looked down at her prone sleep. “Who is she? And where does she come from?” he wondered. He had never cared to find out, but now his ignorance of all appertaining to his wife annoyed him.

He shook her bare shoulder till she yawned out of her heavy sleep. “Who are you, Flo?” he asked. “You must know something about yourself.”

The woman blinked up at him, drawing her satin bed-gown round her breast.

“I was in the opera, wasn’t I?” she answered lazily. “I never knew my people.”

“Came out of an orphanage or the gutter, I suppose?” he returned bitterly.

“Maybe.”

“But your name?” he insisted. “That is never your name, ‘Florence Flannery’?”

“I’ve never known another,” she responded indifferently. “You’re not Irish.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Shute. I’ve been in many countries and seen many strange things.”

He laughed; he had heard some of her experiences.

“You’ve seen so much and been in so many places I don’t know how you’ve ever got it all into one life.”

“I don’t know myself. It’s all rather like a dream and the most dreamlike of all is to be lying here looking at my own name written three hundred years ago.”

She moved restlessly and slipped from the bed, a handsome woman with troubled eyes.

“’Tis the drink brings the dreams, m’dear,” said Mr. Shute. “I had some dreams last night of a fellow named Paley I met by the carp pond.”

“You were drinking in the parlour,” she retorted scornfully. “And you in the kitchen, m’dear.”

Mrs. Shute flung a fringed silk shawl, the gift of an Indian nabob, round her warm body and dropped, shivering and yawning, into one of the warm tapestry chairs.

“Who was this Florence Flannery?” she asked idly.

“I told you no one knows. An Irish girl born in Florence, they said, when I was a child and listened to beldam’s gossip. Her mother a Medici, m’dear, and he a groom! And she came here, the trollop, with some young Shute who had been travelling in Italy — picked her up and brought her home, like I’ve brought you!”

“He didn’t marry her?” asked Mrs. Shute indifferently.

“More sense,” said her husband coarsely. “I’m the first fool of me family. She was a proper vixen. John Shute took her on his voyages; he’d a ship and went discovering. They talk yet at Plymouth of how she would sit among the parrots and the spices and the silks when the ship came into Plymouth Hoe.”

“Ah, the good times!” sighed Mrs. Shute, “when men were men and paid a good price for their pleasures!”

“You’ve fetched your full market value, Mrs. Shute,” he answered, yawning in the big bed.

“I’d rather be John Shute’s woman than your wife,” she returned. “What do you know of him?”

“I saw his portrait on the back stairs last night. Goody Chase showed me. A noble man with a clear eye and great arms to fight and love with.”

“He used ’em to push Florence Flannery out with,” grinned Mr. Shute, “if half the tales are true. On one of their voyages they picked up a young Portuguese who took the lady’s fancy and she brought him back to Shute Court.”

“And what was the end of it?”

“I know no more, save that she was flung out, as I’d like to fling you out, my beauty!” foamed Mr. Shute with gusty violence. His wife laughed and got up discordantly.

“I’ll tell the rest of the tale. She got tired of her new love, and he wasn’t a Portuguese, but an Indian, or partly, and his name was D’Ailey, Daly the people called it here. On one voyage she told John Shute about him, and he was marooned on a lonely island in the South Seas — tied up to a great, great stone image of a god, burning hot in the tropic sun. He must have been a god of fishes for there was nothing else near that island but monstrous fish.”

“Who told you this?” demanded Mr. Shute. “Old Dame Chase, with her lies? I never heard of this before.”

“’Tis the story,” resumed his wife. “The last she saw of him was his bound figure tied tight, tight, to the gaping, grinning idol while she sat on the poop as the ship — the Phoenix — sailed away. He cursed her and called on the idol to let her live till he was avenged on her — he was of the breed, or partly of the breed, that these gods love, and Florence Flannery was afraid, afraid, as she sailed away—”

“Goody Chase in her cups!” sneered Mr. Shute. “And what’s the end of your story?”

“There’s no end,” said the woman sullenly. “John Shute cast her off, for the bad luck that dogged him, and what became of her I don’t know.”

“It’s an ugly tale and a stupid tale,” grumbled Daniel Shute with a groan as he surveyed the bleak chill weather beyond the lattice panes. “Get down and see what’s to eat in the house and what’s to drink in the cellar, and if that rogue Tregaskis is there send him up to me.”

Mrs. Shute rose and pulled fiercely at the long wool-embroidered bell-rope so that the rusty bell jangled violently.

“What’ll you do when the wine is all drunk and the boon companions have cleared out your pockets?” she asked wildly. “Do your own errands, Mr. Shute.”

He flung out of bed with a pretty London oath, and she remained huddled in the chair while he dressed and after he had left her, wringing her hands now and then and wailing under her breath, till Dame Chase came up with a posset and helped her to dress. The sight of her dishevelled trunks restored some of Mrs. Shute’s spirits; she pulled out with relish her furbelows and flounces, displaying to Goody Chase’s amazed admiration the last fashions of Paris and London, mingling her display with fond reminiscences of gilded triumphs.

“Maybe you’d be surprised to learn that Mr. Shute isn’t my first husband,” she said, tossing her head.

The fat old woman winked.

“I’d be more surprised, m’lady, to learn he was your last.”

Mrs. Shute laughed grossly, but her spirits soon fell; kneeling on the floor with her tumbled finery in her lap, she stared out through the window on which her name was written at the tossing bare boughs, the chill sky, the dry flutter of the last leaves.

“I’ll never get away,” she said mournfully, “the place bodes me no good. I’ve had the malaria in me time, Mrs. Chase, in one of those cursed Italian swamps and it affected me memory; there’s much I can’t place together and much I recall brokenly — dreams and fevers, Mrs. Chase.”

“The drink, m’ady.”

“No,” returned the kneeling woman fiercely. “Wasn’t the drink taken to drown those dreams and fevers? I wish I could tell you half I know — there’s many a fine tale in me head, but when I begin to speak it goes!”

She began to rock to and fro, lamenting.

“To think of the fine times I’ve had with likely young men drinking me health in me slipper and the little cabriolet in Paris and the walks in the Prater outside Vienna. So pleasant you would hardly believe!”

“You’ll settle down, m’lady, like women do.”

Indeed, Mrs. Shute seemed to make some attempt at “settling down”; there was something piteous in the despairing energy with which she set to work to make her life tolerable; there was a suite of rooms lined with faded watered green silk that she took for her own and had cleaned and furnished with what she could gather from the rest of the house — old gilt commodes and rococo chairs and threadbare panels of tapestries and chipped vases of Saxe or Lunéville, one or two pastel portraits that the damp had stained, together with some tawdry trifles she had brought in her own baggage.

She employed Mr. Tregaskis to sell her big diamond in Plymouth and bought pale blue satin hangings for her bedroom and spotted muslin for her bed, a carpet wreathed with roses, a gaudy dressing-table and phials of perfume, opopanax, frangipani, musk, potent, searing, to dissipate, she said, the odours of must and mildew.

Arranging these crude splendours was her sole occupation. There were no neighbours in the lonely valley and Mr. Shute fell into melancholy and solitary drinking; he hung on to his existence as just more tolerable than a debtor’s prison, but the fury with which he met his fate expressed itself in curses awful to hear. Such part of the estate as still belonged to him he treated with complex contempt; Mr. Tregaskis continued to supervise some rough farming and the man Paley worked in the garden; taciturn, solitary and sullen, he made an ill impression on Mr. Shute, yet he cost nothing and did some labour, as carrying up the firewood to the house and clearing away some of the thickets and dying weeds and vast clumps of nettles and docks.

Mrs. Shute met him for the first time by the carp pond; she was tricked out in a white satin pelisse edged with fur and a big bonnet, and wandered forlornly in the neglected paths. Paley was sitting on the edge of the carp pond, looking intently into the murky depths.

“I’m the new mistress,” said Mrs. Shute, “and I’ll thank you to keep better order in the place.”

Paley looked up at her with his pale eyes.

“Shute Court isn’t what it was,” he said, “there is a lot of work to do.”

“You seem to spend a power of time by the pond,” she replied. “What are you here for?”

“I’m waiting for something,” he said. “I’m putting in time, Mrs. Shute.”

“A sailor, I hear?” she said curiously, for the draggled nondescript man in his greenish-black clothes was difficult to place; he had a peculiar look of being boneless, without shoulders or hips, one slope slipping into another as if there was no framework under his flabby flesh.

“I’ve been at sea,” he answered, “like yourself, Mrs. Shute.” She laughed coarsely.

“I would I were at sea again,” she replied; “this is horror to me.”

“Why do you stay?”

“I’m wondering. It seems that I can’t get away, the same as I couldn’t help coming,” a wail came into her voice. “Must I wait till Mr. Shute has drunk himself to death?”

The wind blew sharp across the pond, cutting little waves in the placid surface, and she who had been Florence Flannery shuddered in the bite of it and turned away and went muttering up the path to the desolate house.

Her husband was in the dirty parlour playing at bezique with Mr. Tregaskis and she flared in upon them.

“Why don’t you get rid of that man Paley? I hate him. He does no work — Mrs. Chase told me that he always sits by the carp pond and today I saw him — ugh!”

“Paley’s all right, Mrs. Shute,” replied Tregaskis, “he does more work than you think.”

“Why does he stay?”

“He’s waiting for a ship that’s soon due in Plymouth.”

“Send him off,” insisted Mrs. Shute. “Isn’t the place melancholic enough without you having that sitting about?”

Her distaste and disgust of the man seemed to amount to a panic, and her husband, whose courage was snapped by the drink, was infected by her fear.

“When did this fellow come?” he demanded.

“About a week before you did. He’d tramped up from Plymouth.”

“We’ve only his word for that,” replied Mr. Shute with drunken cunning; “maybe he’s a Bow Street runner sent by one of those damned creditors! You’re right, Flo, I don’t like the wretch — he’s watching me, split him! I’ll send him off.”

Mr. Tregaskis shrugged as Daniel Shute staggered from his chair.

“The man’s harmless, sir; half-witted if you like, but useful.”

Still Mr. Shute dragged on his greatcoat with the capes and followed his wife out into the grey garden.

The carp pond was not near the house, and by the time that they had reached it a dull twilight had fallen in the cold and heavy air.

The great trees were quite bare now and flung a black tracing of forlorn branches against the bleak evening sky; patches and clumps of dead weeds obstructed every path and alley; by the carp pond showed the faint outline of a blind statue crumbling beneath the weight of dead mosses.

Paley was not there.

“He’ll be in his hut,” said Mr. Shute, “sleeping or spying — the ugly old devil. I’ll send him off.”

The dead oyster white of Mrs. Shute’s pelisse gleamed oddly as she followed her husband through the crackling undergrowth.

There, in the thickening twilight, they found the hut, a queer arrangement of wattles cunningly interwoven in which there was no furniture whatever, nothing but a bare protection from the wind and weather.

Paley was not there.

“I’ll find him,” muttered Mr. Shute, “if I have to stay out all night.”

For his half-intoxicated mind had fixed on this stranger as the symbol of all his misfortunes and perhaps the avenger of all his vices.

His wife turned back, for her pelisse was being caught on the undergrowth; she went moodily towards the carp pond.

A moment later a sharp shriek from her brought Mr. Shute plunging back to her side. She was standing in a queer bent attitude, pointing with a shaking plump hand to the murky depths of the pond.

“The wretch! He’s drowned himself!” she screamed.

Mr. Shute’s worn-out nerves reacted to her ignoble panic; he clutched her arm as he gazed in the direction of her finger; there was something dark in the shallower side of the pond, something large and dark, with pale flat eyes that glittered malevolently.

“Paley!” gasped Mr. Shute.

He bent closer in amazed horror, then broke into tremulous laughter.

“’Tis a fish,” he declared; “one of the old carp.”

Mrs. Shute indeed now perceived that the monstrous creature in the water was a fish; she could make out the wide gaping jaw, tall spines shadowing in the murk, and a mottled skin of deadly yellow and dingy white.

“It’s looking at me,” she gasped. “Kill it, kill it, the loathsome wretch!”

“It’s — it’s — too big,” stammered Mr. Shute, but he picked up a stone to hurl; the huge fish, as if aware of his intentions, slipped away into the murky depths of the pond, leaving a sluggish ripple on the surface.

Daniel Shute now found his courage.

“Nothing but an old carp,” he repeated. “I’ll have the thing caught.”

Mrs. Shute began to weep and wring her hands. Her husband dragged her roughly towards the house, left her there, took a lantern, and accompanied now by Mr. Tregaskis returned in search of Paley.

This time they found him sitting in his usual place by the side of the pond. Mr. Shute had now changed his mind about sending him away; he had a muddled idea that he would like the pond watched, and who was to do this if not Paley?

“Look here, my man,” he said, “there’s a great carp in this pond — a very big, black old carp.”

“They live for hundreds of years,” said Paley. “But this isn’t a carp.”

“You know about it, then?” demanded Mr. Shute.

“I know about it.”

“Well, I want you to catch it — kill it. Watch till you do. I loathe it — ugh!”

“Watch the pond?” protested Mr. Tregaskis, who held the lantern and was chilled and irritable. “Damme, esquire, what can the thing do? It can’t leave the water.”

“I wouldn’t,” muttered Mr. Shute, “promise you that.”

“You’re drunk,” said the other coarsely.

But Mr. Shute insisted on his point.

“Watch the pond, Paley, watch it day and night till you get that fish.”

“I’ll watch,” answered Paley, never moving from his huddled position.

The two men went back to the desolate house. When Mr. Shute at last staggered upstairs he found his wife with half a dozen candles lit, crouching under the tawdry muslin curtains with which she had disfigured the big bed.

She clutched a rosary that she was constantly raising to her lips as she muttered ejaculations.

Mr. Shute lurched to the bedside.

“I didn’t know that you were a Papist, Flo,” he sneered. She looked up at him.

“That story’s got me,” she whispered, “the man tied up to the fish god — the curse — and he following her — tracking her down for three hundred years, till she was hounded back to the old place where they’d loved.”

Daniel Shute perceived that she had been drinking, and sank into a chair.

“Goody Chase’s gossip,” he answered, yawning, “and that damned ugly fish. I’ve set Paley to catch him — to watch the pond till he does.”

She looked at him sharply, and appeared relieved.

“Anyhow, what’s it to do with you?” he continued. “You ain’t the jade who left the man on the island!” He laughed crudely. Mrs. Shute sank down on her pillows.

“As long as the pond is watched,” she murmured, “I don’t mind.”

But during the night she tossed and panted in a delirium, talking of great ships with strange merchandise, of lonely islands amid blazing seas, of mighty stone gods rearing up to the heavens, of a man in torture and a curse following a woman who sailed away, till her husband shook her and left her alone, sleeping on a couch in the dreary parlour.

The next day he spoke to Mrs. Chase.

“Between your news and your lies you’ve turned your mistress’s head. Good God! she is like a maniac with your parcel of follies!”

But Goody Chase protested that she had told her nothing.

“She told me that story, esquire, and said she had found it in an old book. What did I know of Florence Flannery? Many a time you’ve asked me about her when you were a child and I’ve had no answer to give you — what did I know save she was a hussy who disgraced Shute Court?”

At this Daniel Shute vehemently demanded of his wife where she had got the tales which she babbled about, but the woman was sullen and heavy and would tell him nothing; all the day she remained thus, but when the few hours of wintry light were over she fell again into unbridled terror, gibbering like a creature deprived of reason, beating her breast, kissing the rosary, and muttering, “Mea culpâ, mea culpâ, mea maximâ culpâ!”

Mr. Shute was not himself in any state to endure this; he left his wife to herself and made Tregaskis sleep with him for company in another room.

Winter froze the bleak countryside; Paley kept guard by the pond and the Shutes somehow dragged on an intolerable existence in the deserted house.

In the daytime Mrs. Shute revived a little and would even prink herself out in her finery and gossip with Mrs. Chase over the vast log fire, but the nights always found her smitten with terror, shivering with cowardly apprehension; and the object of all her nightmare dread was the fish she had seen in the pond.

“It can’t leave the water,” they told her, and she always answered: “The first night I was here I saw wet on the stairs.”

“My God, my God!” Daniel Shute would say, “this is like living with someone sentenced to death.”

“Get a doctor over from Plymouth,” suggested Mr. Tregaskis.

But Mr. Shute would not, for fear of being betrayed to his creditors.

“Better rot here than in the Fleet,” he swore.

“Then take her away — and keep her from the bottle.”

The wretched husband could do neither of these things; he had no money and no influence over Mrs. Shute. He was indeed indifferent to her sufferings save in so far as they reacted on him and ever accustomed him to the spectacle of her breakdown; he knew it was not really strange that a woman such as she was should collapse under conditions such as these, and his life was already so wretched that he cared little for added horrors.

He began to find a strange comfort in the man Paley, who, taciturn, slow and queer, yet did his work and watched the pond with an admirable diligence.

One night in the blackest time of the year, the bitter dark nights before Christmas, the shrieks of Mrs. Shute brought her husband cursing up the stairs.

Her door was unbolted and she sat up in bed, displaying, in the light of his snatched-up taper, some red marks on her arm. “Let him kill me and done with it,” she jabbered.

Mr. Tregaskis came pushing in and caught rudely hold of her arm. “She’s done it herself,” he cried; “those are the marks of her own teeth.”

But Mrs. Shute cried piteously:

“He came flopping up the stairs, he broke the bolts; he jumped on the bed! Oh! oh! oh! Isn’t this the bed, the very bed I slept in then — and didn’t he used to creep into this room when John Shute was away?”

“Still thinking of that damned fish,” said Mr. Tregaskis, “and it’s my belief you neither of you saw it at all, esquire — that man Paley has been watching, and he’s seen nothing.”

Mr. Shute bit his fingernails, looking down on the writhing figure of his wife.

“Light all the candles, can’t you?” he said. “I’ll stay with the poor fool tonight.”

While Mr. Tregaskis obeyed he went to the door and looked out, holding his taper high.

There were pools of wet and a long trail of slime down the dusty, neglected stairs.

He called Mr. Tregaskis.

“Ugh!” cried the Cornishman, then, “It’s from Goody Chase’s water crock.”

On the following windy morning Mr. Shute went out, shivering in the nipping air, to the carp pond.

“I don’t want another night like last,” he said.

“You’ll sleep across my wife’s door — she thinks that cursed carp is after her—”

Then, at the gross absurdity of what he said, he laughed miserably. “This is a pretty pantomime I’m playing,” he muttered. A horrid curiosity drove him up to look at his wife.

She sat between the draggled muslin curtains hugging her knees in the tumbled bed; a wretched fire flickered wanly in the chill depths of the vast room; a wind blew swift and remote round the window on which was scratched the name of Florence Flannery. Mr. Shute shivered.

“I must get you away,” he said, stirred above his fears for himself; “this is a damned place — the Fleet would be better, after all.” She turned lustreless eyes on him.

“I can’t get away,” she said dully. “I’ve come here to die — don’t you see it on that window — ‘Died 1800’?”

He crossed the floor and peered at the scratching on the glass. Someone had indeed added the word “died” before the last date.

“These are the tricks of a Bedlamite,” he said nervously. “Do you think there was only one Florence Flannery?”

“And do you think,” she returned harshly, “that there were two?”

She looked so awful crouched up in bed with her hanging hair, her once plump face fallen in the cheeks, her soiled satin gown open over her labouring breast, her whole air and expression so agonized, so malevolent, so dreadful, that Daniel Shute passed his hand over his eyes as if to brush away a vision of unsubstantial horror.

He was shaken by an hallucination of light-headedness; he appeared to enter another world, in which many queer things were possible.

“What are you?” he asked uneasily. “He’s been after you for nearly three hundred years? Aren’t you punished enough?”

“Oh, oh!” moaned the woman. “Keep him out! Keep him out!”

“I’ll put Paley at the door tonight,” muttered Mr. Shute.

He crept out of the horrible chamber; he now detested his wife beyond all reason, yet somehow he felt impelled to save her from the invincible furies who were pursuing her in so gruesome a fashion.

“She’s a lunatic,” said Mr. Tregaskis brusquely. “You’ll have to keep her shut in that room — it’s not difficult to account for — with the life she’s led and this place and the coincidence of the names.” The first snow of the year began to fall that night, sullen flakes struggling in the coils of the leaping wind that circled round Shute Court.

In the last glimmer of daylight Paley came to take up his post. Drab, silent, with his sloping shoulders and nondescript clothes, he went slowly upstairs and sat down outside Mrs. Shute’s door. “He seems to know the way,” remarked Daniel Shute.

“Don’t you know he works in the house?” retorted Mr. Tregaskis.

The two men slept, as usual, in the parlour, on stiff horsehair couches bundled up with pillows and blankets; the litter of their supper was left on the table and they piled the fire up with logs before going to sleep. Mr. Shute’s nerves were in no state to permit him to risk waking up in the dark.

The wind dropped and the steady down-drift of the soft snow filled the blackness of the bitter night.

As the grandfather clock struck three Daniel Shute sat up and called to his companion.

“I’ve been thinking in my dreams,” he said, with chattering teeth. “Is it Paley, or Daley? You know the name was D’Ailey.”

“Shut up, you fool,” returned the agent fiercely; but he then raised himself on his elbow, for a hoarse, bitter scream, followed by some yelled words in a foreign language tore through the stillness.

“The mad woman,” said Mr. Tregaskis; but Daniel Shute dragged the clothes up to his chattering teeth.

“I’m not going up,” he muttered. “I’m not going up!”

Mr. Tregaskis dragged on his trousers and flung a blanket over his shoulders and so, lighting a taper at the big fire, went up the gaunt stairs to Mrs. Shute’s room. The glimmering beams of the rushlight showed him tracks of wet again on the dirty boards.

“Goody Chase with her crocks and possets,” he murmured; then louder, “Paley! Paley!”

There was no one outside Mrs. Shute’s door, which hung open. Mr. Tregaskis entered.

She who had been Florence Flannery lay prone on her tawdry couch; the deep wounds that had slain her appeared to have been torn by savage teeth; she looked infinitely old, shrivelled and detestable.

Mr. Tregaskis backed on to the stairs, the light lurching round him from the shaking of his taper, when Mr. Shute came bustling up out of the darkness.

“Paley’s gone,” whispered Mr. Tregaskis dully.

“I saw him go,” gibbered Mr. Shute, “as I ventured to the door — by the firelight; a great fish slithering away with blood on his jaws.”

“The Regent Magazine” Dec. 1924

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949)

THE BISHOP OF HELL

“The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman”

—King Lear

ENGLAND, 1790.
This is the most awful story that I know; I feel constrained to write down the facts as they ever abide with me, praying, as I do so, a merciful God to pardon my small share therein.

God have mercy on us all!

In the hope, vain though I feel it to be, that when I have written down this tale it may cease to haunt me, I here begin.

It was twenty years ago, and never since, day nor night, have I had any respite from the thought of this story, through which you can hear the drums of Hell beat loudly and yet which has an awful beauty.

God have mercy on us all!

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Hector Greatrix was my friend, yet to say friend is to profane a noble word; rather was he my counsellor, companion, and prop in all things evil.

His reputation was hideous even among the rake-helly crowd who flattered and followed him; he went lengths from which others shrank, and his excesses, his impiety, his boldness terrified even those hardened in wicked ways.

And what added a deeper edge of horror to his conduct was that he had been an ordained clergyman.

Younger son of a younger son, his father had placed him in the Church in the hope of rapid preferment, for the Greatrix were a highly placed family and the great Earl of Culvers was the head of it; but the scandal of young Hector’s life was such that even in those days he was unfrocked. His intimates, in the clubs and gambling dens, called him, in bitter derision, Bishop of Hell.

I write of the year 1770, when this tale begins.

Hector Greatrix was then in the height of his fame and fashion. No-one could deny him certain splendour; he was literally in physical height head and shoulders above his companions, and mentally also; his wit, his invention, his daring knew no bounds, but all these qualities were turned to evil. He was at this time about thirty years of age, of a magnificent figure, so graceful that his strength was hardly noticeable, tawny haired and tawny eyed, with features as yet unblemished from his debaucheries, the most elegant of hands and feet, the most exquisite taste in dress, and the most engaging of manners. There was not one honourable man nor respected woman among his acquaintances and all his intimates were villains; I do not except myself.

There was, however, one exception. Colonel Bulkeley, his cousin on the female side, had helped him by his countenance and by money. Why, I never understood, because William Bulkeley was the most austere, upright, and punctilious of men, of great wealth, of exceptional position, and of the most distinguished career.

I think now, as I thought then, that it was quite impossible for Colonel Bulkeley to realise what Hector Greatrix really was, or the set to which he belonged. The villain could be most plausible, and his cousin must have believed him to be wild, unfortunate, and blameable, but in no way vile or dishonoured.

In sum, Colonel Bulkeley effectually played the mediator between Greatrix and the chief of the family, Lord Culvers, who, no anchorite himself, was not ill-disposed towards his handsome and seductive nephew; but then his lordship, who was much disabled by gout, seldom left Greatrix Park and knew little of London society, so that he was by no means aware of his nephew’s reputation.

I, as one of the most reputable of his disreputable friends, being, as I can truly say, more wild and young than vicious, was chosen to go with Hector to Greatrix Park when the old earl asked his company, and so I was able to see at close quarters how this charming knave pulled the wool over the eyes of his two kinsmen.

The end of the comedy was an allowance for Greatrix, a handsome subsidy from the earl most generously supplemented by a few hundreds more from the wealth of Colonel Bulkeley.

Greatrix was to study the law and live in chambers — suitable to his rank; he had no chance of accession to the family honours of the earl, whose heir, a dull, sickly youth enough, had lately married a blooming young woman of robust constitution, who had provided him with a couple of boys. So, Greatrix, thanks to Colonel Bulkeley, had done better than the most sanguine might have hoped. And he seemed more moved thereby than I had thought possible.

“Bulkeley has done me a good turn,” he swore, “and damme if I’ll ever do him a bad one.”

As for his allowance and the study of the law, he laughed at these things; what he really valued was the countenance of these two great, wealthy gentlemen.

“This visit will help my credit in London,” he declared. “It is good for a couple of years’ debt.”

“And what when two years are up and your credit and the patience of your relatives are alike exhausted?”

“Who am I,” smiled Greatrix, “to think two years ahead?”

I think it was impossible for him to conceive of disaster or even common misfortune. His object gained, he was impatient to return to town; a woman with red hair was waiting for him. He had a curious and persistent passion for women with that bright shade of auburn, like burnt gold.

Colonel Bulkeley pressed us to stay a night with him on our way to town, and Greatrix, with an inner curse, for he wanted to be free of this formal, austere man, consented with a winning courtesy.

Moil Place was in Kent, quite near London, a commodious and elegant residence presided over by Mrs Bulkeley, who was some several years younger than her husband.

This type of woman was unknown to either Greatrix or myself. I have had no sisters and could not recall the character or the lineaments of my mother; Greatrix had two sisters, but they were town ladies of smirched reputation, and his mother had been a passionate, reckless, uncommon woman.

To both of us Mrs Bulkeley appeared flat, childish, almost imbecile, almost incredible. She had been married direct from a Clapham boarding school and had there received several tokens (as the doting husband let slip) for deportment and good conduct.

It was June, and she wore a muslin gown with a wide blue silk sash and a wide straw hat tied under the chin with another ribbon of the same hue. She lisped a little and her small face was clearly and definitely coloured like a china ornament; she was, in fact, like the puppets children dress up and play with; then, when she had gone into the house and was pouring tea behind the Bulkeley silver — pieces that looked larger than herself — she suddenly took off her hat and showed a head overflowing with auburn curls, long, glossy, almost vermilion, yet soft and like burnt gold, all knotted up on the crown of her head.

With this revelation of her hair you saw her beauty — the golden eyes with blonde lashes, the features of such an exquisite delicacy, the pearly shades on throat and neck, the delicious carmine of faint carnation.

I did not care to look at Greatrix, and yet I felt that I need not have suffered this embarrassment.

Colonel Bulkeley was the one man in the world for whom Greatrix had expressed any respect or consideration and the lady obviously adored her husband. I was both amused and surprised to observe the manifestations of sentimental affection between them. There was one child too, a little doll in white lace just out of the cradle; what fondness Colonel Bulkeley could spare from his wife was devoted to the infant.

I was cloyed and thankful when we had taken our seats for town. Greatrix, after the effort of the last few days, was in a surly mood. “I have never passed a couple of days so tiresome,” he said.

And I, always minded to jeer at him when I could, replied: “You have never seen a woman so beyond your reach, Hector. She never looked at you, I do believe.”

He laughed indifferently. “Alicia Bulkeley is ready to the hand of any man who likes to reach out for her.”

What was yet good in me was shocked by this insult to our hostess, a woman who, commonplace and childish perhaps, had yet seemed to me to convey a sweet purity, a gentle fidelity, and an adoring affection beyond all reproach.

“She is in love with her husband,” I declared.

“The more reason she can be in love with another — ’tis your passionately attached wives who fall the easiest victims; that little creature is amorous as a lovebird. Take Bulkeley away for a month or so and she’d flutter into any arms held out—”

“By God, Hector,” I swore, “if you can’t believe in any nobility or decency, don’t defame those qualities. Your words stick in my throat. These people have exerted themselves in kindness towards you. Mrs Bulkeley is silly, maybe, but a gentlewoman deserving of respect.”

“Since when have you turned Puritan?” he asked coldly.

I was not affected by his sneers; I felt a certain definite repulsion against him, and from that day I saw less of him and applied myself with some diligence to my studies.

We each of us had rooms in Paper Buildings, and the more I heard of Hector Greatrix the more I withdrew myself from his companionship. Two of his boon fellows shot themselves; the daughter of his laundress was found hanged; a married woman of his acquaintance was taken out of a Hampstead pond one winter morning. His name was associated, secretly and sombrely, with all these tragedies.

Some rumours of these matters must have reached the earl in his lofty retirement, for I heard from the associates of Greatrix who still continued to be mine that there had been a summons to Greatrix Park, quarrels, and the employment once more of Colonel Bulkeley as Mediator.

I had seen little of the Bulkeleys; their severe and yet sentimental life, the chaste simplicity of their connubial bliss did not greatly attract me. I had been asked again to Moil Place and had needed all my fortitude to control my yawns. Mrs Bulkeley had now another infant at her breast and was more than ever infatuated with her husband.

Another six months and this idyllic family was rudely disturbed: Colonel Bulkeley’s regiment was ordered to India for three years and he was forced to leave abruptly his wife and children he so tenderly loved.

That winter, to my surprise, I met Mrs Bulkeley in a London ballroom; it was only a few months since her husband had sailed and I imagined her consoling herself with her babies at Moil Place. When I spoke to her she seemed shy and confused; I learned that she had “moped” in the country, that the doctor had ordered a change, and that these insufferable years of waiting would seem shorter amid the distractions of society. She was staying with a married brother at St. James’s, and I could not doubt that she was well protected both by her own heart, her position, her relatives, her children; yet when I saw her dancing with Hector Greatrix I did not care to watch.

Needless to follow the course of an experienced and heartless seducer; suffice it to say that Greatrix was soon talked of in connection with Mrs Bulkeley, and, unattainable as I believed her to be, I could not forbear an appeal to her pursuer.

I found him, by rare luck, in his chambers.

“For God’s sake, Hector,” I conjured him, “stop your attentions to Mrs Bulkeley; even though it is impossible for you to destroy her peace of mind, you may blight her reputation.”

“What is this to me?” he asked coldly. “Did I not tell you she would come at my whistle?”

I urged him to forbear. “Never before have you compromised a woman of her position. Consider what it will mean to you — the fury of your uncle and of her husband, the scandal that will put you out of society — out of England.”

“And there,” he interrupted, “I am likely to go in any case. I can keep the duns quiet no longer and my lord will be bled no more.”

I told him I hoped he would go before Mrs Bulkeley’s good name was smirched by his detestable attentions and I reminded him solemnly of his obligations towards Colonel Bulkeley. He had no answer for me, and soon after I observed with relief that Mr Lambert, Alicia Bulkeley’s brother, had taken alarm and that she was being kept from any opportunity of meeting Greatrix.

Yet what availed this?

Hector Greatrix, having spun his credit to the utmost and within a few hours of the Fleet Prison for debt, fled to the Continent and Alicia Bulkeley went with him.

Though I was never squeamish in these affairs, I will confess that this completely sickened me — the man was so vile, the woman so infantile, so pure, so attached to her husband.

The scandal was hideous. The earl cut Hector off with a curse; the Lamberts adopted the abandoned children; and as soon as they had news of Alicia, sent her a small allowance that was probably the main support of the wretched couple. This money was sent care of a bank in Genoa, but no-one knew where Mrs Bulkeley and her lover really were living.

Through the compassion of His Royal Highness, who had the chief command in India, Colonel Bulkeley was allowed to return to England on the receipt of the awful news and arrived in London something less than two years since he had sailed.

He immediately resigned his commission and returned with his children to Moll Place.

Declaring that he had no intention of following the fugitives, he said simply that if Greatrix ever returned to England one of the two would, in a few days, be dead; and Mr Lambert, with his next remittance, reported this message, advising his unfortunate sister and her paramour to keep clear of their native country for fear of further scandal and horror.

I avoided the possible chance of meeting Colonel Bulkeley. I had no desire to see this broken and outraged man, whose career, that had promised so splendidly, was broken in the middle and for whom life seemed to hold nothing but bitterness and humiliation. This, it might seem, should be the end of the story; it indeed appeared that nothing further could happen, either to the outcasts in their exile or to the betrayed husband, to alter the position of either or in any way bring them together again.

But who would have guessed at the turn Fate had in store?

Colonel Bulkeley had not been home much more than another two years when a severe epidemic of smallpox broke out in England; among the first victims were the wife and children of Lord Culvers; the son by his first marriage, always delicate, had lately died of a decline; and the old earl, then over seventy years of age, did not long endure the shock, but sank under the weight of his bereavement a few days after the funeral of his youngest child.

The estates and the money were both entailed, every portion of property having been strictly tied up by a preceding earl, and Hector Greatrix was now Earl of Culvers and one of the wealthiest noblemen in England.

Lord Culvers was summoned to London by his lawyers, and on the same day Colonel Bulkeley came up from Moil Place and took a house in Dover Street, Mayfair, not far from his lordship’s town mansion, Culver House.

Hector came as far as Paris and there stopped. He still had Mrs Bulkeley with him; not, as I supposed, from any remnants of affection, but because of her allowance, which was till now his sole means of support. I winced to think what Alicia Bulkeley must be like now.

There had never been any talk of a divorce, but now people began to ask why Colonel Bulkeley did not permit his wife to marry her lover; they were people who did not know Hector.

I received, unexpectedly, a summons from my lord to attend him in Paris; he had not too many reputable acquaintances then, and I had become a respectable enough citizen while he was sliding down to pandemonium. Therefore, I supposed, this dubious honour.

I went, as one will, partly out of curiosity, partly out of complacence, and partly out of a faint pity for Alicia Bulkeley.

He had, of course, handled plenty of money already, and upset as the city still was, I found them elegantly installed in a hôtel meublé that had only lately become national property.

Hector was sumptuous to behold and cordial enough in his wild way; he had changed for the worse — the first bloom of his beauty had gone, the first fineness of his manners; but he was handsome enough, God help him.

She was with him.

I learnt afterwards that she had had and lost in the feverish heat of Italy three children, and never had she been without another woman sharing her lover’s favours; often these lived under the same roof with her. She had known, I think, most of the humiliations possible to a refined woman who lives with a vile, brutal man; there could have been little of horror and squalor that she had not seen, nay, been in the midst of…

I could hardly keep curiosity from my eyes — this was the doll of Moil Place, with her lisp, her muslin, her babies.

She was, and this is perhaps the most horrible thing, much more beautiful, rich, opulent in line now, with a full bosom and flowing curves of thighs and shoulders, taller (she had been but eighteen), clever at dressing, clever of speech; gay, abandoned, and intolerably wretched. Her tone was one of bravado, but the look in her eyes was that of a whipped dog who creeps away from the lash.

As soon as we were alone she was down on her knees to me with a movement so passionately sudden that I could in no way prevent it — on her knees, Mrs Bulkeley of Moil Place!

“Tell me,” she implored, “will not William divorce me? Surely you have some message from him?”

I told her, none.

She began to weep. “If I were free Hector might marry me before he returned to England — that is my only hope.”

“Surely, madam,” said I in pity, “a vain one?”

But she was not yet free of the illusion women are so slow to lose — that they have always some power over a man who has once loved them or been their lover, and she cherished the desperate hope that her husband might set her free and she regain something of all she had lost under the name of Lady Culvers.

Never was there a more futile and piteous hope even in the brain of a foolish woman. I could not forbear saying to her, when I had induced her to rise from her knees: “Madam, has not your association with my lord shown you the manner of man he is?”

“Indeed it has,” she answered bitterly, “yet surely he could not, in these changed circumstances, abandon me—”

So she clung to the protection of that honour she had herself discarded, and a panic terror showed in her eyes as she added that she had now nothing with which to keep him — it had always been the money that had held him; the money the Lamberts sent, and, Heaven avert its face, other money, presents from Italian lovers of hers whom he had forced on her; she told me, with a wildness that made me fear for her reason, that she had paid for her last child’s funeral by such means.

“And yet, madam,” I shuddered, “you wish to continue your association with such a monster? Indeed, I wonder that you have not already left him, if only for the protection of another man.”

As she was silent, I added: “Is it possible that you love him?”

She replied: “No, I have never loved any but William and my dear, dear children.”

But I doubt if she knew what love was, and I think that for months she had known no emotion save fear.

Seeking to abate her misery I asked her what she could dread worse than had yet befallen her.

“There’s Hell,” she said.

“I should think,” I replied, “that Hell is where my lord is.”

But no; to her, still at heart a religious, respectable English gentlewoman, anything was preferable to the life of open shame before her if my lord forsook her; she thought, in her narrow, ignorant mind, that if she could marry her lover her fault would be condoned; and I knew that in the eyes of many it would be.

I advised her that she could go into retreat somewhere with the money that the Lamberts allowed her, but she shook her head with a feeble laugh; she knew, she said with a dreadful accent, her own weakness, and she saw herself, once cast off by my lord, sinking to the lowest depths of degradation, till she reached Bridewell or a foreign lazar house.

And I could see this too. I promised to speak to my lord, but naturally with little hope; but the next day when I saw him, sitting over his breakfast playing with his dogs, he gave me no opening, for he plunged into his own affairs.

“Look ’ee here, Jack,” he said, “I was too drunk yesterday to talk business and when I came back from the opera you’d gone. But this is the matter I’ve sent for you for — has Bulkeley seen reason? As I’ve no news, I take it he has gone to his prayers and his pumpkins at Moil Place and will give no trouble.”

“No,” I said, “Colonel Bulkeley came up to London as soon as he heard of your fortune, and has taken lodgings in Dover Street — ’tis said that he keeps a watch posted by Culver House for your return.”

My lord’s face turned ashy.

“What for?” he cried.

“That he may challenge you the moment that you set foot in England.”

My lord sprang up then; his rage was diabolic, there is no other word for this fury of a fiend outwitted at last; his oaths and blasphemies were detestable, atrocious, as he strode up and down with his dressing-gown flowing open and his locks, damp from last night’s debauch, seeming to rise on his head.

“I never heard,” I said, wincing, “that you were a coward, Hector, but it seems you are.”

“Coward!” he yelled. “When I eloped with Bulkeley’s wife I was a ruined man without a prospect in the world — did I think I’d ever want to return to England with the title and the money?”

He had been, in fact, exquisitely caught, but I could feel no spark of compassion for him.

“You’ll have to meet the man,” I told him, not looking at his distorted face.

“I’ll not. Bulkeley is a damned good shot. Do you think I want to go out when I’ve suddenly got everything to my hand?”

I could guess that he did not; to him the position, the money, meant the opening of Paradise. He would, no doubt, have a good life — fine flatterers, fine women, all that wealth could buy in London would be his; nay, there would be plenty who would receive him in the finest society of the town and not scruple to offer him their daughters in honourable matrimony; the hounded exile would be the great lord and at last able to get full value for his rank, his beauty, his audacity, his fascination.

“I stay in Paris,” he cried. “People will come over to me here. I’ll cheat the man that way. Paris is as well as London if you have money.”

“It were wiser, perhaps,” I said with disgust. “But no-one will endure a man who is an avowed coward, my lord; you’ll have to keep the company you’ve been used to lately if you stay out of England. People will know why — they’re beginning to say already that you linger. I for one,” and I rose, “would turn my back on you.”

“Blast your impudence, Jack,” he whispered. “What is this tone to me?”

“You’re a peer of England. Culvers is a great name; it’ll cover much, but not cowardice.”

“Damn that word. I don’t want to die — that’s reasonable.”

“Yes; if I were you, my lord, I should not want to die.”

“Bah, you’re thinking of my bishopric. Hell! As if I believed in Hell. There’s nothing, not even Hell, Jack — one goes out like a snuffed candle — just blackness, blackness, nothingness, nothingness.”

The look on his face as he said this was one of such awful despair that I thought this was a moment when he might be softened by his own terrors.

“I can see one possible way out. Hector, if you were to let Colonel Bulkeley know that if he divorced his wife you would marry her — perhaps for her sake, he would forgo his revenge.”

He laughed in my face.

“The woman’s been the harlot of half the rogues in Italy.”

I stopped him. “Don’t talk of that — even your corroded heart might blench there. Marry her, if you can, for your soul’s sake and hers.”

His hideous pride was greater than his fear.

“A kept woman,” he mocked. “My God, I’m Culvers now.”

“Remember it,” I recommended him. “What do you mean to do with this poor creature?”

Then, as if he remembered that she was the original cause of his present predicament, he began to curse her, using those abominable names he so freely applied to women, and as for what he meant to do with her, his project was what the miserable wretch had herself guessed — complete abandonment; and his view of her future was her view — the streets and the maison de Dieu.

I reminded him of her birth and upbringing, of her relatives, but he only redoubled his blasphemies.

“Am I answerable if these Puritans breed women who run into the gutter?”

I left him; useless to contemplate a spectacle so frightful. And I avoided any further interview with Alicia Bulkeley. When I returned to London I observed the watcher set by Colonel Bulkeley near the shuttered gloom of Culver House.

In three months’ time my lord returned to London; whether urged thereto by the jeers of his enemies, the flatteries of his friends, or his own pride, or whether unable to endure his tantalus position, or whether his nerve broke at the suspense and the waiting, I know not, but he came to London. I had heard that he had hopes of approaching Bulkeley with offers of apology or even money; of seeking in some way an accommodation. This sounded ridiculous, but from his nature it was possible to conclude that he cherished some such plan. He arrived in London secretly, with a horrid stealth, and slipped into Culver House under cover of a November evening.

Yet the next morning Lord Mildmay called on him with a challenge from Colonel Bulkeley.

That same evening I was summoned to Culver House.

My lord sat with some of his old boon companions in one of the dismantled rooms (for his coming had been sudden and unexpected); the holland covers were yet over the great velvet and gilt chairs, muslin bags enveloped the candelabra, and where the bottles and glasses stood on the ornate table were rings in the dust; candles had been hastily stuck into tarnished sticks, and the only servants were the French rascals my lord had brought with him.

Rosy amorini and florid wreaths peeped from the shadows of the imposing walls, and the lordly pomp of this chill magnificence was a strange background for the men drinking by the huge fire on the marble hearth. Everyone was drunk but my lord, but he, this night, could find no oblivion in the wine cup; panic kept his head clear, and I could see by the ferocious anguish of his face that his thoughts were by no means dimmed.

He met me with bravado.

“If I go to Hell tomorrow, I’ll pay you a visit to let you know what ’tis like.”

“Is Bulkeley so infallible?” asked one of his followers, and another, with tipsy malice: “He’s a damn good shot.”

“He has on his side justice at least,” I said coldly, for I had now come to detest my lord.

He looked at me in agony. “Say I’ve a chance,” he muttered, and I smiled, always having believed him to be of an invincible courage.

For all that I thought his chance good enough; if Bulkeley was a fine marksman, so was my lord.

“Why don’t you get to bed? What time is the meeting?” I looked with contempt at his hideous company; not one of them had set foot in Culver House, or any mansion like it, before.

“Seven o’clock tomorrow morning,” said one Hilton, the soberest of the wretched band and my lord’s second.

It was now past midnight.

“Why have you sent for me?” I asked again.

He was pacing up and down the room in a very climax of terror and rage, while the drunken crew round the table condoled with and mocked him in a breath. He wore an almond-green velvet coat, overlaced, I recall, with silver — for that year the men’s clothes began to be very plain — and his hair was long and powdered in the old-fashioned style still favoured in Italy. I think that the beauty of his lineaments rendered his expression the more awful — the despair, the dread, the fury expressed in that pale visage were awful indeed to contemplate.

“I will not go!” he cried. “I’ll not stand up to be killed!”

He then asked me to make his will (I was by then a lawyer of some modest standing), for the Culver property was his to dispose of since he was the last male of his family. Yet when it came to asking his wishes he would not reply, and finally refused to consider the matter; and so I left him staring into the huge mirror with a glass of brandy in his hand and cursing the clock for marking the passing of the time.

I had not dared to ask him anything of Alicia Bulkeley, but as I was leaving I did demand particulars of the lady from one of the servants, a man I had seen in Paris.

She had been left in Paris, quieted, I gathered, by some lie as to my lord’s return. This affair and mainly the memory of my lord’s face so wrought on my mind that I could not sleep that night and went out early for news of the duel.

I got this from the creature Hilton, the second.

The meeting had taken place in Hyde Park; at the first shot my lord had fallen. “Killed?” asked Colonel Bulkeley.

“Sir,” said the surgeon, bending over the writhing man, “death would have been more merciful — he is shot through the jaw.”

“He is marked where I aimed to mark him,” replied the implacable soldier coldly. “He will never kiss another man’s wife again; nor his own; nor even any drab from Whitefriars.”

With that remark he left the Park; his austere figure and his sombre countenance had never changed during the course of the encounter.

My lord was carried home in his carriage; he soon became unconscious, for the lower part of his face was shattered, half blown away, and, though he might well live, he would never be anything but a mask of terror.

Alicia Bulkeley, quieted for the moment by my lord’s lies, no sooner lost sight of him than she fell into a fierce panic and resolved to follow him by the next packet. With little more than the price of her journey in her pocket and accompanied by a huge negress, who was her last attendant, she landed at Dover twenty-four hours after my lord, and took the night coach to London.

Arriving there, the demented creature could think of no asylum but Culver House; and, as she could hardly believe that the man for whom she had sacrificed everything and with whom she had lived for years would refuse her shelter, she directed her steps to the stately mansion of my lord.

The valet who opened to her knew her and was for refusing admission, but the negress said cunningly (Mrs Bulkeley being past coherent speech) that my lord had sent for them; and the servant, not knowing if this might be so, reluctantly admitted them. The two shuddering and draggled women had just reached the great doors on the first landing when my lord came home.

He had regained consciousness, and though his pain was fearful he had no tongue to make lament with; he walked between Hilton and the surgeon, who were indeed not well able to carry so large a man, and so slowly came up the wide treads of the stairs to where Mrs Bulkeley, who had heard the steps, cowered against the door, her silk shawl, her fallen hair, her bonnet disarranged, her face like milk, her lips ashy.

As my lord came into view, with his jaw swathed in bloody bandages and his terrible eyes above them, she broke into shriek after shriek; my lord sprang forward with a strength that made nothing of those who held him, took the frail wretch in his quivering hands and hurled her down the stairs. The surgeon tried to catch her, but she was weak and her high heel caught in her dress; she fell to the bottom of the flight and lay in the hall.

Whimpering, the negress scuttled after her; Hilton, to please his patron, from whom he still hoped favours, said: “It’s Alicia Bulkeley, the cause of the whole damn business — turn her out,” he added to the gibbering valet.

The surgeon, who was a fashionable man and fee’d by my lord, made no protest, and as the earl was led to his chamber, the servant and the negress picked up Mrs Bulkeley and carried her into the street. She stirred as they touched her and the black woman clamoured for pity, so that the valet consented to carry her to a pot-house nearby, where the landlady, after marking her rings and watch, took her in and let her lie in a back room, where the customers came and stared at her and the air was thick with the smell of smoke and beer.

She asked for her husband and a clergyman, but the negress was too ignorant to know what she meant; and so, about noon, she died, aged not quite twenty-three years.

It was a clear case of murder, but the landlady and her gossip, the slippered doctor, hushed the thing up, robbed her of her rings, watch, silk, and linen garments — and even the burnt gold hair that had first attracted my lord — and buried her in a pauper’s grave. The negress they turned into the street; and she, distracted with terror, crept back to Culver House and begged for scraps at the kitchen door. There, out of compassion, they gave her my name and where I was to be found, and I discovered her on my stairs when I came home that night and so learnt from her the manner of Alicia Bulkeley’s death. I sent the poor wretch to a friend who had a house of servants, and debated whether or not I should write these matters to Colonel Bulkeley.

I was not encouraged to do so by the remembrance of his face on the morning of the duel, and while I hesitated I had news of the death of my lord. This was practically suicide, because his life had never been in danger, but he tore off the bandages with a ruthless hand, turned his mutilated face to the wall and furiously died — the day of the burial of Alicia Bulkeley.

Would that this were the end and that I, who believed in neither Heaven nor Hell, could have here finished with Hector Greatrix, seventh Earl of Culvers. I went out that day to a gathering of people who knew nothing of my lord, and stayed late, endeavouring to forget. I drank and danced and gambled, and fled the gossips who must mouth over the Culvers’ scandal.

When I returned I found that the light on the stairs, commonly left there by my laundress, had gone out, so must fumble my way up in the dark and silence of the quiet building. When I reached my room I must fumble again in the dark for flint and tinder, feeling from one piece of furniture to another; it was cold, and through the tall window I could see the moon like an icicle in the dark sky. At last, when I had begun to be considerably oppressed by the dark. I found the tinderbox and struck a light.

As I set the flaming tinder to the candle I perceived that I was not alone in the room; someone was seated in the hooded chair that had its back towards me; a man. I could see the white hand hanging down, the skirt of a coat on which some bullion trimming gleamed. I concluded that a friend, minded to pay me a visit, had gone to sleep awaiting my return.

I approached, holding my light, and with I know not what feeling of unfathomable dread.

The figure turned as I neared.

It was my lord.

He wore the almond-green suit with the silver braiding in which I had seen him hold his ghastly vigil of terror and fury. God have mercy on us all!

His face was alight; where the visage should have been was a ripple of flames quivering upwards, and through this crimson veil of fire gleamed his infernal eyes with an expression of unutterable woe. The flames rose above his head, shaped into a peak; he wore a shining mitre glittering with lambent fires of green and blue like hellish jewels.

This fiend had been forced to keep his oath — to discover to another scoffer the truth of Hell.

My eyes could not long support this atrocious spectacle; as he raised his ashy hand in mock benediction, I fell senseless, seeing as I dropped the demoniacal mitre flare from his flaming brows to a man’s height above his tortured eyes.

“The Blue Magazine” Sep. 1925

The Gorgeous Lovers and Other Stories (1929)

The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949)

CAMBRIC TEA

The situation was bizarre; the accurately trained mind of Bevis Holroyd was impressed foremost by this; that the opening of a door would turn it into tragedy.

“I am afraid I can’t stay,” he had said pleasantly, humouring a sick man; he was too young and had not been long enough completely successful to have a professional manner but a certain balanced tolerance just showed in his attitude to this prostrate creature.

“I’ve got a good many claims on my time,” he added, “and I’m afraid it would be impossible. And it isn’t the least necessary, you know. You’re quite all right. I’ll come back after Christmas if you really think it worth while.”

The patient opened one eye; he was lying flat on his back in a deep, wide-fashioned bed hung with a thick, dark, silk-lined tapestry; the room was dark for there were thick curtains of the same material drawn half across the windows, rigidly excluding all save a moiety of the pallid winter light; to make his examination Dr Holroyd had had to snap on the electric light that stood on the bedside table; he thought it a dreary unhealthy room, but had hardly found it worth while to say as much.

The patient opened one eye; the other lid remained fluttering feebly over an immobile orb.

He said in a voice both hoarse and feeble:

“But, doctor, I’m being poisoned.”

Professional curiosity and interest masked by genial incredulity instantly quickened the doctor’s attention.

“My dear sir,” he smiled, “poisoned by this nasty bout of ’flu you mean, I suppose—”

“No,” said the patient, faintly and wearily dropping both lids over his blank eyes, “by my wife.”

“That’s an ugly sort of fancy for you to get hold of,” replied the doctor instantly. “Acute depression — we must see what we can do for you—”

The sick man opened both eyes now; he even slightly raised his head as he replied, not without dignity:

“I fetched you from London, Dr Holroyd, that you might deal with my case impartially — from the local man there is no hope of that, he is entirely impressed by my wife.”

Dr Holroyd made a movement as if to protest but a trembling sign from the patient made him quickly subsist.

“Please let me speak. She will come in soon and I shall have no chance. I sent for you secretly, she knows nothing about that. I had heard you very well spoken of — as an authority on this sort of thing. You made a name over the Pluntre murder case as witness for the Crown.”

“I don’t specialize in murder,” said Dr Holroyd, but his keen handsome face was alight with interest. “And I don’t care much for this kind of case — Sir Harry.”

“But you’ve taken it on,” murmured the sick man. “You couldn’t abandon me now.”

“I’ll get you into a nursing home,” said the doctor cheerfully, “and there you’ll dispel all these ideas.”

“And when the nursing home has cured me I’m to come back to my wife for her to begin again?”

Dr Holroyd bent suddenly and sharply over the sombre bed. With his right hand he deftly turned on the electric lamp and tipped back the coral silk shade so that the bleached acid light fell full over the patient lying on his back on the big fat pillows.

“Look here,” said the doctor, “what you say is pretty serious.”

And the two men stared at each other, the patient examining his physician as acutely as his physician examined him.

Bevis Holroyd was still a young man with a look of peculiar energy and austere intelligence that heightened by contrast purely physical dark good looks that many men would have found sufficient passport to success; resolution, dignity and a certain masculine sweetness, serene and strong, different from feminine sweetness, marked his demeanour which was further softened by a quick humour and a sensitive judgement.

The patient, on the other hand, was a man of well past middle age, light, flabby and obese with a flaccid, fallen look about his large face which was blurred and dimmed by the colours of ill health, being one pasty livid hue that threw into unpleasant relief the grey speckled red of his scant hair.

Altogether an unpleasing man, but of a certain fame and importance that had induced the rising young doctor to come at once when hastily summoned to Strangeways Manor House; a man of a fine, renowned family, a man of repute as a scholar, an essayist who had once been a politician who was rather above politics; a man whom Dr Holroyd only knew vaguely by reputation, but who seemed to him symbolical of all that was staid, respectable and stolid.

And this man blinked up at him and whimpered:

“My wife is poisoning me.”

Dr Holroyd sat back and snapped off the electric light.

“What makes you think so?” he asked sharply.

“To tell you that,” came the laboured voice of the sick man. “I should have to tell you my story.”

“Well, if you want me to take this up—”

“I sent for you to do that, doctor.”

“Well, how do you think you are being poisoned?”

“Arsenic, of course.”

“Oh? And how administered?”

Again the patient looked up with one eye, seeming too fatigued to open the other.

“Cambric tea,” he replied.

And Dr Holroyd echoed:

“Cambric tea!” with a soft amazement and interest.

Cambric tea had been used as the medium for arsenic in the Pluntre case and the expression had become famous; it was Bevis Holroyd who had discovered the doses in the cambric tea and who had put his finger on this pale beverage as the means of murder.

“Very possibly,” continued Sir Harry, “the Pluntre case made her think of it.”

“For God’s sake, don’t,” said Dr Holroyd; for in that hideous affair the murderer had been a woman; and to see a woman on trial for her life, to see a woman sentenced to death, was not an experience he wished to repeat.

“Lady Strangeways,” continued the sick man, “is much younger than I — I overpersuaded her to marry me, she was at that time very much attracted by a man of her own age, but he was in a poor position and she was ambitious.”

He paused, wiped his quivering lips on a silk handkerchief, and added faintly:

“Lately our marriage has been extremely unhappy. The man she preferred is now prosperous, successful and unmarried — she wishes to dispose of me that she may marry her first choice.”

“Have you proof of any of this?”

“Yes. I know she buys arsenic. I know she reads books on poisons. I know she is eating her heart out for this other man.”

“Forgive me, Sir Harry,” replied the doctor, “but have you no near friend nor relation to whom you can confide your — suspicions?”

“No one,” said the sick man impatiently. “I have lately come from the East and am out of touch with people. Besides I want a doctor, a doctor with skill in this sort of thing. I thought from the first of the Pluntre case and of you.”

Bevis Holroyd sat back quietly; it was then that he thought of the situation as bizarre; the queerness of the whole thing was vividly before him, like a twisted figure on a gem — a carving at once writhing and immobile.

“Perhaps,” continued Sir Harry wearily, “you are married, doctor?”

“No.” Dr Holroyd slightly smiled; his story was something like the sick man’s story but taken from another angle; when he was very poor and unknown he had loved a girl who had preferred a wealthy man; she had gone out to India, ten years ago, and he had never seen her since; he remembered this, with sharp distinctness, and in the same breath he remembered that he still loved this girl; it was, after all, a commonplace story.

Then his mind swung to the severe professional aspect of the case; he had thought that his patient, an unhealthy type of man, was struggling with a bad attack of influenza and the resultant depression and weakness, but then he had never thought, of course, of poison, nor looked nor tested for poison.

The man might be lunatic, he might be deceived, he might be speaking the truth; the fact that he was a mean, unpleasant beast ought not to weigh in the matter; Dr Holroyd had some enjoyable Christmas holidays in prospect and now he was beginning to feel that he ought to give these up to stay and investigate this case; for he could readily see that it was one in which the local doctor would be quite useless.

“You must have a nurse,” he said, rising.

But the sick man shook his head.

“I don’t wish to expose my wife more than need be,” he grumbled. “Can’t you manage the affair yourself?”

As this was the first hint of decent feeling he had shown, Bevis Holroyd forgave him his brusque rudeness.

“Well, I’ll stay the night anyhow,” he conceded.

And then the situation changed, with the opening of a door, from the bizarre to the tragic.

This door opened in the far end of the room and admitted a bloom of bluish winter light from some uncurtained, high windowed corridor; the chill impression was as if invisible snow had entered the shaded, dun, close apartment.

And against this background appeared a woman in a smoke-coloured dress with some long lace about the shoulders and a high comb; she held a little tray carrying jugs and a glass of crystal in which the cold light splintered.

Dr Holroyd stood in his usual attitude of attentive courtesy, and then, as the patient, feebly twisting his gross head from the fat pillow, said:

“My wife — doctor—” he recognized in Lady Strangeways the girl to whom he had once been engaged in marriage, the woman he still loved.

“This is Doctor Holroyd,” added Sir Harry. “Is that cambric tea you have there?”

She inclined her head to the stranger by her husband’s bed as if she had never seen him before, and he, taking his cue, and for many other reasons, was silent.

“Yes, this is your cambric tea,” she said to her husband. “You like it just now, don’t you? How do you find Sir Harry, Dr Holroyd?”

There were two jugs on the tray; one of crystal half full of cold milk, and one of white porcelain full of hot water; Lady Strangeways proceeded to mix these fluids in equal proportions and gave the resultant drink to her husband, helping him first to sit up in bed.

“I think that Sir Harry has a nasty turn of influenza,” answered the doctor mechanically. “He wants me to stay. I’ve promised till the morning, anyhow.”

“That will be a pleasure and a relief,” said Lady Strangeways gravely. “My husband has been ill some time and seems so much worse than he need — for influenza.”

The patient, feebly sipping his cambric tea, grinned queerly at the doctor.

“So much worse — you see, doctor!” he muttered.

“It is good of you to stay,” continued Lady Strangeways equally. “I will see about your room, you must be as comfortable as possible.”

She left as she had come, a shadow-coloured figure retreating to a chill light.

The sick man held up his glass as if he gave a toast.

“You see! Cambric tea!”

And Bevis Holroyd was thinking: does she not want to know me? Does he know what we once were to each other? How comes she to be married to this man — her husband’s name was Custiss — and the horror of the situation shook the calm that was his both from character and training; he went to the window and looked out on the bleached park; light, slow snow was falling, a dreary dance over the frozen grass and before the grey corpses that paled, one behind the other, to the distance shrouded in colourless mist.

The thin voice of Harry Strangeways recalled him to the bed.

“Would you like to take a look at this, doctor?” He held out the half drunk glass of milk and water.

“I’ve no means of making a test here,” said Dr Holroyd, troubled. “I brought a few things, nothing like that.”

“You are not so far from Harley Street,” said Sir Harry. “My car can fetch everything you want by this afternoon — or perhaps you would like to go yourself?”

“Yes,” replied Bevis Holroyd sternly. “I would rather go myself.”

His trained mind had been rapidly covering the main aspects of his problem and he had instantly seen that it was better for Lady Strangeways to have this case in his hands. He was sure there was some hideous, fantastic hallucination on the part of Sir Harry, but it was better for Lady Strangeways to leave the matter in the hands of one who was friendly towards her. He rapidly found and washed a medicine bottle from among the sick room paraphernalia and poured it full of the cambric tea, casting away the remainder.

“Why did you drink any?” he asked sharply.

“I don’t want her to think that I guess,” whispered Sir Harry. “Do you know, doctor, I have a lot of her love letters — written by—”

Dr Holroyd cut him short.

“I couldn’t listen to this sort of thing behind Lady Strangeways’ back,” he said quickly. “That is between you and her. My job is to get you well. I’ll try and do that.”

And he considered, with a faint disgust, how repulsive this man looked sitting up with pendant jowl and drooping cheeks and discoloured, pouchy eyes sunk in pads of unhealthy flesh and above the spiky crown of Judas-coloured hair.

Perhaps a woman, chained to this man, living with him, blocked and thwarted by him, might be wrought upon to—

Dr Holroyd shuddered inwardly and refused to continue his reflection.

As he was leaving the gaunt sombre house about which there was something definitely blank and unfriendly, a shrine in which the sacred flames had flickered out so long ago that the lamps were blank and cold, he met Lady Strangeways.

She was in the wide entrance hall standing by the wood fire that but faintly dispersed the gloom of the winter morning and left untouched the shadows in the rafters of the open roof.

Now he would not, whether she wished or no, deny her; he stopped before her, blocking out her poor remnant of light.

“Mollie,” he said gently, “I don’t quite understand — you married a man named Custiss in India.”

“Yes. Harry had to take this name when he inherited this place. We’ve been home three years from the East, but lived so quietly here that I don’t suppose anyone has heard of us.”

She stood between him and the firelight, a shadow among the shadows; she was much changed; in her thinness and pallor, in her restless eyes and nervous mouth he could read signs of discontent, even of unhappiness.

“I never heard of you,” said Dr Holroyd truthfully. “I didn’t want to. I liked to keep my dreams.”

Her hair was yet the lovely cedar wood hue, silver, soft and gracious; her figure had those fluid lines of grace that he believed he had never seen equalled.

“Tell me,” she added abruptly, “what is the matter with my husband? He has been ailing like this for a year or so.”

With a horrid lurch of his heart that was usually so steady, Dr Holroyd remembered the bottle of milk and water in his pocket.

“Why do you give him that cambric tea?” he counter questioned.

“He will have it — he insists that I make it for him—”

“Mollie,” said Dr Holroyd quickly, “you decided against me, ten years ago, but that is no reason why we should not be friends now — tell me, frankly, are you happy with this man?”

“You have seen him,” she replied slowly. “He seemed different ten years ago. I honestly was attracted by his scholarship and his learning as well as — other things.”

Bevis Holroyd needed to ask no more; she was wretched, imprisoned in a mistake as a fly in amber; and those love letters? Was there another man?

As he stood silent, with a dark reflective look on her weary brooding face, she spoke again:

“You are staying?”

“Oh yes,” he said, he was staying, there was nothing else for him to do.

“It is Christmas week,” she reminded him wistfully. “It will be very dull, perhaps painful, for you.”

“I think I ought to stay.”

Sir Harry’s car was announced; Bevis Holroyd, gliding over frozen roads to London, was absorbed with this sudden problem that, like a mountain out of a plain, had suddenly risen to confront him out of his level life.

The sight of Mollie (he could not think of her by that sick man’s name) had roused in him tender memories and poignant emotions and the position in which he found her and his own juxtaposition to her and her husband had the same devastating effect on him as a mine sprung beneath the feet of an unwary traveller.

London was deep in the whirl of a snow storm and the light that penetrated over the grey roof tops to the ugly slip of a laboratory at the back of his consulting rooms was chill and forbidding.

Bevis Holroyd put the bottle of milk on a marble slab and sat back in the easy chair watching that dreary chase of snow flakes across the dingy London pane.

He was thinking of past springs, of violets long dead, of roses long since dust, of hours that had slipped away like lengths of golden silk rolled up, of the long ago when he had loved Mollie and Mollie had seemed to love him; then he thought of that man in the big bed who had said:

“My wife is poisoning me.”

Late that afternoon Dr Holroyd, with his suitcase and a professional bag, returned to Strangeways Manor House in Sir Harry’s car; the bottle of cambric tea had gone to a friend, a noted analyst; somehow Doctor Holroyd had not felt able to do this task himself; he was very fortunate, he felt, in securing this old solitary and his promise to do the work before Christmas.

As he arrived at Strangeways Manor House which stood isolated and well away from a public high road where a lonely spur of the weald of Kent drove into the Sussex marshes, it was in a blizzard of snow that effaced the landscape and gave the murky outlines of the house an air of unreality, and Bevis Holroyd experienced that sensation he had so often heard of and read about, but which so far his cool mind had dismissed as a fiction.

He did really feel as if he was in an evil dream; as the snow changed the values of the scene, altering distances and shapes, so this meeting with Mollie, under these circumstances, had suddenly changed the life of Bevis Holroyd.

He had so resolutely and so definitely put this woman out of his life and mind, deliberately refusing to make enquiries about her, letting all knowledge of her cease with the letter in which she had written from India and announced her marriage.

And now, after ten years, she had crossed his path in this ghastly manner, as a woman her husband accused of attempted murder.

The sick man’s words of a former lover disturbed him profoundly; was it himself who was referred to? Yet the love letters must be from another man for he had not corresponded with Mollie since her marriage, not for ten years.

He had never felt any bitterness towards Mollie for her desertion of a poor, struggling doctor, and he had always believed in the integral nobility of her character under the timidity of conventionality; but the fact remained that she had played him false — what if that had been “the little rift within the lute” that had now indeed silenced the music!

With a sense of bitter depression he entered the gloomy old house; how different was this from the pleasant ordinary Christmas he had been rather looking forward to, the jolly homely atmosphere of good fare, dancing, and friends!

When he had telephoned to these friends excusing himself his regret had been genuine and the cordial “bad luck!” had had a poignant echo in his own heart; bad luck indeed, bad luck—

She was waiting for him in the hall that a pale young man was decorating with boughs of prickly stiff holly that stuck stiffly behind the dark heavy pictures.

He was introduced as the secretary and said gloomily:

“Sir Harry wished everything to go on as usual, though I am afraid he is very ill indeed.”

Yes, the patient had been seized by another violent attack of illness during Dr Holroyd’s absence; the young man went at once upstairs and found Sir Harry in a deep sleep and a rather nervous local doctor in attendance.

An exhaustive discussion of the case with this doctor threw no light on anything, and Dr Holroyd, leaving in charge an extremely sensible-looking housekeeper who was Sir Harry’s preferred nurse, returned, worried and irritated, to the hall where Lady Strangeways now sat alone before the big fire.

She offered him a belated but fresh cup of tea.

“Why did you come?” she asked as if she roused herself from deep reverie.

“Why? Because your husband sent for me.”

“He says you offered to come; he has told everyone in the house that.”

“But I never heard of the man before today.”

“You had heard of me. He seems to think that you came here to help me.”

“He cannot be saying that,” returned Dr Holroyd sternly, and he wondered desperately if Mollie was lying, if she had invented this to drive him out of the house.

“Do you want me here?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” she replied dully and confirmed his suspicions; probably there was another man and she wished him out of the way; but he could not go, out of pity towards her he could not go.

“Does he knew we once knew each other?” he asked.

“No,” she replied faintly, “therefore it seems such a curious chance that he should have sent for you, of all men!”

“It would have been more curious,” he responded grimly, “if I had heard that you were here with a sick husband and had thrust myself in to doctor him! Strangeways must be crazy to spread such a tale and if he doesn’t know we are old friends it becomes nonsense!”

“I often think that Harry is crazy,” said Lady Strangeways wearily; she took a rose-silk-lined work basket, full of pretty trifles, on her knee, and began winding a skein of rose-coloured silk; she looked so frail, so sad, so lifeless that the heart of Bevis Holroyd was torn with bitter pity.

“Now I am here I want to help you,” he said earnestly. “I am staying for that, to help you—”

She looked up at him with a wistful appeal in her fair face.

“I’m worried,” she said simply. “I’ve lost some letters I valued very much — I think they have been stolen.”

Dr Holroyd drew back; the love letters; the letters the husband had found, that were causing all his ugly suspicions.

“My poor Mollie!” he exclaimed impulsively. “What sort of a coil have you got yourself into!”

As if this note of pity was unendurable, she rose impulsively, scattering the contents of her work basket, dropping the skein of silk, and hastened away down the dark hall.

Bevis Holroyd stooped mechanically to pick up the hurled objects and saw among them a small white packet, folded, but opened at one end; this packet seemed to have fallen out of a needle case of gold silk.

Bevis Holroyd had pounced on it and thrust it in his pocket just as the pale secretary returned with his thin arms most incongruously full of mistletoe.

“This will be a dreary Christmas for you, Dr Holroyd,” he said with the air of one who forces himself to make conversation. “No doubt you had some pleasant plans in view — we are all so pleased that Lady Strangeways had a friend to come and look after Sir Harry during the holidays.”

“Who told you I was a friend?” asked Dr Holroyd brusquely. “I certainly knew Lady Strangeways before she was married—”

The pale young man cut in crisply:

“Oh, Lady Strangeways told me so herself.”

Bevis Holroyd was bewildered; why did she tell the secretary what she did not tell her husband? — both the indiscretion and the reserve seemed equally foolish.

Languidly hanging up his sprays and bunches of mistletoe the pallid young man, whose name was Garth Deane, continued his aimless remarks.

“This is really not a very cheerful house, Dr Holroyd — I’m interested in Sir Harry’s oriental work or I should not remain. Such a very unhappy marriage! I often think,” he added regardless of Bevis Holroyd’s darkling glance, “that it would be very unpleasant indeed for Lady Strangeways if anything happened to Sir Harry.”

“Whatever do you mean, sir?” asked the doctor angrily.

The secretary was not at all discomposed.

“Well, one lives in the house, one has nothing much to do — and one notices.”

Perhaps, thought the young man in anguish, the sick husband had been talking to this creature, perhaps the creature had really noticed something.

“I’ll go up to my patient,” said Bevis Holroyd briefly, not daring to anger one who might be an important witness in this mystery that was at present so unfathomable.

Mr Deane gave a sickly grin over the lovely pale leaves and berries he was holding.

“I’m afraid he is very bad, doctor.”

As Bevis Holroyd left the room he passed Lady Strangeways; she looked blurred, like a pastel drawing that has been shaken; the fingers she kept locked on her bosom; she had flung a silver fur over her shoulders that accentuated her ethereal look of blonde, pearl and amber hues.

“I’ve come back for my work basket,” she said. “Will you go up to my husband? He is ill again—”

“Have you been giving him anything?” asked Dr Holroyd as quietly as he could.

“Only some cambric tea, he insisted on that.”

“Don’t give him anything — leave him alone. He is in my charge now, do you understand?”

She gazed up at him with frightened eyes that had been newly washed by tears.

“Why are you so unkind to me?” she quivered.

She looked so ready to fall that he could not resist the temptation to put his hand protectingly on her arm, so that, as she stood in the low doorway leading to the stairs, he appeared to be supporting her drooping weight.

“Have I not said that I am here to help you, Mollie?”

The secretary slipped out from the shadows behind them, his arms still full of winter evergreens.

“There is too much foliage,” he smiled, and the smile told that he had seen and heard.

Bevis Holroyd went angrily upstairs; he felt as if an invisible net was being dragged closely round him, something which, from being a cobweb, would become a cable; this air of mystery, of horror in the big house, this sly secretary, these watchful-looking servants, the nervous village doctor ready to credit anything, the lovely agitated woman who was the woman he had long so romantically loved, and the sinister sick man with his diabolic accusations, a man Bevis Holroyd had, from the first moment, hated — all these people in these dark surroundings affected the young man with a miasma of apprehension, gloom and dread.

After a few hours of it he was nearer to losing his nerve than he had ever been; that must be because of Mollie, poor darling Mollie caught into all this nightmare.

And outside the bells were ringing across the snow, practising for Christmas Day; the sound of them was to Bevis Holroyd what the sounds of the real world are when breaking into a sleeper’s thick dreams.

The patient sat up in bed, fondling the glass of odious cambric tea.

“Why do you take the stuff?” demanded the doctor angrily.

“She won’t let me off, she thrusts it on me,” whispered Sir Harry.

Bevis Holroyd noticed, not for the first time since he had come into the fell atmosphere of this dark house that enclosed the piteous figure of the woman he loved, that husband and wife were telling different tales; on one side lay a burden of careful lying.

“Did she—” continued the sick man, “speak to you of her lost letters?”

The young doctor looked at him sternly.

“Why should Lady Strangeways make a confidant of me?” he asked. “Do you know that she was a friend of mine ten years ago before she married you?”

“Was she? How curious! But you met like strangers.”

“The light in this room is very dim—”

“Well, never mind about that, whether you knew her or not—” Sir Harry gasped out in a sudden snarl. “The woman is a murderess, and you’ll have to bear witness to it — I’ve got her letters, here under my pillow, and Garth Deane is watching her—”

“Ah, a spy! I’ll have no part in this, Sir Harry. You’ll call another doctor—”

“No, it’s your case, you’ll make the best of it — My God, I’m dying, I think—”

He fell back in such a convulsion of pain that Bevis Holroyd forgot everything in administering to him. The rest of that day and all that night the young doctor was shut up with his patient, assisted by the secretary and the housekeeper.

And when, in the pallid light of Christmas Eve morning, he went downstairs to find Lady Strangeways, he knew that the sick man was suffering from arsenic poison, that the packet taken from Mollie’s work box was arsenic, and it was only an added horror when he was called to the telephone to learn that a stiff dose of the poison had been found in the specimen of cambric tea.

He believed that he could save the husband and thereby the wife also, but he did not think he could close the sick man’s mouth; the deadly hatred of Sir Harry was leading up to an accusation of attempted murder; of that he was sure, and there was the man Deane to back him up.

He sent for Mollie, who had not been near her husband all night, and when she came, pale, distracted, huddled in her white fur, he said grimly:

“Look here, Mollie, I promised that I’d help you and I mean to, though it isn’t going to be as easy as I thought, but you have got to be frank with me.”

“But I have nothing to conceal—”

“The name of the other man—”

“The other man?”

“The man who wrote those letters your husband has under his pillow.”

“Oh, Harry has them!” she cried in pain. “That man Deane stole them then! Bevis, they are your letters of the olden days that I have always cherished.”

“My letters!”

“Yes, do you think that there has ever been anyone else?”

“But he says — Mollie, there is a trap or trick here, someone is lying furiously. Your husband is being poisoned.”

“Poisoned?”

“By arsenic given in that cambric tea. And he knows it. And he accuses you.”

She stared at him in blank incredulity, then she slipped forward in her chair and clutched the big arm.

“Oh, God,” she muttered in panic terror. “He always swore that he’d be revenged on me — because he knew that I never cared for him—”

But Bevis Holroyd recoiled; he did not dare listen, he did not dare believe.

“I’ve warned you,” he said, “for the sake of the old days, Mollie—”

A light step behind them and they were aware of the secretary creeping out of the embrowning shadows.

“A cold Christmas,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “A really cold, seasonable Christmas. We are almost snowed in — and Sir Harry would like to see you, Dr Holroyd.”

“I have only just left him—”

Bevis Holroyd looked at the despairing figure of the woman, crouching in her chair; he was distracted, overwrought, near to losing his nerve.

“He wants particularly to see you,” cringed the secretary.

Mollie looked back at Bevis Holroyd, her lips moved twice in vain before she could say: “Go to him.”

The doctor went slowly upstairs and the secretary followed.

Sir Harry was now flat on his back, staring at the dark tapestry curtains of his bed.

“I’m dying,” he announced as the doctor bent over him.

“Nonsense. I am not going to allow you to die.”

“You won’t be able to help yourself. I’ve brought you here to see me die.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve a surprise for you too, a Christmas present. These letters now, these love letters of my wife’s — what name do you think is on them?”

“Your mind is giving way, Sir Harry.”

“Not at all — come nearer, Deane — the name is Bevis Holroyd.”

“Then they are letters ten years old. Letters written before your wife met you.”

The sick man grinned with infinite malice.

“Maybe. But there are no dates on them and the envelopes are all destroyed. And I, as a dying man, shall swear to their recent date — I, as a foully murdered man.”

“You are wandering in your mind,” said Bevis Holroyd quietly. “I refuse to listen to you any further.”

“You shall listen to me. I brought you here to listen to me. I’ve got you. Here’s my will, Deane’s got that, in which I denounced you both, there are your letters, everyone thinks that she put you in charge of the case, everyone knows that you know all about arsenic in cambric tea through the Pluntre case, and everyone will know that I died of arsenic poisoning.”

The doctor allowed him to talk himself out; indeed it would have been difficult to check the ferocity of his malicious energy.

The plot was ingenious, the invention of a slightly insane, jealous recluse who hated his wife and hated the man she had never ceased to love; Bevis Holroyd could see the nets very skilfully drawn round him; but the main issue of the mystery remained untouched; who was administering the arsenic?

The young man glanced across the sombre bed to the dark figure of the secretary.

“What is your place in all this farrago, Mr Deane?” he asked sternly.

“I’m Sir Harry’s friend,” answered the other stubbornly, “and I’ll bring witness any time against Lady Strangeways. I’ve tried to circumvent her—”

“Stop,” cried the doctor. “You think that Lady Strangeways is poisoning her husband and that I am her accomplice?”

The sick man, who had been looking with bitter malice from one to another, whispered hoarsely:

“That is what you think, isn’t it, Deane?”

“I’ll say what I think at the proper time,” said the secretary obstinately.

“No doubt you are being well paid for your share in this.”

“I’ve remembered his services in my will,” smiled Sir Harry grimly. “You can adjust your differences then, Dr Holroyd, when I’m dead, poisoned, murdered. It will be a pretty story, a nice scandal, you and she in the house together, the letters, the cambric tea!”

An expression of ferocity dominated him, then he made an effort to dominate this and to speak in his usual suave stilted manner.

“You must admit that we shall all have a very Happy Christmas, doctor.”

Bevis Holroyd was looking at the secretary, who stood at the other side of the bed, cringing, yet somehow in the attitude of a man ready to pounce; Dr Holroyd wondered if this was the murderer.

“Why,” he asked quietly to gain time, “did you hatch this plan to ruin a man you had never seen before?”

“I always hated you,” replied the sick man faintly. “Mollie never forgot you, you see, and she never allowed me to forget that she never forgot you. And then I found those letters she had cherished.”

“You are a very wicked man,” said the doctor drily, “but it will all come to nothing, for I am not going to allow you to die.”

“You won’t be able to help yourself,” replied the patient. “I’m dying, I tell you. I shall die on Christmas Day.”

He turned his head towards the secretary and added:

“Send my wife up to me.”

“No,” interrupted Dr Holroyd strongly. “She shall not come near you again.”

Sir Harry Strangeways ignored this.

“Send her up,” he repeated.

“I will bring her, sir.”

The secretary left, with a movement suggestive of flight, and Bevis Holroyd stood rigid, waiting, thinking, looking at the ugly man who now had closed his eyes and lay as if insensible. He was certainly very ill, dying perhaps, and he certainly had been poisoned by arsenic given in cambric tea, and, as certainly, a terrible scandal and a terrible danger would threaten with his death; the letters were not dated, the marriage was notoriously unhappy, and he, Bevis Holroyd, was associated in everyone’s mind with a murder case in which this form of poison, given in this manner, had been used.

Drops of moisture stood out on the doctor’s forehead; sure that if he could clear himself it would be very difficult for Mollie to do so; how could even he himself in his soul swear to her innocence!

Of course he must get the woman out of the house at once, he must have another doctor from town, nurses — but could this be done in time; if the patient died on his hands would he not be only bringing witnesses to his own discomfiture? And the right people, his own friends, were difficult to get hold of now, at Christmas time.

He longed to go in search of Mollie — she must at least be got away, but how, without a scandal, without a suspicion?

He longed to have the matter out with this odious secretary, but he dared not leave his patient.

Lady Strangeways returned with Garth Deane and seated herself, mute, shadowy, with eyes full of panic, on the other side of the sombre bed.

“Is he going to live?” she presently whispered as she watched Bevis Holroyd ministering to her unconscious husband.

“We must see that he does,” he answered grimly.

All through that Christmas Eve and the bitter night to the stark dawn when the church bells broke ghastly on their wan senses did they tend the sick man who only came to his senses to grin at them in malice.

Once Bevis Holroyd asked the pallid woman:

“What was that white packet you had in your workbox?”

And she replied:

“I never had such a packet.”

And he:

“I must believe you.”

But he did not send for the other doctors and nurses, he did not dare.

The Christmas bells seemed to rouse the sick man from his deadly swoon.

“You can’t save me,” he said with indescribable malice. “I shall die and put you both in the dock—”

Mollie Strangeways sank down beside the bed and began to cry, and Garth Deane, who by his master’s express desire had been in and out of the room all night, stopped and looked at her with a peculiar expression. Sir Harry looked at her also.

“Don’t cry,” he gasped, “this is Christmas Day. We ought all to be happy — bring me my cambric tea — do you hear?”

She rose mechanically and left the room to take in the tray with the fresh milk and water that the housekeeper had placed softly on the table outside the door; for all through the nightmare vigil, the sick man’s cry had been for “cambric tea”.

As he sat up in bed feebly sipping the vapid and odious drink the tortured woman’s nerves slipped her control.

“I can’t endure those bells, I wish they would stop those bells!” she cried and ran out of the room.

Bevis Holroyd instantly followed her; and now as suddenly as it had sprung on him, the fell little drama disappeared, fled like a poison cloud out of the compass of his life.

Mollie was leaning against the closed window, her sick head resting against the mullions; through the casement showed, surprisingly, sunlight on the pure snow and blue sky behind the withered trees.

“Listen, Mollie,” said the young man resolutely. “I’m sure he’ll live if you are careful — you mustn’t lose heart—”

The sick room door opened and the secretary slipped out.

He nervously approached the two in the window place.

“I can’t stand this any longer,” he said through dry lips. “I didn’t know he meant to go so far, he is doing it himself, you know; he’s got the stuff hidden in his bed, he puts it into the cambric tea, he’s willing to die to spite you two, but I can’t stand it any longer.”

“You’ve been abetting this!” cried the doctor.

“Not abetting,” smiled the secretary wanly. “Just standing by. I found out by chance — and then he forced me to be silent — I had his will, you know, and I’ve destroyed it.”

With this the strange creature glided downstairs.

The doctor sprang at once to Sir Harry’s room; the sick man was sitting up in the sombre bed and with a last effort was scattering a grain of powder into the glass of cambric tea.

With a look of baffled horror he saw Bevis Holroyd but the drink had already slipped down his throat; he fell back and hid his face, baulked at the last of his diabolic revenge.

When Bevis Holroyd left the dead man’s chamber he found Mollie still leaning in the window; she was free, the sun was shining, it was Christmas Day.

“Hutchinson’s Magazine” Jul. 1925

MARWOOD’S
GHOST STORY

Marwood had never been very successful as far as money goes, though the critics, those one or two or three or four that can really be called critics, always encouraged him; still he had sufficient means to be able to, sometimes, do what he liked; he was able now, for instance, to give up the winter to writing this ghost story; able, with the assistance of Janet, his wife, who came willingly into the country because the doctors, three very clever doctors, had said that Marwood was overworking, that he wanted quiet, a rest and change.

Doctors say that kind of thing very often, and sometimes rich, or lazy, or solitary folk are able to take advantage of the advice.

The cottage was very lonely, but not inconvenient; it was solid, compact, and could be made warm. Marwood paid so little rent for it that Janet felt she could be slightly lavish in comforts; Marwood had his big soft chair, his clear lamp, his roomy shelves, his thick curtains, his bright fires and his books.

The room soon began to overflow with books; Marwood began to collect ghost stories; he had never read a ghost story before, being a rational, sceptical man; his sharp, acrid studies of modern life had had as little to do with ghosts as with fairies.

“It is a queer thing,” said Janet, “that you should want to write about ghosts — it is so silly, really, and so overdone.”

“I know; that’s the interest, to see if you can put some new vigour into such old stuff — one ought to be able to do — it is just a question of applying your intelligence.”

Janet said: “The best ghost stories have been written by those who believe in ghosts.”

Marwood didn’t think so; he didn’t really think that anyone believed in ghosts.

“Well,” argued Janet. “I don’t see how you can hope to scare anyone, if no one believes—”

“Oh,” said Marwood impatiently, “the fools who read ghost stories — It’s a special audience, of course.”

It was November and he had not begun to write; he just sat in his comfortable room and read the other fellows’ failures.

He didn’t think much of any of them, not even Defoe, or Poe, or Walter Scott.

“Stuff to frighten children,” he said. “There must be a good ghost story somewhere, and I’m going to write it—”

Janet didn’t care as long as he was quiet, resting; she was absorbed in making him comfortable; a plain woman who had never been enticed by pleasure, she did not miss the seductions of town, but sometimes she found the place rather lonely.

It was in a field, off a by-lane, and when the tradespeople (three times a week) and the postman, had “called” there was no one else all day but perhaps a farmhand trudging through the mud.

It had been a wet summer; when the Marwoods first came the trees were still green, a dank and sodden green, and for a month the low swollen clouds hung over the bistre-coloured uplands and the rain slashed, for many hours each day, into fields already like a sponge full of water. Then, in November, came the frost. and everything was dry and blackish against a sky the colour of iron.

Marwood continued to buy ghost stories; he searched old catalogues for anything remotely bearing on the subject; piles of books came from the library.

“I’m not trying to get ideas,” he explained to Janet. “I’m just seeing what the other fellows have said, so I can leave all that alone and start fresh — it’s amazing. The credulity, the childish nonsense!”

“You’ll get swamped in all that rubbish.” replied Janet, who was a very practical woman. “I should stop if I were you and begin to write — after all. we can’t stay here forever.”

“Of course not. I’ve got my plot, you know; it won’t take me long to write it — I ought to have it ready soon after Christmas; that was part of my plan, you know, to spend Christmas here—”

“You won’t know if it is Christmas or not here, no one comes near us. they think we are mad, or heathen.”

“Still it will be Christmas Eve and I shall get the atmosphere—”

“I don’t see why ghosts should come out on Christmas Eve, never could; there’s no logic in it-”

“Of course there isn’t,” said Marwood, irritated. “it is all an absurd invention. Haven’t I told you that is what I want to do, take the stupid nonsense as it stands and make something out of it that’s going to touch people up a bit?”

Janet thought that he was becoming rather bad-tempered and rude; she didn’t believe much in his ghost story, she wished that he would get it over and done with and back to his usual work; with the cold the loneliness increased and Janet would have been quite glad to have returned to town.

When she ventured to make some remark of this effect, he returned a queer reply.

Janet said: “If we stay away much longer you’ll get out of touch with things.”

And Marwood answered:

“I’m just getting into touch with things!”

He looked vexed at her surprise and added sullenly: “it depends what you mean by things.”

The first day of real snow Janet remarked that it might be a good occasion to commence the book.

Marwood said, yes, it was a good occasion, and he would go upstairs and write.

During their quiet meal that evening he seemed thoughtful, his lean, yellowish face was. Janet believed. paler than usual.

“Isn’t it remarkable,” he asked suddenly, “where they get it all from!”

“All what?” Janet was stupid at an emergency.

“All those things — ghosts, griffins, cockatrices, hobgoblins, vampires — if they never existed, how did people come to think of them?”

“Ignorance, of course.” Janet was alert now. “They saw something that they didn’t understand and they made up a tale—”

“But why? And how! Where did they get the stuff for the tale!”

“imagination, obviously.”

“But what is imagination, Janet?”

Janet became impatient.

“I should think that you are reading too much of that trash.”

“I only want to know where they got it from,” he persisted obstinately. “Some of those tales are so queer—”

“inventions, fancies.”

“I know,” replied Marwood. exasperated, “but where did they get them from?”

“Well, there’s drink, and drugs.” Janet tried to humour him.

“That only starts it off — do you think the vision is in the glass? It’s in your brain and the drink sets it free.”

“What’s madness, then?” asked Janet finally. “What’s raving lunacy!”

Marwood sat up in some excitement.

“Now don’t you ask me that — don’t you ask me what madness is—”

“You needn’t be personal over the stupid argument. I wish you’d finish your book so that we could get away from here—”

“You don’t like the place?”

“I don’t say that. But we’ve been here long enough. It’s rather lonely.”

“Yes. it’s rather lonely.”

They both glanced round the room, the one large low living room, as if to confirm this impression of loneliness.

“Fancy sitting up in bed at night and feeling the Devil pulling the mattress from under you, or hearing an empty box opening and shutting, or something with eight feet shuffling round the house—”

“Robert.” said Janet, “you couldn’t frighten a child with those things, nowadays.”

“Couldn’t you? Couldn’t you?”

“Of course not.”

“What would you say if I told you I saw a gigantic negress, very lean, with a huge red turban. prying round the house and staring in at my window?”

“I should say that it was a poor joke.”

“So it is.” responded Marwood grimly. “a very poor joke.”

“Silly.”

“Silly,” agreed Marwood.

They sat in silence a little while.

It was real silence in the cottage, heavy palpable silence.

That night Marwood stayed up late. writing or reading, Janet did not know which; she heard him talking to himself — a bad habit that had lately increased upon him, a habit to be discouraged.

They awoke to snow so thick that the dawn could scarcely penetrate the heavy chilled clouds; the fields were pure against a dirty sky.

A few days off Christmas Eve now.

“I hope you got on all right last night,” said J

“Splendidly.”

“Really begun the ghost story?”

“Really begun.”

“Well, I shall be glad when you’ve finished and we can get away.”

“That’s the trouble,” said Marwood. “It isn’t so easy to get away, in fact it’s extraordinarily difficult.”

“What do you mean, quite?”

“Oh, I can’t keep explaining what I mean,” he replied testily.

She left him alone. Queer how the snow added to the loneliness; they seemed absolutely cut off from humanity; if it hadn’t been for that glimpse of the tradespeople and the postman Janet would have felt herself completely isolated; she wanted to go to the village, just to see people, but it was a long way and there was the snow, and her husband didn’t seem to care to be left alone.

“Someone might come to the door and interrupt me—”

“Not likely.”

“You never know. The Vicar perhaps. And I really can’t be interrupted.”

Janet stayed in.

That evening they sat alone round the fire; the snow had ceased, there was a wind and a frost; they had been to the door several times to look at the stars and to listen to the church bells, practising for Christmas Day, that could just be heard in the absolute stillness.

“Funny,” said Marwood, “if something really came along—”

“What do you mean, Robert?”

“Ghosts, or devils—”

She laughed thinly: they evaded each other’s look.

“Mind you,” Marwood added earnestly, “if any were to come, I couldn’t bear it; I’ve been thinking it over — and I really couldn’t.”

Janet smiled at his joke.

“You aren’t afraid?” she asked feebly.

“How can you be afraid of what you don’t believe in? I never believed in them, did I?”

Still they didn’t look at each other; Marwood lowered his voice and continued:

“What I am afraid of is Fear.”

“Afraid of being afraid?” she suggested.

“That’s it — if you were afraid now, if you looked afraid — if I saw Fear — anywhere,” he answered confidentially.

“That is foolish,” said Janet stoutly. “We are really shut up too much alone.”

Marwood looked sullen; he remarked that he had a bad headache; temper, translated Janet, who was beginning to be nettled herself — and it was lonely.

Lonely.

They locked and barred and bolted it all up, they put out all the lights but one candle, and went up to bed.

Janet could not get to sleep; she thought it was because the silence was oppressive.

But Marwood was asleep, and dreaming, she thought, by his mutterings and tossings.

Janet felt uneasy; what a lot of queer things her husband had said lately! He wasn’t really a bit like his usual level-headed self; she would be glad when they got away from this place and all these ghost books.

Then Janet heard a faint noise.

Outside the house.

A shuffling, scrapping, peculiar sort of noise.

What had Marwood said about SOME thing with eight feet?

Janet struck a match and lit the candle by the bedside; in the spurt of yellow light she saw her husband’s face staring up from the pillow.

“It’s nothing,” she said quickly. “Some stray dog.”

“Oh, you do hear it, then?”

“Of course — a stray dog, I say.”

Marwood sat up and they listened.

The noise seemed to encompass the house; it was as if they were being surrounded, beleaguered in the cottage.

“A dog,” said Marwood.

Then the shuffling was broken by a hoarse, quickly suppressed laugh. Janet gripped her husband’s shoulder; they stared at each other, shivering.

“If it IS,” whispered Marwood. “I can’t bear it.”

“Nonsense. It ISN’T.”

They peered forward across the murk of the room; the window space now showed faintly luminous, a square of reddish light; at the sight of this doubtless infernal illumination Janet winced.

“You’re afraid,” gibbered Marwood. “I can see that — you’re afraid.”

“No — I’m going down to find out—”

He clung to her.

“No, you’re not—”

A sudden clash, wail and howl tore the tension.

Marwood shrieked.

“I knew they couldn’t have invented it all, I knew they’d got the stuff somewhere! It’s true! It’s true!”

“What’s true?” mumbled Janet.

“Devils, ghosts — there outside — legions of ’em.”

The howl took form and substance; it became:

“Hark, the Herald Angels sing—”

With triangle and trombone accompaniment.

“The Waits,” sighed Janet, trembling.

Marwood never wrote his ghost story; he composed instead an essay on “Fear,” but he could not care to have it published.

You see, he never believed they were the Waits.

“John o’ London’s Weekly” 06 Dec. 1925

THE ACCIDENT

Murchison was amazed at the speed with which he escaped from the flaming car, across the common, for he could now see the red blaze on the lonely road in the distance: they were fools to row, he and Bargrave, and send the cursed vehicle over like that; he had not ceased running since he had felt the first shock of the released fire from the wreckage.

He wondered why they had quarrelled: the fright had seared his memory; but he certainly knew he loathed Bargrave; the landscape was oddly dim, like the dimness of an eclipse.

Murchison, still fleeing, suddenly saw Bargrave in front of him, also hurrying — an attenuated, grey wisp of a Bargrave, blown thin by the forlorn breeze.

Murchison yelled in triumph:

“So you were killed, you silly fool!”

“Do you think that you’re alive?” jeered the ghost of Bargrave, then Murchison knew that he also had no body and that the red flames were not the blaze of the burning car but the light of their future destination.

Dark Ann and Other Stories (1927)

A PERSISTENT WOMAN

Temple, exhausted, resolved to leave his wife; their atrocious quarrels were killing him; he was still shaken by the furies of this morning’s disagreement when he returned home with bitter reluctance; difficult to get free of Sarah, but it must be done; Temple was resolved.

She met him in the sombre lane that led to their house, and clung to his arm in silence; she was repentant, no doubt, but Temple would not relent; he was mute and tried to shake her off, but she clung with great tenacity. When they reached their home he found it full of commotion; out of a phantasmagoria someone told him that his wife had been discovered in the pond — “Suicide, poor thing!” and his brother whispered: “You’re free.” But Temple grinned at the spiteful shape hugging his arm and knew he never could be free from Sarah.

Dark Ann and Other Stories (1927)

DARK ANN

Nothing could have been more neutral, more dull; the scene was the lecture hall of one of our most learned societies, as austere and grim a place as the cold mind and lifeless taste of Science could conceive, or anyhow did conceive and execute in the days when this hall, and many others, was built.

A lecture was in progress.

A man as austere, as grim as the hall, but in the same way rather grand and imposing, was in the rostrum, talking about hygiene and sanitation.

Like the hall, like the society, he seemed, in his disdain of any concession to the lighter graces, dreary and forbidding, ageless, featureless, drab.

I wondered why I had come; Minnie Levine had brought me; she was one of those women who try, and quite successfully, to make good works fashionable.

This had brought her into the chill and lofty circle where Sir William Torrance moved, and, somehow, to this lecture.

Not altogether purposelessly, for afterwards we were to take the great man back to Minnie’s reception and introduce him to a number of other earnest and charming workers in the cause of health and happiness for others.

Minnie had said a great deal about the personality of the lecturer, but to me he seemed to have no personality; he was part of the remote classic decorations of that depressing room, something almost dehumanized.

Yet, as I studied the man (for there was nothing else to do since I could not concentrate on the matter of his speech), I discovered that he was not by any means unattractive, though subdued to the drab dignity of his surroundings, eclipsed by the sombre correctness of his orthodox clothes, those dull blacks, greys and icy white linen.

He was not so old though his hair was ash coloured, his face haggard, not so old, I was sure, perhaps forty-eight, fifty. Handsome features, aquiline, dark, with a narrow high nose and full lips, bluish eyes, cold and clever, a figure that would have been graceful enough if he had not so carefully refrained from any movement, any gesture, if he had not held himself with such monotonous stateliness.

The lecture was over; I thought I caught Minnie’s sigh of relief.

I, too, was glad to leave, though it was a cruel winter’s day without, colourless, biting, grim.

We waited for the lecturer; he carefully and gravely answered the earnest questioners who came timidly up to the platform, then waited for us, methodically rolling up his charts of “Drainage Systems for Country Houses” that he had been showing us.

He was presented to me and I felt further depressed by his lifeless courtesy; perhaps he had heard of me as a foolish trifler in dreams and visions, a writer of stories fantastical and strange; I felt uncomfortable thinking how he must despise me; of course I didn’t believe he had any right to despise me, yet, unreasonably it made me wince to realize that he probably did, he had so much weight about him, an air of being unassailable.

He hadn’t much to say as we went home in Minnie’s car; I believe he was wondering why he had consented to come. I’ve often seen that surprised resentment lurking in the eyes of Minnie’s celebrated guests.

What he did say was heavy and wise, fragments of his lecture.

“Instructive but not amusing,” whispered Minnie, “but rather a dear, don’t you think?”

“No, I really don’t. He knows too much — he’s quite dried up.”

“But so good-looking,” insisted Minnie. “And not married—”

“A lucky escape for some woman” — the obvious gibe came sincerely to my lips. “Think of being married to a treatise on Sanitation—”

“Oh, he’s much more than that,” said Minnie earnestly, “a really great doctor, you know.”

I did know, but I was quite vague as to his actual achievements; one generally is vague as to the achievements of those outside one’s own world.

I noticed him once or twice, impassive, bored, grave, among the guests; I was surprised not to see the familiar gesture of the hand to the watch, the murmur of “an appointment” which is such a man’s usual escape from a crowd of women.

But he stayed.

When tea was over and dancing had begun, he, alone for a moment, looked round as if searching for someone.

He caught my eye and came so directly over to me that my companion rose at once and wandered off.

Sir William took the vacant chair; I was more overwhelmed than flattered.

“You must have been very bored this afternoon,” he said seriously.

I replied that I rather made a point of never being bored, but that I’d been depressed — and understood very little; I paid him the compliment of not trying to “play up” to him.

“Of course you were. You write, don’t you?”

“Only a little. As an amateur.”

“I’ve read them. Phantasmagoria.”

This was amazing.

“Yes, they’re phantasmagoria — don’t you love the word? But strange you should bother with them, Sir William.”

“Do you think so?”

“Well — I shouldn’t have thought you’d have much time for that kind of thing.”

He looked at me, wistfully, I thought.

“Yet I could tell you something.”

And then he was silent, as if I had discouraged him; he seemed so remote from the scene, the warm, shaded room, the dancers, the hothouse flowers, that he made me too feel detached.

We were sitting a little apart in one of Minnie’s famous alcoves lit by a painted alabaster lamp; we were left alone, because all the others were enjoying themselves.

Minnie glanced at me and nodded cheerfully; I think that she was rather glad to have the great man taken off her hands.

As for him, I really think he was as unconscious of his surroundings now as he had been during his lecture, he never asked if I danced, he never seemed to notice that anyone was dancing.

He spoke again, almost in a challenging tone.

“Do I seem to you very alien to all that?” he asked.

I was at a loss as to what thought he was finishing with this sentence, and so I said, “All — what?”

He hesitated.

“Romance is perhaps the word.”

Even to me that word was rather profaned.

“Oh, Romance—”

“I use it,” said Sir William stiffly, “in the purest sense. It has of course been cheapened by our lesser writers. Like several other beautiful words — love, lovely, and others. They become clichés, slick, disgusting. Think, however, what Romance would mean to a lonely man who never saw a newspaper or heard a gossip and never read a book that was less than two hundred years old.”

I agreed that everything was overdone.

“Nothing fresh is left,” I lamented, “every story has been told and staled.”

Sir William corrected me.

“You should know better. Told, but not staled. What of a kiss, the rose’s scent? You’ve been kissed before, if you’re lucky; you’ve smelt a rose before, if you’ve any sense — yet you are just as eager for the present kiss, the present rose.

“And with Romance. It is always the same Romance, of course, but only a fool seeks for novelty.”

He spoke abstractedly, dryly, and his words, so at variance with his manner, surprised me a great deal.

“It is quite true,” I said, “but I hardly thought you would know as much, Sir William.”

“Why?”

I did not know how to explain to him how remote, how stern, how impressive and cold he seemed.

“You’re too wise,” I said, “you know too much to know that.”

“Exactly. ‘With all thy wisdom get understanding’, eh? Yes, I know too much, and none of it much use. But I know that too. A materialist may have his glimpses into spiritual matters.”

“Not if he’s really a materialist, Sir William.”

He ignored that.

“I came here to speak to you,” he said in a coldly impersonal tone, “because of some things of yours I’ve read. I thought I’d like to tell you something that happened to me, perhaps get you to write it down as a sort of record. One ages, memory weakens. I always fear that what is so vivid today tomorrow may be dim. That is,” he added with perfunctory politeness, “if it interests you.”

I said with truth that it did interest me. Of course.

“That’s good of you. And then, on my death — I am considerably your senior — you might publish the story, as — a lesson to other people.”

He looked at his watch (the familiar gesture at last!) and excused himself in conventional tones.

Another time perhaps he might tell me the story? Or, no, there wasn’t a story. I hoped he wouldn’t forget, but thought he would.

Three days later he rang up to ask for an appointment; I begged him to come that afternoon; I should be alone.

He came; immaculate, stately, unsmiling, very impressive.

And, after an apology for tea, he began speaking, looking into the fire the while just as if I wasn’t there; I saw at once that he was intensely lonely and that it was an immense joy and relief for him to speak, which he did carefully and without a trace of emotion, in a concise, stately language.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

It’s twenty years ago, 1905, exactly twenty years, in the winter. I was very hard-working, very absorbed and very successful for a youngster. I had no ties and a little money of my own, I’d taken all the degrees and honours I could take, and I’d just finished a rather stiff German course in Munich — physical chemistry — and I was rather worn out.

I had not begun to practise and I decided to rest before I did so.

I recognized in myself those dangerous symptoms of fatigue, lack of interest in everything and a nervous distrust of my powers. And by nature I was fairly confident, even, I daresay, arrogant.

While I was still in Munich a cousin I had almost forgotten, died and left me a house and furniture.

Not of much value and in a very out-of-the-way place.

I thought the bequest queer and paid no attention to it; of course I was rather pleased, but I decided to sell.

I meant to live in London and I had not the least intention of an early marriage, nor indeed of any marriage at all.

I was nearly thirty and sufficiently resolute and self-contained.

When I returned to London and consulted my lawyers about the sale of the house, which was called Stranger’s End, they advised that I should see it first and check the inventories of the contents.

They said that there were some curious old pieces there I might care to keep; I did not think this likely, as I had no interest in such things, but I thought I would go to see the house.

I was too tired for pleasure or amusement; one can be, you know.

The thought of this lonely, quiet house attracted me; it was near Christmas and I dreaded the so-called festivities, the invitations of friends, the upset to routine.

I went to Stranger’s End and my first impression justified my lawyers’ warning; it was not a very saleable property.

The house stood one end of a lonely Derbyshire valley, on the site of one much older that had been burnt down.

The style was classic-Palladian, purplish brick, white pilasters, hard, square, ugly, more like Kent than Wren.

The garden had been very formal, with broderie beds, but was neglected, the stucco summer-houses, statues and fountains being in a dilapidated condition, and the parterres a tangle of wild growth.

The situation was lonely in the extreme, really isolated; the railway had missed the valley and there was no passable motor road near; the approaches to Stranger’s End were mean tracks across moor and mountain.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Sir William Torrance was silent here; he seemed to sink into deep abstraction, as he stared into the fire.

And I, too, could see what he was seeing, that solitary, pretentious, ugly and neglected mansion in the Derbyshire dales.

“It sounds haunted,” I suggested.

He roused himself.

“No, it wasn’t. I never heard the least suggestion of that. There was no story about the place at all. It had come to my cousin through his father’s people; our connection was through the female side, and they had been quiet, prosperous folk who hadn’t for a hundred years lived much at Stranger’s End. But my cousin, an eccentric sort of man, had taken a liking to the place.”

“Why did he leave it to you?”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I don’t know why he left it to me. We had been slightly friendly as boys, but he was queer. We went such different ways. He was a little older than I. And died rather tragically, through an accident. Well, there was the place. I liked it.

Really relished the isolation; I was terrified of a breakdown, of losing my capacity, my zest for work; I thought — whatever I do, I’ll get fit.

That was a very severe winter, at least in Derbyshire; the fells and dales were covered with snow, and all that cracked stucco frippery in the garden, those sham deities of the eighteenth century, were outlined in white and masked in ice.

I had no personal servant in those days; the caretaker, an old man, and his widowed daughter looked after me; they were rather a dour couple but efficient enough and seemed attached to Stranger’s End, for they asked if I would “speak for them” to my purchaser who did not yet exist.

The house was furnished exactly as you would expect it to be, panelled walls, heavy walnut furniture, indigo blue green tapestry, gilt wood mirrors, and pictures of the schools of Van Dyck and Kneller.

It was a large house, much larger than you would think from that stern façade, and I was there a while before I knew all the rooms.

I enjoyed, with a sense of irony, the grandeur of the state bedroom which probably had chiefly been used for the “lying in state” of defunct owners.

The four-poster was adorned by dusky plumes and curtains stiff with needlework, rotting at the cracks and faded a peculiar dove-like colour.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Sir William spoke with a lingering relish curious to hear.

“Strange,” I thought, “that he should remember all these details, strange, too, that this is the man who gave that drab lecture in that drab hall.”

He seemed to want no encouragement nor comment from me, and continued in his level, pleasant tones that were so virile and powerful even when muted as they were now.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I found, during those first few days, several odd pieces in the house. Of course I had nothing to do but look for them.

It was ferociously cold and snowed steadily; all prospect from the windows even was blotted out.

Among other things I found a little box of blue velvet sewn with a very intricate design in seed pearl and embroidered in gold thread — “Made by mee, Darke Ann”. Impossible to describe how that fascinated me!

An empty, trifling sort of box, rather worn, odorous of some aromatic — musk or tonquin.

Made by “Darke Ann”!

Why should she so describe herself, in that formal age to which she belonged?

There was no date, but I thought the thing went back to the time of my grandmother.

It was because, perhaps, my brain was so exhausted, because I was so studiously keeping it free from all serious matter, that this absurd detail so obsessed me; I had never had any imagination nor cared for fanciful things, I’d worked too hard.

But now, when my mind was empty this seized on it — “Darke Ann.”

I had no difficulty in visualizing her; I could see her moving about the house, bending over that box, looking out of the windows on to the snow.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

“The house, then, was haunted after all,” I suggested.

Sir William denied this earnestly.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

No. I have been trying to convey to you that it was not.

Nothing of the kind. It was merely that I, shut up alone in this queer (to me) house in this great solitude, was able to picture, very clearly, this creature of my fancy.

Purely of my fancy:

You know how the snow will give one that enclosed feeling, shut in alone, remote, softly imprisoned.

So few people came to the house, and those few I never saw.

Then one night — it could not have been long before Christmas, of which festival I took no account — I went up to my room holding a lamp — there was no other means of lighting in the old house — and glancing at the bed I saw there—

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

He paused, and when he continued I had the strangest sensation, for this man, so dry, so austere, so conventionally clothed, whom I had heard lecturing on ‘Sanitation’, whose reputation was so lofty, whose life and career were well known to have been so dry, cold and laborious, spoke like a poet making an embroidery of beautiful words.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

A woman, he went on with infinite tenderness. She lay lightly to one side with her arms crossed, so that the delicate fingers rested on her rounded elbows, but so lightly! She wore a plain robe and a cap, with a crimped edge, tied under her chin; tucked into her breast was a posy of flowers, winter flowers, aconite, I think. She was so fine, so airy that she did not press the bed at all, but rested there, as a little bird might rest on a water flower without rippling the pool.

She smiled; her face was soft and dimpled, her eyes closed, yet not so completely that a streak of azure did not show beneath the fragile lids; her lips were full, but pale — the whole colour of her pearl and mist, merged into the faded tarnish of the bed.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Sir William, who had been gazing into the fire, suddenly looked at me.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Not a ghost, he said. I knew she was not there. I knew the bed was empty. Hallucination is perhaps the word. I had been over-working. Mind and nerves were strained.

I told myself that she was not there, and I seated myself with my needless lamp beside the bed and looked at her; I say, needless lamp, for when I had extinguished it, I saw her in the dark as easily, as precisely.

Then the window must rattle at the pane and make me look round with a start, and when I looked back again she was gone.

The next day I examined my casket of blue velvet with even greater tenderness, and chancing to pull at a little odd thread, ripped the stuff, so old and perished it was, so that there was an ugly slit across the lid.

I was looking at this in much chagrin when my caretaker entered.

“Who would this be?” I asked, as lightly as I could. “Darke Ann”?

“That would be Lady Ann Marly, sir,” he answered sullenly. “There’s her portrait upstairs.”

“Where?” I was startled.

“In the attics. I don’t think you’ve been up to the attics, sir.”

I went; that bitter, windy day I went up to the attics of Stranger’s End. The snow had ceased and I could see the valley white from end to end, and the hills, sombre against a sky like a grey goose’s breast.

There was the portrait, standing with others amid dusty lumber, cobwebs and decay.

It was she, of course, Dark Ann, but as I turned the picture round I was shocked.

She was so much further away than I had thought.

A hundred years, I had guessed, but the costume was that of the first Charles, a tight gown of grey satin, monstrous pearls at throat and ears, a confusion of jet black ringlets and the face that I had seen in my — hallucination.

It was a fine painting by that sterling artist, Janssens van Ceulen, and I wondered why it had been banished to that sad obscurity.

On the black background was painted “The Lady Ann Marly, aetat. 25, Darke Ann.”

Dark she was, as a gipsy, as a Spaniard, in eyes and hair, yet pure and clear in her complexion as a lily, as a rose.

I had the picture taken downstairs and hung in the room where I usually sat. The man, old Doveton, knew nothing of the portrait, or of the Lady Ann Marly, only what I could see for myself, the names on canvas and casket, but he told me that the Marlys were buried in Baswell Church and probably this “black Madam” amongst them, and also that there was an antique shop in the same town where I could get my casket repaired.

I will not bother you, said Sir William at this part of his extraordinary narrative, with any of my feelings, moods, or states of mind. I will merely tell you the facts.

The first day it was fit to leave the house (for the snow had fallen again in great abundance), I went down across the valley to Baswell, a town so small, so old, so grim and silent, that it seemed to me like a thing imagined, not seen.

The church, heavy, mutilated, dark, squatted on a little slope and was flanked by tombs so gaunt, monstrous, ponderous and grim as to seem a very army of death; the snow touched them here and there with a ghastly white, and the ivy on the tower was a green darker than black against that pallid winter sky.

Inside, the place was musty, dull, crowded with tombs, knights, priests, ladies, children in busts and effigies — so much dust on everything!

As if it had risen from the vaults below to choke the holy air!

The pale dimness of the faint December light struggled through panes of old, dingy glass in withered reds and blues, only to be blocked by melancholy pillars and frowning arches.

I found her tomb; a gigantic rococo urn draped with a fringed cloth with boastful letters setting forth her prides and virtues, and a Latin epigram, florid and luscious, punning on her name of “Dark Ann” and the eternal Darkness that had swallowed her loveliness.

She had died, unmarried, “of a sudden feaver” in her 25th year, 1648.

The year the portrait was painted.

I had the casket in my pocket and I set out to find the antique shop.

There was only one, in a side street, in a house as old, as sad, as grim as the church, with a tiny window, crowded by melancholy lumber, the broken toys and faded vanities of the dead.

Clocks that had stopped forever, rusty vessels from which no one would drink again, queer necklaces no woman would ever again clasp round her throat, snapped swords and chipped tea cups — oh, a very medley of pathetic rubbish!

I pulled the bell, for the door was locked, and was opened immediately by a woman who stood smiling and asking me in out of the uncharitable afternoon.

It was Dark Ann — or, as my common sense assured me, a creature exactly like her.

“What is your name?” I asked stupidly.

“Ann Marly,” she replied in the sweetest accents.

“Why, I’ve just been looking at your tomb.”

She smiled, not, though, surprised.

“I believe there is such a name in the churstory — many of them, indeed. The Marlys were great people round about here. And yet we have been long away and only just returned.”

As she spoke she held the door for me and I entered the low, dusky shop, which was piled with lumber and lit by only a twilight greyness.

“Long away?” I echoed.

“Yes, a long time,” she smiled. “And, please what did you want?”

In a delicious amaze I handed her the casket; she looked at it and sighed.

“You want that mended?”

“Yes, please — she was called Dark Ann and that should be your name too, you know.”

She did not answer this, but said gravely that the box could be mended — she herself would do the exquisite stitching.

I could look at nothing but the lady — I must use this word; neither woman nor girl will express this creature.

She wore a dark dress that might have been of any period, low in the neck, and the clouds of her dark ringlets were lightly confined by a comb I could not see.

She asked me into an old room at the back of the shop, and there she gave me tea in shallow yellow cups.

The whole place was old, she said — the high-backed cane chairs in which we sat, the boards beneath our feet, the beams above our heads, the dark pictures of carnations and gillyflowers in gilt bronze frames, the sea green glass mirror in red tortoiseshell, all these things were old.

She and her grandfather had opened the little shop only lately, and only, it seemed, because they wanted to come back to Baswell; she told me nothing more of herself, nor did I speak of myself.

I could not think of her as another than the Dark Ann of the portrait, the casket, the tomb; I did not wish to think of her as another; hallucination and reality blended in one.

I went over every day to see her; it was understood we were lovers, that we should marry and live in Stranger’s End all our lives.

Understood but not spoken of—

Once I brought her up to the ugly, queer house that now I no longer had any intention of selling.

I had found an old pair of tiny gauntlets in a chest, much worn, fringed with gold; she slipped them on, and they fitted to the very creases.

Enough of this.

As you know, one can’t describe a rapture — sometimes, when I stood near her, there was a sense of radiance, well—

With every year it becomes more difficult to recall, sometimes I forget it altogether, and yet I know it was there, it actually happened — that time of ecstasy.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

He was silent for a little, and in my quiet room I could see the glittering evanescent gleams of a vision that would not wholly vanish through all the prosaic years.

“And I suppose,” I said, “that you forgot your work and your ambitions.”

He looked at me sharply.

“That was exactly what happened. I remembered nothing, I lived in the moment, I hardly thought even of the future, though that was to be spent with her. I lived in that queer, ugly house in that lonely valley, and I went to and fro that grim, silent little town, accompanied by snow, wind and clouds, to sit in the little dim parlour behind the huddled shop and drink tea with Ann Marly out of those flat yellow cups, beneath the old beams, the old pictures, lit by a clear fire that glittered on the smooth surface of bluish tiles with puce-coloured landscapes, and the mellow radiance of wax candles in heavy plated sticks that showed the red copper through where they were worn.”

“You remember it all very distinctly, Sir William.”

“Even the threads in her dress — where the sleeve was sewn to the bodice — a little lighter than the silk.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I said I would keep to the facts, he sighed. So let all that go. One day I received a telegram.

I read it as if it had been in an unknown language at first.

When I came to understand it, I remembered who I was, where I was, what I had been and hoped to be, what was expected of me.

It was from a friend, a man I greatly admired and respected, a really eminent, brilliant doctor—

It was a long telegram.

At that time Medicine was beginning to be very interested in Encephalitis Lethargica and a Swiss doctor claimed to have found a — what you would call a cure. Would I go, with three other men and investigate, report, and if need be, learn the treatment?

I was excited, alert; I wired back an acceptance; in twenty-four hours I was in London.

I had been tremendously interested in this disease, so rare, deadly and horrible, with its terrible sequelae, of dementia praecox, change of character and loss of memory, and I was again the careful, keen man of science, trained to test, to doubt, to explore—

We were in the train for Geneva before I thought of Dark Ann.

I wired her from the first stop; I didn’t really know her address, I had never noticed the name of the shop or the street, but I put “Miss Ann Marly, Baswell, Derby”; the place was so small I had no doubt it would find her; I wrote from Geneva, I said I was coming back.

I wrote and wired often enough during three weeks.

But she never sent me any message.

I blamed myself; my flight had been atrocious, I could not explain it to myself, it was extraordinary, incredible. I had started off like a man wakened from a dream!

She was offended, angry. I thought it reasonable that she should be, I thought of her always as waiting for me.

It was a month before I got back — the Swiss doctor’s work was interesting, but there was nothing in it, really.

I returned to Derbyshire.

It was still cold, grey, iron-like in earth and sky.

“Why on earth is this house called ‘Stranger’s End’?” I asked old Doveton.

“I don’t know, sir. But it was a fancy in those old days, I think.”

I went to Baswell.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

“And this is pretty well the end of my story,” said Sir William ironically.

“She was dead?”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I could not find the shop. In the street where I could have sworn it was, stood an old empty house; the neighbours said it had been empty a long time, they remembered no antique shop, no Ann Marly — they were vague, stupid, unfriendly.

I ransacked the town; she, her grandfather, the shop with that delicious parlour had utterly disappeared.

I went to the post office and they showed me the last of my little heap of letters; the others had travelled back to Switzerland through the dead letter office and must now be waiting for me at my London address.

“There’s a name like this in the church,” said the postmaster sullenly, looking at me queerly, “on a tomb. I’ve never heard of another here.”

I brought Doveton in to Baswell and made him point out the shop he had recommended for the repair of the velvet box.

He showed me a dingy furniture shop in the High Street where they did upholstering.

I asked him if he remembered the lady who had come to Stranger’s End.

And the sulky fellow said that he did not, which may have been true, for I brought her and took her away myself and I do not think she met either of the servants.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I knew that he had never found her; the room seemed full of a miasma of regret, of remorse, of yearning.

“So you went back to your work,” I said tentatively, for I was not sure of his control.

“Yes, I did. I sold the house and all the contents.” He looked at me wildly. “I burnt the portrait, I could not endure it. I sold the house to the neighbouring lord who wanted the ground for his shooting — it was just in his way, that old garden, that old ugly house. He destroyed both. I wouldn’t have sold to anyone who had not promised to destroy.”

He looked withered, shrunk.

“I have the little blue box, so neatly mended, full of dead aconites, like she held against her breast—”

“You’re confusing the vision and the reality,” I said; “that — hallucination must have been the first Ann — after death, I rather think.”

“After death,” repeated Sir William.

“You’ve done good work,” I reminded him, “devoted yourself to real, fine, man’s work — she would have spoilt you for that, perhaps.”

He said drearily:

“Yes, I’ve had my work. And nothing else.”

“Well, fame, applause, gratitude, money, honours.”

“Oh, those,” he looked at me vaguely, “but I never had another dream. Not one. Now if that telegram hadn’t come—”

He paused and I finished for him:

“It broke the spell, you mean. It restored you to your normal self — it made you return to your normal life.”

“Exactly.” He was now composed, austere, even ironic again. “I would give all I’ve ever gained since to have that moment again, to have that choice — the dream or the bread and water. And at the moment I didn’t know it was a choice.”

“You wish you hadn’t gone?”

He rose.

“Do I wish I hadn’t gone! Haven’t I told you the story as a warning? That was the only real thing that ever happened to me.”

He turned to the door.

“But Ann, Ann Marly?” I asked. “What of her? Why did she disappear?”

“Why did she come, you mean,” he answered dryly. “I lost her, because I forgot how to dream.”

“You mean — she didn’t really exist?” I felt a pang of fear.

Sir William Torrance smiled.

“I’m due the other end of London at six — I’ve talked you to death. Good-bye.”

His manner was correct, lifeless again; I knew from the papers that he was lecturing on “Bacteriology in Food” at some institute.

I let him go, there was nothing to be said.

Nothing.

Dark Ann and Other Stories (1927)

HALF-PAST TWO
aka
“AN APPOINTMENT
WITH STIFFKEY”

The light had been put out on the stairs. Usually, when he returned late to spend the night in his rooms, he found it burning. Now he had to make his way slowly, striking matches as he went up the old dingy enclosed stairs.

It was a long time since he had spent a night in this house, and he did not greatly care about doing so. It was an ancient, inconvenient residence, hidden away in a small square which had been half demolished, and was hemmed in on either side by massive modern buildings. Only when, as now, the young man had been detained so late at a dance that he had missed the last train to his home in the country did he resort to the expedient of spending the night in this makeshift fashion.

Roger Hoby knew that he would be alone in the house, as he always was when he spent the night there, with a great many other empty houses to right and left of him, and there was something in this silence more oppressive than the silence of the open country — so many buildings around him, so busy and crowded in the day, at night so empty and silent; and he blamed the caretaker who had not left the old-fashioned gas (for there was no electric light in the house) burning on the stairs. So heavy was the sense of oppression on him that he decided the next night he had to pass in town would be in a hotel.

He found his own door, opened it, and entered the suite of chambers he occupied on the second floor, lit the gas in the first room, and passed into the second, which he used as his architect’s office.

It was a hateful, raw, cold and foggy night, and Roger Hoby was shuddering and shivering from having passed through the bitter, bleak streets and the damp cold of the dark stairway. He was therefore pleasantly amazed when he felt the genial warmth that met him as he opened the second door and saw the room full of all his own familiar and pleasant possessions, brightly illuminated by the glow of a large fire.

As he had not been there since the afternoon he wondered who could have made up such a large fire to last until this late hour. The caretaker was seldom in the building after six; even as Hoby wondered he noticed that someone was sitting in the large armchair drawn up by the fireplace — a man whose dark shape appeared to be one with that of the chair and was outlined against the bright blaze of the coals.

“Hallo!” cried Hoby, considerably startled, and not without an odd creep of fear in his blood, and more than ordinary amazement.

The figure did not move. One hand was hanging over the edge of the armchair, and Hoby noticed that it was a peculiarly shaped hand, with long splay-ended fingers. Roger Hoby, advancing with considerable effort of will, almost laughed aloud with relief when he saw that the man whom he had seen sitting before the fire was Durant Loveday, who occupied the rooms above his own. He was a man with whom Hoby had no more than the most casual acquaintance, and for whom he did not greatly care. It was more than odd to find him sitting there at this hour.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Loveday, and he seemed as relieved to see Hoby as Hoby had been to see him.

“What do you want?” asked Roger, briefly. “I didn’t know you ever spent the night here. How did you get in?”

“I don’t ever spend the night here,” replied Durant Loveday, quickly. “This is the first time I have ever been here late. But then, you see, I have an appointment.”

“An appointment here at this hour?”

“Yes, it sounds peculiar, doesn’t it?”

Roger Hoby thought it sounded very peculiar. He wondered that he had never noticed before that Loveday had such ugly splayed fingers. But then he had never given him more than the most cursory glance on the stairs or in the street. He knew nothing at all about the fellow, and he had never liked the thin dry face, the eyes that were too pale, too deeply cut and deeply set. All he knew of Loveday was that he also was an architect and appeared to have an income independent of his work, which amounted to very little, as far as Hoby knew.

“Well, you didn’t make an appointment here, I suppose?” said Hoby, warming himself before the fire which his uninvited guest had kept so generously piled with coal.

“No, it was because I decided not to keep my appointment that I came here,” replied the other. “Someone was coming back for me — but I didn’t want to see him.”

“How did you get in?”

“I slipped in before your clerk went. I hid, and he went and left me locked in.”

“Did he?” thought Hoby.

“I’m glad you’ve come back,” said Loveday in a confidential tone, leaning forward from the armchair. “I’ve been here for hours. I am glad of your company. I kept on piling up the fire to make a bright light, but, still, I am glad of your company.”

“Well, I can’t keep you company,” replied Hoby. “I want to go to bed. It must be two o’clock.”

Loveday put up his hand, his thick finger-ends travelled over his thin lips, and those pale, deep-set eyes gazed at Hoby with an expression that the young man had never seen in a human face before — one of absolute terror.

“Why, you’re afraid,” cried Hoby, involuntarily.

“I’ve got an appointment,” muttered Loveday, “at half-past two.”

Hoby went to his cupboard and set out the whisky and soda. “Look here,” he said, in a voice he tried to make as practical as possible, “you’d better tell me what this is all about. You seem to have lost your nerve a bit, haven’t you? What are you doing here really — hiding?”

“There’s someone coming back to see me at half-past two,” cried Loveday; “someone whom I have been avoiding for years.”

“Then, why on earth,” asked Hoby, “did you make an appointment with him in such a place and at such an hour?”

“He forced me,” said Loveday, his voice falling to a whimper; “he forced me to it. You don’t know what power he’s got over me. I met him in the street, and then in a restaurant, but that wouldn’t do. He would come here at half-past two. I didn’t make the appointment; he did. He told me, ‘Half-past two today, and I’ll be there.’ He came and went, without saying anything except, I’ll be back at half-past two tonight.’”

“How is he going to get in?” asked Hoby. “I closed the door behind me.”

“He forced me to give him the passkey,” said Loveday. “He’ll get in all right. But—” his voice dropped to an accent of cunning — “he’ll go upstairs to the offices overhead. He won’t think of looking for me here. And I’m locked in, aren’t I?”

“Yes, I shut the door,” said Hoby doubtfully. He took a drink and gave one to Loveday, who, however, refused it. “You had better tell me what it’s all about, hadn’t you?”

“It would be a very long story,” grinned Loveday. “There’s a great deal in it; in fact, there’s everything in it.” Then, seeing that Hoby had taken up some matches, he cried out, “Don’t light the gas; he’ll know there’s somebody here, then, and he might try to get in.”

“But he can’t,” replied Hoby briefly, “and we’re two to one if he does.”

“You don’t know Stiffkey,” said Loveday, still with a grin.

Hoby put down the box of matches. The room was really sufficiently illuminated by the fire, and it occurred to him that if anyone did come he would judge by firelight as easily as by gaslight that the room was occupied. He did not, however, mention this to Loveday. He had come to his own conclusions about him, the usual conclusions that the ordinary man comes to when faced with anything peculiar or extraordinary — he thought that Loveday was ill or out of his mind.

“Well,” he remarked soothingly, “you can have a shakedown here all night if you like. I sleep in the other room. There’s a sofa there, too, if you would like it.”

But Loveday said no, he preferred to sit by the fire. He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece, which now showed ten minutes past two.

No one will come, of course, thought Roger Hoby; the man’s been badly scared by something, and this is the way it’s taken him. He imagines an appointment with an enemy, but no one would come to such a place and at such a time. Observing again that snarl of terror on Loveday’s face, he was, however, himself slightly affected by fear, and said, “You had better really tell me something of what it’s about if you want me to stand by you in this you know.”

“I robbed Stiffkey,” confessed Loveday, “years ago when we were in Africa. He entrusted me with something of his to sell — stones, and I brought them over to England and gave them to a jeweller to value, and then I told him that the jeweller had absconded with them. Of course, I had sold them and kept the money. That was the beginning of better times for me. I thought Stiffkey had died in Africa, I didn’t hear from him for years… Hush! What was that?” He paused to listen, and Hoby listened, too, but there was no sound in the empty house.

“It sounds a pretty rotten sort of trick,” said Hoby, drinking his whisky and soda. “I wonder you care to talk about it.”

“There are other things,” said Loveday. “We were great enemies, but for years I haven’t seen him. I haven’t thought about him until I met him just the other day, and he insisted on this appointment — ‘to settle scores,’ he said. I offered him money — a great deal of money — but he said money wouldn’t pay for all those years. Hush! I do think that’s his step on the stairs.”

“It isn’t,” said Hoby impatiently. “There is no sound of anything. It’s too silent.” He went to the window. “The fog is quite thick,” he added.

“He’ll find his way through the fog all right,” answered Loveday faintly. “He means to have his vengeance.”

“Vengeance?” repeated Hoby. “Do you think he’ll come here to revenge himself on you?”

“Of course,” said Loveday, huddling himself together, “he always said he’d get me in the end.”

“Well, I shouldn’t have met him in this place and at this time of night,” replied Hoby, trying to speak with more confidence than he felt. He also found himself straining his ears to catch the possible sound of a footstep on the stairs, a rap, or a voice at the door. “He would come,” whimpered Loveday. “It’s his own fault, he would come. Nothing else would do for him, and I was in his power, wasn’t I? ‘I’ll be back,’ he said, ‘at half-past two tonight.’” Roger Hoby shuddered and drew nearer to the fire. He didn’t want to go to bed, after all; he thought he’d prefer to sit up with Loveday, not to leave him anyhow until after half-past two. The clock now showed twenty minutes past that hour.

Hoby had no compassion for him. He had never liked the man, who, on his own showing, deserved no friendship or respect from anyone — a thief, a traitor, and a coward. No, Hoby had no compassion for him, but he was drawn to him by a stronger link than compassion, that of terror. He was infected by the fear that Loveday gave out — fear that was so definite that it seemed another personality in the room, and one that had laid its grip on Hoby, who was seized by this terror that had seized Loveday, and shuddering and dreading — whoever it was — this Stiffkey, who was coming at half-past two. So strongly and suddenly did this terror overwhelm him that he made an impulsive movement towards the clock to stop the hands. Loveday, watching him, grinned: “I thought of that,” he said, “but it’s no use, there are other clocks outside.”

“Look here,” said Hoby roughly, trying to keep up his own courage, “this is all nonsense, you know; you’re imagining the whole thing; nobody’s coming, and even if they did—”

Loveday interrupted, more by his movement and his clutch on the arm of the chair, and the look on his face, than by anything he said, though he did mutter for the third time, “Hush!”

“It sounds like the front door,” said Hoby, “opening and closing.”

“Can’t you hear?” whispered Loveday. “There’s someone coming up the stairs.”

“No, I can’t,” said Hoby roughly.

The clock on the mantelpiece struck half-past two.

“Warmth, warmth!” cried Loveday. “I want to get warm.” He pulled his chair up to the fire, so closely it seemed that he must scorch.

Hoby went into the outer room and listened; that shivering man was afraid of murder. There certainly was someone coming up the stairs, slowly and deliberately, as if unhindered by the dark. Hoby, moved by some unaccountable impulse of dread, saw that his own door was secure, and then returned to where Loveday crouched lower and lower over the fire. Hoby could still hear the footsteps, slow and deliberate. Had Stiffkey come with the purpose of murder? Hoby looked around — he did not know why — for a weapon, and picked up a heavy stone paperweight, which had been laid carelessly on the chimney piece to hold down a few odd papers beside the clock. He found it was wet. He dropped it, and holding his fingers into the firelight, saw they were red.

“What’s this — blood?” cried Hoby.

Loveday began to laugh. “Do you hear a footstep? Half-past two — exactly to his appointment.”

Hoby could hear the footsteps. They had passed the door now. He could hear them overhead — tramping to and fro. He had struck a match and was staring at the chimney piece. The papers underneath the paperweight were splashed and spluttered with red. A thin dark line was running down the wall. Hoby, looking up, saw that it was coming from a patch on the plastered ceiling, exactly where it met the wall — a patch that seemed to be spreading as he looked. Loveday’s room was exactly overhead, by the dark patch on the plaster.

“Up in your room,” whispered Hoby, dropping the flaring match.

“Stiffkey,” grinned Loveday, staring, “Stiffkey.”

“And who else?” whispered Hoby.

“Only Stiffkey,” said Loveday.

The steps were again crossing the room overhead, and coming down the stairs. The two men listened, bending closer together, Loveday farther and farther leaning towards the fire. The footsteps paused at the outer door, and there was a sharp rap.

“I won’t let him in,” whispered Hoby.

“It doesn’t matter whether you do or not,” whimpered Loveday. “The door is open.”

“No, I shut the door.”

But, even as the young man spoke, he felt a draft of cold outer air. Driven by panic he went into the outer room. The door, which he was certain he had closed, stood open on the black staircase. The sound of footsteps had departed in the direction of Loveday, but he saw no one. Then he heard Loveday from behind him give a gurgle and a shriek of incredible anguish, and he did not dare go back to the tire. He knew that it was useless to do so, that Loveday was dead.

It was quite a long time before he was able to return to the room, light the gas, and stare at Loveday, rigid in his chair, beneath that red patch on the ceiling.

Hoby had known that he would be there alone.

The fog was now so thick that even with the gaslight everything looked dim, monstrous, and misshapen.

Torn by a fearful curiosity, Roger Hoby went up into Loveday’s chambers. They were not locked. Hoby, striking matches, found what he had expected to find — a dead man lying by the wainscot, who had been battered to death by the poker which lay beside him. His watch was staring on the floor beside him — it had stopped at half-past two, which must have been the hour when Loveday murdered him.

The appointment was for half-past two, but in the afternoon — not in the night — he had said he would return.

But, who was the other? For whom had Loveday waited all those hours — first upstairs, and then hiding down in Hoby’s room? Stiffkey, returning to keep his second appointment again, the next time the clock was at half-past two?

“The Daily Mail” 15 Aug. 1928

Sheep’s Head and Babylon, and Other Stories of Yesterday and Today (1929)

THE PRESCRIPTION

John Cuming collected ghost stories; he always declared that this was the best that he knew, although it was partially second-hand and contained a mystery that had no reasonable solution, while most really good ghost stones allow of a plausible explanation, even if it is one as feeble as a dream, excusing all; or a hallucination or a crude deception. Cuming told the story rather well. The first part of it at least had come under his own observation and been carefully noted by him in the flat green book which he kept for the record of all curious cases of this sort. He was a shrewd and trained observer; he honestly restrained his love of drama from leading him into embellishing facts. Cuming told the story to us all on the most suitable occasion — Christmas Eve — and prefaced it with a little homily.

“You all know the good old saw — ‘The more it changes the more it is the same thing’ — and I should like you to notice that this extremely up-to-date ultramodern ghost story is really almost exactly the some as one that might have puzzled Babylonian or Assyrian sages. I can give you the first start of the tale in my own words, but the second part will have to be in the words of someone else. They were, however, most carefully and scrupulously taken down. As for the conclusion, I must leave you to draw that for yourselves — each according to your own mood, fancy, and temperament; it may be that you will all think of the same solution, it may he that you will each think of a different one, and it may be that everyone will be left wondering.”

Having thus enjoyed himself by whetting our curiosity, Cuming settled himself down comfortably in his deep chairman and unfolded his tale.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

It was about five years ago. I don’t wish to be exact with time, and of course I shall alter names — that’s one of the first rules of the game, isn’t it? Well, whenever it was, I was the guest of a — Mrs. Janey we will call her — who was, to some extent, a friend of mine; an intelligent, lively, rather bustling sort of woman who had the knack of gathering interesting people about her. She had lately taken a new house in Buckinghamshire. It stood in the grounds of one of those large estates which are now so frequently being broken up. She was very pleased with the house, which was quite new and had only been finished a year, and seemed, according to her own rather excited imagination, in every way desirable. I don’t want to emphasise anything about the house except that it was new and did stand on the verge, as it were, of this large old estate, which had belonged to one of those notable English families now extinct and completely forgotten. I am no antiquarian or connoisseur in architecture, and the rather blatant modernity of the house did not offend me. I was able to appreciate its comfort and to enjoy what Mrs. Janey rather maddeningly called “the old-world gardens,” which were really a section of the larger gardens of the vanished mansion which had once commanded this domain.

Mrs. Janey, I should tell you, knew nothing about the neighbourhood nor anyone who lived there, except that for the first it was very convenient for town, and tor the second she believed that they were all “nice” people, not likely to bother one. I was slightly disappointed with the crowd she had gathered together at Christmas. They were all people whom either I knew too well or whom I didn’t wish to know at all, and at first the party showed signs of being extremely flat. Mrs. Janey seemed to perceive this too, and with rather nervous haste produced, on Christmas Eve, a trump card in the way of amusement — a professional medium, called Mrs. Mahogany, because that could not possibly have been her name. Some of us “believed in,” as the saying goes, mediums, and some didn’t; but we were all willing to be diverted by the experiment. Mrs. Janey continually lamented that a certain Dr. Dilke would not be present. He was going to be one of the party, but bad been detained in town and would not reach Verrall, which was the name of the house, until later, and the medium, it seemed, could not stay; for she, being a personage in great demand, must go on to a further engagement. I, of course, like everyone else possessed of an intelligent curiosity and a certain amount of leisure, had been to mediums before. I had been slightly impressed, slightly disgusted, and very much bewildered, and on the whole had decided to let the matter alone, considering that I really preferred the more direct and old-fashioned method of getting in touch with what we used to call “The Unseen.” This sitting in the great new house seemed rather banal. I could understand in some haunted old manor that a clairvoyant, or a clairaudient, or a trance-medium might have found something interesting to say, but what was she going to get out of Mrs. Janey’s bright, brilliant, and comfortable dwelling?

Mrs. Mahogany was a nondescript sort of woman — neither young nor old, neither clever nor stupid, neither dark nor fair, placid, and not in the least self-conscious. After an extremely good luncheon {it was a gloomy, stormy afternoon) we all sat down in a circle in the cheerful drawing room; the curtains were pulled across the dreary prospect of the sky and grey landscape, and we had merely the light of the fire. We sat quite close together in order to increase “the power,” as Mrs. Mahogany said, and the medium sit in the middle, with no special precautions against trickery; but we all knew that trickery would have been really impossible, and we were quite prepared to be tremendously impressed and startled if any manifestations took place. I think we all felt rather foolish, as we did not know each other very well, sitting round there, staring at this very ordinary, rather common, stout little woman, who kept nervously pulling a little tippet of grey wool over her shoulders, closing her eyes and muttering, while she twisted her fingers together.

When we had sat silent for about ten minutes Mrs. Janey announced in a rather raw whisper that the medium had gone into a trance. “Beautifully,” she added. I thought that Mrs. Mahogany did not look at all beautiful. Her communication began with a lot of rambling talk which had no point at all, and a good deal of generalization under which I think we all became a little restive. There was too much of various spirits who had all sorts of ordinary names, just regular Toms, Dicks, and Harrys of the spirit world, floating round behind us, their arms full of flowers and their mouths of good will, all rather pointless And though, occasionally a Tom, a Dick, or a Hairy was identified by some of us, it wasn’t very convincing, and, what was worse, not very interesting We got however, our surprise and our shock, because Mrs Mahogany began suddenly to writhe into ugly contortions and called out in a loud voice, quite different from the one that she had hitherto used: “Murder!”

This word gave us all a little thrill, and we leaned forward eagerly to hear what further she had to say. With every sign of distress and horror Mrs Mahogany began to speak:

“He s murdered her. Oh, how dreadful! Look at him! Can’t somebody stop him? It’s so near here, too He tried to save her. He was sorry you know. Oh, how dreadful! Look at him! — he’s borne it as long as he can, and now he s murdered her! I see him mixing it in a glass. Oh, isn’t it awful that no one could have saved her — and he was so terribly remorseful afterward. Oh, how dreadful! How horrible!”

She ended in a whimpering of fright and horror, and Mrs. Janey, who seemed an adept at this sort of thing, leaned toward and asked eagerly:

“Can’t you get the name — can’t you find out who it is? Why do you get that here?”

“I don’t know,” muttered the medium, “it’s somewhere near here — a house, an old dark house, and there are curtains of mauve velvet — do you call it mauve? a kind of blue-red — at the windows. There’s a garden outside with a fish-pond and you go through a low doorway and down stone steps.”

“It isn’t near here,” said Mrs. Janey decidedly, “all the houses are new.”

“The house is near here,” persisted the medium. “I am walking through it now; I can see the room, I can see that poor, poor woman, and a glass of milk—”

“I wish you’d get the name,” insisted Mrs. Janey, and she cast a look, as I thought not without suspicion, round the circle. “You can’t be getting this from my house, you know, Mrs. Mahogany,” she added decidedly, “it must he given out by someone here — something they’re read or seen, you know,” she said, to reassure us that our characters were not in dispute.

But the medium replied drowsily, “No, it’s somewhere near here. I see a light dress covered with small roses. If he could have got help he would have gone for it, but there was no one; so all his remorse was useless…”

No further would induce the medium to say more; soon afterward she came out of the trance, and all of us, I think, felt that she had made rather a stupid blunder by introducing this vague piece of melodrama, and if it was, as we suspected, a cheap attempt to give a ghostly and mysterious atmosphere to Christmas Eve, it was a failure.

When Mrs. Mahogany, blinking round her, said brightly, “Well, here I am again! I wonder if I said anything that interested you?” we all replied rather coldly, “Of course it has been most interesting, but there hasn’t been anything definite.” And I think that even Mrs. Janey felt that the sitting had been rather a disappointment, and she suggested that if the weather was really too horrible to venture out of doors we should sit round the fire and tell old-fashioned ghost stories. “The kind,” she said brightly, “that are about bones and chairs and shrouds. I really think that is the most thrilling kind after all.” Then, with some embarrassment, and when Mrs. Mahogany had left the room, she suggested that not one of us should say anything about what the medium had said in her trance.

“It really was rather absurd,” said our hostess, “and it would make me look a little foolish if it got about; you know some people think these mediums are absolute fakes, and anyhow, the whole thing, I am afraid, was quite stupid. She must have got her contacts mixed. There is no old house about here and never has been since the original Verrall was pulled down, and that’s a good fifty years ago, I believe, from what the estate agent told me; and as for a murder, I never heard the shadow of any such story.”

We all agreed not to mention what the medium had said, and did this with the more heartiness as we were, not any one of us, impressed. The feeling was rather that Mrs. Mahogany had been obliged to say something and had said that….

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

“Well,” said Cuming comfortably, “that is the first part of my story, and I daresay you’ll think it’s dull enough. Now we come to the second part.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Latish that evening Dr. Dilke arrived. He was not in any way a remarkable man, just an ordinary successful physician, and I refuse to say that he was suffering from overwork or nervous strain; you know that is so often put into this kind of story as a sort of excuse for what happens afterward. On the contrary, Dr. Dilke seemed to be in the most robust of health and the most cheerful frame of mind, and quite prepared to make the most of his brief holiday. The car that fetched him from the station was Mrs. Mahogany away, and the doctor and the medium met for just a moment in the hall. Mrs. Janey did not trouble to introduce them, but without waiting for this Mrs. Mahogany turned to the doctor, and looking at him fixedly, said, “You’re very psychic, aren’t you?” And upon that Mrs. Janey was forced to say hastily: “This is Mrs. Mahogany, Dr. Dilke, the famous medium.”

The physician was indifferently impressed. “I really don’t know,” he answered, smiling, “I have never gone in for that sort of thing. I shouldn’t think I am what you call ‘psychic’ really; I have had a hard, scientific training, and that rather knocks the bottom out of fantasies.”

“Well, you are, you know,” said Mrs. Mahogany; “I felt it at once; I shouldn’t he at all surprised if you had some strange experience one of these days.”

Mrs. Mahogany left the house and was duly driven away to the station. I want to make the point very clear that she and Dr. Dilke did not meet again and that they held no communication except those few words in the hail spoken in the presence of Mrs. Janey. Of course Dr. Dilke got twitted a good deal about what the medium had said; it made quite a topic of conversation during dinner and after dinner, and we all had queer little ghost stories or incidents of what we considered “psychic” experiences to trot out and discuss. Dr. Dilke remained civil, amused, but entirely unconvinced. He had what he called a material, or physical, or medical explanation for almost everything that we said, and, apart from all these explanations he added, with some justice, that human credulity was such that there was always someone who would accept and embellish anything, however wild, unlikely, or grotesque it was.

“I should rather like to hear what you would say if such an experience happened to you,” Mrs. Janey challenged him; “whether you use the ancient terms of ‘ghost,’ ‘witches,’ ‘black magic,’ and so on, or whether you speak in modern terms like ‘medium,’ ‘clairvoyance,’ ‘psychic contacts,’ and all the rest of it; well, it seems one is in a bit of a tangle anyhow, and if any queer thing ever happens to you—”

Dr. Dilke broke in pleasantly: “Well, if it ever does I will let you all know about it, and I dare say I shall have an explanation to add at the end of the tale.”

When we ail met again the next morning we rather hoped that Dr. Dilke would have something to tell us — some odd experience that might have befallen him in the night, new as the house was, and banal as was his bedroom. He told us, of course, that he had passed a perfectly good night.

We most of us went to the morning service in the small church that had once been the chapel belonging ho the demolished mansion, and which had some rather curious monuments inside and in the churchyard. As I went in I noticed a mortuary chapel with niches for the coffins to be stood upright, now whitewashed and used as a sacristy. The monuments and mural tablets were mostly to the memory of members of the family of Verrall — the Verralls of Verrall Hall, who appeared to have been people of little interest or distinction. Dr. Dilke sat beside me, and I, having nothing better to do through the more familiar and monotonous portions of the service, found myself idly looking at the mural tablet beyond him. This was a large slab of black marble deeply cut with a very worn Latin inscription which I found, unconsciously, I was spelling out. The stone, it seemed, commemorated a woman who had been, of course, the possessor of all the virtues; her name was Philadelphia Carwithen, and I rather pleasantly sampled the flavour of that ancient name — Philadelphia. Then I noticed a smaller inscription at the bottom of the slab, which indicated that the lady’s husband also rested in the vault; he had died suddenly about six months after her — of grief at her loss, I thought, scenting out a pretty romance.

As we walked home across the frostbitten fields and icy lanes Dr. Dilke, who walked beside me, as he had sat beside me in church, began to complain of cold; he said he believed that he had caught a chill. I was rather amused to hear this old-womanish expression on the lips of so distinguished a physician, and I told him that I had been taught in my more enlightened days that there was no such thing as “catching a chill.” To my surprise he did not laugh at this, but said:

“Oh, yes, there is, and I believe I’ve got it — I keep on shivering; I think it was that slab of black stone I was sitting next. It was is cold as ice, for I touched it, and it seemed to me exuding moisture — some of that old stone does, you know; it’s always, as it were, sweating; and I felt exactly as if I were sitting next a slab of ice from which a cold wind was blowing; it was really as if it penetrated my flesh.”

He looked pale, and I thought how disagreeable it would be for us ail, and particularly for Mrs. Janey, if the good man was to be taken ill in the midst of her already not-too-successful Christmas party. Dr. Dilke seemed, too, in that ill-humour which so often presages an illness; he was quite peevish about the church and the service, and the fact that he had been asked to go there.

“These places are nothing but charnel houses, after all,” he said fretfully; “one sits there among all those rotting bones, with that damp marble at one’s side….”

“It is supposed to give you ‘atmosphere,’” I said. “The atmosphere of an old-fashioned Christmas…. Did you notice who your black stone was erected ‘to the memory of’?” I asked, and the doctor replied that he had not.

“It was to a young woman — a young woman, I took it, and her husband: ‘Philadelphia Carwithen,’ I noticed that, and of course there was a long eulogy of her virtues, and then underneath it just said that he had died a few months afterward. As far as I could see it was the only example of that name in the church — all the rest were Verralls. I suppose they were strangers here.”

“What was the date?” asked the doctor, and I replied that really I had not been able to make it out, for where the Roman figures came the stone had been very worn.

The day ambled along somehow, with games, diversions, and plenty of good food and drink, and toward the evening we began to feel a little more satisfied with each other and our hostess. Only Dr. Dilke remained a little peevish and apart, and this was remarkable in one who was obviously of a robust temperament and an even temper. He still continued to talk of a “chill,” and I did notice that he shuddered once or twice, and continually sat near the large fire which Mrs. Janey had rather laboriously arranged in imitation of what she would call “the good old times.”

That evening, the evening of Christmas Day, there was no talk whatever of ghosts or psychic matters; our discussions were entirely topical and of mundane matters, in which Dr. Dilke, who seemed to have recovered his spirits, took his part with ability and agreeableness. When it was time to break up I asked him, half in jest, about his mysterious chill, and he looked at me with some surprise and appeared to have forgotten that he had ever said he had got such a thing; the impression, whatever it was, which he had received in the church, had evidently been effaced from his mind. I wish to make that quite clear.

The next morning Dr. Dilke appeared very late at the breakfast table, and when he did so his looks were matter for hints and comment; he was pale, distracted, troubled, untidy in his dress, absent in his manner, and I, at least, instantly recalled what he had said yesterday, and feared he was sickening for some illness.

On Mrs. Janey putting to him some direct question as to his looks and manner, so strange and so troubled, he replied rather sharply, “Well, I don’t know what you can expect from a fellow who’s been up all night. I thought I came down here for a rest.”

We all looked at him as he dropped into his place and began to drink his coffee with eager gusto; I noticed that he continually shivered. There was something about this astounding statement and his curious appearance which held us all discreetly silent. We waited for further developments before committing ourselves; even Mrs. Janey, whom I had never thought of as tactful, contrived to say casually:

“Up all night, doctor. Couldn’t you sleep, then? I’m so sorry if your bed wasn’t comfortable.”

“The bed was all right,” he answered, “that made me the more sorry to leave it. Haven’t you got a local doctor who can take the local cases?” he added.

“Why, of course we have; there’s Dr. Armstrong and Dr. Fraser — I made sure about that before I came here.”

“Well, then,” demanded Dr. Dilke angrily, “why on earth couldn’t one of them have gone last night?”

Mrs. Janey looked at me helplessly, and I, obeying her glance, took up the matter.

“What do you mean, doctor? Do you mean that you were called out of your bed last night to attend a case?” I asked deliberately.

“0f course I was — I only got back with the dawn.”

Here Mrs. Janey could not forbear breaking in.

“But whoever could it have been? I know nobody about here yet, at least, only one or two people by name, and they would not be aware that you were here. And how did you get out of the house? It’s locked every night.”

Then the doctor gave his story in rather, I must confess, a confused fashion, and yet with an earnest conviction that he was speaking the simple truth. It was broken up a good deal by ejaculations and comments from the rest of us, but I give it you here shorn of all that and exactly as I put it down in my notebook afterward.

“I was awakened by a tap at the door. I was instantly wide-awake and I said, ‘Come in.’ I thought immediately that probably someone in the house was ill — a doctor, you know, is always ready for these emergencies. The door opened at once, and a man entered holding a small ordinary storm-lantern. I noticed nothing peculiar about the man. He had a dark greatcoat on, and appeared extremely anxious. ‘I am sorry to disturb you,’ he said at once, ‘but there is a young woman dangerously ill. I want you to come and see her.’ I, somehow, did not think of arguing or of suggesting that there were other medical men in the neighbourhood, or of asking how it was he knew of my presence at Verrall. I dressed myself quickly and accompanied him out of the house. He opened the front door without any trouble, and it did not occur to me to ask him how it was he had obtained either admission or egress. There was a small carriage outside the door, such a one as you may still see in isolated country places, but such a one as I was certainly surprised to see here. I could not very well make out either the horse or the driver, for, though the moon was high in the heavens, it was frequently obscured by clouds. I got into the carriage and noticed, as I have often noticed before in these ancient vehicles, a most repulsive smell of decay and damp. My companion got in beside me. He did not speak a word during the whole of the journey, which was, I have the impression extremely long. I had also the sense that he was in the greatest trouble, anguish, and almost despair; I do not know why I did not question him. I should tell you that he had drawn down the blinds of the carriage and we travelled in darkness, yet I was perfectly aware of his presence and seemed to see him in his heavy dark greatcoat turned up round the chin, his black hair low on his forehead, and his anxious, furtive dark eyes. I think I may have gone to sleep in the carriage, I was tired and cold. I was aware, however, when it stopped, and of my companion opening the door and helping me out. We went through a garden, down some steps and past a fish-pond; I could see by the moonlight the silver and gold shapes of fishes slipping in and out of the black water. We entered the house by a side door — I remember that very distinctly — and went up what seemed to be some secret or seldom-used stairs, and into a bedroom. I was, by now, quite alert, as one is when one gets into the presence of the patient, and said to myself, ‘What a fool I’ve been, I’ve brought nothing with me,’ and I tried to remember, but could not quite do so, whether or not I had brought anything with me — my cases and so on — to Verrall. The room was very badly lighted, but a certain illumination — I could not my whether it came from any artificial light within the room or merely from the moonlight through the open window, draped with mauve velvet curtains — fell on the bed, and there I saw my patient. She was a young woman, who, I surmised, would have been, when in health, of considerable, though coarse, charm. She was now in great suffering, twisted and contorted with agony, and in her struggles of anguish had pulled and torn the bedclothes into a heap. I noticed that she wore a dress of some light material spotted with small roses, and it occurred to me at once that she had been taken ill during the daytime and must have Iain thus in great for many hours, and I turned with some reproach to the man who had fetched me and demanded why help had not been sought sooner. For answer he wrung his hands — a gesture that I do not remember having noticed in any human being before; one hears a great deal of hands being wrung. but one does not so often see it. This man, I remember distinctly, wrung his hands, and muttered, ‘Do what you can for her — do what you can!’ I feared that this would be very little. I endeavoured to make an examination of the patient, but owing to her half-delirious struggles, this was very difficult; she was, however, I thought. likely to die, and of what malady I could not determine. There was a table nearby on which lay some papers — one I took to he a will — and a glass in which there had been milk. I do not remember seeing anything else in the room — the light was so bad. I endeavoured to question the man, whom I took to be the husband, but without any success. He merely repeated his monotonous appeal for me to save her. Then I was aware of a sound outside the room — of a woman laughing, perpetually and shrilly laughing. ‘Pray stop that,’ I cried to the man; ‘who have you got in the house — a lunatic?’ But he took no notice of my appeal, merely repeating his own hushed lamentations. The sick woman appeared to hear that demoniacal laughter outside, and raising herself on one elbow said, ‘You have destroyed me and you may well laugh.’

“I sat down at the table on which were the papers and the glass half full of milk, and wrote a prescription on a sheet torn out of my notebook. The man snatched it eagerly. ‘I don’t know when and where you can get that made up,’ I said, ‘but it’s the only hope.’ At this he seemed wishful for me to depart, as wishful as he had been for me to come. ‘That’s all I want,’ he said. He took me by the arm and led me out of the house by the same back stairs. As I descended I still heard those two dreadful sounds — the thin laughter of the woman I had not seen, and the groans, becoming every moment fainter, of the young woman whom I had seen. The carriage was waiting for me, and I was driven back by the same way I had come. When I reached the house and my room I saw the dawn just breaking. I rested till I heard the breakfast gong. I suppose some time had gone by since I returned to the house, but I wasn’t quite aware of it; all through the night I had rather lost the sense of time.”

When Dr. Dilke had finished his narrative, which I give here badly — but, I hope, to the point — we all glanced each other rather uncomfortably, for who was to tell a man like Dr. Dilke that he had been suffering from a severe hallucination? It was, of course, quite impossible that he could have left the house and gone through the peculiar scenes he had described, and it seemed extraordinary that he could for a moment have believed that he had done so. What was even more remarkable was that so many points of his story agreed with what the medium, Mrs. Mahogany, had said in her trance. We recognized the frock with the roses, the mauve velvet curtains, the glass of milk, the man who had fetched Dr. Dilke sounded like the murderer, and the unfortunate woman on the bed sounded like the victim; hut how had the doctor got hold of these particulars? We all knew that he had not spoken to Mrs. Mahogany, and each suspected the other of having told him what the medium had said, and that this having wrought on his mind he had the dream, vision, or hallucination he had just described to us. I must add that this was found afterward ho be wholly false; we were all reliable people and there was not a shadow of doubt we had all kept our counsel about Mrs Mahogany. In fact, none of us had been alone with Dr. Dilke the previous day for more than a moment or so save myself, who had walked with him from the church, when we had certainly spoken of nothing except the black stone in the church and the chill which he had said emanated from it. Well, to put the matter as briefly as possible, and to leave out a great deal of amazement and wonder, explanation, and so on, we will come to the point when Dr. Dilke was finally persuaded that he had not left Verrall all the night. When his story was taken to pieces and put before him, as it were, in the raw, he himself recognized many absurdities: How could the man have come straight to his bedroom? How could he have left the house? — the doors were locked every night, there was no doubt about that. Where had the carriage come from and where was the house to which he had been taken? And who could possibly have known of his presence in the neighbourhood? Had not, too, the scene in the house to which he was taken all the resemblance of a nightmare? Who was it laughing in the other room? What was the mysterious illness that was destroying the young woman? Who was the black-browed man who had fetched him? And, in these days of telephone and motorcars, people didn’t go out in the old-fashioned one-horse carriages to fetch doctors from miles away in the case of dangerous illness.

Dr. Dilke was finally silenced, uneasy, but not convinced. I could see that he disliked intensely the idea that he had been the victim of a hallucination and that he equally intensely regretted the impulse which had made him relate his extraordinary adventure of the night. I could only conclude that he must have done so while still, to an extent, under the influence of his delusion, which had been so strong that never for a moment had he questioned the reality of it. Though he was forced at last to allow us to put the whole thing down as a most remarkable dream, I could see that he did not intend to let the matter rest there, and later in the day (out of good manners we had eventually ceased discussing the story) he asked me if I would accompany him on some investigation in the neighbourhood.

“I think I should know the house,” he said, “even though I saw it in the dark. I was impressed by the fish-pond and the low doorway through which I had to stoop in order to pass without knocking my head.”

I did not tell him that Mrs. Mahogany had also mentioned a fish-pond and a low door.

We made the excuse of some old brasses we wished to discover in a nearby church to take my car and go out that afternoon on an investigation of the neighbourhood in the hope of discovering Dr. Dilke’s dream house.

We covered a good deal of distance and spent a good deal of time without any success at all, and the short day was already darkening when we came upon a row of almshouses in which, for no reason at all that I could discern, Dr. Dilke showed an interest and insisted on stopping before them. He pointed out an inscription cut in the centre gable which said that these had been built by a certain Richard Carwithen in memory of Philadelphia, his wife.

“The people whose tablet you sat next in the church,” I remarked.

“Yes,” murmured Dr. Dilke, “when I felt the chill,” and he added, “when I first felt the chill. You see, the date is 1830. That would he about right.”

We stopped in the little village, which was a good many miles from Verrall, and after some tedious delays because everything was shut up for the holiday, we did discover an old man who was willing to tell us something about the almshouses, though there was nothing much to be said about them. They had been founded by a certain Mr. Richard Carwithen with his wife’s fortune. He had been a poor man, a kind of adventurer, our informant thought, who had married a wealthy woman; they had not been at all happy. There had been quarrels and disputes, and a separation (at least, so the gossip went, as his father had told it to him); Finally, the Carwithens had taken a house here in this village of Sunford — a large house it was and it still stood. The Carwithens weren’t buried in this village though, but at Verrall; she had been a Verrall by birth — perhaps that’s why they came to this neighbourhood — it was the name of a great family in those days, you know…. There was another woman in the old story, as it went, and she got hold of Mr. Carwithen and was for making him put his wife aside; and so. perhaps, he would have done, but the poor lady died suddenly, and there was some talk about it, having the other woman in the house at the time, and it so convenient for both of them…. But he didn’t marry the other woman, because he died six months after his wife…. By his will he left all his wife his money to found these almshouses.

Dr. Dilke asked if he could see the house where the Carwithens had lived.

“It belongs to a London gentleman.” the old man said, “who never comes here. it’s going to be pulled down and the land sold in building lots; why, it’s been locked up these ten years or more. I don’t suppose it’s been inhabited since — no, not for a hundred years.”

“Well, I’m looking for a house round about here. I don’t mind spending a little money on repairs if that house is in the market.”

The old man didn’t know whether it was in the market or not, but kept repeating that the property was to be sold and broken up for building lots.

I won’t bother you with all our delays and arguments, but merely tell you that we did finally discover the lodgekeeper of the estate, who gave us the key. It was not such a very large estate, nothing to be compared to Verrall, but had been, in its time, of some pretension. Builders’ boards had already been raised along the high road frontage. There were some fine old trees, black and bare, in a little park. As we turned in through the rusty gates and motored toward the house, it was nearly dark, but we had our electric torches and the powerful head lamps of the car. Dr. Dilke made no comment: on what we had found, but he reconstructed the story of the Carwithens whose names were on that black stone in Verrall church.

“They were quarrelling over money, he was trying to get her to sign a will in his favour; she had some little sickness perhaps — brought on probably by rage — he had got the other woman in the house, remember; I expect he was no good. There was some sort of poison about — perhaps for a face wash, perhaps as a drug. He put it in the milk and gave it to her.”

Here I interrupted: “How do you know it was in the milk?”

The doctor did not reply to this. I had now swung the car round to the front of the ancient mansion — a poor, pretentious place, sinister in the half-darkness.

“And then, when he had done it,” continued Dr. Dilke, mounting the steps of the house, “he repented most horribly; he wanted to fly for a doctor to get some antidote for the poison with the idea in his head that if he could have got help he could have saved her himself. The other woman kept on laughing. He couldn’t forgive her that — that she could laugh at a moment like that; he couldn’t get help! He couldn’t find a doctor. His wife died. No one suspected foul play — they seldom did in those days as long as the people were respectable; you must remember the state in which medical knowledge was in 1830. He couldn’t marry the other woman, and he couldn’t touch the money; he left it all to found the almshouses; then he died himself, six months afterward, leaving instructions that his name should he added to that black stone. I daresay he died by his own hand. Probably he loved her through it all, you know — it was only the money, that cursed money, a fortune just within his grasp, but which he couldn’t take.”

“A pretty romance,” I suggested, as we entered the house; “I am sure there is a three-volume novel in it of what Mrs. Janey would call ‘the good old-fashioned’ sort.”

To this Dr. Dilke answered: “Suppose the miserable man can’t rest? Supposing he is still searching for a doctor?”

“We passed from one room to another of the dismal, dusty, dismantled house. Dr. Dilke opened a damaged shutter which concealed one of the windows at the back, and pointed out in the waning light a decayed garden with stone steps and a fish-pond; and a low gateway to pass through which a man of his height would have had to stoop. We could just discern this in the twilight. He made no comment. We went upstairs.’

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Here Cuming paused dramatically to give us the full flavour of the final part of his story. He reminded us, rather unnecessarily, for somehow he had convinced us that this was all perfectly true.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I am not romancing; I won’t answer for what Dr. Dilke said or did, or his adventure of the night before, or the story of the Carwithens as he constructed it, but this is actually what happened…. We went upstairs by the wide main stairs. Dr. Dilke searched about for and found a door which opened on to the hack stairs, and then he said: “This must be the room.” It was entirely devoid of any furniture, and stained with damp, the walls stripped of panelling and cheaply covered with decayed paper, peeling, and in parts fallen.

“What’s this?” said Dr. Dilke.

He picked up a scrap of paper that showed vivid on the dusty floor and handed it to me. It was a prescription. He took out his notebook and showed me the page where this fitted in.

“This page I tore out last night when I wrote that prescription in this room. The bed was just there. and there was the table on which were the papers and the glass of milk.”

“But you couldn’t have been here last night,” I protested feebly. “the locked doors — the whole thing!…”

Dr. Dilke said nothing. After a while neither did I. “Let’s get out of this place,” I said. Then another thought struck me. “What is your prescription?” I asked.

He said: “A very uncommon kind of prescription, a very desperate sort of prescription, one that I’ve never written before, nor I hope shall again — an antidote for severe arsenical poisoning.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

“I leave you,” smiled Cuming, “to your various attitudes of incredulity or explanation.”

“The London Magazine” Jan.1929

CRAB-APPLE HARVEST
writing as
GEORGE R. PREEDY

The old woman pushed her truck through the soldiers gathered on the outskirts of the ruined village. Corded to the truck was a large rudely-made box in the shape of a coffin. The soldiers were amazed, for it was amusing that anyone should think of burying their dead when corpses were as common in Silesia as hedgerow berries. They began to gather round the rude bier, offering to challenge, to interfere. The beldame was plainly glad to pause at her task. She stopped, rested on the hand-cart and wiped with the ragged ends of her tattered shawl the dirty sweat from her face. She was greatly fatigued; had she not been as strong as a draught-mare she would have been dead of starvation, plague or fright, long since.

Some of the soldiers jeered.

“Where are you going, ma belle? Where did you get the coffin? Crazy hag, did you see the bonfire in the churchyard last night after the bomb had made a hole? Plenty of coffins there, ma foi! And fine yellow skulls inside. Mon Dieu! they seemed glad of a little warmth by the way they grinned at us.”

Swinging his arms across his chest a cuirassier added through blue lips: “You have a damned early winter in this infernal country!”

The old woman had a little recovered her breath, only a slight trembling of her strong jaw showed her age and her exhaustion.

“It is my husband — my man — he is dead of famine; I am taking him to the little cemetery which the nuns keep on the hill. He used to work for them and they always promised to give him a burying.”

“How did you make the coffin?” asked a slim cornet. He was young enough to be depressed by the devastated country, the constant massacres. His fine eyes were inflamed by smoke and wine, but his complexion, despite the rigours of military life, was clear and smooth above his blue uniform.

“My husband was a carpenter, he made his own coffin when wood was cheap.”

The soldiers, yawning, heavy-headed, stared; there was something monstrous about the old hag, so powerful, so gaunt, with great worn hands, lean chaps rough with silver hairs, dried saliva at the corners of her lips, and a glance direct, vigorous, perhaps crazy.

“Very likely,” suggested a sergeant, embittered by a shattered hand roughly bandaged (even the victors lacked almost everything), “the harridan has some concealed money or good stuff in that box; I have heard of such dirty tricks, vielle folle!”

The cornet again languidly approached the hand-cart; he sneered at the thought of any booty being left in Klatz; why, it was a wonder that the old woman was alive herself. The loungers grinned to see him retreat, for the loathsome odour of decay had struck disgust into even his nostrils no longer sensitive.

“Parbleu, you have kept the carrion long enough, ma fille,” he said, holding his nose.

“May His Holy Name be blessed,” murmured the ancient creature. “Had I not to get up strength in my old body to do all as it should be done? It is not easy in these times.”

“Get on!” shrugged the cornet.

As the old woman bent to her task he threw a late loosened wild rose that he had been tormenting in his fingers on to the massive deal box; the others thought he mocked, but his face expressed only weariness; it was near the end of the campaign, everything pleasant had long since been destroyed, all supplies were wanting… When had anyone last tasted a glass of good wine, or a plate of fresh meat? And a pretty, lively girl would have been worth her weight in gold.

Along the road to Cracow by the side of the Vistula the old woman trudged, pushing and pulling her burden.

The sky was milky blue, the clouds curdled into heavy flower-like forms; half-rotted rushes bent in the flow of the river. The old creature was nearing the end of her endurance. She was so old, so ill-fed, and then the anxiety, eh, it was nearly too much for a miserable ancient woman.

“Surely she would never reach the convent on the hill… Eh, but she would; after all these weeks was she to fail now? And getting away from those ruffians, too, that was luck… God must be looking after a wretched old woman. May His Holy Name be blessed!” She crossed herself.

But her body and limbs ached, a bitter fluid soured her mouth, an acrid film dimmed her eyes, her heart beat heavily, with reluctance, in a bosom which felt empty… She leant straining against the hand-cart.

She proceeded with great pain along the road to Cracow. She reached the small orchard below the cemetery, she looked up at the lonely chapel of the convent (the soldiers had respected the nuns, it was difficult to know why), and she thought: “I cannot go any further.”

Her rough hands untied the knotted cords of the rude coffin on the truck, and slowly she lifted the lid after glancing round furtively, and a sprightly young girl, white and plump as a pet rabbit, sat up; she held a cloth soaked in vinegar to her dainty nostrils to deaden the smell of the dead rats at her feet. She got out stiffly and yawned. The fresh air was delicious. Ever since the soldiers had entered Klatz she had lived in a cupboard, hidden from greedy and covetous eyes, fed on tit-bits, it is true, but still in a cupboard.

The old woman cast away the rats and sank down on her haunches, gazing at her granddaughter with looks of pride, with the timidity of love.

“Listen, my Lisbeth, I have saved you, God be praised; the soldiers do not know you exist, but I can do no more, I am very tired — no one can see us here for the bend in the road — Now you must run quickly up to the convent, my darling.”

The girl gazed about her. It was an exquisite evening, pure, cold, azure; in all the landscape only the convent was dark, sombre.

The old woman’s senses began to fail, she had spent her last forces in pushing her heavy burden.

“Run quickly, my love, my dear, you will be safe with the holy sisters. Kiss me good-bye, Lisbeth … God be praised! I have saved you from the soldiers and their desires!”

The girl glanced at the old woman, no need to kiss her since she was already dead…. How ugly she was, sprawling in the frost-bitten grass! Lisbeth fingered her own soft unblemished bosom and eyed the convent on the hill. She was hungry, she greedily snatched up a fallen apple and lustfully set her little pointed teeth in it. A crab apple! She pitched it away with disgust; as if her mouth were not already twisted with the vinegar! The disappointment confirmed her decision; everything was so dull and quiet, the convent so morosely silent, her grandame so repulsive in her sudden twisted death — and the orchard was of crab apples! She picked up from the truck the overblown rose, licked her red lips slyly and turned back along the Cracow road in search of the fine young cornet whom she had observed through the joints of the roughly-made coffin.

“The Sketch” 24 Dec. 1930, as by George R. Preedy

The Knot Garden (1933)

THE CROWN DERBY PLATE

Martha Pym said that she had never seen a ghost and that she would very much like to do so, “particularly at Christmas, for you can laugh as you like, that is the correct time to see a ghost.”

“I don’t suppose you ever will,” replied her cousin Mabel comfortably, while her cousin Clara shuddered and said that she hoped they would change the subject for she disliked even to think of such things.

The three elderly, cheerful women sat round a big fire, cosy and content after a day of pleasant activities; Martha was the guest of the other two, who owned the handsome, convenient country house; she always came to spend her Christmas with the Wyntons and found the leisurely country life delightful after the bustling round of London, for Martha managed an antique shop of the better sort and worked extremely hard. She was, however, still full of zest for work or pleasure, though sixty years old, and looked backwards and forwards to a succession of delightful days.

The other two, Mabel and Clara, led quieter but none the less agreeable lives; they had more money and fewer interests, but nevertheless enjoyed themselves very well.

“Talking of ghosts,” said Mabel, “I wonder how that old woman at Hartleys is getting on, for Hartleys, you know, is supposed to be haunted.”

“Yes, I know,” smiled Miss Pym, “but all the years that we have known of the place we have never heard anything definite, have we?”

“No,” put in Clara; “but there is that persistent rumour that the House is uncanny, and for myself, nothing would induce me to live there!”

“It is certainly very lonely and dreary down there on the marshes,” conceded Mabel. “But as for the ghost — you never hear what it is supposed to be even.”

“Who has taken it?” asked Miss Pym, remembering “Hartleys” as very desolate indeed, and long shut up.

“A Miss Lefain, an eccentric old creature — I think you met her here once, two years ago—”

“I believe that I did, but I don’t recall her at all.”

“We have not seen her since, Hartleys is so un-get-at-able and she didn’t seem to want visitors. She collects china, Martha, so really you ought to go and see her and talk ‘shop.’”

With the word “china” some curious associations came into the mind of Martha Pym; she was silent while she strove to put them together, and after a second or two they all fitted together into a very clear picture.

She remembered that thirty years ago — yes, it must be thirty years ago, when, as a young woman, she had put all her capital into the antique business, and had been staying with her cousins (her aunt had then been alive) that she had driven across the marsh to “Hartleys,” where there was an auction sale; all the details of this she had completely forgotten, but she could recall quite clearly purchasing a set of gorgeous china which was still one of her proud delights, a perfect set of Crown Derby save that one plate was missing.

“How odd,” she remarked, “that this Miss Lefain should collect china too, for it was at Hartleys that I purchased my dear old Derby service — I’ve never been able to match that plate—”

“A plate was missing? I seem to remember,” said Clara. “Didn’t they say that it must be in the house somewhere and that it should be looked for?”

“I believe they did, but of course I never heard any more and that missing plate has annoyed me ever since. Who had Hartleys?”

“An old connoisseur, Sir James Sewell; I believe he was some relation to this Miss Lefain, but I don’t know—”

“I wonder if she has found the plate,” mused Miss Pym. “I expect she has turned out and ransacked the whole place—”

“Why not trot over and ask?” suggested Mabel. “It’s not much use to her, if she has found it, one odd plate.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Clara. “Fancy going over the marshes, this weather, to ask about a plate missed all those years ago. I’m sure Martha wouldn’t think of it—”

But Martha did think of it; she was rather fascinated by the idea; how queer and pleasant it would be if, after all these years, nearly a lifetime, she should find the Crown Derby plate, the loss of which had always irked her! And this hope did not seem so altogether fantastical, it was quite likely that old Miss Lefain, poking about in the ancient house, had found the missing piece.

And, of course, if she had, being a fellow-collector, she would be quite willing to part with it to complete the set.

Her cousin endeavoured to dissuade her; Miss Lefain, she declared, was a recluse, an odd creature who might greatly resent such a visit and such a request.

“Well, if she does I can but come away again,” smiled Miss Pym. “I suppose she can’t bite my head off, and I rather like meeting these curious types — we’ve got a love for old china in common, anyhow.”

“It seems so silly to think of it — after all these years — a plate!”

“A Crown Derby plate,” corrected Miss Pym. “It is certainly strange that I didn’t think of it before, but now that I have got it into my head I can’t get it out. Besides,” she added hopefully, “I might see the ghost.”

So full, however, were the days with pleasant local engagements that Miss Pym had no immediate chance of putting her scheme into practice; but she did not relinquish it, and she asked several different people what they knew about “Hartleys” and Miss Lefain.

And no one knew anything save that the house was supposed to be haunted and the owner “cracky.”

“Is there a story?” asked Miss Pym, who associated ghosts with neat tales into which they fitted as exactly as nuts into shells.

But she was always told: “Oh, no, there isn’t a story, no one knows anything about the place, don’t know how the idea got about; old Sewell was half-crazy, I believe, he was buried in the garden and that gives a house a nasty name—”

“Very unpleasant,” said Martha Pym, undisturbed.

This ghost seemed too elusive for her to track down; she would have to be content if she could recover the Crown Derby plate; for that at least she was determined to make a try and also to satisfy that faint tingling of curiosity roused in her by this talk about “Hartleys” and the remembrance of that day, so long ago, when she had gone to the auction sale at the lonely old house.

So the first free afternoon, while Mabel and Clara were comfortably taking their afternoon repose, Martha Pym, who was of a more lively habit, got out her little governess cart and dashed away across the Essex flats.

She had taken minute directions with her, but she had soon lost her way.

Under the wintry sky, which looked as grey and hard as metal, the marshes stretched bleakly to the horizon, the olive-brown broken reeds were harsh as scars on the saffron-tinted bogs, where the sluggish waters that rose so high in winter were filmed over with the first stillness of a frost; the air was cold but not keen, everything was damp; faintest of mists blurred the black outlines of trees that rose stark from the ridges above the stagnant dykes; the flooded fields were haunted by black birds and white birds, gulls and crows, whining above the long ditch grass and wintry wastes.

Miss Pym stopped the little horse and surveyed this spectral scene, which had a certain relish about it to one sure to return to a homely village, a cheerful house and good company.

A withered and bleached old man, in colour like the dun landscape, came along the road between the sparse alders.

Miss Pym, buttoning up her coat, asked the way to “Hartley” as he passed her; he told her, straight on, and she proceeded, straight indeed across the road that went with undeviating length across the marshes.

“Of course,” thought Miss Pym, “if you live in a place like this, you are bound to invent ghosts.”

The house sprang up suddenly on a knoll ringed with rotting trees, encompassed by an old brick wall that the perpetual damp had overrun with lichen, blue, green, white colours of decay.

“Hartleys,” no doubt, there was no other residence of human being in sight in all the wide expanse; besides, she could remember it, surely, after all this time, the sharp rising out of the marsh, the colony of tall trees, but then fields and trees had been green and bright — there had been no water on the flats, it had been summertime.

“She certainly,” thought Miss Pym, “must be crazy to live here. And I rather doubt if I shall get my plate.”

She fastened up the good little horse by the garden gate which stood negligently ajar and entered; the garden itself was so neglected that it was quite surprising to see a trim appearance in the house, curtains at the window and a polish on the brass door knocker, which must have been recently rubbed there, considering the taint in the sea damp which rusted and rotted everything.

It was a square-built, substantial house with “nothing wrong with it but the situation,” Miss Pym decided, though it was not very attractive, being built of that drab plastered stone so popular a hundred years ago, with flat windows and door, while one side was gloomily shaded by a large evergreen tree of the cypress variety which gave a blackish tinge to that portion of the garden.

There was no pretence at flower-beds nor any manner of cultivation in this garden where a few rank weeds and straggling bushes matted together above the dead grass; on the enclosing wall which appeared to have been built high as protection against the ceaseless winds that swung along the flats were the remains of fruit trees; their crucified branches, rotting under the great nails that held them up, looked like the skeletons of those who had died in torment.

Miss Pym took in these noxious details as she knocked firmly at the door; they did not depress her; she merely felt extremely sorry for anyone who could live in such a place.

She noticed, at the far end of the garden, in the corner of the wall, a headstone showing above the sodden colourless grass, and remembered what she had been told about the old antiquary being buried there, in the grounds of “Hartleys.”

As the knock had no effect she stepped back and looked at the house; it was certainly inhabited — with those neat windows, white curtains and drab blinds all pulled to precisely the same level.

And when she brought her glance back to the door she saw that it had been opened and that someone, considerably obscured by the darkness of the passage, was looking at her intently.

“Good afternoon,” said Miss Pym cheerfully. “I just thought that I would call to see Miss Lefain — it is Miss Lefain, isn’t it?”

“It’s my house,” was the querulous reply.

Martha Pym had hardly expected to find any servants here, though the old lady must, she thought, work pretty hard to keep the house so clean and tidy as it appeared to be.

“Of course,” she replied. “May I come in? I’m Martha Pym, staying with the Wyntons, I met you there—”

“Do come in,” was the faint reply. “I get so few people to visit me, I’m really very lonely.”

“I don’t wonder,” thought Miss Pym; but she had resolved to take no notice of any eccentricity on the part of her hostess, and so she entered the house with her usual agreeable candour and courtesy.

The passage was badly lit, but she was able to get a fair idea of Miss Lefain; her first impression was that this poor creature was most dreadfully old, older than any human being had the right to be, why, she felt young in comparison — so faded, feeble, and pallid was Miss Lefain.

She was also monstrously fat; her gross, flaccid figure was shapeless and she wore a badly cut, full dress of no colour at all, but stained with earth and damp where Miss Pym supposed she had been doing futile gardening; this gown was doubtless designed to disguise her stoutness, but had been so carelessly pulled about that it only added to it, being rucked and rolled “all over the place” as Miss Pym put it to herself.

Another ridiculous touch about the appearance of the poor old lady was her short hair; decrepit as she was, and lonely as she lived she had actually had her scanty relics of white hair cropped round her shaking head.

“Dear me, dear me,” she said in her thin treble voice. “How very kind of you to come. I suppose you prefer the parlour? I generally sit in the garden.”

“The garden? But not in this weather?”

“I get used to the weather. You’ve no idea how used one gets to the weather.”

“I suppose so,” conceded Miss Pym doubtfully. “You don’t live here quite alone, do you?”

“Quite alone, lately. I had a little company, but she was taken away, I’m sure I don’t know where. I haven’t been able to find a trace of her anywhere,” replied the old lady peevishly.

“Some wretched companion that couldn’t stick it, I suppose,” thought Miss Pym. “Well, I don’t wonder — but someone ought to be here to look after her.”

They went into the parlour, which, the visitor was dismayed to see, was without a fire but otherwise well kept.

And there, on dozens of shelves was a choice array of china at which Martha Pym’s eyes glistened.

“Aha!” cried Miss Lefain. “I see you’ve noticed my treasures! Don’t you envy me? Don’t you wish that you had some of those pieces?”

Martha Pym certainly did and she looked eagerly and greedily round the walls, tables, and cabinets while the old woman followed her with little thin squeals of pleasure.

It was a beautiful little collection, most choicely and elegantly arranged, and Martha thought it marvellous that this feeble ancient creature should be able to keep it in such precise order as well as doing her own housework.

“Do you really do everything yourself here and live quite alone?” she asked, and she shivered even in her thick coat and wished that Miss Lefain’s energy had risen to a fire, but then probably she lived in the kitchen, as these lonely eccentrics often did.

“There was someone,” answered Miss Lefain cunningly, “but I had to send her away. I told you she’s gone, I can’t find her, and I am so glad. Of course,” she added wistfully, “it leaves me very lonely, but then I couldn’t stand her impertinence any longer. She used to say that it was her house and her collection of china! Would you believe it? She used to try to chase me away from looking at my own things!”

“How very disagreeable,” said Miss Pym, wondering which of the two women had been crazy. “But hadn’t you better get someone else.”

“Oh, no,” was the jealous answer. “I would rather be alone with my things, I daren’t leave the house for fear someone takes them away — there was a dreadful time once when an auction sale was held here—”

“Were you here then?” asked Miss Pym; but indeed she looked old enough to have been anywhere.

“Yes, of course,” Miss Lefain replied rather peevishly and Miss Pym decided that she must be a relation of old Sir James Sewell. Clara and Mabel had been very foggy about it all. “I was very busy hiding all the china — but one set they got — a Crown Derby tea service—”

“With one plate missing!” cried Martha Pym. “I bought it, and do you know, I was wondering if you’d found it—”

“I hid it,” piped Miss Lefain.

“Oh, you did, did you? Well, that’s rather funny behaviour. Why did you hide the stuff away instead of buying it?”

“How could I buy what was mine?”

“Old Sir James left it to you, then?” asked Martha Pym, feeling very muddled.

“She bought a lot more,” squeaked Miss Lefain, but Martha Pym tried to keep her to the point.

“If you’ve got the plate,” she insisted, “you might let me have it — I’ll pay quite handsomely, it would be so pleasant to have it after all these years.”

“Money is no use to me,” said Miss Lefain mournfully. “Not a bit of use. I can’t leave the house or the garden.”

“Well, you have to live, I suppose,” replied Martha Pym cheerfully. “And, do you know, I’m afraid you are getting rather morbid and dull, living here all alone — you really ought to have a fire — why, it’s just on Christmas and very damp.”

“I haven’t felt the cold for a long time,” replied the other; she seated herself with a sigh on one of the horsehair chairs and Miss Pym noticed with a start that her feet were covered only by a pair of white stockings; “one of those nasty health fiends,” thought Miss Pym, “but she doesn’t look too well for all that.”

“So you don’t think that you could let me have the plate?” she asked briskly, walking up and down, for the dark, neat, clean parlour was very cold indeed, and she thought that she couldn’t stand this much longer; as there seemed no sign of tea or anything pleasant and comfortable she had really better go.

“I might let you have it,” sighed Miss Lefain, “since you’ve been so kind as to pay me a visit. After all, one plate isn’t much use, is it?”

“Of course not, I wonder you troubled to hide it—”

“I couldn’t bear,” wailed the other, “to see the things going out of the house!”

Martha Pym couldn’t stop to go into all this; it was quite clear that the old lady was very eccentric indeed and that nothing very much could be done with her; no wonder that she had “dropped out” of everything and that no one ever saw her or knew anything about her, though Miss Pym felt that some effort ought really to be made to save her from herself.

“Wouldn’t you like a run in my little governess cart?” she suggested. “We might go to tea with the Wyntons on the way back, they’d be delighted to see you, and I really think that you do want taking out of yourself.”

“I was taken out of myself some time ago,” replied Miss Lefain. “I really was, and I couldn’t leave my things — though,” she added with pathetic gratitude, “it is very, very kind of you—”

“Your things would be quite safe, I’m sure,” said Martha Pym, humouring her. “Who ever would come up here, this hour of a winter’s day?”

“They do, oh, they do! And she might come back, prying and nosing and saying that it was all hers, all my beautiful china, hers!”

Miss Lefain squealed in her agitation and rising up, ran round the wall fingering with flaccid yellow hands the brilliant glossy pieces on the shelves.

“Well, then, I’m afraid that I must go, they’ll be expecting me, and it’s quite a long ride; perhaps some other time you’ll come and see us?”

“Oh, must you go?” quavered Miss Lefain dolefully. “I do like a little company now and then and I trusted you from the first — the others, when they do come, are always after my things and I have to frighten them away!”

“Frighten them away!” replied Martha Pym. “However do you do that?”

“It doesn’t seem difficult, people are so easily frightened, aren’t they?”

Miss Pym suddenly remembered that “Hartleys” had the reputation of being haunted — perhaps the queer old thing played on that; the lonely house with the grave in the garden was dreary enough around which to create a legend.

“I suppose you’ve never seen a ghost?” she asked pleasantly. “I’d rather like to see one, you know—”

“There is no one here but myself,” said Miss Lefain.

“So you’ve never seen anything? I thought it must be all nonsense. Still, I do think it rather melancholy for you to live here all alone—”

Miss Lefain sighed:

“Yes, it’s very lonely. Do stay and talk to me a little longer.” Her whistling voice dropped cunningly. “And I’ll give you the Crown Derby plate!”

“Are you sure you’ve really got it?” Miss Pym asked.

“I’ll show you.”

Fat and waddling as she was, she seemed to move very lightly as she slipped in front of Miss Pym and conducted her from the room, going slowly up the stairs — such a gross odd figure in that clumsy dress with the fringe of white hair hanging on to her shoulders.

The upstairs of the house was as neat as the parlour, everything well in its place; but there was no sign of occupancy; the beds were covered with dust sheets, there were no lamps or fires set ready. “I suppose,” said Miss Pym to herself, “she doesn’t care to show me where she really lives.”

But as they passed from one room to another, she could not help saying:

“Where do you live, Miss Lefain?”

“Mostly in the garden,” said the other.

Miss Pym thought of those horrible health huts that some people indulged in.

“Well, sooner you than I,” she replied cheerfully.

In the most distant room of all, a dark, tiny closet, Miss Lefain opened a deep cupboard and brought out a Crown Derby plate which her guest received with a spasm of joy, for it was actually that missing from her cherished set.

“It’s very good of you,” she said in delight. “Won’t you take something for it, or let me do something for you?”

“You might come and see me again,” replied Miss Lefain wistfully.

“Oh, yes, of course I should like to come and see you again.”

But now that she had got what she had really come for, the plate, Martha Pym wanted to be gone; it was really very dismal and depressing in the house and she began to notice a fearful smell — the place had been shut up too long, there was something damp rotting somewhere, in this horrid little dark closet no doubt.

“I really must be going,” she said hurriedly.

Miss Lefain turned as if to cling to her, but Martha Pym moved quickly away.

“Dear me,” wailed the old lady. “Why are you in such haste?”

“There’s — a smell,” murmured Miss Pym rather faintly.

She found herself hastening down the stairs, with Miss Lefain complaining behind her.

“How peculiar people are—she used to talk of a smell—”

“Well, you must notice it yourself.”

Miss Pym was in the hall; the old woman had not followed her, but stood in the semi-darkness at the head of the stairs, a pale shapeless figure.

Martha Pym hated to be rude and ungrateful but she could not stay another moment; she hurried away and was in her cart in a moment — really — that smell—

“Good-bye!” she called out with false cheerfulness, “and thank you somuch!”

There was no answer from the house.

Miss Pym drove on; she was rather upset and took another way than that by which she had come, a way that led past a little house raised above the marsh; she was glad to think that the poor old creature at “Hartleys” had such near neighbours, and she reined up the horse, dubious as to whether she should call someone and tell them that poor old Miss Lefain really wanted a little looking after, alone in a house like that, and plainly not quite right in her head.

A young woman, attracted by the sound of the governess cart, came to the door of the house and seeing Miss Pym called out, asking if she wanted the keys of the house?

“What house?” asked Miss Pym.

“Hartleys, mum, they don’t put a board out, as no one is likely to pass, but it’s to be sold. Miss Lefain wants to sell or let it—”

“I’ve just been up to see her—”

“Oh, no, mum — she’s been away a year, abroad somewhere, couldn’t stand the place, it’s been empty since then, I just run in every day and keep things tidy—”

Loquacious and curious the young woman had come to the fence; Miss Pym had stopped her horse.

“Miss Lefain is there now,” she said. “She must have just come back—”

“She wasn’t there this morning, mum, ’tisn’t likely she’d come, either — fair scared she was, mum, fair chased away, didn’t dare move her china. Can’t say I’ve noticed anything myself, but I never stay long — and there’s a smell—”

“Yes,” murmured Martha Pym faintly, “there’s a smell. What — what — chased her away?”

The young woman, even in that lonely place, lowered her voice.

“Well, as you aren’t thinking of taking the place, she got an idea in her head that old Sir James — well, he couldn’t bear to leave Hartleys, mum, he’s buried in the garden, and she thought he was after her, chasing round them bits of china—”

“Oh!” cried Miss Pym.

“Some of it used to be his, she found a lot stuffed away, he said they were to be left in Hartleys, but Miss Lefain would have the things sold, I believe — that’s years ago—”

“Yes, yes,” said Miss Pym with a sick look. “You don’t know what he was like, do you?”

“No, mum — but I’ve heard tell he was very stout and very old — I wonder who it was you saw up at Hartleys?”

Miss Pym took a Crown Derby plate from her bag.

“You might take that back when you go,” she whispered. “I shan’t want it, after all—”

Before the astonished young woman could answer Miss Pym had darted off across the marsh; that short hair, that earth-stained robe, the white socks, “I generally live in the garden—”

Miss Pym drove away, breakneck speed, frantically resolving to mention to no one that she had paid a visit to “Hartleys,” nor lightly again to bring up the subject of ghosts.

She shook and shuddered in the damp, trying to get out of her clothes and her nostrils — that indescribable smell.

Grace Latouche and the Warringtons (1931)

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949)

RAW MATERIAL

Linley was fond of collecting what he called “raw material” and, as a fairly successful barrister, he had good opportunity for doing so. He despised novelists and romancists, yet one day he hoped to become one of these gentry himself, hence his collection of the raw material… however, after some years he became disgusted and overwhelmed by the amount of “stuff” (as he termed it) which he had gathered together — scenes, episodes, characters, dialogues, descriptions and decorations for all or any possible type of tale; he remained, he declared, surprised at the poverty of invention of the professional story-tellers who gave so little for the public’s money in the way of good, strong, rousing drama, such as he, Robert Linley, had come across, well, more times than he cared to count…

“There isn’t anything,” he declared with some vehemence, “of which I haven’t had experience.”

“Ghosts?” I asked, and he smiled contemptuously.

“Yes, of course, I’ve had any amount of experiences with ghosts, with people who’ve seen ’em, and people who think they’ve seen ’em, and with the ghosts themselves…”

“Well,” I asked, “have you come across a real Christmas ghost story — what we used to call the old-fashioned kind? They’re getting a bit threadbare now, you know; they’ve been told over and over again, year after year; have you got a novelty in that direction?” Linley, after a moment’s pause, said that he had.

“There’s some raw material for you,” he cried, waxing enthusiastic, “the story of the Catchpoles and Aunt Ursula Beane, there’s some raw material — why, there’s everything in it — comedy, tragedy, drama, satire, farce—”

“Hold on!” I cried, “and just tell us as briefly as possible what your ‘raw material’ consists of. I’m out for a Christmas ghost story, you know, and I shall be disappointed if you don’t give us something of that kind.”

Linley made himself extremely comfortable and, with a lawyer’s relish of the right phrase and the correct turn of sentence, gave us the history of Aunt Ursula Beane, with the usual proviso, of course, that the names and places had been altered. Before he began his narration Linley insisted on the novelty of the story, and before he had finished we all of us (those select few who were privileged to hear him hold forth) agreed that it was very novel indeed.

The case of Aunt Ursula Beane, as he called her, had come under his notice in a professional way and in the following manner, commonplace enough from a lawyer’s point of view, although the subsequent case was one which the papers endeavoured to work up into what is described by that overworked word “sensational.” As far as the lawyers and the public were concerned it began with an inquest on Mrs. Ursula Beane. In Linley’s carefully selected phrases the case was this:

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Mrs. Ursula Beane had died suddenly at the age of seventy-five. The doctor who had been intermittently attending her — she was an extremely robust and healthy old woman — had not been altogether satisfied with her symptoms. He had refused a death certificate, there had been an autopsy, and it was discovered that Mrs. Ursula Beane had died from arsenical poisoning. The fact established, an enquiry followed, eliciting the following circumstances. Mrs. Ursula Beane had lived for forty years in a small house at Peckham Rye which had belonged to her father and his father before him. The house had been built in the days when Peckham Rye — well, was not quite like it is now. She resided with a nephew and niece — James and Louisa Catchpole. Neither of them had ever married, neither of them had ever left Peckham Rye for more than a few weeks at a time, and the most minute investigation did not discover that either of them had had the least adventure or out-of-the-way event in their lives. They enjoyed a small annuity from a father who had been a worthy and fairly prosperous tradesman. James was, at the time of the inquest, a man over sixty and had been for many years a clerk — “confidential clerk” as he emphasized it — with a large firm of tea merchants. He received a sufficient, if not a substantial salary and was within a year or two of a pension. His sister, Miss Louisa Catchpole, was younger — fifty or so; she also had a substantial, if not a brilliant, position as a journalist on one of those few surviving monthlies which rather shun publicity and cater for the secluded and the virtuous. She wrote occasional short stories in which the hero was always a clergyman and the heroine sans peur et sans reproche. She also wrote little weekly causeries — as I believe they are called — “Meditations in a Garden”; they were headed and adorned with a little cut of an invalid in a basket-chair gazing at a robin. In these same causeries Miss Louisa Catchpole affected month after month, year after year, with unfaltering fortitude, a vein of Christian cheerfulness, and encouraged her readers with such maxims as “Character is stronger than Destiny,”  “A man is only as strong as his faith in himself,” and chirpings about the recurring miracle of spring, together with quotations from the more minor poets — you know the type of thing.

It is irrelevant to our story to go into why Aunt Ursula Beane lived with those two; they seemed to be the only surviving members of their very unimportant family, and they had lived together in the house at Peckham Rye for forty years, ever since Louisa was quite a small child and had gone there to live with Aunt Ursula who, on her husband’s death, had retired to this paternal abode. Nobody could think of them as apart one from the other. During those forty years James had gone to and fro his work, Louisa had written her articles and stories, and at first had been looked after by, and afterwards had looked after, Aunt Ursula Beane. Their joint earnings kept the tiny establishment going; they were considerably helped by the fact that there was no rent to pay and they lived in modest comfort, almost with (what James would have called) “every luxury.” Besides giving them the house to live in, Mrs. Beane paid them at first thirty shillings, then, as the cost of living went up, two pounds a week for what she called “her keep.” What, you will say, could have been more deadly commonplace than this? But there was just one touch of mystery and romance. Aunt Ursula was reputed to be of vast wealth and a miser — this was one of those family traditions that swell and grow on human credulity from one generation to another. The late Mr. Beane was spoken of with vague awe as a very wealthy man, and it appeared that the Catchpoles believed that he had left his widow a considerable fortune which she, a true miser, had concealed all those years, but which they might reasonably hope to inherit on her death, as a reward for all their faithful kindness. Investigation proved that what had seemed rather a fantastic delusion had some startling foundation. Mrs. Ursula Beane employed a lawyer and his evidence was that her late husband, who had been a tobacconist, had left her a tidy sum of money when he had died forty years ago, amounting to fifteen thousand pounds, which had been safely invested and not touched till about five years before. What Mrs. Beane lived on came from another source — a small capital left by her father that brought her in about a hundred and fifty pounds a year; therefore this main sum had been, as I have said, untouched and had accrued during those thirty-five years into a handsome sum of nearly fifty thousand pounds. The lawyer agreed that the old lady was a miser, nothing would induce her to draw out any of this money, to mention its existence to a soul, or to make a will as to its final disposal. The lawyer, of course, was pledged to secrecy. He knew that the Catchpoles guessed at the existence of the hoard, he also knew that they were not sure about it and that they had no idea as to its magnitude. Five years before her death the old lady had drawn out all her capital — forty-eight thousand pounds — without any explanation whatever to the lawyer, and had taken it away in a black bag, going off in a taxicab from the lawyer’s office in Lincoln’s Inn. It might have been the Nibelung hoard flung into the Rhine for all the mystery that was attached to it, for nobody saw or heard of it again. Both the Catchpoles swore that they had no knowledge whatever of the old woman realizing her capital; she had certainly not banked it anywhere, she must have taken that very large sum of money in notes and, I believe, a few bonds, to that small house at Peckham Rye and in some way disposed of it. A most exhaustive search revealed not so much as a five-pound note. In the bank was just the last quarterly instalment of her annuity — barely enough, as Louisa Catchpole remarked with some passion, “to pay the doctor and the funeral expenses.”

There you have the situation. This old woman dead in what was almost poverty, the disappearance of this large sum of money she had realized five years previously, and the fact that she had died from arsenical poisoning. To explain this there were the usual symptoms, or excuses, whatever you like to call them; she had been having medicine with arsenic in it, and she might have taken an overdose. There had been arsenic in the house in the shape of powders for an overgrown and aged dog, and in the shape of packets of weed-killer, James had always taken an industrious interest in the patch of garden that sloped to the Common. The old lady might have committed suicide, she might have taken some of the stuff in mistake, or the Catchpoles might have been murderers. The only possible reason for suspecting foul play would have been that the Catchpoles knew of her hoard and wished to get hold of it. But this it was impossible to prove. I was briefed to watch the case for the Catchpoles. There was, of course, a certain sensation and excitement over the fact of the large sum of money, the only startling and brilliant fact about the whole commonplace, drab and rather depressing story. I myself thought it rather absurd that any question of suspicion should attach to the Catchpoles. After forty years of placid uninspired devotion to Aunt Ursula Beane, why should they suddenly decide to put her out of the way when, in the nature of things, she could not have had more than a few years to live? Their demeanour, too, impressed me very favourably. There was none of the flaunting vanity, posing or vehement talk of the real criminal, they seemed slightly bewildered, not very much disturbed, and to trust wholly in their undeniable innocence, they almost found the whole thing grotesque and I could understand their point of view. The verdict, however, was rather surprising. It was confidently expected that it would be “Death from misadventure,” but instead, the verdict was “Death from arsenical poisoning not self-administered.” This is really about as near as we can get in England to the Scottish verdict “Not proven,” and I was rather indignant, for it seemed to me to attach a great deal of wholly unmerited suspicion to the two Catchpoles. Still, of course, they were quite free and no direct blame was laid on them. In fact, the coroner had remarked on their devoted care of an old lady who must have been, from the various facts proved by the doctors, “very trying and difficult,” as the saying goes. They conducted themselves very well after the inquest, still with that slightly bewildered patient air of resignation. It seemed to me that they did not realize the ghastly position in which they stood and, as I knew when I heard the verdict, the very narrow escape they had had from being arrested on a charge of murder. They paid all the expenses connected with the inquest at once and without any trouble. They had, as James explained with a certain mild pride, “savings.” I was interested in them, they were so meek and drab, so ordinary and repressed; there was something kindly and amiable about them and they were very attached to each other. I questioned them about this mysterious hoard, the existence of which would have been difficult to believe but for the evidence of the lawyer. They did not seem very concerned, they had always known that Aunt Ursula Beane had money and, said Louisa without passion, they had always guessed that she had tried to do them out of it — she had been an extraordinarily malicious old woman, they complained, and it was quite likely that the money was buried somewhere, or had been destroyed. She was capable of feeding the fire with it, of sticking it in a hole in the ground, of throwing it into the water in a bag weighed down with stones, in fact of doing anything in the world with it except putting it to some profitable use. She was undoubtedly not right in her head.

“She ought to have been certified years ago,” I declared.

James Catchpole shook his head. “She was never bad enough for that,” he announced with resignation.

They had really been slaving and “bearing” things for forty years for that money, and they took the loss of it, I thought, with extreme gallantry.

They returned to the little house in Peckham Rye which came to them as next-of-kin. The little annuity, which was all that Aunt Ursula had left of her worldly goods after she had disposed of her main fortune, perished with her. James and Louisa would have to live on his clerkship and her journalism.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

At this point Linley stopped to ask me if we did not perceive a real strong drama in what he had told us — “A whole novel, in fact,” he added triumphantly.

“Well,” I replied, “one might make it into a whole novel by inserting incidents and imagining this and that and the other. As you have given it, it seems a dreary stretch of nothingness with a rather damp squib at the end. After all, there was no murder, I suppose the old woman took an overdose of medicine by mistake. Where,” I asked, “does the Christmas ghost story come in?”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I will tell you if you will have just a little more patience. Well, I have said that I was interested in the Catchpoles, I even went to see them once or twice. They seemed to me to be what used to be called “human documents” — the very fact that they had such blank faces made me want to study them. I know there must be some repression somewhere, some desire, some hope, something beside what there appeared on the surface — this blank negation. They did not betray themselves. Louisa said she missed the old lady and that she was having quite a handsome headstone put on her grave in the vast London cemetery where she had been laid to rest. James spoke of the old lady with a certain deference, as if the fact of her being dead had made a saint of Aunt Ursula Beane.

I continually asked them if they had had any news of the money. They shook their heads with a compassionate smile at my hopefulness. They were convinced that during those five years Aunt Ursula Beane had completely destroyed the forty-eight thousand pounds — easily destroyed, for most of it had been in hundred-and thousand-pound notes. Of course the garden had been dug over and every brick and plank in the house disturbed, with no result.

“And if she never left the house and garden?” I asked.

They told me she had. She was a robust old woman, as I said before, and she used to take long walks and every year during those five years she went away for a fortnight — sometimes with Louisa, sometimes with James, sometimes to the seaside and sometimes to lodgings in a farmhouse, and on all these different occasions she had had plenty of opportunity of getting rid of her money. Of course these five several lodgings had been searched and the country round about them, but always with no result.

“You see, sir,” said James, with his meek and placid smile, his pale faded eyes gleaming at me behind the glasses, “she was far too cunning for all of us.”

One winter evening about a year after the inquest the mood took me to go and visit these two curious specimens. I found them with a planchette, their eyes goggling at the sprawling writing that appeared on the piece of paper beneath. James informed me without excitement that they had “taken up” spiritualism, and Miss Louisa chirped in that they were getting “the most wonderful results.”

Aunt Ursula Beane had “come through,” as they put it, almost at once, and was now in constant communication with them.

“Well, I hope she can tell you what she did with the money.”

They answered me quite seriously that that was what they were trying to find out, but that the old lady was just as tricky and malicious on the other side, as they termed it, as she had been on this, luring them on with false scents and wayward suggestions. At the same time, they declared, placidly but with intense conviction, they believed that sooner or later she would disclose to them her secret.

I soon began to lose interest in them after this. When people of the type of the Catchpoles get mixed up with this spiritualistic business they cease to be — well, almost cease to be “human documents.” I thought I’d leave ’em to it, when I received a rather urgent invitation from Miss Louisa Catchpole, begging me to be present at a “demonstration” at which Aunt Ursula Beane would undoubtedly appear in person.

I went to the little house in Peckham where the furniture, the wallpaper, even the atmosphere did not appear to have been changed all those monotonous forty years — forty-one now to be exact. There was a medium present and no one else save myself and the brother and sister. We sat round the table. The medium who beamed with a rather fussy kindness went off with surprising celerity into a trance, and soon the “demonstration” took place.

At first I was cynical, secondly I was disgusted, and thirdly, I was rather disturbed, finding myself first in the midst of farce, low charlatanry and chicanery, then suddenly in the presence of something which I could not understand. The “demonstration” began by groans and squeaks issuing from the lips of the medium, greetings to Louisa and James (presumably in the voice of the defunct Aunt Ursula), various jovial references to a bottle containing poison, a few other crude remarks of that nature, and then several knocks from different parts of the room — rappings loud and quick, and then beating time, as if to a piece of music, then a sudden clatter on the table in the middle of us as if the old lady were dancing there with heavy boots on. James and Louisa sat side by side, their hands clasped, listening to all this without a shade of expression on their blank faded faces. The hideous little room was the last resort of the antimacassar, and presently these began to fly about, scraps of the horrible white crocheted tatting gliding through the air in a way which would have been very funny if it hadn’t been rather dreadful. Of course I knew that many mediums have these powers and there is nothing much in them — I mean, it can all be explained in a perfectly practical and satisfactory fashion. At the same time I did not greatly care about the exposition, and I begged the Catchpoles to bring it to an end, particularly as the old lady had nothing definite to say. James whispered that the medium must not be disturbed while she was in trance. Aunt Ursula Beane then began to sing a hymn, but with a very unpleasant inflection, worse than any outspoken mockery. While the hymn was being sung I gained the impression far more vividly than I had ever received before that Aunt Ursula Beane had been a rather terrible person. When she had finished the hymn she began in an old half-broken voice softly to curse them all in a language that was not at all agreeable to listen to, coming as it did in those querulous, ancient feminine tones. This was rather too much for me, and I shook the medium violently. She came out of her trance. Louisa and James did not seem in the least affected, drank tea, ate biscuits, and discussed in banal terms the doings of those on “the other side.”

I received no more invitations from the Catchpoles and did not go near them for a considerable time. In fact, I think I had rather forgotten about them, as I had had a great many other interesting cases and a good many other interesting specimens had come my way. I had heard a vast number of stories as good as the story of Aunt Ursula Beane, but it did happen one day that I had to pass through Peckham and could not resist the passing impulse of curiosity that urged me to go and look at the house on the Common. It was “To Let” or “To be Sold,” according to two or three estate agents’ blatant boards on the front railing. I called next door and was received with the inevitable suspicion with which the stranger is usually regarded in small places. I did, however, discover what I had set out to discover, namely, that the Catchpoles had left the neighbourhood about six months ago, and no one knew where they were. I took the trouble to go to one of the estate agents whose address was given on the board, to make further enquiries. The house was to be let or sold, it did not seem to have been considered a great prize, and it certainly had not gone off very quickly, though it was cheap enough; the neighbourhood, even the estate agent admitted, “was not what it had been.” Then, of course, one couldn’t deny that the Ursula Beane case and the fact that the old lady had died there, and of poison, had given a slightly sinister air to the modest stucco building. As to the Catch-poles, the estate agent did not know where they had gone; all he had was the address of a bank, nor was it any of my business, so I decided to dismiss the whole thing from my mind.

Good raw material, no doubt, but none of it worked up sufficiently to be of much interest.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Linley glanced round at us all triumphantly as he said this.

“But it was all rounded off as neatly as any novelist could do it. Let me tell you,” he added with unction.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Five years afterwards I ran over to Venice for Christmas — I don’t know why, except just the perverse desire to see the wrong place at the wrong time, instead of forever the right place at the right time. I like Venice in the winter fogs, with a thin coat of ice on the canals, and if you can get a snowstorm — well, so much the better — St. Marco, to me, looks preferable with the snowflakes in front of the blue and the bronze instead of that eternal sunshine… Well, there I was in Venice, and I’m not going to bore you with any more local colour or picturesque details. I was in Venice, very well satisfied with myself, very comfortable and alone. I was tolerably familiar with the city and I always stay at the same hotel. One of the first things I noticed was that a large and very pretentious palace near by had recently been handsomely and expensively “done up”; I soon elicited the fact that the place which I had always envied had been bought by the usual rich American who had spent a great deal of money in restoring and furnishing it, but who did not very often live there, he only came and went after the fashion of all Americans, and was supposed to travel considerably in great luxury. Once or twice I saw this American going past in a gondola, wrapped in a foreign, rather theatrical-looking cloak, lounging with a sort of ostentation of ease on the cushions. He was an elderly man with a full grey beard, and wore, even now in the winter, blue sunglasses. On two separate occasions when I was sitting on the hotel balcony in the mild winter sunlight and he was being rowed past underneath I had the impression that he was looking at me sharply and keenly behind those coloured spectacles, and also the impression, which was likely enough to be correct, that I had seen him before. I meet, of course, a great many people, but even with a memory on which I rather pride myself, cannot immediately place everyone. The hotel at which I was staying — and this was one of the reasons I always selected it — did not have any of those ghastly organized gaieties at Christmas; we were left to ourselves in a poetic gloom best suited to the season and the city. I was seated by myself enjoying a delicious kind of mournful repose, piquantly in contrast with my usual life, when I received a message and a very odd one: the gentleman, Signor Hayden, the American from next door, would very much like to see me. He had observed me on the balcony, knew my name and my profession, and requested the honour of my company. Attracted by anything queer or the least out of the way, I at once accepted, and in ten minutes or so found myself in the newly-restored palace which I had so often admired and envied. The place was furnished with a good deal of taste, but rather, I suspected, the orthodox taste of the professional decorator. Mr. Hayden was not immediately visible, but, I understood, in bed ill; I expressed my willingness to go to his bedside and was shortly conducted there. The room was very handsome, the servants very well trained, and I was impressed by the fact that this rich American must be very rich indeed. One knows, of course, what these out-of-the-way little caprices of newly-restored palaces in Venice cost. The owner of this up-to-date luxury was in bed, propped up with pillows and shaded by old-fashioned mauve velvet curtains. He still wore the coloured glasses, and I concluded that he had some defect in his sight. He appeared to see me perfectly well, however, and beckoned to me to approach his bedside. As I did so he removed his glasses; there was an electric standard lamp on an antique table by the bedside and the light of it was turned full on to the sick man’s face, which I immediately recognized. I was looking down into the faded, mild, light-blue eyes of James Catchpole.

“Very odd that you should be here,” he smiled at me, “very odd indeed. You’ve always been interested in us and I thought perhaps you’d like to hear the end of the story, that is, if any story ever does end; there’s a pause in ours at this point, anyway.”

I expressed due surprise and gratification at seeing him. In truth, I was considerably amazed. I was startled, too, to see how ill he was. He asked me to help him up in bed. He declared, without emotion, that he knew himself to be dying.

“Where’s Miss Louisa?” I asked; “where is your sister?”

“She died last year,” he answered placidly. “She had a thoroughly good time for four years and I suppose it killed her, you know; but, of course, it was worth it, she always said so.”

The inevitable conclusion had jumped to my mind.

“You found Miss Ursula Beane’s hoard?” I suggested.

James Catchpole, passing his hand over the full grey beard which had so changed his face, replied simply:

“We never lost it — we had it all the time.”

“You mean you?” I asked dubiously, and he nodded and replied:

“Exactly!”

“That you—”you—â€� I suggested, and this time he nodded and said:

“Precisely!”

“Louisa persuaded her to realize her capital,” he continued with childish calm. “She was a proper miser and she rather fretted not having the actual stuff in her hands. It wasn’t difficult to make her get it — she liked a real hoard, a thing you can put under the hearthstone or in the mattress, you know. We thought we should get hold of it easier that way when she came to die. You never knew with anyone like that what she might do in the way of a will, she was keen on lost cats and Christians. We thought she would enjoy herself playing with it, and then we’d get it if we were patient enough.”

He blinked up at me and added, with the faintest of ironic smiles — “We’d been patient for forty years, don’t you suppose we spent some part of that time planning what we would do with the money? We were both engaged, to start with, but her young man and my young woman couldn’t wait all those years… We read a good deal, we made lists of things we wanted, and places we wanted to go to… We had quite a little library of guide-books, you may have noticed them on the bookshelf — one of them was a guide to Venice. Louisa, writing her piffling articles, and I at my piffling job, to and fro — well, you don’t suppose we didn’t have our ideas?”

“I see,” I said doubtfully, “and then, when there was that little misfortune about the arsenic, I suppose you didn’t care to mention the hoard?”

“It wouldn’t have been altogether wise, sir, would it?” smiled James Catchpole simply. It would have thrown a lot of suspicion on us, and we’d been very careful. There wasn’t any proof, not a shred. We had to wait until the case had blown over a bit, and then we — well, we did the best we could with the time that was left us. We lived at the rate of ten thousand a year. We had the best of everything… Of course it was the pace — don’t you call it? — that killed. We were neither of us young, and we knew we couldn’t stand it for long, so we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, believe me, sir, thoroughly….”.”

He paused and added reflectively:

“But it’s a good thing we made a move when we did, we shouldn’t have been able to get about at seventy; she — she might have gone on to a hundred and ten.”

“Do you mean that you—” I suggested quietly.

“It was the easiest thing in the world,” he smiled, “to drop a couple of those dog powders into her milk…”

I’d always been intensely interested in murderers. I tried to question James Catchpole as to his motives, his sensations, his possible remorse; he appeared to have had none of any of these…

“You didn’t regret it afterwards, you haven’t felt the Furies behind you, or anything of that sort?”

He replied, as far as his feeble strength would permit:

“I have enjoyed myself thoroughly. I wish we hadn’t waited so long.”

I was puzzled. They had always seemed such very nice people.

“I am dying now,” said James Catchpole, “and it’s about time, for I’ve spent all the money. The doctor said my next heart attack would be fatal, and I’ve done my best to bring one on. I couldn’t go back to lack of money.”

“Who are you going to leave all this to?” I asked with professional interest. I glanced round the handsome room.

He smiled at me with what I thought was compassion.

“I haven’t been so silly as all that,” he replied. “Everything that I possess wouldn’t pay half of my debts. I have had full value, I can assure you. After all, I had a right to it, hadn’t I? I’d waited long enough.”

“What about the planchette and the demonstrations?” I asked. “I suppose all that was a fake to throw us off the scent?”

“Not at all,” he declared, in what seemed to be hurt surprise, “that was perfectly genuine. We made up our minds to get in touch with Aunt Ursula Beane, to find out what she thought about it all.”

“And what did she think?” I asked, startled.

“She said we were a couple of fools not to have done it sooner.”

“Come, come, Mr. Catchpole,” I cried, something shocked, “this is unseemly jesting.”

“No jesting at all,” he assured me. “Aren’t I dying myself? I shall be in the old girl’s company in a few minutes, I daresay. You heard her yourself, sir, dancing on the table that evening. She said she’d been a perfect fool herself, and now that she’d ‘got over’ she realized it. She said if we didn’t have a good time, or someone didn’t have a good time with that damn money, she’d never forgive us. You see, sir, at first we began to have that miserly feeling too and didn’t want to spend it. We thought we’d go on hoarding it, living just the same and knowing it was there. She used to scribble out on the planchette saying what idiots we were. That’s why she used all that strong language. ‘You’ve got it — now use it!’ That was what she always said. ‘I’ll go with you and share in your good time’ — and so she has, sir, believe me. We’ve often seen her sitting at the table with us, nodding over the champagne; she’d have been fond of champagne if she’d allowed herself… We’ve seen her dancing in some of those jazz-halls, we’ve seen her in boxes listening to opera, we’ve seen her sitting in the Rolls-Royce revelling in the cushions and the speed… Remorse? Why, I tell you we’ve given the old girl the good time she ought to have had years ago.”

“Come, come, James Catchpole,” I said, “you’re delirious. I’d better fetch the doctor.”

He smiled at me with compassion and some contempt.

“You’re a clever lawyer,” he said, “but there are a lot of things you don’t understand.”

Even as he spoke he seemed to fall into a peaceful sleep and I thought it was my responsibility to fetch a doctor. Of course I believed hardly anything he said — I thought it was quite likely that he hadn’t poisoned Aunt Ursula Beane, but that he had invented the story. At the same time there was the hard concrete evidence of the palace, the servants, the furniture — he had got money from somewhere.

“Good raw material, eh? Think what you could make of it if you wrote it up!”

I went downstairs, telephoned on my own responsibility to the address of one of the English doctors. It was Christmas Eve and I could not find him at home. I was quite uncertain what to do. I stood hesitant at the foot of the wide magnificent staircase, when I observed a dreadful old woman creeping up the stairs with a look of intense enjoyment on her face — Mrs. Ursula Beane — not a doubt of it — Aunt Ursula Beane! I saw her so clearly that I could have counted the stitches in the darns at the elbows of her black sleeves. I ran up after her, but of course she was there before I was. When I came up to the bedside James Catchpole was dead, with an extremely self-satisfied smug smile on his face.

There’s my Christmas Eve ghost! An hallucination, of course, but you can give it all the usual explanation. There’s the story, you can put it together as you will. There’s plenty of stuff in it — good raw material, eh, take it how you will?

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

We all agreed with Linley.

Grace Latouche and the Warringtons (1931)

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

THE SIGN-PAINTER
AND THE CRYSTAL FISHES

I. — THE RIVER AND THE HOUSE

The house was built beside a river. In the evening the sun would lie reflected in the dark water, a stain of red in between the thick shadows cast by the buildings. It was twilight now, and there was the long ripple of dull crimson, shifting as the water rippled sullenly between the high houses.

Beneath this house was an old stake, hung at the bottom with stagnant green, white and dry at the top. A rotting boat that fluttered the tattered remains of faded crimson cushions was affixed to the stake by a fraying rope. Sometimes the boat was thrown against the post by the strong evil ripples, and there was a dismal creaking noise.

Opposite this house was a garden — a narrow strip of ground closed round by the blank, dark houses, and led up to from the water by a flight of crumbling steps.

Nothing grew in this garden but tall, bright, rank grass and a small tree that bore white flowers. The house it belonged to was empty and shuttered; so was every house along the canal except this one, at the top window of which Lucius Cranfield sat shivering in his mean red coat. He was biting his finger and looking out across the water at the tree with pale flowers knocking at the closed shutter beside it.

The room was bare and falling to decay. Cobwebs swung from the great beam in the roof, and in every corner a spider’s web was spun across the dirty plaster walls.

There was no glass in the window, and the shutters swung loose on broken hinges. Now and again they creaked against the flat brick front of the house, and then Lucius Cranfield winced.

He held a round, clear mirror in his hand, and sometimes he looked away from the solitary tree to glance into it. When he did so he beheld a pallid face surrounded with straight brown hair, lips that had once been beautiful, and blurred eyes veined with red like some curious stone.

As the red sunlight began to grow fainter in the water a step sounded on the rotting stairway, the useless splitting door was pushed open, and Lord James Fontaine entered.

Slowly, and with a mincing step, he came across the dusty floor. He wore a dress of bright violet watered silk, his hair was rolled fantastically, and powdered such a pure white that his face looked sallow by contrast. To remedy this he had painted his cheeks and his lips, and powdered his forehead and chin. But the impression made was not of a pink and fresh complexion, but of a yellow countenance rouged. There were long pearls in his ears and under his left eye an enormous patch. His eyes slanted towards his nose, his nostrils curved upwards, and his thin lips were smiling.

He carried a cane hung with blood-coloured tassels, and his waistcoat was embroidered with green flowers, the hue of an emerald, and green flowers the tint of a pale sea.

“You paint signs, do you not?” he said, and nodded.

“Yes, I paint signs,” answered the other. He looked away from Lord James and across the darkening water at the lonely tree opposite. The sky above the deserted houses was turning a cold wet grey. A flight of crows went past, clung for a moment round the chimney-pots, and flew on again.

“Will you design me a sign-board?” asked Lord James, smiling. “Something noble and gay, for I have taken a new house in town.”

“My workshop is downstairs,” said Lucius Cranfield, without looking round. “Why did you come up?” He laid down the mirror and rubbed his cold fingers together.

“I rang and there was no answer, I knocked and there was no answer, so I pushed open the door and came up; why not?” Lord James regarded the sign-painter keenly, and smiled again, and pressed the knob of his clouded cane against his chin.

“Oh, why not?” echoed Lucius Cranfield. “Only this is a poor place to come to for a gay and noble sign.”

He turned his head now, and there was a curious twist on his colourless lips.

“But you have a very splendid painting swinging outside your own door,” said Lord James suavely. “Never did I see fairer drawing nor brighter hues. It is your work?” he questioned.

“Mine, yes,” assented the sign-painter drearily.

“Fashion me a sign-board such as that,” said Lord James. Lucius Cranfield left off rubbing his hands together.

“The same subjects?” he asked.

The other lowered his lids.

“The subjects are curious,” he replied. “Where did you get them?”

“From life,” said the sign-painter, staring at the tattered veils of cobwebs fluttering on the broken window-frame. “From my life.”

The bright dark eyes of the visitor flickered from right to left. He moved a little nearer the window, where, despite the thickening twilight, his violet silk coat gleamed like the light on a sheet of water.

“You have had a strange life,” he remarked, sneering, “to cull from it such incidents.”

“What did you behold that was so extraordinary?” asked Lucius Cranfield.

“On one side there is depicted a gallows, a man in a gay habit hanging on it, and his face has some semblance to your own; the reverse bears the image of a fish, white, yet shot with all the colours… it is so skilfully executed that it looks as if it moved through the water…”

An expression of faint and troubled interest came over the sign-painter’s face.

“Have you ever seen such a fish?” he asked.

Lord James’s features seemed to contract and sharpen.

“Never,” he said hastily.

Lucius Cranfield rose slowly and stiffly.

“There are two in the world,” he said, half to himself; “and before the end I shall find the other, and then everything will be mended and put straight.”

“Unless you lose your own token first,” remarked Lord James harshly.

“How did you know I had one?” asked the sign-painter sharply. Lord James laughed.

“Oh, you’re going mad, my fine friend! Do you not feel that you must be, living alone in such fashion in this old house?” Lucius Cranfield dragged himself to a cupboard in the wall.

“How my limbs ache!” he muttered. “Mad?” A look of cunning spread over his features. “No, I shall not go mad while I have the one crystal fish, nor before I find the owner of the other.”

It was so dark they could barely see each other; but the nobleman’s dress still shone bright and cold in the gloom.

“Yet it is enough to make a man go mad,” he remarked suavely, “to reflect how rich and handsome you were once, with what fine clothes and furniture and friends… and then to remember how your father was hanged, and you were ruined, and all through the lies of your enemy….”

“But my enemy died, too,” said Lucius Cranfield. He took a thick candle and a rusty tinder-box out of the cupboard.

“His son is alive,” replied Lord James.

A coarse yellow flame spurted across the dust.

“I wish I had killed them both,” said the sign-painter; “but I could never find the son… How badly the candle burns!…”

He held the tinder to the cold wax, and only a small tongue of feeble fire sprang up.

“You are quite mad!” smiled Lord James. “You never killed either… and now that your blood is chilled with misery and weakened with evil days, you never will.”

The candle-flame strengthened and illumined the chamber. It showed Lord James holding his sharp chin in a long white hand, and woke his diamonds into stars.

“Will you come downstairs and choose your design?” said Lucius Cranfield, shivering. “Take care of the stairs. They are rather dusty.”

He shuffled to the door and held aloft the light. It revealed the twisting stairway where the plaster hung cracked and dry on the walls, or bulged damp and green in patches as the damp had come through. The rafters were warped and bending, and in one spot a fan-shaped fungus had spread in a blotch of mottled orange.

Lord James came softly up behind the sign-painter, and peered over the stairs.

“This is a mean place,” he said, smiling, “for a great gentleman to live in… and you were a great gentleman once, Mr. Cranfield.” The other gave him a cunning look over his shoulder.

“When I find the owner of the fish,” he answered, “I shall be a great gentleman again or kill my enemy — that is in the spell.” They went downstairs slowly because of the rotting steps and uncertain light. Lord James rested his long fingers lightly on the dusty balustrade.

“Do you not find the days very long and dull here?” he asked.

The reply came unsteadily from the bowed red figure of the sign-painter.

“No… I paint… and then I make umbrellas.”

“Umbrellas!” Lord James laughed unpleasantly.

“And parasols. Would you not like a parasol for your wife, James Fontaine?”

“Ah, you know me, it seems.”

“I know what you call yourself,” said Lucius Cranfield. “And here is my studio. Will you look at the designs upon the wall?”

Lord James grinned and stepped delicately along the dark passage to the door indicated. It opened into a low chamber the entire depth of the house. There were windows on either side: one way looking onto the river, the other onto the street.

Lucius Cranfield set the candle in a green bottle on the table, and pointed round the walls where all manner of drawings on canvas, wood, and paper hung. They depicted horrible and fantastic things — mandrakes, dragons, curious shells and plants, monsters, and distorted flowers. In one corner were a number of parasols of silk and brocade, ruffled and frilled, having carved handles and ribboned sticks.

Lord James put up his glass and looked about him.

“So you know who I am?” he said, speaking in an absorbed way and keeping his back to Lucius Cranfield, who stood huddled together on the other side of the table, staring before him with dead-seeming eyes.

There was no answer, and Lord James laughed softly.

“You paint very well, Mr. Cranfield, but I must have something more cheerful than any of these” — he pointed his elegant cane at the designs. “That fish, now, that you have on your own sign, that is a beautiful thing.”

The sign-painter groaned and thrust his fingers into his untidy brown hair.

“I cannot paint that again,” he said.

“Sell me the sign, then.” Lord James spoke quickly.

“I cannot… it is hanging there that it may be seen… that whosoever holds the other fish may see it… and then…”

“How mad you are!” cried Lord James. “What then, even should one come who has the other fish?” His black eyes blinked sharply, and his lips twitched back from his teeth.

“Then I shall find my enemy. The witch said so….”

“But you may die first.”

“I cannot die till the spell is accomplished,” shivered Lucius Cranfield. “Nor can I lose the fish.”

Lord James put his hand to his waistcoat-pocket.

“Your light is very dim,” he remarked. “I do not see clearly, but I think I observe a violet-coloured parasol—”

The other lifted his head.

“They are very interesting to make.”

“Will you show me that one?”

Lucius Cranfield turned slowly towards the far corner of the room.

“I began to work on that the night my father was hanged… as I sewed on the frills I thought of my enemies and how I hated them; and the night I killed one of them I finished it, carving the handle into the likeness of an ivory rose.”

“You have sinned also,” said Lord James, through his teeth. He took his hand from his pocket and put it behind his back. “I have been a great sinner,” answered the sign-painter.

He took the purple parasol from the corner and shook out its shimmering silk furbelows.

“I will buy that.” Lord James leant against the table, close to the candle flaring in the green bottle. In its yellow light the brilliant colour of his coat shone like a jewel.

“The parasol is not for sale,” said Lucius Cranfield sourly, gazing down on it. “Why do you not choose your design and go?” Now it was quite dark, both outside, beyond the windows, and in the corners of the long room. The waters sounded insistently as they lapped against the house. There was no moon; but through a rift in the thick, murky sky one star flickered, and the sign-painter lifted his dimmed eyes from the candle-flame and looked at it.

“What do you see?” asked Lord James curiously. He came softly up bed the other.

“A star,” was the reply. “It is shining above the lonely white tree that is always knocking at the closed shutters….”

Lord James’s hand came round from behind his back.

“But one can never see them both at the same time,” continued the sign-painter. “When the star comes out, the tree is hidden; and only when the star sets…”

Lord James’s fine hand rose slowly and fell swiftly…

Lucius Cranfield sank on his face silently, and the flaring light of the unsnuffed candle glistened on the wet dagger as it was withdrawn from between his shoulders.

Lord James stepped back and gazed with a long smile at his victim, who writhed an instant and then lay still on the dusty floor.

The sound of the water without seemed to increase his strength. The secretive yet turbulent noise of it filled the chamber like a presence as Lord James turned over the body of the sign-painter and opened his red coat.

In an inner pocket he found it, wrapped in a piece of blue satin.

The crystal fish. It was of all colours yet of no colour; translucent as water, holding, like a bubble, all hues, finely wrought with fins and scales, light and cold to the hand, shining with a pure light of its own to the eye.

Lord James rose from his knees and put out the candle.

The river sounded so loud that he paused to listen to it. He thought he could distinguish the swish of oars and the latter of them in the rowlocks.

He went to the window and looked out. By the glimmer of the star and the radiance cast by the fish in his hand he could discern that there was nobody on the river, only the deserted boat fastened to the rotting stake.

He smiled; the faint light was caught in his ribbons, his diamonds, his dark, evil eyes. As he stared up and down the black road of water, the crystal fish began to writhe in his hand. It pushed and struggled, then leapt through his fingers and plunged into the blackness of the river.

Lord James peered savagely after it, his smile changing to a grin of anger. But the fish had sunk like a bolt of iron, and thinking of the depth of the river Lord James was comforted.

He came back to the table. It was quite dark, but his eyes served him equally well day or night. He picked up his clouded cane with the crimson tassels, his black hat laced with gold, his vivid green cloak, he kissed his hand to the prone body of the sign-painter, and left the room. In a leisurely fashion he walked down the passage, pushed open the crazy front door, and stepped out into the lonely street.

He looked up at the sign on which were painted the crystal fish and the man on the gallows; then he began to put on his gloves.

As he did so the violet parasol came to his mind. He turned back.

Softly he re-entered the long studio. The noise of the water had subsided to a mere murmur. Rats were running about the room and sitting on the body of Lucius Cranfield. He could see them despite the intense darkness, and he stepped delicately to avoid their tails.

The violet parasol was on the floor near the dead man. He stooped to pick it up, and the rats squealed and showed their teeth.

Lord James nodded to them and left the house again with the parasol under his arm.

II. — THE RIVER AND THE GARDEN

The garden sloped down to the straight high-road upon the side to which the house faced, and at the back ran the river dividing the pleasaunce from the meadows.

Separating the garden from the road was a prim box hedge, very high, very wide, and very old. Behind this grew the neat garden flowers, and beneath it the tangled weeds that edged the road.

Here sat Lord James on a milestone, playing Faro with a one-eyed gipsy

The summer sunset sparkled on the red gables of the house and in the clothes of Lord James, which were of crimson and blue sarcenet branched with gold and silver.

The gipsy was young and ugly; he wore a green patch over his eyeless socket, and now and then listened, keenly, to the sound of the church-bells that came up from the valley, for the village ringers were practising for Lord James’s wedding.

The two played silently. The red and black cards scattered over the close green grass shaded by the large wild-parsley flowers. Beside the milestone lay Lord James’s hat, stick, and cloak. His horse was fastened by its bridle to a stout branch of a laurel-tree that bent over from the garden.

“You always win,” said the gipsy.

Lord James smiled, then coughed till he shook the powder off his face on to his cravat.

“Another game,” he said, and shuffled the cards.

At this a lady looked over the box hedge, and gave them both a bitter frown.

Little bright pink and blue ribbons were threaded through her high-piled white curls, round her neck was a diamond necklace, and on the front of her black velvet bodice a long trail of jasmine was pinned. Her painted lips curled scornfully, and her azure eyes darkened as she stared across and over the box hedge at Lord James.

He looked up at her, waved his hand, and rose.

“You are late,” she remarked stiffly.

“I have been playing cards,” he answered. “May I present you to my friend?” He pointed to the gipsy.

“No,” she said, and turned her back.

The gipsy laughed silently. The sound of the bells swelled and receded in the golden evening.

“Take my horse round to the stables.” Lord James grinned at the gipsy, and gathered up his hat and cloak from the grass.

“I hate those bells!” cried the lady pettishly.

“They will ring no more after tomorrow, my dear.”

Lord James came round to the gate as he spoke, and entered the garden.

She gave him a side-glance, and pouted. Her enormous pink silk hoop, draped with festoons of white roses, overspread the narrow garden-path, and crushed the southernwood that edged it. Her hands rested on her black velvet panniers embroidered with garlands of crimson carnations. There was a moon-shaped patch on her bare throat and one like a star on her rouged cheek; beneath her short skirts showed her black buckle shoes and immensely high red heels. Her name was Serena Thornton.

“I have broken my parasol,” she said, looking at the gables of her house where the red-gold sunset rested. “The violet one you brought me.”

“It can be mended,” answered Lord James.

He came up to her, and they kissed.

“Yes,” assented Serena. “I sent it to be mended today,” she added. He laughed.

“There is no one here can mend a parasol like that. You must give it to me, Serena, and I will take it to town.”

They moved slowly along the gravel walk, he in front of her, since her hoop did not allow him to be by her side.

It was a very pleasant garden. There were beds of pinks, of stocks, of roses, bushes of laurel, yew, and box, all intersected with little paths that crossed one another and led towards the house.

“There is a man in the village,” said Lady Serena, “who is a maker of umbrellas. He came here yesterday.”

“Ah?” questioned Lord James. He glanced back over his shoulder. “I heard he was painting a new sign for The Goat and Compasses, and that he had made a beautiful blue umbrella for the host, so I sent down my parasol.”

A slight greenish tinge, visible through the paint and powder, overspread Lord James’s handsome face.

“It was careless of you to break it,” he said softly.

Lady Serena lifted her shoulders.

“I could not help it. Shall I tell you how it happened?”

They had reached a square plot of close grass round which ran the box hedge and a low stone coping. In the centre stood a prim fountain, and in its clear water swam the golden and ruby carp.

“Yes, tell me how it happened,” said Lord James. He pressed his handkerchief to his thin lips and looked up at the sunset.

“I wish they would stop those bells!” cried Lady Serena.

“They are practising for our wedding tomorrow, my dear,” he smiled.

They could walk now side by side, she looking in front of her, and he gazing at the sunset that was pale and bright, the colour of soft gold, of pink coral, and of a dove’s wings above the gables of her house.

“I was walking by the river two days ago,” said Lady Serena, “and I had in my hand the crystal fish. Do you remember, Lord James, that I showed it to you just before you left for town?”

“Yes; a foolish toy,” he answered.

“How pleasant the box smells!” murmured Lady Serena, in a softer tone. “Well, I walked along the bank, thinking of you, and as I looked into the water I saw another fish — it floated just as if it were swimming — and oh, it was like the one I held in my hand! Just as it neared me it became entangled in the water weeds….”

“This does not explain how you broke your parasol,” remarked Lord James.

“I drew the fish to land with it — my new parasol that your little black boy had just brought me — and broke the handle.”

Lord James turned his pallid face towards her.

“Did you get the fish?”

“Yes. It is just like the one I have.” She pulled out a green ribbon from the white velvet bag that hung on her arm, and at the end of it dangled two crystal fishes, cut and carved finely, holding a clear light, and filled with changing colours.

Lady Serena touched one with her scented forefinger. “That is the one I found. See, it has a bright blood-like stain across the side.”

“So it has,” said Lord James, putting up his glass. “It is curious you should have found it. A witch gave you the other, did you not say?”

“Yes,” she answered half sullenly. “And she told me that the other was owned by my lover, and that he must live in misery till he found me.” She turned the blue light of her eyes on her companion.

“You should have had it,” she said, and slipped the fishes back into her bag.

The afterglow was fading from the sky, and they turned towards the house.

“I won three thousand pounds at Faro last night,” said Lord James, “and I have brought you some presents.”

And he thrust his hand into his pocket and drew out a string of amethysts.

“I dislike the colour,” said Lady Serena, and put it aside. “It is the colour you wear,” he answered.

She took the necklace at this with a sudden laugh, and fastened it round her long, pale throat.

They reached the three shallow steps that led to the open door of the house, and passed side by side out of the sunset glow into the soft-hued gloom of the wide hall.

In the great banqueting-room a dinner of two covers was laid. The service was of agate and silver, the glasses twisted with milk-white lines. The table was lit by six tall candles painted with wreaths of pinks and forget-me-nots, and their light ran gleaming and faint over the white cloth.

“I am going to try on my wedding-dress,” said Lady Serena. “Will you wait for me?”

“It is unlucky to wear your wedding-dress before your wedding-day,” answered Lord James.

But she left the chamber without a word or a smile.

The room opened by wide windows onto the terrace at the back that sloped down to the river, and the sound of the water throbbing between its banks seemed to grow in volume and to speak threateningly to Lord James as he sat at the table with the glass and silver glittering before him, and the heart-shaped candle-flames casting a flickering glow over his sickly face.

It was the same river, and he knew it. As the last flush of light faded from the heavens he could see the moon, a strong pearl colour, rise above the trees, and a great sparkling reflection fell across the river, marking with lines of silver the turbulent eddies that chased one another down the stream.

After a while Lord James rose and walked softly to the window, and his eyes became wide and bright as he stroked his chin and stared at the river.

When he turned round again, Lucius Cranfield stood in the doorway looking at him.

A spasm of fear contracted Lord James’s features; then he spoke evenly.

“Good evening,” he said.

“Good evening,” replied Lucius Cranfield, and he bowed. “I have brought back a parasol I have mended — a lady’s parasol, purple, with an ivory rose on the handle.”

Between them was an ill-lit space of room and the bright table bearing the candles. They looked at each other, and Lord James’s face grew long and foxy.

“How much do I owe you, Mr. Cranfield?” he asked.

“A great deal,” said the sign-painter, shaking his head. “Oh, a great deal!”

Smiling, he set the parasol against a chair. His eyes were no longer bloodshot nor his cheeks pallid. His hair was neatly dressed. He wore the same red suit, and between the shoulder-blades it had been slit and mended with stitchings of gold thread.

“How much?” repeated Lord James.

Lucius Cranfield laughed.

“I do not believe that you are alive at all,” sneered the other, rubbing his hands together. “How did you get away from the rats?”

“Do you hear the river?” whispered the sign-painter. “It is the same river.”

Lord James came towards the table.

“I will pay you tomorrow for your work,” and he pointed to the mended parasol.

“That is no debt of yours,” answered Lucius Cranfield. “I did it for the lady of the house, Serena Thornton.”

“She is my betrothed,” said Lord James. “And I will pay you tomorrow—”

“No… tonight.”

And the sign-painter smiled and stepped nearer.

“You lost the crystal fish,” murmured Lord James, biting his forefinger and glancing round the dark, lonely room.

“But someone else has found it.”

The other gave a snarl of rage.

“No! It is at the bottom of the river!”

At that Lucius Cranfield leant forward and seized his enemy by the throat. Lord James shrieked, and they swayed together for a moment. But the sign-painter twisted the other’s head round on his shoulders and dropped him, a heap of gay clothes, on the waxed floor.

Then he began to sing, and turned to the open window.

The river was quiet now, flowing peacefully in between its banks, and Lucius Cranfield stepped out onto the terrace and walked towards its waters shining in the moonlight.

Almost before the last echo of his footsteps had died away in the silent room, Lady Serena Thornton entered, holding her dress up from her shoes.

Her gown was white, all wreathed across the hoop with ropes of seed-pearls, and laced across the bodice with diamonds. In her high head-dress floated two soft plumes fastened with clusters of pale roses. Round her neck hung Lord James’s gift of amethysts.

She stood in the doorway, her painted lips parted, her dark blue eyes fixed on the body of her betrothed husband.

Presently she went up and looked at him; then she sat down on the chair by the table — sat down, breathing heavily — with her right hand on the smooth satin of her bodice, and slow, strange changes passing over her face. She glanced at the purple parasol, resting across the chair where Lord James should have sat, and then out at the distant river, that showed white as her bridal-dress where the moonlight caught its ripples.

She heard the far-off singing of the sign-painter, and she sighed, closing her eyes.

The six candles burnt steadily, casting a rim of dark shadow round the table and the dead man on the floor, and glittering in the embroidered flowers on his gaudy coat and in the jewels of the woman at the table.

The black clock on the mantelshelf struck ten. The sound was echoed by the chimes from the village church.

Lady Serena Thornton rose and went upstairs, he: wide hoop brushing the balustrade either side, her high heels tapping on the polished wood.

She entered her room and lit a little silver lamp on the dressing-table.

The chamber looked out upon the back; the window was open, and she could still see the river and hear Lucius Cranfield singing.

Slowly she took the feathers, ribbons and flowers out of her curls, and laid them on the tulip-wood table. Then she shook down her hair from its wire frame and brushed the powder out of it. She had almost forgotten what colour it was — in reality a ruby golden-brown, like the tint of wallflowers.

She unlaced her bodice and flung aside her jewels. She stepped out of her hoop and took off her satin coat, staring at herself in the gilt oval mirror.

Then she washed her face free of paint and powder in her gold basin, and tied up her locks with a red ribbon. She cast off her long earrings, her bracelets, her rings, the necklace Lord James had given her. This slipped, like a glitter of purple water, through her fingers, and shone in a little heap of stars on the gleaming waxed floor.

She arrayed herself in a brown dress, plain and straight, and took the two fishes from their velvet bag to hang them round her neck. Again she looked at herself. Who would have known her? Not Lord James himself, could he have risen from the floor in the solitary room below, and come up the wide stairs to gaze at her. Her face was utterly changed, her carriage different.

She blew out the lamp. A faint trail of smoke stained the moonlight that filled the room. She listened and heard the river and the sign-painter singing. On her bosom the fishes throbbed and glowed, opal-coloured and luminous.

Leaving the room lightly, softly she descended through the dark to the dining-room.

The six flower-wreathed candles still burnt steadily among the glass and silver. She glanced at Lord James sorrowfully, and picked up the mended parasol.

As she did so the bells broke out in a volume of glad sound — the villagers practising yet again for her wedding on the morrow.

Lady Serena Thornton smiled, and as Lucius Cranfield had done, and almost in his steps, went down the long room and through the open window on to the terrace. Slowly she walked towards the river, which she could see moving restlessly under the moonlight. The bells were very loud, but through them came the words of his song—

“The clouds were tangled in the trees They broke the boughs and spoiled the fruit; The sleeper knows what the sleeper sees — You play spades, and I follow suit!

The clouds came down the drops of rain, And woke the grass to blooms of fire; The sleeper tore his dream in twain, And sought for the cards in the bitter mire!”

The bells ceased suddenly. Lady Serena saw the dark figure of the sign-painter, standing at the edge of the water, his back to her.

“If I have won, ’tis little matter;

If I have lost, ’tis naught at all;

The wind will chill and the sun will flatter,

And the damp earth fill the mouth of all.”

There was a boat before him, rocking on the argent water, and as the lady came up the sign-painter stooped over it. Then he turned and saw her.

“Good even,” said Lady Serena. He took her hands and kissed her face. The sound of the river was heavily in their ears.

“I found your fish,” she whispered.

He nodded, and they entered the boat. It was lined with violet silk and scented with spices.

“The villagers will have practised for nothing,” said Lady Serena. Lucius Cranfield loosened the rope that held the boat fast to a willow, and it began to drift down the stream towards the town.

“We are going to a house where a tree with white flowers knocks for admittance on the shutters,” he said.

“I know,” she answered; “I know.”

She sat opposite to him, leaning back, and the light night wind blew apart her brown robe here and there on the gleam of the bright green petticoat beneath. Her yellow hair floated behind her, and the crystal fishes rose and fell with her breathing. Across her knees lay the purple parasol.

They looked at each other and smiled with parted lips. The boat sped swiftly under a high bank, treeless and full under the rays of the moon. Here, by a round stone, sat two figures playing cards.

Lucius Cranfield glanced up. The players turned white, grinning faces down towards the boat. They were the one-eyed gipsy and Lord James.

“Good night,” nodded the sign-painter. “I do not believe you are alive at all. Why, I can almost see through you!…”

“Do you know me?” mocked Lady Serena.

And the boat was swept away along the winding river.

Lord James listened to the sign-painter’s song that floated up from the dark water.

“If I win, ’tis little matter;

If I lose, ’tit naught at all;

The wind will chill and the sun will flatter,

And the red earth stop the mouths of all.”

“They will never get there,” grinned Lord James. “T shall go down tomorrow and see the empty boat upside down, tossing outside the shuttered house.”

“There is no tomorrow for such as you,” leered the gipsy. “You had your neck broken an hour ago… presently we will go home… your deal…”

Lord James sighed, and a great cloud suddenly overspread the moon.

The gipsy began to sing in a harsh voice, and his eyes turned red in his head as he shuffled the cards.

“If I win, ’tis little matter;

If I lose, ’tis naught at all;

The wind will chill and the sun will flatter,

And the red earth stop the mouths of all.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Far away down the river the boat flashed for the last time in the moonlight, then was lost to sight under the shadow of the overhanging trees.

Grace Latouche and the Warringtons (1931)

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

ELSIE’S LONELY AFTERNOON

Elsie was always lonely, but her desolation seemed more poignant when the day was sunny.

Elsie lived with her grandmother in a large house at Hampstead. She thought that there could not be, anywhere, a house with more rooms, more stairs, more quiet and empty.

There were three servants. They lived in the day downstairs in a large basement, and nightly slept in attics at the top of the house. Both basement and attics were out of Elsie’s reach; she was not allowed to speak to the servants. There was not, to Elsie’s mind, a single thing in this great house that was cheerful or pleasant. A great many people must have lived there once, there were so many empty rooms. There was an empty schoolroom, the inky, tattered lesson-books still on the shelves round the walls, a globe in one corner, and a tattered map hanging between the windows, and worn cut desks and benches as if quite a number of children had once learnt their lessons there.

There was also an empty study, with a huge bookcase with a glass front, that was always locked; and there was a drawing-room in which no-one ever sat. The shutters were always closed in this room into which Elsie had only, just by chance, once peeped. It was full of mirrors with glass frames and little cabinets lined with quilted silk in which stood china figures.

Then there was the dining-room, so much too large for Elsie, who had her dinner and tea there alone on a little cloth laid at one end of the long, shining mahogany table.

But Grandmamma always had her meals in bed. She suffered from what Elsie had been told was a “stroke”. When Elsie asked what that was, her grandmother replied, “The hand of God”.

So Elsie thought of God’s hand reaching out of heaven into Grandmamma’s large bedroom and stroking her down one side and leaving that dead.

Elsie did not find Grandmamma’s bedroom a pleasant place, either. It was very large and had two windows which looked on to the garden at the back. Between the two windows was a dressing-table, covered in white spotted muslin over stiff pink stuff.

There were a great many engravings on the walls. They seemed to be all very much alike, with a smooth baby face, like a china doll, and each of these pictures had a little story.

One was of a young prince: the Prince Imperial, Grandmamma said, who had recently been killed by blackamoors. Another was of a girl, crying over a dead bird which she held in her hand, and there was a little hole at her feet where the bird was presently to be buried. And another was of a woman tying a scarf on to a man’s arm, and Grandmamma explained that if he went out without the scarf he would be murdered.

Grandmamma’s bed was very large. Grandpapa used to sleep there, too, before he had died. It had curtains at the back which looped on to the wall. Beside the curtain was Grandmamma’s slipper-case and watch-case, made of stiff, white, perforated cardboard, tied up with dark ribbon. There were a great many objects in the room, but Elsie was forbidden to touch any of them. Grandmamma sat up in bed in a little wool jacket and knitted and crocheted all day long. She had on a lace cap with thick, pale mauve, velvet ribbons on it. Sometimes she would be helped to a chair and drawn to the window. The doctor used to come to see her every day; sometimes another man, whom Elsie heard referred to as a lawyer; and whenever these people were there, Elsie was sent out of the way.

Her grandmother used to tell her to “efface herself”, and Elsie soon became aware that this word meant that she was to act as if she didn’t exist. She soon began to understand that she ought never to have existed. Her father, Grandpapa’s son, was dead and her mother was poor, therefore neither of them were of any use to Elsie.

She was six years old and could neither read nor write, but she soon understood quite plainly that she ought never to have been born. Indeed, Mrs Parfitt, the cook, had once said as much in her hearing: “Poor little thing, it was a pity she was ever born.”

Elsie thought so too. She had never enjoyed a moment of her short life, Father being dead and Mother being poor, and Elsie having to suffer for something very wrong which they had evidently both done.

Everything that Elsie did was wrong too. She knew that, and was resigned to the fact. Whenever her grandmother spoke to her it was nearly always to say something beginning with “don’t”.

The few people who ever came to the house and who ever took any notice of her nearly always also said something beginning with “don’t”, or else “run away”.

Elsie liked the servants, Grace and Sarah and Mrs Parfitt. Sometimes she opened the swing door at the top of the basement stairs and sat there listening to their talk and laughter; not that she could hear what they said, but the sound of voices was comforting in the large, empty house, with Grandmamma sleeping or dozing and no other company at all.

When Mrs Parfitt found Elsie one day at the top of the stairs, she too began to talk of “don’t” and “mustn’t”. She said that Elsie was a “tell-tale” and a “spy” and a “nuisance” and would lose them all their places. Though Elsie did not understand what any of this meant, she realised that she had again done something wrong.

But sometimes, even after that, the servants were kind. Mrs Parfitt once brought her up an apple after her lunch, and on another occasion, in the middle of a long afternoon, some sandwiches. Once, when there was a thunderstorm and Grandmamma had had her sent to bed, the servants allowed Elsie to come down and sit by the kitchen fire. There was a cat on the hearth and a kettle, and rows of shining pots and plates on the walls and red curtains at the windows, and for a little while Elsie felt almost happy, though she shuddered whenever the door was opened to think of the stone passage without, and all the vaults and cellars and closets and presses, which, like the rest of the house, were disused.

But the moment came when Elsie had to go upstairs to her little bed in the dressing-room which opened out of Grandmamma’s great room. Cook said it “was a shame”, but Elsie had to go just the same, and lie awake all night in the dark room, listening to the thunder and watching the lightning, her teeth chattering with terror, biting the pillow for fear she cried out.

She lay awake the most part of every night. She had only cried out once. That time she had disturbed Grandmamma and been punished, beaten very hard on the backs of her hands with a hairbrush, by Mary, who looked after Grandmamma, and made to stay in bed all the next day with nothing but bread and water to eat and drink. This diet was no such very great change for the little girl, for her fare was of the plainest and often such as she could not stomach. She was fastidious and preferred to go hungry rather than eat fat cold mutton, coarse boiled potatoes, stiff rice-puddings, and Normandy pippins boiled into a pulp. She did not know why she was living with Grandmamma, but she understood it was very kind of Grandmamma to have her there. Indeed, it was very kind of anybody to endure her at all; nobody wanted her, and of course she must be, she was sure, quite useless and a nuisance.

Once she had contrived to creep into the wide hall when Sarah, who was good-humoured, was washing the black and red tiles, and Sarah began to talk to her. She was evidently smarting under some reprimand from Grandmamma, and Elsie understood from what Sarah said in a low, careful voice, that all Grandmamma’s children had been useless and nuisances.

It seemed hard to believe that once that great house had been full of people. Grandmamma had had quite a lot of children, boys and girls. They were all dead or had gone away. None of them, so Elsie understood, was any good. Only Grandmamma remained, powerful and, of course, virtuous, always there and always right.

“Your poor papa was the favourite,” said Sarah. “I shouldn’t be surprised if you was to get the money after all.”

“But Grandmamma hasn’t got any money,” said Elsie. “When she talks to me she always says: ‘Mind, I haven’t got a farthing!’”

At that Sarah laughed, and pushed back a lock of hair from her forehead with her wet hand that still held the scrubbing brush. She said that Grandmamma was very rich, but a miser; that no doubt there was gold hidden all over the house if one only knew where to look for it.

Elsie asked what was the good of it? Sarah said that it was all the good in the world. If you had gold you could do anything. She said that that was what Master Tom used to come about. That’s why the old lady had a stroke, quarrelling with him.

Elsie asked who was Master Tom? Sarah said: “Why, your uncle of course, silly.” And then Mrs Parfitt called out to Sarah and Elsie had to go away.

After that, she used to look for gold for something to do in the long afternoons — she even ventured into those empty rooms which she held most in horror. One had a large hole in the floor. She used to lean down and bring her little face close to the hole and peer into the darkness and think that she might see gold lying there among the dust. She knew what gold was like — there was a gold clock in the drawing-room and her grandmamma had a gold watch, and her wedding ring, which moved round on her thin, knobby finger, was gold too. And on Grandmamma’s kidney-shaped dressing-table were boxes that Grandmamma kept locked. Once, on a wet day, she had let Elsie bring them to the bed, and opened them, and there was this gold too, brooches and chains and earrings, and Elsie had played with them on the down coverlet.

Elsie never found any gold — gold which would do anything, even procure an escape from this house. She frightened herself very much wandering in and out of those empty rooms, some furnished, some unfurnished, but all silent, dusty, and desolate. The whole street, which was full of large houses with pillared porticoes like Grandmamma’s, seemed to Elsie to be always silent, desolate. Occasionally a carriage and pair passed, and sometimes, peering from the window in the midst of an afternoon that seemed endless, she would see some woman and child go by and her little heart would be pinched with an odd nostalgia for a happiness she had never known — no, not even the name of, and then for hours and hours the wide street would seem as silent, as empty as the house. Even the sunshine — and that summer there was a great deal of sunshine — could not lighten the tedium of that street and house to Elsie.

Even the flowering trees, lilac, laburnum, and may (for every house had before the basement a little square in which grew such trees and shrubs), could not give an air of cheerfulness and joy to those dreary sunny afternoons.

Every house had striped sun-blinds out over the windows and striped curtains hanging in front of the door. The very sight of these awnings, mostly red and white, filled Elsie with an unutterable woe, born of complete loneliness. She had nothing to do, neither work nor play. Mrs Parfitt had said that she was getting a big girl and would soon be sent to school, and Elsie had hoped that as she was such a nuisance and ought to efface herself, she might indeed be sent away somewhere. She did not know what “school” was; it could not be worse than the great house in Hampstead.

Once Mary turned her into the back garden, shut the door of the schoolroom that gave on to it, and told her to stay there all the afternoon. Elsie hated the garden almost as much as she hated the house. It had a dirty, high brick wall all round it and at the bottom a sloping bank on which were four tall poplar trees. The heart-shaped leaves fluttered continually to the ground; they were dirty and had a disagreeable smell and a harsh texture. The stems of the lilac bushes were thick with soot and the flowers were tarnished and brown almost as soon as they came out.

There were no other flowers in the garden. The square of grass in the middle was rusty and dirty. Everything in the garden was dirty; Elsie never played in it, but she often got a scolding when she came in for having spoiled her pinafore. And this afternoon she began to amuse herself by trying to make a mud pie. The first digging with her fingers brought up some worms, and she left off, sick with disgust, that attempt at diversion.

When at last she was allowed into the house Mary scolded her, as she had expected to be scolded, as a naughty, naughty girl for getting herself into a mess. The servants all seemed rather excited. She was given her tea in the schoolroom, bread-and-butter and milk and a piece of seed cake, and scolded again because she did not like the seeds and tried to pull them out with her unskillful fingers.

When she had finished she tried to creep into the kitchen, with a hope of a sight of the cat or the kettle. She heard the servants talking about Master Tom and how he had been there that afternoon. There had been “a scene”, and Elsie wondered what “a scene” was. It all seemed even more wrong and unhappy than before. It seemed to Elsie not only a pity that she had ever been born, but that anyone else had.

“He’s a regular scapegrace, and will come to a bad end, you mark my words,” said Cook; and Elsie longed to ask what a bad end was, but she did not dare to be seen. She was discovered just the same, and smacked and turned out of the kitchen up into the lonely, empty passage, study, and dining-room, where she roamed at will all day, when she was not sitting by Grandmamma’s bed or in her own room, which was quite bare, save for a bed and a tin wash-hand stand. Everything had been taken out of it when Elsie came to live there for fear she should touch something. She quite accepted the justice of this, because everything she touched was either spoilt or broken or soiled, for her hands were never clean and she seemed incredibly clumsy.

Except on those rare trembling expeditions when she had been looking for secret gold in a desperate hope that it might somehow procure her release from her present predicament, Elsie had never ventured up above her grandmother’s bedroom, though there were three stories above that floor. The servants slept up there, but that did not seem to give an air of human habitation to those dreadful upper floors. One of them contained a large black oil painting the sight of which had made Elsie sick with terror. Some children, long ago, perhaps her own uncles and aunts, had used the picture for a target, and filled it full of small holes from toy arrows or darts.

It was the portrait of a dark man, and Elsie thought that he scowled in agony from his many wounds and that he would leap from the canvas to pursue her if she stared at him a second longer. Elsie had never looked into that room again, and besides that there were ghosts upstairs. Mrs Parfitt and Mary and Sarah had all said so.

Once, when she had lain awake listening to Grandmamma’s snoring in the other room, she had certainly heard footsteps overhead, and unable at length to bear her torture any longer she had run downstairs in her nightgown and screamed out at the top of the basement stairs that she had heard steps overhead.

Mrs Parfitt had said good-humouredly: “Nonsense! There’s nobody up there.” Words which had filled Elsie with complete terror.

Sarah had laughed and said: “The ghosts, I dare say.”

Mary had added: “Of course — the ghosts!”

Mrs Parfitt, meaning to console, had assured Elsie that if she was a good girl and behaved herself and kept out of the way and didn’t annoy Grandmamma ghosts would leave her alone.

Elsie had not returned to her own bed that night. She had not enough courage to do so. She had crept, instead, into her grandmother’s room, and lain awake, curled, cold and sweating, on the outside of the coverlet, taking what comfort she could from the old lady’s heavy snoring. And in the morning, just before Mary came in to bring Grandmamma her tea and wash her and comb her hair and put on her thick lace cap with the heavy, pale-violet, velvet ribbons, Elsie had crept away into her own bed and pretended to sleep.

All the next day she tried to make herself very agreeable to Grandmamma because she wanted to ask her about the ghosts upstairs. She held her wool for her and fetched her scissors and tried to remember to close the door quietly and not to raise her voice nor to talk too loud nor too fast.

Presently, in the afternoon, holding on her tiny hands the skein of orange wool, she asked: “Have you ever seen the ghost upstairs, Grandmamma?”

Grandmamma was in a good humour that day. You would hardly have thought she was ill at all. She had been a very handsome woman and she still had an air of energy and vigour.

Propped up against her big pillows she laughed and said: “I should think there are a good many ghosts in this house, my dear. Think of all the people who have been born and died here, even in my time, and only you and I left, eh, little Elsie!”

“How many people were there, Grandmamma?”

“Eh, I couldn’t remember now. You see, this was your grandfather’s father’s house. He had it when it was first built and there were a lot of children then. They died or scattered. Mostly died, I think. I remember four of them went off in a week with typhus. Then there were my own. Plenty of them, little Elsie. You wouldn’t think now, would you, there used to be such a noise here that I often didn’t know what to do. Children all over the place, boys and girls — in the schoolroom, running up and down the stairs, playing in the garden—”

She stopped and dropped her knitting needles on to the sheets. “Plenty of noise then, little Elsie; quiet enough now, isn’t it?”

“Are they all ghosts now?” asked Elsie, and she dropped the skein of wool on to her lap.

“Ghosts — or worse,” said Grandmamma, with a sigh; “most of them seemed to go wrong somehow.”

“Were they nuisances, like I am?”

Grandmamma looked at her sharply, as if she suspected her of an impertinence.

“Never mind what’s become of them, Elsie, or whether they’re ghosts or not. Pick up that wool — it’ll get tangled; and put the pillow straight under my left arm. Mary knows I can’t knit like this.”

Though Grandmamma was partially paralysed down one side, she could, by a deft arrangement of pillows propping up one of her elbows, still knit and crochet, which she did for hours every day with a certain ferocity, making thick grey garments for the poor and the heathen and squares and squares of crochet in bright colours, which were going to be sewn together one day into a great quilt.

Elsie thought of the poor and the heathen with horror; she saw armies and armies of them in grey woollen petticoats advancing on her with hostile looks and menacing cries when she woke in the middle of the night.

Cunningly she tried to get more information about the ghosts. “Are there ghosts in the schoolroom, Grandmamma?”

“Aye, indeed, I should think there are ghosts in there. That’s where they learnt their lessons, all of them. Learnt no good, no, not one of them. That’s a strange thought, Elsie — all of them down there, learning lessons year after year and not one of them learning anything good.”

“And the ghosts upstairs in the bedroom?” persisted Elsie.

“There’d be ghosts there. That’s where a lot of them died. Your grandfather died in this room, but I don’t suppose you’ll see his ghost. Why are you so interested, little Elsie? It’s a funny thing for a child to talk about, isn’t it? Have you been gossiping with the servants?”

Elsie shook her head. She was accustomed to the quick lying of utter fear.

“I thought I heard one last night, Grandmamma. Walking about.” Her child’s vivid imagination forced her to add: “When I got out of bed and opened the door I thought I saw a ghost coming down the stairs and I wondered who it was.”

“Who would you like it to be?” grinned the old lady. “Who would you like it to be out of all your uncles and aunts and great-uncles and aunts? Well, they weren’t any of them any good, as I told you. Except your father, perhaps. Yes, that now, your father.”

“I’d like to see him,” said Elsie. “Is he a ghost, too?”

Grandmamma was silent for a while. She seemed to be dozing, and Elsie felt even more afraid than she usually did when the old lady went off into one of her half-trances, half-sleeps, sitting propped up against the pillows, with her sharp chin on the little jacket of white Iceland wool she wore across her shoulder and breast.

Elsie began to whimper through fear of the ghosts and of Grandmamma and of loneliness of the great empty house. But Grandmamma was not asleep nor ill. She had only been thinking of the past.

“Your father would be a very pleasant sort of ghost. He was my youngest — the flower of the flock. Yes, if you saw him, Elsie, you would see a very handsome young man. Well, he wouldn’t be so young now, I suppose. He died soon after you were born. How old are you, Elsie?”

“Nearly seven years old, Grandmamma.”

“Yes, he wouldn’t be such a very young man, but he was handsome. Oh yes, my James was handsome. He had a mole on his left cheekbone.”

“I hope I won’t see him,” said Elsie, shuddering, as she sat rigid on her little stool. “I hope he’ll stay upstairs. I wonder where he lived. I expect in that room with the big black picture all full of holes.”

“He used to amuse himself with that old canvas,” said Grandmamma, smiling, as if at a pleasant recollection. “He used to have his games and sport there. He always was bold and spirited, and very loving to me, whatever they say about him.”

“And Uncle Tom?” asked Elsie. “Was he loving too?”

At that name a convulsive spasm passed over Grandmamma’s face. She struck out angrily with her strongest hand, missing Elsie, Who shrank back from the bedside.

“You have been gossiping with the servants! You haven’t got an Uncle Tom! There’s no such person! He doesn’t exist! Who told you there was an Uncle Tom?”

“Nobody,” said Elsie, “only you yourself, Grandmamma, the other day when you seemed half asleep you said something about Uncle Tom coming.”

The old woman looked at her dubiously, but was not able to contradict this, for she knew that she had not always full control over her senses.

“Well, perhaps I did, perhaps I did,” she grumbled. “You shouldn’t have taken any notice. I didn’t know what I was saying. I dare say I’ve been dreaming about the ghosts upstairs, Elsie, just like you have — a lot of nonsense! There’s no Uncle Tom. If you ever meet one who says he’s your Uncle Tom or says he’s any son of mine, you tell him that he’s a scoundrel and a liar, Elsie. I’ve no son, do you hear? Do you hear? All my sons are dead — dead.”

Elsie said “Yes” obediently and readily. Uncle Tom did not, after all, matter much to her. It was the ghost upstairs who concerned her and about whom she wanted to hear.

One afternoon in that odious June was more dreadful than any other afternoon to Elsie, for she was left quite alone in the house with her Grandmamma. Of course, this should never have happened and was not meant to happen. It occurred like this.

Mary and Sarah were, it seemed, both nieces of Mrs Parfitt, and when an uncle of theirs died all three wanted to go to the funeral. Grandmamma, of course, could not be left alone. Mrs Parfitt said she could easily arrange to send in a friend — a Mrs Skerrell — who would sit with Grandmamma and give Elsie her tea and do anything that was wanted until she, Mrs Parfitt, and the two girls came back about six o’clock, as they easily could, for the funeral was at Highgate.

So Mrs Parfitt told Elsie to be a good girl and Mary said, “Don’t get into mischief;” Sarah said, “Don’t you go telling no tales to your grandmother about what you haven’t seen or heard”; and Elsie was left alone with Grandmamma and Mrs Skerrell, who was a dreary widow woman in a long black garment and a bonnet with jet flowers.

Elsie had taken advantage of this unusual confusion to get down into the kitchen. She was staring at Mrs Skerrell just untying the strings of the black bonnet when there was a sharp ring at the bell. Both the woman and the child started. Nothing was, as Mrs Parfitt had put it to Mrs Skerrell, “expected”. All the tradespeople had called and visitors were rare.

Mrs Skerrell said “Drat it”, retied the strings of her bonnet, and ran up the stairs from the basement into the hall. Elsie remained alone in the kitchen. She wished she had the strength to get down one of the jars full of sultanas or sugar or motley biscuits and spice and eat large handfuls. She was always hungry. She had neither the strength nor the courage, so she remained standing beside the large, scrubbed, white-deal table, and looking up through the kitchen window into the area, she could just see a foot or so of the railings which divided the stone area, with its doors into coal cellars, from the square of garden where grew the ragged laburnum tree and the sooty lilac bushes.

Mrs Skerrell seemed to have been gone a very long time and loneliness increased and crystallised on the small figure of Elsie. She was shut into the desolation like a fly into a lump of amber, not daring to move for fear of finding worse things than loneliness in the other parts of the house. She peered up at the railings. Presently she saw the bottom of Mrs Skerrell’s beaded mantle and black skirt going past. Then Elsie ran to the window and, pressing her face to the panes, looked up. Mrs Skerrell was certainly leaving the house. Elsie listened and heard the gate go “click”, the iron tongue of the lock into the iron socket. She knew that sound so well; indeed, she knew every sound in the large empty house in which she had spent her entire life.

She was, then, in the house alone with Grandmamma, who, about this time in the early afternoon, was always asleep. Elsie’s first sensation was not one of added fear, but rather of deliverance. She now, given so much time, might be able to climb up on to the dresser and get down some of those canisters of things good to eat. She might be able to make a slow and careful hunt right through the kitchen and find out where the biscuits and the candied peel were kept; she might be able to tiptoe to the pantry, discover if there was a slice of pie or a portion of cake or a dish of fruit there. All things which she was not allowed and that were not good for Grandmamma, and off which the servants freely feasted.

Then she thought of an even fiercer temptation — an even more resplendent opportunity — the long, darkly gleaming sideboard in the dining-room. There was no speculation about that — there would not need to be any search. Elsie knew exactly where, on the top shelf when the large folding doors underneath the drawers were open, was kept jam, marmalade, and sugar. She was never allowed any of these delicacies. The marmalade used to go on her Grandmamma’s breakfast tray, the jam on her afternoon tea tray. There were preserves, too, and cherry and quince, that were brought out for the rare visitors.

It was true that this cupboard, which was large enough to have contained a dozen Elsies, was usually locked, and Grandmamma had the keys. Elsie had seen her take them out of a little box on the table by her bedside and give them to Mary, and seen Mary give them back to her. And once Elsie had found the cupboard open. It was true she had been discovered before she had time to take anything, but perhaps, just perhaps, Mrs Parfitt, in the excitement of her day’s outing, had left it open again, then Elsie would be able to help herself.

She would be discovered without doubt. She had little hope of being able to conceal the crime, there would be horrid stickiness on her fingers. When her fingers were sticky, she could, somehow, never get it off, even though she held them under the tap or wiped them on the towels.

But to satisfy her hungry craving for something sweet and delicious and delicate it would be worth enduring the punishment of being smacked on the backs of both her hands with a hard hairbrush, sent to bed in the daylight, or something worse if Grandmamma and Mrs Parfitt could think of a more severe punishment.

So she crept quietly up the stairs into the large, empty house. It was the very worst part of the afternoon, sunny, silent, with a feeling that it would be hours and hours and hours before the dark fell, as if the world had stopped and all life was in suspension and only she, Elsie, was alive and miserable.

As cautious as if she were certain that she would be overheard, Elsie went down the wide, black and red tiled corridor and into the dining-room, which was shuttered against the sun and full of dusty shadows, which lay in little straight lines of gold from the slats of the Venetian blinds.

Elsie had no luck. She found the sideboard locked. She had become by now reckless and daring; she would go upstairs, she decided, and take the key from the little box beside Grandmamma’s bed. Grandmamma would be asleep, and she had heard Mrs Parfitt tell Mrs Skerrell the old lady `had had her medicine and wouldn’t give any trouble.

The sunny, silent afternoon hung like a halter round Elsie’s soul. She thought that if she could get the keys and open the cupboard, a pot of jam, yes, a whole pot of jam, eaten slowly and with relish, would do something to mitigate the horrible loneliness of her imprisonment.

Grandmamma was, as she had thought she would be, asleep. The clothes were drawn up over her face as usual, and only the top of her cap with violet ribbons could be seen against the pillow. There were the slippers in the slipper-case, the watch neatly in the watch-case, there was the box standing beside the bottle of medicine with the glasses, the spectacles in their case, the Bible with the bronze clasp, and the different balls of wool, the various pieces of knitting.

The sun-blinds were drawn over Grandmamma’s window; the poplars in the garden made a fluttering shadow on them. The little breeze lifted them now and then so that a spurt of golden sunlight would fall into the shadowed room. All the smooth-faced pictures on the wall seemed to be watching Elsie — the girl with the dead bird, the girl tying the bandage on the man’s arm, the baby-faced boy who was called the “Prince Imperial”; all these, in their pale, smooth, shining frames, seemed to turn and stare at Elsie, but she did not falter.

She lifted the lid of the key-box and was putting in her hand to take out the key when she heard, overhead, footsteps.

The ghost of course, undoubtedly the ghost, and she alone in the house and at its mercy. On a frantic impulse of terror she turned and tried to rouse her grandmother, even venturing, seldom as she dared to touch the invalid, to shake the gaunt shoulder that heaved up the clothes. Grandmamma was very soundly asleep and did not rouse. The steps came nearer, unmistakably descending the stairs from the upper room. Elsie thought only of hiding, of creeping under the bed or into the huge cupboard where Grandmamma kept hanks and hanks of brightly-coloured wool and skeins and skeins of grey wool. But before she had time to run farther than the length of the bed, the door, which she had left ajar, was pushed open and the ghost walked in.

It was a handsome man with red hair and a mole on the left cheekbone. Elsie remembered what Grandmamma had said about her father and stood still at the end of the bed, staring. The apparition gave her no special feeling of terror; it was, indeed, far less terrible than she had supposed it would be. She even thought that in the warm glint of the eyes, the half curl of the lips, she detected promise of an ally. He was, at least, younger and more attractive than any creature she had seen for a long time, nay, than she had ever seen before.

“Hullo, little nipper,” said the ghost. “What are you doing here?” And as Elsie did not answer he advanced into the room and said in a low, steady voice, “Oh, you’re Elsie, I suppose, James’s child.”

“And you’re James,” said Elsie. “Grandmother told me about you.”

“James,” said the ghost, “your father do you mean? He’s dead.”

“Yes, I meant that. I meant that you are my father and dead and a ghost. Isn’t that right, please?”

The apparition seemed to reflect and gave a frown that made Elsie feel as if she were dwindling away with terror, then he said shortly, in the same low, cautious tone: “Well, if you like. Come here and let me have a look at you.”

Elsie stood mute, shaking her head in terror. The ghost became at once angry.

“Don’t be a little fool. I’m here for your good as well as my own. You don’t have much of a life, do you? They’ve always packed you out of the way when I’ve been before.”

“Oh, you’ve been before?” whispered Elsie in a thin tone of curiosity.

“Yes, I don’t suppose you heard anything about that. Well, I shan’t come again. Come outside, anyway, I might help you. How old are you?”

“Seven,” replied Elsie, who felt that the extra six months gave her added importance. Not for anything would she have admitted to six and a half.

“I see. Well, you’re old enough to have some sense. I’ve come here looking for something. Perhaps you could help me find it.”

“Grandmamma would know where it is,” said Elsie, pointing to the bed.

“I don’t want to wake her,” said the man, with a queer look. “She’s asleep. I think she’s going to sleep for a long time.”

“Mrs Skerrell ought to be looking after her,” whispered Elsie. “What happened to Mrs Skerrell?”

“I sent her away with a cock-and-bull story. Never you mind that. I want a little time in this house to myself. I’ve been looking out for an opportunity for a long while. I had it today when the women went out. Now look here, if you’ll help me, I’ll do something for you. Is there anything you want?”

Elsie understood nothing of this except the last question. She did not know to what sort of creature she spoke; she was quite bewildered. She felt more confident than she had ever felt before, more happy than she had been since she had been brought, so long ago that she could not remember it, to this house.

“I came up for Grandmamma’s keys.”

“Her keys?” asked the other sharply. “Where are they?”

“In the little box by the bed.”

“What did you want with her keys?”

“I was going to take something out of the sideboard — jam.”

“I see.”

The man looked at her very shrewdly out of narrow eyes.

“I suppose the old miser — God forgive me — keeps you half-starved. Well, you shall have some jam, Elsie, and something else too. What else would you like?”

“Sixpence,” said Elsie, in wild bravado.

The stranger smiled sourly.

“I’ll give you a gold sovereign. You could do a lot with that, couldn’t you, a child of your age?”

Elsie’s senses reeled. On rare occasions Mary or Sarah had taken her for short walks, but she had seen, oh, a long way off, shops in which, the servants had told her, almost anything could be purchased for money. There would not be any limit to what one could get with a golden sovereign.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked. Then her small shrewd face clouded. “Have you come here looking for gold?”

He seemed startled.

“Gold! What made you think of that? I promised you a sovereign. I didn’t say I’d come here looking for gold.”

“I thought perhaps you had, because there isn’t any. Grandmamma’s only got farthings, she told me so herself. Mrs Parfitt said something about gold hidden in the house, but I looked, and there wasn’t any. Grandmamma,” she repeated, “has only farthings. I think they’re hidden under her pillow.”

“No, I haven’t come looking for gold. I want to know where your grandmother keeps her writing-desk, her papers. Has she got them here? Or does Furnival, that’s the lawyer, have them all?”

Elsie shook head, not understanding.

“Don’t be a stupid,” said the man keenly, and with a certain desperation she had thought was impatience. “How can I put it so that you’ll understand? I’m looking for a piece of paper, do you see? And it’s very important. It may not be here; but she used to, when I lived here, keep all her papers under her own eye and look at them secretly. Now, have you ever seen her sit up in bed and call for a little desk or a box and turn it over and look at the papers?”

Elsie nodded.

“Yes, she does that sometimes. And I have to fetch them.”

“Good girl.” The man seemed with difficulty to control an intense eagerness. “Now, if you can find those papers and let me see them, I suppose the key’s on the same bunch where the key for your jam cupboard is?”

Elsie nodded again. She began to feel herself important.

At least here was action, a chance to express oneself, to show one’s quickness and courage. She opened the box, put her hand in, and took out the bunch of keys. She knew them all, through quick observation and a keen memory.

“This opens the cupboard downstairs, the jam and sugar cupboard. This is the key of the little box that Grandmamma keeps in her wool cupboard underneath her grey wool, and I bring it to her sometimes, and there are papers in it.”

“Give it to me.”

He held the keys in his hand, while Elsie went to the cupboard and quickly found this box of inlaid wood.

“Aren’t you afraid she’ll wake?” she said, as she came back and laid this on the quilted coverlet.

“No,” he said, tucking up his lips in a peculiar smile. “I’m not afraid she’ll wake. I’m not afraid of her at all.”

He quickly found the right key. His deft, swift fingers turned over the papers in the small box. The child stared at him, her peaked face taut with interest.

“I don’t believe you’re a ghost,” she said at length. “I think you’re Uncle Tom.”

At that he turned on her with a low snarl. “Who told you there was an Uncle Tom?”

“Mrs Parfitt talked about him.”

“And she…” The man pointed to the huddled outline of the sleeping woman in the bed. “Did she say anything about me?”

“No,” said Elsie; “she said there was no such person as Uncle Tom.”

“Well, isn’t that right? Wouldn’t she know? There is no such person. I am James, the ghost of James, your father, as you said just now when you saw me. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” said Elsie, “but I don’t seem to be afraid like I should have been if you were a ghost.”

“You’ve forgotten your pot of jam, my dear,” he said, taking envelope, after envelope out of the box and scanning them keenly. “Yes, and the golden sovereign I promised you. Ah, here we are. I knew she’d keep it. She was always in two minds about everything.”

He had taken two documents that looked very dull to Elsie and laid them on the bed.

“You can’t read, I suppose, my little dear, can you?”

The child shook her head.

“Will you give me the other key and I’ll run downstairs and get the jam,” she said. “If they punish me afterwards you might come back and say you let me take it.”

“They won’t punish you. They’ll have something else to think about.” He tossed her the keys. “Bring them back here. You seem sharp and spry. You ought to know your way about.”

“What are those two pieces of paper?”

“Never you mind. I’ve found what I want. I’ll give you two sovereigns, but you’re not to tell anybody you saw me. You understand?”

“Oh, why mayn’t I say I’ve seen a ghost? I said the other night I’d seen one and I hadn’t really and nobody minded.”

He laughed and the tension of his dark face relaxed.

“Oh, well, you can say you’ve seen a ghost if you like. That will do very well. Why not?”

“Didn’t Mrs Skerrell see you?” asked the child cunningly.

“No she didn’t. What’s that to you, anyway? Yet I ought to be grateful to you for reminding me. I suppose the hag’ll be back soon.”

He stood staring at the two papers in his hand, then put one paper carefully back into the box, locked it, and watched Elsie while she cunningly returned it underneath the piles of grey wool in the cupboard. Then he tore the second piece of paper into small pieces and put them carefully in the inner breast pocket of his coat and followed Elsie downstairs and stood over her in a listening attitude while she unlocked the cupboard and took out a pot of apricot jam.

Her eyes glistened and her mouth watered so at the sight of the jam that she almost forgot about the two sovereigns and her bewilderment as to whether or not the man was an apparition or flesh and blood. Whoever he was, he took two sovereigns out of his pocket and placed them on the end of the shining mahogany table.

“There you are, my dear; you can’t say I haven’t kept my bargain. Now mind, I am a ghost. If you say anything about me I don’t like, I shall come in the middle of the night and give you a fright. Perhaps carry you away to where it’s all bogies and blue flames.”

“Oh, please,” said Elsie, nearly dropping the pot of jam in her terror, “I’ll do anything you like. What do you want me to say?”

“Nothing at all. Only that you’ve just seen a ghost. Better not mention the jam or the keys or those papers I took. See — not a word.”

He frowned and thrust his head forward and made himself look so menacing and hideous that Elsie began to weep.

“There, I know you’re a good girl and won’t say anything. Now take the jam somewhere you’re not likely to be found and remember you’ve simply seen a ghost this afternoon — the ghost of your father, James.”

“Are you going away now? Where do you go? Through that stepladder up on to the roof? .I think that’s the way the ghosts come.”

“No, I shall go out the back. Do you know who lives next door? Anybody likely to be about just now?”

“One house is empty,” said Elsie, “there’s only a caretaker there, and they don’t come until the evening. The other side the people are away. There’s never anyone there at all.”

“Good! My lucky day. Now remember what I told you about the ghost.”

Then he was gone.

When Elsie had finished her pot of jam she looked round for the sovereigns, but they had gone too. This caused her to weep bitterly, for it was the vanishing of the brightest dream of her life. Yet in her soul she felt that it was logical. What could a ghost leave but fairy gold? But she cried all the same in pure disappointment at the loss of the golden visions that the two golden coins had conjured up.

Mrs Skerrell, coming back hurried and panting, and out of temper, found her crying in the dining-room.

“Why aren’t you up with your grandmother, you naughty girl? You’re old enough — you might have been watching of her. What’ll happen to me if the old lady’s come to some harm while I was away?”

Mrs Skerrell, untying her bonnet and unfastening her cloak, began to mutter about a queer business — a boy had come with a message to say she was wanted at home, a matter of illness, serious and immediate. When she’d rushed back there had been nothing at all. The boy had said that it was a stranger whom he had never seen before had told him to give the message. He thought the gentleman was a doctor, he was very civil and had given him half a crown.

“All a lot of rubbish,” said Mrs Skerrell, going upstairs, considerably ruffled and discomposed, with Elsie behind her for the sake of company.

“Grandmamma’s asleep,” said Elsie, “Better leave her alone.” Then, because she could not keep her great secret any longer to herself: “I’ve seen a ghost. He gave me two sovereigns, and as soon as he went the money went too.”

“Don’t be a naughty wicked girl and tell a pack of lies,” scolded Mrs Skerrell. “The old lady seems asleep,” she added with a sigh of relief. “Better leave her, she won’t want her tea before five, and by that time Mrs Parfitt will be home.”

Mrs Parfitt was punctual. At the usual appointed hour when she brought up Grandmamma’s tea Elsie was sitting on her little stool sobbing to herself at the loss of the fairy gold, trying to wind the yellow wool. When Mrs Parfitt and Mrs Skerrell endeavoured to rouse Grandmamma they found they could not do so.

The old lady was dead.

When the doctor came he said she had been dead for some hours. Of course, it was quite likely that she might have had a sudden stroke. “She passed away,” as the phrase went on, in her sleep. It was really not worth while making any question or raising any fuss. What else could have happened?

Mrs Skerrell did not admit that she had been decoyed away from the house and Elsie did not even mention the ghost. The doctor had thought that there were queer marks round the old woman’s throat, as if her frail life had been impetuously shaken out of her, but of course, he assured himself, this must have been a delusion.

The lawyer said that Grandmamma had left a recent will leaving everything to Elsie, but as this could not be found he was quite prepared to believe that the old lady, in a capricious mood, had destroyed it. The earlier will, then, which was found quite readily in a box where the old lady kept her important papers hidden under the pile of grey wool which she knitted into petticoats for the poor, was proved.

Grandmamma’s only surviving son, Mr Thomas, came into all her money and into the big lonely house at Hampstead. Grandmamma was a much wealthier woman than anyone had thought she was, and Mr Thomas behaved generously towards Elsie.

He paid for her to go into an orphanage for the daughters of decayed gentlefolk.

He did not come near the house at Hampstead himself, so Elsie never saw him.

She left the house with a great feeling of relief. She did not, of course, expect to be happy in the orphanage nor anywhere. She knew that she was a nuisance and not wanted and must always efface herself, but she was glad to get away from the house which was haunted by the ghost of her father, James. Though she had loyally kept her word to him, and never said a word about what he had done when he visited her the day Grandmamma died, she was filled with fear that his angry apparition might return one night under some hideous form.

And another reason for her relief at leaving the great house in Hampstead was the fact that now there was hardly any possibility that anyone would discover that she had stolen the pot of apricot jam.

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

THE HIDDEN APE

“Nothing at all,” smiled the Doctor, “but a few bruises and shock. No, really nothing. It was a very brave thing for Joliffe to do,” he added; “extremely brave.”

“Of course, I understand that,” said Professor Awkwright, a little stiffly. He felt that the Doctor thought him lacking in gratitude and sympathy, and he knew that he was indeed incapable of any emotional expression, also that he resented, deeply resented, the intrusion of the violent and sensational into a life that he had contrived to make exactly as he wished it to be.

But, all the same, he did feel immensely grateful to Joliffe, and said so again, snappishly, blinking behind the thick crystal spectacles that distorted his pale eyes.

“Naturally I shall do all in my power to show my deep appreciation.”

The Doctor, who did not like the Professor, cheerfully remarked:

“It is rather rare, you know, for a scholar — a man who leads an intellectual and sedentary life — to be so prompt and decisive in action; it’s no reflection on Joliffe to say that I would have thought him the last man — not to have the will to, but to have the power — to risk his life for another.”

When the Doctor had gone Professor Awkwright rather resentfully considered these words. He agreed with the Doctor; he secretly thought that Joliffe’s action was quite amazing and the last thing he would have expected of him.

“I could never have done it,” he confessed to himself ruefully. He had always, in a kindly fashion, patronized Joliffe, but now Joliffe was definitely revealed as the superior being. Really, in the Professor’s estimation, the whole episode was disagreeable, and what was worse, slightly ridiculous; he was sure that the Doctor had been faintly amused.

Yet, he certainly ought to feel grateful to Joliffe and on many counts.

The incident which had first alarmed, then irritated the Professor, was this: his orphan ward Edmund had been out as usual with his tutor, Samuel Joliffe, and Charles the vicar’s son, just one of the usual rambles over the lovely North Wales hills which were undertaken every day as a matter of duty; when Edmund, scrambling on ahead, had slipped, like the clumsy lad he was, over a precipice and hung, stunned, on a ledge overhanging a ravine.

Now the Professor would have thought that the jolly athletic Charles, a stout, trained youth, would really without any fuss at all have gone down the face of the rock and brought up Edmund; but Charles had done nothing of the kind; he had just “lost his head” like a silly girl and could think of nothing better to do than to run and fetch help from the nearest cottage which was some distance away. On the other hand, Samuel Joliffe, middle-aged, stiff-limbed, short-sighted, absent-minded to all appearances, cautious and timid, whom no one would expect to be quick or active, had actually lowered himself down the face of the precipice, supported Edmund till help arrived and then, with great coolness and dexterity, with the aid only of a dubious rope and some frail saplings, hauled up Edmund and himself to safety.

It was all, Professor Awkwright thought, very grotesque, the sort of thing one would so much rather had not happened.

He peeped in at his nephew sleeping heavily on his bed behind a screen. Mrs. Carter, the housekeeper, was in charge; the wretched woman seemed to enjoy the sensation caused by the accident, as Professor Awkwright looked at the boy with the bandaged head, breathing heavily under the influence of the sleeping potion, she began to murmur the praises of Mr. Joliffe.

It was clear that the tutor would be a hero in the eyes of everyone; the Professor resented this as a fuss and an interruption to a very smooth existence, but he was, at bottom, a just, even an amiable man, and he did not wish to evade his obligations to Samuel Joliffe.

So he went downstairs rather nervously to the study where he was sure the tutor would be working and, as he went, he honestly put before himself the extent of his obligations towards Samuel Joliffe; these were very varied and deep and amounted to far more than gratitude for the rather absurd act of heroism yesterday.

Professor Awkwright was a born scholar and solitary; his one interest and passion was the most abstruse branch of archaeology, the deciphering of dead languages; he had always had sufficient means to enable him to devote himself entirely to this fascinating labour and the one interruption in a life otherwise devoid of incident had been when his only brother had died and left in his charge a sullen, unruly boy of ten years of age, of the type known as “difficult and awkward,” slightly abnormal and not very lovable, but a boy who had a comfortable income from a nice little fortune that would make him, when he attained his majority, quite a wealthy man.

Professor Awkwright had the conventional ideas of duty and subscribed, to the full, to the codes endorsed by his class and training, so he very scrupulously did his best with his unwelcome charge and made the great sacrifice of keeping with him a boy so obviously unfitted for school.

And after the Professor had found Samuel Joliffe, Edmund was no trouble at all; and the little household in the exceedingly comfortable but lonely Welsh mansion ran very smoothly and with a most agreeable, if eventless, harmony.

For Samuel Joliffe, besides being the perfect tutor, was the perfect secretary, the perfect assistant, and had thrown himself with the greatest ardour into the Professor’s enthusiastic labours.

Indeed, Professor Awkwright, pausing at the door of the study, realized, in the emotional upset of the accident, that Joliffe was absolutely essential to him; after eight years of his support, help, assistance and company Joliffe was indeed indispensable; indispensable, that was the word.

“I daresay,” said the little scholar to himself, pausing on the threshold, “I never quite appreciated Joliffe — of course, he has been handsomely paid and very well treated, but really I don’t believe that I ever quite realized his — his sterling worth.”

And Professor Awkwright thought, with a shudder, how ghastly it would have been if poor Edmund had died in that miserable way; he was fond of the unattractive boy who would probably never evoke any other affection in all his futile life.

And with that sharp realization of happiness that comes when happiness is threatened, the Professor cast over with profound gratitude all the blessings he had hitherto taken for granted… the smooth, easy life; the congenial, successful work; the way that all four of them, himself, Joliffe, Edmund, Mrs. Carter the housekeeper, all fitted together, like hand in glove — the comfort, the peace, the ordered leisure of it all! And surely much of this was owing to Joliffe — Joliffe who was never out of humour, nor ill, nor wanted a holiday, who was never tired or dull, who had known from the first how to “manage” Edmund, who never crossed Mrs. Carter nor vexed the servants, who worked so diligently, with such enthusiasm and skill under his employer’s direction…

The Professor opened the door quickly; he crossed to the desk where Joliffe was sitting (as he had known he would be), and said:

“I don’t know how to thank you, Joliffe, how to express my gratitude, I really don’t.”

Joliffe rose and stared; this was the first time since his knowledge of him that Awkwright had expressed himself on impulse; the tutor stood humbly; behind him the huge desk was neatly piled with the manuscripts that embodied their joint labours on the subject of the Minoan language.

“But,” added the Professor with even greater warmth, “I am quite resolved that you shall have your name on the book. That is only just — it is your work as much as mine, you have been far more, for years now, than an assistant—”

Joliffe’s sandy face flushed.

“I could not think of that, sir, really, I couldn’t; what I have done has been the greatest pleasure and honour.”

He spoke sincerely, without servility; Awkwright grasped his hand.

“I know. But, of course, we are to go equal shares in this — I ought to have thought of it before.”

He glowed with the pleasure of his generous action; it was no ordinary prize, no feeble glory that he offered; he believed that when his, their, book was published it would bring to the authors a fame equal to that of Champollion.

For the two secluded scholars working almost in secret were convinced that they had discovered the clue to the long-dead language of one of the most interesting civilizations of prehistoric Greece, that of Crete.

Joliffe said:

“I hope, sir, yesterday had not put this into your mind. What I did was nothing. Anyone would have done as much.”

“I don’t think so, Joliffe.”

“Anyone, sir, as fond of Edmund as I am.”

“Again I disagree. Presence of mind, coolness like that! Rare indeed. But, of course, one can’t talk of rewards; absurd, of course; but—”

The Professor sat down in front of the great bow-window; his kindly, conventional and rather simple face, with the thin beard, speckled like his grey tweed coat, and the thinner hair exact and glossy over the large brow was clearly outlined against the shining laurels in the garden and the blue hills beyond.

Joliffe regarded him with meek intentness.

“But, you were saying, sir,” he prompted—

“I was about to say,” remarked the Professor candidly, “that a shock — like this — clarifies the air, as it were. I suppose we live rather a monotonous, rather an old-fogeyish sort of life, values get a little dimmed, one gets absorbed in the past, in one’s work. One’s own life gets a little unreal… until a thing like this happens….”

“I have never felt that,” replied Joliffe thoughtfully.

“No? A remarkably clear brain,” agreed the other with simple admiration. “I’ve noticed how you never lose grip on things. That’s why you’ve been so successful with Edmund. But really, for myself, I confess that a — a revelation of this kind — what the loss of Edmund would mean — the sort of man you really are — wakes me up, puts everything clearly.”

“I don’t see that the fact that I rescued Edmund, in the most ordinary way, reveals the sort of man I am.”

“But that kind of prompt action isn’t expected of — of our type, Joliffe. It’s most unusual; the Doctor said so.”

“I don’t think Dr. Jones knows very much.”

“No, but I agreed with what he meant. And it is settled about the book.”

Professor Awkwright felt very content for the rest of that day; the sense of the absurdity of the accident, the irritating, disturbing excitement had passed away. Edmund came down to tea and the household was stolidly normal again; but the Professor continued, as he had himself put it, “to see clearly” — the vast value of Joliffe, for instance, and Edmund’s inarticulate and pathetic affection for him, and the very agreeable intimacy that bound them all together; it was surprising how fond he was himself of the unattractive, slightly “mental” youth; why, he believed that if Edmund had really been killed the shock would have prevented him from finishing the book.

When the two men settled down in the study that evening after Edmund had gone to bed Professor Awkwright felt that their relationship had subtly changed; never had they been so intimate, never so frank, as if there was no possibility of any misunderstanding or irritation between them.

Joliffe seemed to “let himself go” intellectually; his usually respectful, almost timid manner mellowed, he was more candid, more brilliant, slightly, though quite unmistakably, different, Awkwright thought, from his habitual self.

One of Mrs. Carter’s most tempting dinners had celebrated Edmund’s escape; there had been good wine and afterwards, contrary to custom, good brandy.

Perhaps it was the brandy that stimulated the Professor’s added sense of clarity, of which he had been aware all day; a most temperate man, he had always, on the few occasions when he had drunk liberally, been teased as to the right naming of his heightened perceptions. Did alcohol give everything an air of caricature, or did it allow you to see everything as it really was?

Was it, for instance, just excitement and then the brandy that made him think what a queer fellow Joliffe was? — or had he, Awkwright, always had his head so in the air that he had never before observed the strangeness of his constant companion? Joliffe sat a little more at his ease than he had ever sat before; a very tall, stiff, long-legged man, with an odd look of being featureless; the only definite object about his face was his glistening spectacles, for the rest a sandy glow seemed to blot out any salient point in his countenance; even his profile seemed to mean nothing; a closer inspection showed his features to be sharp, small and neat, his expression composed and kindly.

He also must have been a little excited that night, also a little stimulated by the occasion and the brandy, for he forgot (to the Professor’s amusement) to go up to his room and listen for the wireless news bulletin.

Professor Awkwright had always refused to have wireless, gramophone or telephone; but Joliffe, with meek persistence, had indulged in all in his own room; he had little chance of using any of these inventions and he scrupulously contrived so that they never annoyed the rest of the household; but he liked to “sneak off,” as the Professor put it with indulgent irony, to listen to news, a talk, or a concert; but tonight he seemed to have forgotten even the attraction of the evening bulletin which he so seldom missed.

The two elderly men talked of their researches, of the book that was going to bring glory to both, and of the accident of yesterday which the Professor, at least, could by no means dismiss from his mind.

“It was pure impulse,” said Joliffe at last; “if I had reflected at all I don’t suppose that I should have done it.”

“I’m sure that you would.”

“No, because I always think that we attach too much importance to human life. And Edmund wouldn’t really mind dying; I daresay he’d be better off in another state.”

“I didn’t know that you had those ideas.”

“They aren’t ideas. Surely, sir, you don’t hold by all the orthodox views—”

“I’d really rather—”

“Oh, the sacredness of human life, et cetera, et cetera?”

“I suppose so, I haven’t quite thought it out.”

“I have. I can’t see, sir, how, after all your researches you can avoid a broader view… look at the East, Russia, Mexico, today — look at the Elizabethans, look at America, at Italy — and how they regard and have regarded death—”

“You don’t think it matters — violent death?”

“No. An intelligent man should be able to deal with death — give it, withhold it, accept it, avoid it, according to his reason. The world was more worthwhile when this was so.”

“But, my dear Joliffe, to argue like that is to condone murder,” Awkwright smiled, very comfortable in his chair, “and suicide.”

Joliffe did not reply, he seemed sunk in a pleasing reverie; to rouse him Awkwright said:

“I suppose one gets conventional-minded on these subjects, but I think the West is right in the value put on human life — our violences, our indifferences to right and wrong, our cowardices are nothing, I fear, but manifestations of the hidden ape, still lurking within so many of us, alas!”

Joliffe listened to this speech with closed eyes.

“On the contrary,” he declared, “I believe that the hidden ape in me made me rescue Edmund.”

“My dear Joliffe, as if apes—”

“They do — animal affection — animal devotion, no reason, no logic. I am fond of Edmund.”

“Why?” wondered the Professor rather wistfully.

“One doesn’t know. The ape again! The boy never pretends, he is very wise about some things, has extraordinary instincts! I believe I understand him as no one else ever will.”

Joliffe sat up suddenly. He was smiling, his small eyes looked yellow behind the glasses, his movement seemed to dismiss the subject; they each drank some more brandy and began to discuss the book; but this speedily brought them to the same point; Joliffe remarked on the beauty of some of the Minoan seals he had been copying the very morning of the accident, and Awkwright’s comment was that the artist who designed them had an evil mind.

“Why?” challenged the tutor with his new freedom.

“Well, they are evil. The Minoans were, it is acknowledged — cruel; consider their bull-leaping sports — no soul…”

“Nonsense!” Never had Joliffe expressed himself so boldly to his employer; he seemed really excited, “They were simply too civilized to put so much value on individual life—”

“The hidden ape wasn’t hidden, you mean?” smiled Awkwright.

They argued keenly and at length, remaining in the study long after their usual hour for retiring; to Awkwright it was an entirely academical discussion, but Joliffe seemed to throw more and more feeling into it until he was making quite a personal point of his contention that no civilized people would consider murder a crime.

The Professor did not know how they had got to this subject; it was strange how the accident seemed to have thrown both a little out of their stride, a little off their balance; even Awkwright felt the mental atmosphere becoming distasteful, an unpleasant sense of unreality obscured the familiar cosy room; he wished that Joliffe would not talk so much, so at random (and he had never wished that before). He roused himself out of a disagreeable lethargy to say, with a rather false attempt at authority:

“This sort of stuff is really absurd from a man like you, Joliffe.” The tutor rose and stood in front of the fire; his attitude was dogmatic, his habitual featurelessness seemed to have developed into a face that Awkwright did not recognize.

“Pardon me, my dear sir, how do you know what kind of man I am?”

“We have been intimate for eight years.”

“But I know you much better than you know me.”

“I don’t agree.”

“Well, what do you know of me? You said yourself that what I did yesterday surprised you.”

“But—”

Joliffe talked him down.

“You’ve always accepted me on my face value, you just met me through an agency. I had excellent credentials and you were quite satisfied. You never asked me why I had no relations, no friends, why I never wanted a holiday—”

“My dear Joliffe,” interrupted the Professor testily, “don’t try to make yourself out a mysterious person. I know you as just a solitary scholar like myself, one who happens to have drifted away from his relatives and not cared to make friends; come, come, this is all really rather childish.”

“Is it?” Joliffe peered over his glasses down on the little man in the chair, his face was sharpened by what seemed a queer vanity. “So you think that you know me through and through?”

“My dear fellow, of course I do.”

“Well, to begin with, my name isn’t Samuel Joliffe.”

The Professor tried to smile; he thought this was a joke, but it was certainly a stupid, vulgar joke, and he wished that the tutor, who must really be a little drunk, would be quiet and go up to bed.

“Do you remember the Hammerton case — ten years ago?” demanded Joliffe.

“As if I ever took the slightest interest—”

“No, I thought you didn’t. Well, it was the case of a man, an educated man of means, well-connected, intelligent, being tried for the murder of his wife. The usual arsenic from weed-killer.”

“I do recall something — Hammerton was acquitted, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. But no one thought he was innocent; the jury just gave him the benefit of a very small doubt. A ‘not proven’ it would have been in Scotland. He was ruined — he had to disappear.”

“But I don’t see what all this has got to do with anything—”

“Wait a minute. Though everyone thought Hammerton was guilty, everyone had a secret sympathy with him.”

“Morbid sentimentality.”

“No, his wife was such an awful woman, she nagged and whined and pestered and was always sickly, and he was a very decent fellow; he just wanted peace and quiet, and then, perhaps, one day she went too far even for his patience—”

“And the hidden ape leaped up in him? A very usual case—”

“Not at all. Perhaps he used his reason and removed a worthless, tiresome, repulsive creature—”

“If he did he was a murderer,” snapped the Professor. “And, since he was acquitted, we have no right to assume that.”

He rose, hoping to silence Joliffe, but the tutor leaned forward, took him by the lapel of the coat, and said with a smile: “I am Hammerton.”

The little Professor twisted and squealed in grotesque (through it all he felt all was grotesque) horror.

“No,” he cried, “no, we’ve both had too much to drink and it’s time we went to bed.”

But the tutor did not release his calm, steady grasp on the other’s lapel.

“A man of your intelligence, sir,” he said gently, “should not find my information so surprising, I merely gave it to prove a point; it can’t possibly make any difference to our relationship.”

“Of course you were acquitted, but, but it is very terrible, very unfortunate. And the false name…”

“I had no chance with my own. I waited for two years for an opportunity like you gave me. And I did not deceive you. My credentials were exact save for the name. I had all the attainments, the qualifications you required, and I believe that I have served you faithfully — you and Edmund.”

“Of course.” The Professor made a show of recovering himself, he twisted away from the other and sat down. “And then yesterday — but I wish that you hadn’t told me.”

“Why, what difference can it make?”

“Well, it’s a shock and you spoke just now as if — as if you were — but it’s absurd.”

“What’s absurd?”

“Didn’t you say that you had — that you were—”

“Guilty? I assumed it, yes. I don’t say so definitely — let it go. I was acquitted and no one can touch me now, even if I confessed, and I don’t intend to confess. We need not talk of it again.”

Professor Awkwright sickened; he sat shrunk together in the big cosy, pleasant chair and felt all the agreeable, safe and familiar places of his life laid bare and devastated.

“I should like to think that it isn’t true, Joliffe.” The little man’s eyes were pathetic behind the thick crystals.

“I can prove it if you wish. What difference can it make? There’s the boy, our work, the book, all our years together. Whatever I did can’t affect any of that?”

“Quite so. Quite so.”

The tutor went to bed; he did not seem in the least disturbed, he spoke of the Minoan seals he hoped to finish copying in the morning, and gave his usual “Good night, sir” cheerfully.

The Professor sat alone with his problem.

What ought he to do?

What did he intend to do?

Joliffe was essential to him, to the boy, to the book… where would he find another man who suited him so well, who would be willing to live his kind of life? Who would put up with Edmund?

Professor Awkwright groaned and began to argue speciously with himself.

Joliffe had been acquitted, a victim of a terrible misfortune; it was ten years ago and no one’s business; Joliffe had put him under the greatest obligation yesterday — why shouldn’t everything go on as before?

“Just forget all about it, eh? Joliffe would never speak of it again.”

But there was that stern streak in the Professor that made him soon reject the easy, the convenient way, and all specious, fallacious reasonings.

He grimly tackled himself; the man was almost, on his own confession, a murderer, and one without remorse; the Professor utterly rejected all arguments about the codes of the Cretans, the Elizabethans, Mexico and Chicago and the value of human life; he was an upright, law-abiding man; murder was murder, deceit was deceit; of course it was most extraordinary that a cultured human being like Joliffe… He returned to his own theory of the hidden ape, the ape striking down where it hated, rescuing where it loved; he shuddered before the horrid vision of Joliffe, suddenly agile as a monkey, scaling down those rocks after Edmund… he had wondered how the stiff-limbed man had done it… the Professor checked these crazy, miserable thoughts, he forced himself to be brave and cool.

After all, there was only one thing to be done. Joliffe must go.

Yes, if all the Professor’s peace and happiness went with him he must go; that was the only right, reasonable and logical solution of the horrid problem.

And, screwed up to an unnatural courage that he feared would not last till the morning, Professor Awkwright went up at once to Samuel Joliffe’s (for so he persisted in naming him) room.

The tutor opened the door to the timid knock of his employer. “I am afraid I must speak to you, Joliffe, at once.”

Joliffe wore a camel-hair dressing-gown, rather short in the sleeves, he looked meek, surprised and of an imperturbable innocence; the Professor felt very shaky indeed as he followed him into the neat bedroom.

“Speak to me, sir, at once? About the book?”

Joliffe glanced at a pile of notes on the table by his bedside, but Awkwright glanced at the wireless set, the gramophone, the telephone.

Why had it not occurred to him before that these were outlets for the tutor’s personality which was by no means satisfied by the quiet scholarly life that, outwardly, seemed so to content him?

Perhaps he spoke to friends of the old days on the telephone, no doubt he kept in touch with the busy doings of the world by means of the wireless, and indulged personal tastes with the gramophone discs — safety valves all these for a dangerous, complex personality.

“I’m afraid” — Professor Awkwright checked himself with a cowardly clutching at a faint hope — “I suppose it wasn’t all a joke about your being Hammerton?”

“It wasn’t a joke. I thought I knew you well enough to tell you. But you began to say, ‘I am afraid’—”

“I am afraid that you must go.”

“I must go? You mean that I am dismissed?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that—”

“But that is what it comes to—”

“I’m afraid so.”

Joliffe seemed completely amazed; he took off his glasses, fidgeted with them, returned them to his nose, and asked dully:

“What about the boy?”

“It’s dreadful, I know — but—”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“Oh, not the truth — some excuse — I know it is all dreadful,” repeated the Professor feebly.

“Dreadful?” repeated Joliffe shortly. “It is absurd. It means that we have never understood each other — indeed, totally mistaken each other — all these years. I thought that, under your little mannerisms, you were a broad-minded man—”

“But a question of — of—”

“Of murder? I never admitted to murder, but if I had? It can’t be possible that you take the view of the man in the street about that — think of these ancient peoples we are always studying—”

“It is no use, Joliffe.” Professor Awkwright was shuddering with anguish. “You must go.”

“And the book?”

The little Professor’s drawn face took on a livelier expression of grief.

“The book must be sacrificed” — there was heroism in his supreme renunciation. “I quite agree that you have a large share in it — but to publish it under an assumed name — or under your own!”

“Impossible?”

“Quite impossible, you must see it.”

“I don’t see it.”

They stared at each other with the bitter hostility only frustrated affection can assume; Professor Awkwright’s dry and trembling fingers stroked his thin grey beard; he felt quite sick with the temptation to “forget all about it” as he put it childishly to himself — why not, for the book’s sake, the boy’s sake, hush up the whole affair? It was so long ago and who was to care now?

But the little man’s innate integrity was too strong for his intense desires; Joliffe was watching him quietly, with dignity, yet as a prisoner may watch a judge about to pronounce sentence. “I’m happy here and useful,” he remarked drily. “And you have nothing to go on but bare suspicion — you might consider that.”

“I can’t tell you quite what it is, Joliffe—” The Professor’s anguish was very stressed and Joliffe’s glance darkened into some emotion that seemed (the other man thought) pity mingled with disdain.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you are afraid? Of me? Of what you call ‘the hidden ape’?”

“That’s absurd!” Awkwright made a great effort to give the whole nightmare business a commonplace, almost a jovial, air, to reduce what was so fantastically horrible and had indeed changed the aspect of everything for him, into an affair of everyday — just the giving of “notice” to a secretary, a tutor, who had proved unsuitable — a distasteful business, no more, but he shuddered with the desperate futility of this attempt; he made for the door with an uncontrollable need to get away from Joliffe’s gaze.

He had said that it was “absurd” for him to be afraid — but of course he was afraid, horribly afraid, of Joliffe, of his own weakness, of something more powerful than either that seemed to fill the room like a fearful miasma.

But nothing sensational happened; Joliffe said in the most ordinary tones:

“Very well. I will go tomorrow. Of course I shall miss the book. And Edmund.”

At the door Professor Awkwright mumbled:

“I shall always remind Edmund that you saved his life — what a great deal he owes you.”

“Oh, there won’t be any need of that — he’ll remember me all right — good night, Professor Awkwright.”

The Professor closed the door, and went, not to his bedroom, but to his study where he and Joliffe had worked for so long in complete harmony.

“I’m sure I’ve done right,” he kept saying to himself, “I’m quite sure I’ve done right.” But he found it unbearable to look at the other man’s notes, at the neat evidences of his long labour, he found it impossible to rest or in any way to consider the situation calmly, and he could not for a second conceive in what manner he should deal with Edmund when that poor youth discovered that Joliffe was gone.

And there was another torturing horror working in Awkwright’s mind.

“I say I am quite sure, but I never shall be quite sure — I mean if he is — or not—”

Professor Awkwright sat quite still for a full quarter of an hour; staring at the materials for his book which showed familiar yet horrible in the shaded electric lamp. He was really hardly able to grasp his misery nor the full value of all that he had sacrificed to a principle; he tried to comfort himself by the sheer strength of his integrity of purpose, the blamelessness of his own motives — but it was useless; he could make himself conscious of nothing but his great personal disaster.

The window had been set open to air the room and Awkwright became gradually conscious of the physical discomfort of the cold draft blowing beneath the blind.

He rose at last heavily, and almost without his own volition to remedy this; exhausted by emotion he stood with the blind in his hand and stared stupidly across the lawn and the shrubbery, faintly lit by the beams of a high moon falling through a mist; he soon forgot that he had risen to shut the window, and stood patiently in the cold air which harshly stirred his loose grey hair.

Suddenly his attention was aroused and held by an object which suddenly swung into the circle of his vision and seemed immediately to become the focus of the midnight landscape and of his own mind.

A thin, darkly clad figure was proceeding across the lawn, half leaping, half crawling through the shadows; the arms looked very long, now and then the lanky, uncouth shape appeared to sink to hands and knees in a scrawling effort at haste.

Professor Awkwright dropped the blind; with no more hesitation than if an imperative hand had seized his collar he swung round, ascended the stairs and crept into Edmund’s room.

Until he looked on the bed he did not know why the sight of the ape-like figure had sent him to the boy.

The cosy glow of the carefully sheltered night light showed in the warm flickers of soft illumination a lifeless body on the scarcely disarranged pillow; powerful hands had skilfully strangled Edmund in his sleep.

Again Awkwright found himself at the window, trying now to scream, to signal, to express his scattered soul; again he saw the ape-like figure, running over the fields beyond the garden, towards the gloomy hills; it seemed to proceed with a hideous exultation, a dark joy powerfully expressed in the swinging animal movements, in the triumphant haste towards the wilderness, in the challenging thrown back head which seemed to howl at the moon that swung in an unfathomable, dreadful void.

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

THE LADY CLODAGH

The Lady Clodagh now found pleasure in detaching herself from the world; the sharp sadness of her grief was assuaged by the sublime and gentle comforting of religion; in an ancient convent near Douai in Flanders she mourned without bitterness and endured her widow’s black without too gross a pang; she felt herself being drawn daily nearer to the Heaven where her lost beloved surely dwelt — the kind good man! Truly there would be no more than the briefest taste of Purgatory for him, with his upright life and the great benefactions he had made to Holy Church.

Clodagh, her short period of probation over, intended to take her vows, to become a religieuse; the poor woman! what had she now to live for?

The grey nuns, the grey church, the shadowed cloisters, the convent building of small lamp-lit cells closed her in; dark low clouds blew across the flat land and cast heavy rain over the plain gravestones, the wreaths of withered leaves in the earth, the stone statues of saints resigned in their weather-worn draperies, and all seemed to enfold Clodagh, wrapping her away from life.

She had great estates in Connacht; though the law was cruel then against those of her faith, it was often not enforced, and peaceable people, if discreet, were allowed to live in peace; these lands were held in trust for her only son Dermot, who was being trained for the great place he would one day inherit — but what had she to do with him, the poor foolish creature she knew herself to be? He had his tutors and counsellors, her kin and his father’s kin; let her leave him alone lest her maternal love engrossed her, hindered the youth and distracted her from the decent dedication of her widowhood to Heaven.

So the Lady Clodagh mourned in the convent near Douai, not without patience, knowing peace at least. And when she had been in the convent nearly three years she forgot that she was a beautiful woman and her son Dermot became a faint tender memory only, scarcely stronger than the memory of Dermot her husband.

Then Clodagh was disturbed in the sloth of her piety, for her Irish steward wrote urgently:

“Madam, you must surely now return to Connacht, as the guardian of my young lord and in your own name you must plead before the law against the vexations, insolent villainies of your neighbour who is a notorious rogue and breaker of the peace; he has consumed his own fortune and now infringes on yours, for he seizes your meadows where the estates march, your cattle and your timber and has trumped up a case to get Murrish, your jointure, into his possession. I speak of Thomond O’Malley, God help him, a heretic and one who learnt more than his native evil, serving the Usurper’s Government in Flanders—”

There was much more of this, and Clodagh was bewildered and not a little troubled; what did she know of such things? Let her kin and her husband’s kin concern themselves with these worldly matters…

But no, she must face the matter, though the abbess and nuns cried out against this interference with her holy peace, her piety, her withdrawal from all that was earthly.

“I’ll not go.” She shuddered at the thought of leaving her retreat where she was so sheltered, where her soul was being daily wafted Heavenwards on the incense of perpetual prayers; she even had a faint but terrible perception of fierce danger awaiting her if she ventured to turn aside from her chosen path of abnegation and resignation.

But her husband, in his complete love and trust, had left her in charge of his estates and guardian of the son; besides, some of the lands this ruffian Thomond O’Malley had dared to claim were hers, an inheritance from her father; was not this wicked man, already infamous for his great daring and wrongdoing, venturing on his insolence because he believed the Lady Clodagh was a foolish grief-smitten widow who had not wit nor courage to defend her own? A religieuse, dedicated to God and memory?

So Clodagh, trembling and weeping, returned to Connacht to defend her right to the lands and that of her son.

What must she now do, the sad, pious woman? Her steward, her lawyers, her kin (distant and strange to her) gathered round with advice, with suggestions; she heard much evil of Thomond O’Malley, yet the worst known of him was not fit to tell to any woman; she felt lonely and frightened in the large empty mansion where she had been richly happy; she was homesick for the convent, for the nuns, for the quiet peace of Douai.

Her son was almost a stranger, too, now a grave youth immersed in his studies, absorbed by his tutors; his coldness increased her timidity.

“When this law case is over I shall return to Douai, Dermot.”

“It is fitting that you should do so, Madam.”

“Soon,” said Clodagh wistfully. “You will be a man and all will be put into your hands.”

“I shall be glad to take charge of all, Madam.”

“I shall want nothing, Dermot, you may take even my jointure — it is my desire to strip myself and hide my bereavement under the veil of a nun.”

The young lord inclined his head.

“I am indeed very sorry, Madam, that the action of this scoundrel Thomond O’Malley has disturbed your pious solitude, and brought you to Ireland again.”

He regarded her, she saw, with profound respect, almost as a saint already in a shrine, and she sighed, not having yet, she discovered, overcome all desire for the soft fond follies of the human heart — the poor weak woman!

On a chill golden day of autumn, with the clouds curdling high in a faint blue heaven, the Lady Clodagh went to the Court-house, and all the countryside turned out to see her pass, applauding her sorrow, her courage, loving her for her beauty, her chastity, her wrongs; ah, the hard things they said of her persecutor, the wicked man! And wasn’t he hated already by high and low and the mark of Satan was on him?

She took her seat in the Court-house and all turned towards her with admiring respect and deference; she was tender and trembling in her full suit of mourning with her veil of widowhood, almost she was dedicated to God.

As she took her oath she glanced timidly round the filled Court, abashed by all these stern-looking men, by the Judge and the lawyers, amazed by the grim parade of the place; she saw her son, silent and austere, proudly controlled, her kin and her counsellors, and in a long beam of sunshine in which the motes played, she saw a man who made all these others seem but of pale worth.

The man moved his head in the beautiful light that sent gold through his dark hair, and now he smiled at the Lady Clodagh.

Her words broke on her lips, she sank down and the Book fell from her hand; they feared that a swooning fit was upon her and that this appearance after so long a seclusion was more than she could well endure.

Her laces were loosened and her veils lifted and the throwing aside of this cloud of dark gauze revealed her as soft and lovely so that even the dry Judge thought: “A fair woman indeed”.

She composed herself as her breeding enabled her, and looked again at the stranger seated the other side of the Court, and again he smiled as if they were alone in the chamber.

Then the Lady Clodagh knew that never had she loved her husband nor any man, that her life till then had been pretence and sham, that never could she be a religieuse, that God was so far away that it was hopeless to think of reaching Him.

She gave her evidence in much confusion of mind, which passed very well for a natural emotion; her case was manifestly just; but what cared the Lady Clodagh now for that, or even for her son’s heritage?

Who was the man who had smiled at her?

She was soon to know; he was the defendant in the case — Captain Thomond O’Malley.

“I am sure,” sighed Clodagh in her heart, “he is not wicked.”

She marvelled indeed that anyone could suppose he was evil; all he did was engaging and his bearing had nothing of the villain; from under her lids she marked his figure, slim waisted, broad shouldered, in the blue riding-coat with silver buttons — aye, every detail of him, from the folds of muslin at his throat to the bullion tassels on his sword string, did the poor woman note; and while her lawyer was pleading her just cause, she was thinking: “Whatever they said of Thomond O’Malley, no one could deny that he had a perfect mouth.”

She listened not at all to her own case, but when he came to speak (he took charge of his own defence, being more cunning than any attorney) she listened with all her soul.

Everyone there was hostile to Thomond O’Malley, a renegade, who served the usurper, despised by those who employed him, and hated by his countrymen, for he might call himself what he would, his breed was clear enough in the look of him; he was direct descendant of the Ni Inhaille, sea kings of the Isle of Clare, and of the great Grainne, ruler of Clew Bay, who had defied Queen Elizabeth of England — was it not in their right he still held Achill and Mallavanny?

A shame and a disgrace, surely, was this man to such noble ancestors of Ireland—

Yet his pleasant modesty and his manly candour almost seduced his enemies and hushed their malice against their wish; he looked no more at Clodagh and she thought: “How can any resist him when he speaks in such a voice?”

Very skilfully he put his case, using all the nice arts of a fine gentleman which he had learned in France.

“Far be it from me to wrong a widow and her son — if there has been marauding of land and cattle by men of mine, it has been without my knowledge and consent. Who can be responsible for the villainies of his people? Very willingly will I see any hanged who have disturbed this noble lady and this gallant youth” — and he bowed slightly, like a King granting a favour, towards my young lord, who bit his lip and looked bitterly offended — “and as for my occupation of the lands of Ballycroy and Curraun, I believed I had a good title to them.”

And he dwelt at length on old title deeds in the Latin which all present believed to be forged, running over ancient claims and descents with learning and clarity, turning with great deference to the Judge, yet without abasement or servility.

And what was the Lady Clodagh thinking of the while? She was in a deep muse, and precious delights that she had dreamed of long ago yet never known and believed forgotten, returned to her, thick as bees round a blossoming lime-tree.

Ah, the thoughts she had had as a young girl alone in the walled garden of her father’s house, in the still drowsy afternoons; the lover she had imagined coming through the flowering grasses, embracing her beneath the fruiting trees, loosening her hair, raising her face, kissing her lips, all in the lonely, lovely silence…

And there he stood, that lover, with his law papers clasped in his fine hand; Clodagh blushed at the thought of those long white fingers stealing across her bosom, and they thought she coloured with shame at the man’s false, specious reasoning.

Captain O’Malley lost his case; yet he had cast some spell on them all, for though he had done what merited hanging, yet he was acquitted of blame and went unpunished; how may this be accounted for? They all knew the evil he had done and many had suffered from it, but he seemed armoured against all attack, and when he left all with suave compliments none could deny a civil reply, though all felt uneasy.

The kin of Clodagh were discontented.

“He escapes without punishment! The Government protects him because he is a renegade! He will be a perilous neighbour yet—”

“He looks like a King,” thought Clodagh.

She waited at the door of the Court-house for her sedan; my young lord fumed at her side, complaining of injustice and the heavy disabilities he was under because of his ancient Faith; little heed gave Clodagh to that, she was lingering for the coming forth of Thomond O’Malley, and when he came, descending the steps slowly while he drew the buckles of his gloves, she had but one desire and that was to turn about and follow him, not asking where he went.

He paused and saluted her and my lord very civilly, regretting (he smiled) the vexatious manner of their making acquaintance; Clodagh ventured to give him a close glance, so anxious was she to know the colour of his eyes at a near view, and he looked at her as the lover she had never known would have looked.

“Sir,” said young Dermot in a voice which was not yet that of a man, “I can scarcely pretend to desire a closer knowledge of you—”

And, awkwardly, yet grandly, he handed his mother into her chair, while Thomond O’Malley stood at pause on the steps, unperturbed, and smiling with his eyes on Clodagh; now she knew the colour of them, flecked green and brown they were, very clear and radiant, like water of a shallow mountain stream.

Thomond O’Malley returned to his Castle of Carrigahooly, which had been one of the strongholds of the sea kings of Clare and which lay beneath the mountains of Buckoogh and Bengoern and close to the glen running into the heart of the hills that all held to be haunted; he was glad to hide himself for a while, men declared, and the simple folk thought that he had gone to consult with Satan his master in the lonely mountain pass by Lough Fee.

Clodagh returned to her demesne of Aghagower, and everyone expected her soon to return to Douai; what was to prevent her now?

But it was impossible for her to go.

“I would sooner be under the seas or the mountains than in the grey church with the grey nuns, and what would be coming between me and my prayers?” she mourned to herself, and aloud she made excuses of this and that, and so all was delayed through the warm autumn weather.

Lonely was the great mansion and not built for a widow surely; the Lady Clodagh went timidly through the vast rooms and up the wide stairs, and shadows seemed to start and fly before her; there was no one to keep her company; Dermot was shut away with his tutors, and the servants with their work, and the day seemed so long.

“I would like again to see a man’s beaver and gloves, sword and cane in the hall,” mused Clodagh. “And to open a press and see his coats and boots, aye, and the impress of his head on the smooth pillow by my side.”

But it was not for the return of her husband that she longed; the poor man! she had forgotten him, save when she wondered sometimes how she had come to wed one so fair, when all her delight was in a dark complexion.

But for the boy she felt a frightened tenderness and tried to woo him into her solitude.

“Dermot, there are only the two of us and we should be more together. Have a little patience with me — for soon you will bring a wife home and I shall have no part in you.”

“I shall always love and protect you, Madam. But were you not more happy at Douai? Everyone wonders that you do not return there.”

“Oh, Dermot, if you do love me a little you will want to keep me here and cherish me.”

There was a sighing wistfulness in her words that the boy did not understand; he was uneasy because everyone said that his mother should return to the convent, and because something (he knew not what) about her was strange and alarming.

The truth was that Clodagh had grown in beauty since the day of the trial and was soft, warm and dazzling as a rose widespread to the sun at crown of summer; and though this tall boy was her son, she was younger than anyone thought, so childish had she been at her wedding, the poor creature!

What background was this empty house for her, what adornment her widow’s mourning?

When she went to her husband’s grave in Burrishoule Abbey she felt she stood by the last bed of a stranger, and all the gay little grasses that fringed his stone seemed more important than his bones beneath.

Ah, she was sorry for young Dermot because she had cared so little for his father, and so maybe caused the coldness in him, and she yearned over him delicately.

From his Castle of Carrigahooly Thomond O’Malley came to wait on her; it was a beautiful horse he had and he rode superbly, it was natural to him to have all splendid about him, but in his person he was very plain in the finely cut blue coat with the silver buttons and his black hair in a club.

“I have not been able to rest, Madam, thinking of the disease I put you to, with that unlucky lawsuit of mine. You so lonely, Lady Clodagh, in this great house — you’ll never return to Douai?” he added abruptly.

“Here or there is my life — lonely — and both places lonely too, Captain O’Malley.”

“And you obscured in this ugly crape! Had I left a sweet fair creature behind in the world, I would not wish her to go in black, surely.”

Oh, he changed the very air she breathed, the gay, bold man! So gentle he was and deferential, yet the look in his eyes made her cast hers down; her heart sang like a bird in May and when he had gone from her she locked herself in her room and took out a shift of pale satin, yellow and pink interchanged, and flung off her mourning and stood in the dainty night rail, half naked, laughing before the long mirror which had reflected her husband’s stiff outline straight between the tall death-watch candles.

Three times did Thomond O’Malley come to woo her and she did not listen to the outcry this caused, nor to the reproaches of my young lord; on the third visit he asked her for his wife.

“Dear woman, indeed I love you — from the first when I saw you in the Court-house and cared no longer how my cause went! Whatever you have heard of me, never has it been like this with me before — here my life changes, stops, and is offered to you — do with it what you will!”

Clodagh made no feint of resistance; that was beyond her power, from the first moment she had seen him her spirit had sent up the old cry of surrender — “I can deny thee nothing.”

She gave him her hand and the tears lay in her gentle eyes; she thought: “If God meant this man to be refused He should have fashioned him differently.”

And when he embraced her, gently, delicately, all her childish, bright dreams crowded round her heart, so dazzling and overwhelming her that she was near fainting in his arms.

Ah, the exclaim and the scandal there was! — the sending to and fro of expresses, the visits of angry kin.

“The fellow is a blackguard, suffocated with debts, of a foul reputation, no honourable woman would endure his presence! Clodagh, you’re never in love with a mere fine figure and handsome face, surely?”

And others, the women, more deadly, more correct:

“Ah, well, he’s a pretty fellow and you’ve tumbled into his arms just like every other woman he’s ever seduced!”

Clodagh cared nothing for all this, but she winced before the bitter scorn, the cold fury of her son.

“Will you put this scoundrel in my father’s place? Am I to be beggared to pay his creditors? This is a shameful and an awful thing surely.”

“Dermot,” she pleaded with him earnestly, “I’ll never love you less for loving another — and you are heir of all your father’s estate.”

“You, God help me, are my guardian till I am twenty-one. All is in your hands.”

“Do you think I would touch a pebble or a blade of grass that is yours?”

“I fear it. So gross a passion for so worthless a creature!”

“Dermot, that I will not hear. The man is noble, of higher birth than ours — of great estates, too.”

“All encumbered, Madam. Even you know his reputation, surely?”

“I have heard of some reckless passages in his youth much blown on — but—”

The youth interrupted:

“ — but, Madam, you intend to have him, and I then can hold myself no better than ruined.”

It was true that Clodagh meant to marry Thomond O’Malley whatever was said against him, but there was more truth in her than that; she really believed the man to be what he appeared to her, noble, generous, honourable, fine and greatly maligned by mean spirits.

And in the matter of her son’s right she felt herself impregnable.

Candidly she broached the subject to her lover.

“All that is mine is yours to the pearls at my breast — but what I have in trust from my husband is for Dermot — forgive me that I speak of this.”

So intense was her love that she wished his disinterestedness confirmed by his own lips, and publicly known.

He responded just as she wished him to do.

“Surely I am not so mean as to encroach on the boy’s rights! I shall not even enquire after the amount of his fortune. My own is not so poor though something disordered — but what is all this compared to what is betwixt me and thee, my love?”

She married him in Burrishoule Abbey; nor were those lacking to applaud him as well as those who pitied her, for he had his friends and followers, his creditors and those who hoped to profit from his wife’s wealth; ah, they knew already that the fond woman had put into his hands all her property with softest words of adoration — “Would I had more to give thee, Love.”

In grief and fury her kin stayed away; and Dermot’s face was pinched and shadowed as he put off his mourning to attend his mother’s wedding. Yet truly he had nothing against Thomond O’Malley who had behaved to him openly with flattering respect, and had told him: “It is my last desire to interfere with your affairs — you must acquit me of any intention of vexing you. God grant we may live in friendliness, my dear lord.”

It was the palest day of earliest spring and veils on veils of fine vapour were blown across the ancient sides of the mountains when Clodagh came to Carrigahooly Castle; ah, she was happy, the wedded woman, could she believe how happy she was?

In every kiss he gave her she felt some foretaste of an infinity of bliss and her spirit entered into the surrender of her body surely.

With her girdle and her garters on the floor at her feet, all her laces loosened, she lay against his breast and over his shoulder watched the clouds flying past the mountain gorges trembling with the hues of sunset.

And when the sun rose again and she woke to find him asleep at her side, how could she say how happy she was then?

Trembling, she touched the dark locks on the pillow and vowed to his service her all; with joy she noted that his alluring face was candid in sleep; this man had no secrets, surely.

Even her angry kin sullenly admitted that the ill-omened (so they called it) marriage went very smoothly; some began to think Captain O’Malley maligned.

What had they against him? Nothing.

Truly he managed them all with consummate skill; he had great arts; he could find the weakness of each and flatter it, he could make common events exciting, gild dullness, create gaiety and touch all with ardour and enthusiasm; in all he did was the sense of a passion of life surging up and held in, as if the world was too small for what he might do; nor was he gross in anything, neither a drunkard nor a glutton nor foul mouthed.

With these graces he won over even my young lord, at least to the extent of inducing him to live under the same roof, for Clodagh loved better to be at Aghagower than Carrigahooly, which was so vast and lonely in the mountains, built for war and close to the darkly haunted glen of the fatal Lough Fee.

So she returned with her second husband to her son’s demesne and it was agreed that when Dermot married, the jointure house should be rebuilt for her; no one could say that she was not the contented woman, surely.

At the end of six months her stewards, her attorneys had one tale to tell and told it grimly:

“Madam, will you not look into your affairs? Is Captain O’Malley our master? He bids us sell and mortgage — cut timber — neglect farms.”

“He is master.”

She dismissed her stewards, she sent away her lawyers, she said to her husband:

“All is yours. I know you have good reason for all you do.”

My lord’s tutor said to her face:

“Madam, if Captain O’Malley could not get your estates one way he has another; I pray you consider a little, for the sake of your son—”

“Sir, I forgive your indiscretion — your mistake — because of your long, loving service. My lord’s estates shall not be touched.”

What did her husband’s extravagance matter to her? — did she need an account from him of what he spent, as if he were a hired servant? She liked to see his fine horses, his liveried servants, the rich wine and food on the table, his clothes from Paris, his dogs, his costly equipage; she liked his lavish entertainments, his presents of jewels, of enamel, of porcelain to herself, for were they not always given with kind and loving words? Nay, she even endured his long absences in Dublin, in London, and none dare tell any tale of him; for did he not always return with an eager air and caress her tenderly?

It took him a year to come to the end of her resources and by then her happiness was a little clouded because she had had no child; she became restless, secretly tormented by this insatiable passion that possession could not allay; she had utterly divorced herself from holy thoughts, she dared not pray, no priest came to the house, her visits to church were few and hurried; she could not believe that the quiet woman mourning at Douai was herself, so completely had she given herself to an earthly love.

The return of the spring reminded her of her passionate bridals; she besought him to put off a proposed visit to Dublin.

“Why, if you will, my love, but will you not rather come with me to the city?”

Clodagh shook her head; she would not have the world break in on their love.

“Stay here — why should you go?”

“I have some business, Clodagh. You know I struggle against embarrassments. I cannot free myself—”

“All I have is yours—”

“But it is not enough, Clodagh,” he smiled tenderly. “You do not understand, sweet, what our spendings are—”

“It is true, my dear love.” She sighed, wishing she were a wealthy woman; no one had told her how he gambled, what debts he had all over Mayo, the mistresses he kept in London and Dublin. What would have been the use? She would have believed none of it. “I would I had more,” she mourned.

“You could raise what you wished on Dermot’s estates.”

“That I will never do,” said the Lady Clodagh.

“It is three years before he is of age — in that while I could repay—”

“Thomond, I must not do it. I have sworn to respect Dermot’s possessions.”

“What do you know of oaths, pretty Clodagh?”

“I have kept that I made to you. But for the boy—”

“He is a boy — what does he want with all that great wealth lying idle?”

Clodagh was very pale; never before had she refused him anything.

“I cannot. The boy — and the dead — trust in me.”

Her husband regarded her smilingly; his courteous demeanour did not falter.

“Make me the boy’s guardian,” he said. “Leave all in my hands — you have given me everything, why refuse me this?”

“It is not mine to give.”

“All is in your power, to the last farthing, you know that?”

“That is why I cannot touch it. If we did we should provoke the Judgement and the Fire of Hell.”

“Do you not love me, my wife, better than this child and his dead father?”

“I love you so much, Thomond, that I would give you everything I have. But this I have not.”

He saw she was not to be moved and he embraced her, telling her that he but spoke to test her spirit and applauding her loyalty to the boy. And presently he went to Dublin, leaving her for a long while alone.

When Captain O’Malley’s influence was withdrawn, my young lord began to turn restive and listen to tales of his stepfather which he understood better than he had a year ago; shameful things cannot long be hushed up and Dermot discovered that all his mother had to give she had given; he learnt, too, something of the way in which Clodagh’s portion had been spent, and being serious and shrewd he took counsel secretly with his kin.

“Your mother is in the power of a villain, surely, but she will hold out against wronging you. Make no broil, but be patient, enduring all until in three years you are your own master. We watch your interests and will quickly make a scandal if he touches a stone of yours — but before the law we are powerless.”

This was the answer my young lord got and he was much disturbed in mind and dreaded what might happen in those three years to come by reason of Thomond O’Malley working subtly on his mother.

Taking advantage of his stepfather’s absence he said:

“Madam, my affairs are a vast burden and responsibility, and though my father, God save his soul, left all to you in love, yet it was too much for a woman. And would it not relieve you if all your powers were transferred to my kin, men of my father’s house?”

“You fear my husband,” said Clodagh. “What has he ever done to you?”

“Nothing. I think him too courteous, perhaps, I fear he flatters me.”

“Indeed you grow too much of a man, Dermot, to be so suspicious.”

“Alas, many give me advice!”

“And tell you tales, too, Dermot.”

“At least it is known that he is ruined and has ruined you.”

Clodagh was stricken that this should be common talk, though she thought it a slander.

“I will give your estates into the keeping of your kin, surely.”

The boy kissed her, wistfully, with regret; why had she left Douai, where she was safe, soul, body and estate, in the keeping of God?

When Thomond O’Malley returned to Aghagower his wife told him of her design to transfer the guardianship of Dermot to his kin; to her deep pleasure her husband agreed instantly and offered to assist in every way.

“’Twill be a weight off you, and maybe a slander off me — for they say I meddle in the lad’s affairs.”

“This will prove them wrong — and, Thomond, it is not true that we are ruined?”

“Why, no,” he laughed. “We are very well, my difficulties that I lamented are solved. I have found a way out of all of them. Come, we have been married a year, what fault have you to find with this rogue who was to break your heart?”

“None, ah, none!” Her whole soul spoke in the passionate affirmation.

That night he helped her write to Dermot’s kin and when the letter was dispatched by express to Sligo to the Castle by Lough Gill, my young lord felt all his suspicions vanish and the charm of Captain O’Malley exert itself again so strongly that he could almost persuade himself that he liked the man and credited none of the gossip as to his wickedness.

And in pleasant amity they spent some days in Aghagower, awaiting the answer from Sligo.

It was near the anniversary of the death of Dermot’s father, early summer and fine weather; my young lord rode morning and evening to the Abbey to attend Masses and prayers for his father’s soul, and sometimes Thomond O’Malley (who had re-entered Holy Church) accompanied him; but on a day of sharp clouding and sudden thunder darkness, he did not do so, for it was time, surely, he said, that the answer arrived from Lough Gill, and he was impatient to receive it, so he stayed with Clodagh and was busy with the plans for rebuilding the jointure house.

In the afternoon the express arrived from Dermot’s kin and Clodagh ran to show the letter to her husband; she did not immediately find him, and in her excitement finally went to his private toilet closet where she had never been before, and after one knock opened the door.

He was changing his clothes, buttoning on a long skirted waistcoat, and Clodagh stepped back, smiling and begging forgiveness for her intrusion and a little bewildered also, by two queer little details.

The first was the look her husband had given her when she had broken in on him; surely her impulsive entry on to his toilet (fastidious as she knew him to be) did not justify those dark flames in his eyes, the frown that changed his whole face, the first anger he had ever shown her?

The second was a glimpse she had had of a fine white cord wound round and round his waist over his shirt; this was an odd manner of belt for a man so nice in his attire.

But he had fastened his waistcoat so quickly, smiled so instantly, rejoiced with her so heartily over the friendly, grateful letter from Sligo, that she forgot these things.

It was a riding-suit he had changed to, and though the day was darkening down he would go abroad for a little air and exercise.

“To meet Dermot?”

“Nay, in the other direction, the road is better — the boy will be pleased with the letter!”

He smiled, kissed her and was gone; how happy then was Clodagh, secure in his good faith, his love, his honour, the future of her son secured!

Yet as the twilight deepened she grew a little uneasy for Dermot had never been so late before and to return from the Abbey he had to take a mountain path which was, to her woman’s nervous fancy, perilous.

When her husband returned, flushed from the ride, he chided her fears; but when complete dark fell, he led her servants in a search for my young lord.

It was near the dawn before they brought him back to the weary wretched waiting woman; they carried him on a gate, covered by his own summer cloak; they had found him and his horse dead with broken necks, beneath the steep narrow mountain path that Clodagh had been justified in thinking perilous.

An accident and one not so difficult to understand — the dusk, a nervous mount, a youthful rider, the sudden alarm of bird or beast — a bolt, a slip — and no need for anyone to concern themselves about the future of my young lord.

Clodagh was ill with grief, with horror, with a strange remorse; yet what wrong had she done, the poor woman? This perhaps — the day that her son was laid in holy turf beside his father she thought (her senses coming back to her slowly): “Supposing it had been Thomond?”

Now one grave held all of her past; she need struggle with her infatuate passion no more; there was no one to claim the wide lands, the money, the castles, the lakes, the villages she had held in trust for young Dermot.

“All that is mine is thine.”

Within three months of her son’s cruel death she had placed all his possessions in her husband’s hands, not keeping even a pittance for herself, and all her grief was that she still had no other child.

And in her distress she resolved to consult a wise old woman, esteemed through the whole of Connacht; and so set out secretly, ashamed of her superstitious credulity, to the Isle of Clare where the beldam dwelt.

So, on a late autumn day Clodagh, cloaked like a peasant, was rowed out to Roonagh through the mists, and entered the hut of the wise woman, who peered at her through the peat smoke.

“Is it of the son whom you have lost or the son whom you hope to have you have come to ask me, Clodagh O’Malley?”

“The son I have lost lies in the lap of God, surely. There is an unchangeable loss. But may I hope for an heir to the line of Ni Inhaille, sea kings of Clare and Clew? Truly I love my lord, truly he loves me, and I am shamed because I am barren.”

“You should have deeper shames than that, Clodagh O’Malley. Are you a fool that you do not hear the whispers all round you? The man whom you love has sold himself to Satan.”

“Truly I did not think to hear the wild speech of ignorance here.”

“Return home and thank God fasting that you have borne no child to that man.”

Clodagh rose, frightened.

“Have you no more to say beyond this foolish spite?”

“Ask Matty O’Flaterty, a servant in your house, what he knows.”

Clodagh fled; when she returned to Aghagower it was evening, and in the twilight she sent for O’Flaterty, who was a man employed in the stables, and across the dim room she addressed him, holding her muff before her face.

“O’Flaterty, what do you know that I ought to know?”

“Who said I knew anything?” he muttered, troubled.

“Someone speaks behind my back. I am told of whispers. What do you know?”

“Something I do not wish to tell you.”

“Yet speak.”

He approached reluctantly across the grand, shadowed room, and pulled from his pocket and showed her a length of broken white cord.

“I found that the day of my young lord’s death tied round the stem of a tree on the mountain path. Who dares say anything? A cord drawn tight across his way in the dusk. All had been removed but this — Captain O’Malley was there first.”

Clodagh took the cord in her hand; in that moment she had a vision of the devil standing in a clear spurt of Hell Fire — he was buttoning a long skirted waistcoat over a cord wound round his waist; his eyes were angry and he had the charming aspect of the man in whose arms she had so often lain with rapture.

“She takes it very easy,” thought O’Flaterty. “Is it that she knew, God help her?”

Clodagh left him standing troubled in the dusk; she went to her husband’s room where he was writing letters by the light of fine candles.

“I am going to Douai tonight,” she said.

He looked up, smiled, looked again, rose and smiled no more.

“Is it that you have had all? All of mine, all of theirs? God let me be tempted and now I must be damned.”

She did not speak with any extravagance of passion but simply as a natural expression of her intense misery.

“And you so courteous and kind, loving, too — it must have been the Devil, surely, lent you such arts. And you caring nothing for me.”

“I have cared for you more than I ought for my own interests.” Thomond O’Malley was more troubled than she had ever known him; but she did not perceive that. “I was sure of you,” he added. “Have you at last been listening to tales of me?”

Clodagh had nothing more to say to this man; she took the piece of broken cord she had held behind her back and placed it between the two candles; her husband was silent and she left him.

When he enquired of her he learnt that she had left Aghagower with two servants for Galway.

Then he had everything, the cunning, scheming man! And if people said again that the Devil had helped him surely, was that a wonder?

There was then no restraint on him; all the great properties of the dead man and the murdered boy were, through a woman’s folly, in his hands to do as he would with, and no one daring to say a word against him save very secretly.

And Clodagh was in a convent, mortifying the feeble flesh that had betrayed her spirit.

In Aghagower Captain O’Malley held festival, bringing about him the friends, hangers-on and flatterers he had kept at a distance while Clodagh was there; very gay were they all with the substance he had so easily cajoled from his wife, very sumptuously he entertained them with games, gambling and all wantonness of music, dancing, plays and indulgence of all carnal lusts.

Her house was filled with these people and he was drinking at her board (since she had left him he was not so sober) when he heard the news of her death.

Not for long had her poor body withstood the penance she had inflicted on it; God (the nuns said) had had pity on her remorse; she had died in her bare cell, wearing a hair shirt — but what was all this to Thomond O’Malley enjoying the fruits of his wickedness?

She had sent him a letter, sealed in black; he thrust it into his pocket and went on with his merriment.

Then, in the middle of the feast, when they were bringing out the dice boxes and more wax lights he left the chamber suddenly and went upstairs to my young lord’s room.

There he lit a taper and looked about; all was neatly arrayed; the boy’s globes and his books, his gloves and his cane; on the bed the valances were folded and the curtains carefully laid by.

Thomond O’Malley opened the shutters, for the air was close; but, in the moonbeams that flowed in from across the mountains he hid his face as if he feared the cold light would discover what he wished to conceal.

He opened her letter, leaning against the heavy bedpost; why should he be reading it?

It would contain nothing but a withering curse; he had had her soul, her honour, her son, her possessions; because of him she had died miserably, in her own estimation horribly dishonoured, the fond creature!

But he read her message, in the light of taper and moon.

His companions missed him; his wantons and toadies called up the stairs to him with sallies and jests, entreating him to return to the festival.

Clodagh had written:

“Through you I have had all the joy and happiness that I have ever known.”

And he was snared.

He heard them coming up the stairs joyously to draw him back into their wicked plays and he bolted the door; how had it come about that he must pass judgement and sentence on himself?

He did not know; as his fellow-sinners retreated from the locked door and went away whispering, he took from his pocket a piece of broken white cord that he always carried with him and made it into a noose.

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

THE LAST BOUQUET

I

Mme. Marcelle Lesarge and Miss Kezia Faunce quarrelled violently in the private sitting-room of an expensive Parisian hotel. The interview had begun with embarrassment, but decorously, and had proceeded through stages of mutual exasperation to final outbursts of recrimination that were without restraint. The disgust, contempt, and fury which each had cherished in their hearts for years rose to their lips, and rage at being involved in such a humiliating quarrel added force to the energy with which they abused each other.

Mme. Lesarge was a fashionable actress, beautifully dressed in a frilled interchangeable crimson and blue silk, with dark red feathers in the small hat exquisitely poised on her glossy curls. The reticule that dangled from the wrist of her white kid pearl-buttoned gloves was of gold mesh, and the handle of her parasol was carved ivory. There were real diamonds at her ears and in the costly lace at her throat. All her movements were graceful and well trained, at once impetuous and languishing.

Miss Faunce wore an ugly brown travelling dress frogged with black braid. Her hair was grey and brushed into a chenille net. Her gestures were brusque and her voice was harsh.

These two women, who seemed in everything dissimilar, were twin sisters. They had not seen each other for ten years.

A spiteful curiosity that thinly masked hatred had brought Miss Faunce to Paris, and the same emotion had induced Mme. Lesarge to call at her sister’s hotel. Yet the first interchanges after this long silence had been civil enough. Miss Faunce had sent quite a friendly little note stating casually that she was in Paris for a few days, naming her hotel and adding how pleased she would be to see Martha again after so many years.

Mme. Lesarge replied in a letter written on an impulse of kindness and had accepted, quite warmly, the invitation to renew the relationship broken off so early and for such a great while, as it seemed, completely forgotten.

But, when they met, the first friendly conventionalities had soon changed into this bitter quarrelling. Neither woman could forgive the appearance of the other. Miss Kezia Faunce saw in the actress the woman who had attained everything which she, in the name of Virtue, had denied herself. She admired, envied and loathed all the manifestations of this unblushing Vice which had made such a profitable use of its opportunities. In this successful wanton who was really her twin sister Kezia Faunce saw the woman she would have liked to have been, and the realisation of this brought to a climax the smouldering anger of years. But, if she were enraged, no less deep was the fury of Martha who called herself Marcelle Lesarge, for in this plain woman with the grey hair, harsh voice, drab complexion, and clumsy clothes she saw herself, the woman who, without her affectations, her graces, her costly clothes, her paints and dyes, she really was.

It was true that she contrived to look thirty and that Kezia did not look a day less than fifty, but they were twins and their common age, forty-five, seemed to the actress to be written all over the red plush and gilt of the hotel sitting-room.

There was a pause in their fierce speech and they sat slack, exhausted by passion, staring at each other and each thought: “It must never be known by any of my friends that that dreadful woman is my sister.”

“I should be ruined,” the actress said to herself. “Everyone would think I am even older than I am. That hideous, middle-aged, dowdy bourgeoisemy sister! I should be laughed out of Paris. Why did she come here? Why was I such a fool as to see her?”

And Kezia thought:

“If anyone at Stibbards were to see her I should be ruined and I should never be able to hold up my head again. A great, blowzy, painted trollop! I must have been crazy to come.”

The actress was the first to recover herself. Her rage had resolved itself into a steady fear that someone in Paris should get to know that this miserable English provincial was her twin sister.

Mme. Lesarge was not without rivals nor fears for the future. She had skilfully built up many legends about herself that even the whisper of the existence of Miss Faunce would destroy.

So, pulling at the large pearls that fastened her pale grey gloves she said, with some art:

“It is very stupid of us to quarrel. You should not have come and I should not have seen you. But now I suppose we have said all the unpleasant things we can think of. We had better try to forget each other again.”

“I wish I could forget, Martha, but you know perfectly well that one can’t forget just because one wants to… I’ve tried to forget you time and again for years, but it’s no use. You keep coming up in my mind — between me and my duty, between me and my prayers, sometimes.”

Mme. Lesarge laughed uneasily. The more she considered the situation the more she felt it imperative for her sister to leave Paris quietly and at once.

“Well, I can’t help that, can I, Kezia? You must have got a morbid mind. I can’t say I ever think of you, though I very well might. I might say that you got on my nerves.”

“That’s impertinence,” put in Kezia sharply. Her lips were dry and trembling, and her flaccid cheeks quite pale.

“I don’t see that it is impertinence. I ran away from home when I was sixteen, and I have had all manner of adventures since.”

“Pray don’t relate any of them to me,” flung in Kezia.

“As if I should!” The actress smiled with a maddening self-complacency. “You wouldn’t understand them. They are quite out of the range of your experience. But, as I said, I left home when I was sixteen and I think it would be quite reasonable for me to feel that it was rather dreadful to think of you at Stibbards all that time — going on just the same, day in, day out. Doing everything exactly as mother used to do it. And grandmother before that, I suppose.”

“In other words,” interrupted Kezia, “leading the life of a decent gentlewoman with a sense of honour and of duty.”

“How can you talk like that?” asked Mme. Lesarge with a vicious smile. “Don’t you realise how really shocking that sounds to me? But I suppose I ought to be sorry for you. You never had the strength to break away.”

Miss Faunce rose and walked to the window and peered down through the stiff, white, starched lace curtains into the narrow noisy street below and watched a baker’s boy putting the very long powdered loaves into a handcart. She wanted to say what she had to say with the deadly effect of perfect calm. She realised that it would, perhaps, be better to say nothing at all, but she could not attain to that amount of self-control.

She must, clearly, and once and for all, get out of her heart and soul all her thoughts about her twin sister.

Mme. Lesarge was glad of this respite. She was sorry about the quarrel, which had been unbecoming and exhausting; she regretted that she had not had more power over herself. It had been a very long time since she had been in such a rage; she was, on the whole, a good-natured woman and not often crossed nor exasperated. Her life had been easy, full of facile success, light friendships and superficial adulation; she avoided everyone who disapproved of her, therefore this violent interview had been a detestable experience.

She rose also and went, not to the window, but to a mirror and there skilfully adjusted the smooth curls that should, perhaps, have been the same colour as the harsh locks of her sister, but which were very carefully tinted a glossy auburn. She took paint and powder from her reticule and made up her lips and her cheeks; she always looked at herself a little anxiously when she studied her face in the mirror, but never had she looked at herself so anxiously as she did now. For she seemed to see in her comely face, which had satisfied her well enough until the present moment, the ugly lines, the sour bilious tint, the creeping wrinkles, and the sagging folds that for the last half-hour she had been observing with fear and terror in the countenance of her twin sister.

She had thought, quite gaily, as she had come up the hotel stairs:

“I suppose Kezia will be looking a terrible frump by now.”

But she had been quite unprepared for what Kezia really did look like.

All the time they had been quarrelling she had been unable to take a terrified, fascinated gaze from the plain woman seated opposite her, and she had thought continuously, “She is my age to the very minute.” Of course, no one would recognize that there was the least likeness between them; it was not only the dress and the paint and the dye and the acquired graces that disguised the actress. Although they were twin sisters their natures were absolutely different, always had been, but the fact remained that they were twin sisters, and Mme. Lesarge knew that she would feel deeply uneasy until she was assured that Kezia had left Paris and was not likely to return.

So, when she had a little reassured herself by that nervous, anxious contemplation of her reflection in the mirror (her figure at least was very good, and her taste in clothes excellent), she turned and said, with an attempt at conciliation:

“Let us part with some civility at least, Kezia. I wish you no ill will. It was a stupid mistake for us to meet. When are you leaving Paris?”

Miss Faunce turned round from the window. She felt she had herself well in hand now, would be able to say exactly what she meant without allowing her passion to betray her into useless abuse.

“I don’t know that it was a mistake for me to come to Paris,” she said deliberately. “I felt it my duty to do so. As I said, I have been thinking of you continuously for years. I live alone, as you know, and of course, there is plenty to do, I am never idle. But there is no other person beside yourself nearly connected with me. Say and think what you like, Martha, we are twin sisters, and I suppose there is some sort of bond,” she paused and added, “even if it be a bond of hatred.”

“Hatred,” repeated the actress, with an elegant shrug, “that’s an ugly word to use, isn’t it? Why do you bother about me at all? I don’t hate you, I assure you.”

“Oh, yes, I think you do,” said Miss Faunce. “I think you do, Martha. I saw hatred in your eyes all the time we were talking together. You were thinking that I was old and ugly and your twin sister.”

“Did you read me as clearly as that?” smiled Mme. Lesarge, rather pale under the careful tinting of powder and rouge. “Well, perhaps some such thought did come into my mind. You’ve let yourself go, you see, terribly, Kezia. You look fifteen years older than you are. I suppose you rather revel in it.”

“I’ve let myself alone,” replied Miss Faunce. “I am as God made me. My hair is the colour yours ought to be, my face looks as yours would look without all that stuff you’ve got on it.”

“Not quite, I think,” said Mme. Lesarge. “We have different thoughts, different minds. We live very differently. I don’t suppose if we were stripped side by side we should look in the least alike.”

“Don’t you? Well, I think that if we were stripped, people would know us for twins, but that’s not what I want to argue about. And I don’t want to hear about your life, which I am sure is vile and disgusting. It was thinking of your life and how horrible it was that brought me here. I felt it was my duty to try and save you.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” murmured the actress. She picked up her gold-mesh bag and her ivory-handled parasol. “You are really becoming absurd, ridiculous. Save me — from what?”

“You know quite well what I mean, and I really do want to save you. I dare say that, as you boast, I don’t know as much of the world as you do, but I know what happens to women like you when they are not young. I suppose you haven’t saved anything?”

“No, and I am in debt,” smiled the actress.

“I thought so. What are you going to do when you can’t any longer get parts — when you can’t find any friends?”

“That is many, many years ahead,” replied Mme. Lesarge. “You need not concern yourself about my future, my dear Kezia. Even if I do live to be old I shall—”

“Well, what will you do?”

Miss Faunce leaned forward eagerly.

“I shall repent, of course. Either marry some good man and go and live in the country or go into a convent. You know I am a Roman Catholic?”

Miss Faunce shuddered.

“You are the first of our family to become that,” she said with real distress.

Mine. Lesarge laughed. She was uneasy and wanted to escape.

“Did you really come to Paris to say these silly things to me?” she said. “You have wasted your time and your money.”

“I have plenty of both,” replied Kezia, “you know Grandmother Tallis died last year. She left me all her fortune. Half of it would have been yours if you had been — a different sort of woman. I’d give you what would have been your share now, if you’d like to change your way of living.”

“Repent — I suppose, is what you wanted to say, Kezia. This is all so hopeless. We don’t even talk the same language. I don’t want Grandmother Tallis’s money nor any of yours. Though you must admit,” she added, a little grimly, “that it has been fortunate for you, from a practical point of view, that I did take — the primrose path, I suppose you’d call it, eh? You had everything, didn’t you — the house, the lands, the money, father’s fortune, mother’s fortune, Grandmother Tallis’s fortune. To whom are you going to leave it when you die?”

“To charities,” replied Kezia Faunce sternly. “Every penny of that money will be left to do good to someone. I am quite prepared, as I said just now, to give you all you need, if you leave the stage — leave Paris.” Then, on another note, she added, “Don’t you ever feel homesick, Martha?”

Mme. Lesarge reflected. The words did take her back to certain broken dreams and odd moments of nostalgia. She had run away from home when she was sixteen, a schoolgirl home for the holidays. She had eloped with a subaltern from the neighbouring garrison. They had gone to India and in three years she had been divorced ignominiously. There had been another marriage with a husband who drank and ill-treated her, and this time a separation without a divorce. Then, a long connection with Adrian Lesarge, the French actor, who had taught her his language and his art, given her the place which she had contrived to hold since. For she was industrious, clever, and talented, and had a rare charm and radiance in her personality.

It seemed a long time ago since she had fled from Stibbards, with a veil down over her bonnet and a small case in her hand. It was very early summer, she could recall the scent of the flowering currant bushes as she had hurried through the kitchen garden to let herself out by the back door in the red-brick wall where the apricots grew.

Homesick — for those sixteen years in an English village! She remembered it as always afternoon and always sunny, quiet, with the smell of hot jam coming from the kitchen.

Kezia was watching her keenly.

“You are homesick,” she said, “you are. Martha, why don’t you come back?”

Mme. Lesarge looked up quickly, as if she wondered if these were the accents of love. Love? How could it be, or any touch of affection or any kindly feeling? Curiosity, envy, fused into hatred gazed out of Kezia’s dull brown eyes. And Mme. Lesarge knew that this expression was reflected in her own gaze. Yes, envy too. There was something about Kezia’s life and character which she envied; when she looked at her sister she thought of things that she had missed, just as Kezia thought of lacks in her own existence when she looked at her sister.

Each woman hated and envied in the other what she might have been — it was a complex and terrible emotion.

The actress contrived to speak lightly.

“Return! Impossible! And you know it is. You would not wish to have me at Stibbards.”

“No, I suppose not,” agreed Miss Faunce. “You’re quite right, it would be a scandal — intolerable. Unless some story could be made up or you came as a penitent.”

Mme. Lesarge laughed.

“I suppose you really are crazy enough to think that might happen — that I might come with a made-up story behind me, or as a penitent, and that you would be able to torture me day after day! We’re both going crazy, I think. Let’s try to talk of real things.”

She spoke with a good deal of resolution and with far fewer graces or affectations than she had used on her entry into this gilt and plush sitting-room. She was becoming indeed, though she did not know it, more like her sister in manner than she had been for years, more familiar with her own language that she had not spoken for so long, more like Kezia in abrupt gestures and straight looks.

“You know that I am not coming back. You know that I am not going to take any of Grandma Tallis’s money. You know that I don’t want ever to see you again. If you should come to Paris again, pray don’t disturb me.”

She grasped the ivory-handled parasol so tightly that it seemed it might break. Kezia Faunce watched her very curiously.

“I daresay you think that I am completely degraded, but pray don’t waste any such pity on me. I am successful — I always have been successful. I am, in a way, triumphant over everything, over the usual conventions, the traditions that bind women, over the usual stupid emotions that cause them to waste their hearts and lives; over all the pettifogging duties and obligations that wear away a woman like you. Yes,” she repeated, with a shrill note creeping into her voice, “I am in every way successful and triumphant, and I beg that you will not think of me with any compassion or believe that I have or ever could have any regrets.”

Miss Faunce’s contemptuous smile had deepened as she listened to this flaunting speech.

“And the end?” she asked. “What is the end to be?”

“I beg you not to concern yourself about that, Kezia. I daresay my end will be as comfortable and as edifying as yours, and at least, it is a long way off.”

“You are not so secure as you think,” said Miss Faunce. “I was in Paris two or three days before I let you know that I was here, and I made inquiries, and I read things for myself. You are not so popular as you were. Although you deliberately blind yourself, people do realise that you are getting old.”

The actress gave a painful smile.

“A woman like myself is never old.”

“Oh, that is very easy to say, Martha, and I have no doubt that it consoles you. You are forty-five. It will not be very long before you are fifty. There are younger women, and I know that you do not get such good parts as you did. And the men don’t run after you like they used to. That you have lost one or two wealthy — protectors, don’t you call them? That you go about now with very much younger men, quite young boys in fact.”

“So you have been spying on me!” cried Mme. Lesarge, who looked quite livid. “You who call yourself an honest, honourable woman!”

“No, I haven’t been spying on you, Martha. It wasn’t difficult to find out these things. Just a word here and there at the dressmakers, the perfumers, in the foyer of the theatre itself. Oh, I’ve been to see you two or three times. You act quite well, but you’re getting tired, aren’t you — very tired?”

“Your talk is ridiculous, inspired by envy. We are both of us in the prime of life. You need not look an old woman. If you had ever lived you would not do so, it is because everything has been dried up in you — always, you have faded without blooming.” Then, in desperation, almost with a note of appeal, Mme. Lesarge added: “Why could you not let me alone? I haven’t thought of you for years. When your note came I did have an impulse of kindness.”

“Neither of those statements is true,” interrupted Kezia Faunce with a force that held the other woman utterly silent. “You know that you have thought about me, again and again, and of Stibbards, and of the life I lead, of your own childhood and our own father and mother and all our neighbours and friends. Yes, we are twins, there is some affinity between us, and in a way we do know each other’s thoughts, and I know you have thought of me — that I have haunted you like you have haunted me. That is the truth, is it not, Martha?”

With a half step threateningly forward the actress, with a shrug pulling at the pearls fastening her pale gloves, admitted sullenly:

“Yes, I suppose it is true. You have rather haunted me. And that is why I came. But what is there in it? Why do we talk about it or think of it?”

“And the other thing you said is not true, either,” continued Kezia coming still closer to the other woman. “You didn’t come here in a fit of kindness. You hate me as much as I hate you. You can’t endure to think that I am existing in Stibbards, any more than I can endure to think that you are existing in Paris.”

“It does get on my nerves, sometimes,” admitted Mme. Lesarge, “but I don’t know why it should. It is a mere accident that we’re sisters — twin sisters. We’re quite different women.”

“I wonder,” said Kezia Faunce, with great bitterness. “Perhaps we really are the same kind of woman, only in you one side, and in I the other, has got the uppermost. Well, it’s no good talking about that. I, at least, have behaved myself, and you haven’t. I’ve every right to scorn you, but you’ve no right at all to scorn me. You’ve been a bad woman since you were a young girl — bad daughter, bad wife. Not fulfilling a single duty or obligation, while I did everything that was expected of me.”

Mme. Lesarge echoed these words with an accent of mockery.

“Everything that was expected of you — poor Kezia!”

“It’s all very well to jeer, but I stayed behind. I nursed mother, I nursed father, I didn’t get married when I might have got married, because it meant leaving them. There were all kinds of things that I would have liked to have done, but I didn’t even think about them. And when father and mother were dead I felt a duty towards Stibbards, to the name, the position we held.”

Mme. Lesarge interrupted this with great gusts of laughter, half-hysterical laughter. She turned towards the door.

“I really think I shall go mad if I stay here and listen to you any longer. I do hope you will leave Paris soon. And please don’t try to see me again.”

“No,” said Kezia sourly, “I won’t try to see you again, it’s too horrible. The worst of it is that I shan’t be able to avoid thinking about you.”

“I suppose not.”

Mme. Lesarge had her hand on the doorknob. The two sisters were looking at each other very intently and in the utter unself-consciousness of that moment of passion the likeness between them was quite strong. The dyed curls of the actress and the harsh grey hair of Kezia Faunce seemed mere details in the general resemblance, which was one of shape and structure.

“Are you going to act tonight?” asked Miss Faunce.

“Yes. I hope you won’t be there to see me. It would make me nervous if I thought you were watching.”

“I’ve watched you twice, as I told you. I shan’t come again. I suppose there’ll be bouquets?”

“I suppose so. It is rather an especial occasion. Why did you ask?”

Kezia Faunce did not reply. She had grown flowers, profusion, multitudes of flowers all her life, she had given away flowers for village weddings and funerals, to the poor, the sick, to charity, to church festivals; she had plucked flowers by the armful, the basketful, to adorn her room, but she had never had as much as a single rose or lily given her, and all her life Martha had been receiving bouquets.

“Well,” she said, “one kiss has got to be the last kiss, you know, and one bouquet the last bouquet. I wonder if you’ve ever thought of that?”

“Yes, I’ve thought of it,” replied the actress coolly. “I daresay we have a good many thoughts in common. Never mind, my dear, I daresay I shall repent, as you call it, in time. I shall marry, as I said, some old respectable man, and keep house for him to the best of my ability. Or I shall go into a convent, or, I might die suddenly. In any of these cases there would be no more kisses nor bouquets, and I suppose you would be satisfied, Kezia?”

“Satisfied? I don’t know. But I should like to think that the kind of life you are leading had come to an end. I shall watch the papers, Martha — the French papers.”

“Whatever I do won’t be in the papers,” laughed Mme. Lesarge. “I shall keep it secret.”

“How am I to know then? I don’t want you to write to me. I don’t want a French letter to be seen at Stibbards.”

“Oh, I shan’t write to you, but you’ll know, somehow. I’ll send you my last bouquet, Kezia.”

She pulled the door open, and with the swiftness of one well versed in dramatic effect was gone.

Kezia Faunce sat down, trembling; the palms of her hands and her forehead were damp. How hateful this interview had been! What a mistake — this hideous visit to Paris! She had certainly satisfied a curiosity that had haunted her for years; through all her monotonous, orderly, placid life had always run the question “What is Martha like?” She had sometimes woken up in the middle of the night after a dream that had been of some other subject and sat up in bed and said to herself, half-aloud: “What is Martha doing now? What is she wearing? Who is her present lover? What part is she playing? How many people are drinking her health or sending her presents? What does she look like and how much money has she got?” And all these questions had been like so many arrows piercing her in the dark. She had felt that her own life was poor and mean before the opulence and splendour of Martha’s life and yet at the same time, by a maddening paradox, she had felt intensely proud of her own virtue, supremely scornful of her twin sister’s wickedness.

Nobody ever spoke of Martha in Stibbards. It was nearly thirty years since she had run away and Miss Faunce hoped that she had been forgotten through the sheer force of never being mentioned. Many people, surely, believed she was dead, and a great many more, even if they did occasionally read the newspapers and see the name therein of a certain famous actress, would not associate the name of Marcelle Lesarge with that of Martha Faunce. But always in her twin sister’s mind she had been alive, vital, and exasperating, until this suppressed emotion had not been any longer endurable and Miss Faunce, under some excuse, more or less feasible, had left Stibbards and come to Paris and sought out and really seen Martha.

And now it was over, that momentous interview, and it had been nothing but recriminations, a bitter and humiliating quarrelling and an intensifying of her deep emotion of mingled contempt and envy. She sat stiffly in the red plush empire chair and rested her head on the back and closed her eyes and imagined herself in Martha’s place.

She saw herself as Mme. Marcelle Lesarge stepping out into her little phaeton with the smart groom in a smart livery on the box, and some comely, well-dressed gentleman beside her. She saw herself being swept over the cobbled Paris streets, laughing, chattering, bowing to acquaintances, and so to her sumptuous apartments.

Why hadn’t Martha asked her to her apartment, why hadn’t she, Kezia, insisted on going there? Merely through lack of courage. Because she had been ashamed of herself as much as of her sister. She would not have known how to behave to the people whom she might have met in Martha’s bijou little house.

Ah, what was it like, that little house? Very different from Stibbards, Kezia was sure, full of gilded furniture, of pictures and statuary, all presents from her lovers, no doubt. And these lovers, who and what were they? Kezia Faunce had heard many rumours, many scandalous tales. She did not know which of them to credit. But what did that matter, the lovers were there, and she might imagine them as she pleased.

She opened her eyes and sat up. She found that this identification of herself with her twin sister was a dangerous pastime. Tomorrow she would return to England and to Stibbards. Everything would be as it was, outwardly, at least. She would not soon be able to forget, perhaps she would not be able to ever forget the interview in this hateful, gaudy room, with the vulgar, red plush and gilt furniture, the great mirrors, wreathed with coarse carvings that rose to the ceiling. Neither of the sisters would influence the other by one iota. Their tragedy was that neither could forget the other.

Her last bouquet!

What did she mean by that? How could she say anything so absurd?

“Send me her last bouquet!” Kezia Faunce could not get that out of her excited mind. She, who all her life had never had a posy sent her, to receive that bouquet which would mean that her sister’s life of sin was over! The idea was as exasperating, as ridiculous as it was hateful.

Miss Faunce left Paris the next day. Her progress to the station was rendered hateful by constant glimpses of her sister, pretty, provoking, and elegant, smiling at her in red and black paint from the bill posters. In one of these she was depicted as holding an enormous cluster of scarlet roses in a stiff white paper frill, and Miss Faunce, staring at the vivid drawing which had in the set of the nose and chin a grotesque likeness to herself, repeated with bitter vexation:

“Her last bouquet! Her last bouquet!”

II

Kezia Faunce lived very well at Stibbards. She had power, money, position, activities and leisure, and valued all these things exactly in that order.

There was no one to dispute her authority either in her own household or in the village; there was no fear of any contradiction either in her management of the Manor or in her general supervision of her poorer neighbours’ affairs. She was charitable and even kind, for she felt these things to be virtuous and she had early set herself out to be virtuous. The fine Palladian Manor House, Tudor timber and bricks, re-fronted with eighteenth-century stone, classic portico and windows, was far too large for her, for she lived alone and seldom entertained. But she refused to shut up any of the rooms and the large staff of servants kept everything as precise and orderly as if the original number for which the house had been built still inhabited its spacious wings. And she filled her days that would otherwise have been sometimes empty and often lonely, by a minute supervision of all the details of her own household, by a close supervision of all the affairs of all her servants, tenants, and poorer neighbours.

For years she had led this active, authoritative life with no trouble save the annoying thought of Martha in Paris, and since she had been to Paris and seen Martha this thought had grown until it overspread all her days as a fungus will overspread a healthy tree, seizing on a speck of diseased wood and growing until there is no sap or vitality in root or branch, and, in the next Spring, no leaves are put forth.

There was no one to whom Kezia Faunce could speak of her sister, and therefore she brooded the more deeply day and night on that same personality that was at once so alien and so much part of herself, leading that other life so distant from her own, and yet very much a life that would have expressed something of herself that had never been expressed. It was not likely that she would ever see her again or that they would ever correspond. Someday she would read in the paper of the retirement or the death of Mme. Marcelle Lesarge; possibly of her marriage or her disappearance into a convent. There was only one thing that Mme. Lesarge, supposing that she ever looked at an English newspaper, could read of her, and that would be her death and her burial in the churchyard which was so near Stibbards and where every other Faunce lay and would lie, except Martha herself.

The estate would go to a distant cousin whose name was not Faunce, and Kezia’s money would go to austere charities. And so the very existence of the two sisters would be, as it were, wiped off the earth. There would only be Kezia’s name among all her ancestors in the English churchyard, and that assumed, false name of Marcelle Lesarge in some huge Parisian cemetery. And Kezia often wondered which of them would die first. Which would read the notice of the other’s death in the paper? And what would it be like for her to realise that that other self of hers in Paris had ceased to exist, or for Martha to know that her second half which had stayed at home in Stibbards had left the familiar rooms empty?

Kezia Faunce tried, often enough, to analyse her feelings towards her sister, to get, as it were, to the very heart of this dull, envious hatred, but she could not. Whenever she tried to do so she became both confused and rebellious. She was quite sure that her scorn for Martha was sincere and that she despised the kind of woman that Martha was, and yet she was forced to admit that Martha had had a great deal that she would have liked to have had, experiences that she would have given much to have enjoyed, adventures that she would have delighted to have tested.

She believed that Martha felt much the same about her; surely she had seen regret and envy in those dark, painted eyes under the elegant little hat with the crimson ostrich feathers!

Martha had regretted, ah, surely, that she had forfeited her status as an English gentlewoman, that she had no part in Stibbards, and all that Stibbards meant. She had envied Kezia and the courage which had chosen the dull, monotonous way, the dignity that had clung to duty, the self-sacrifice, the austere decorum which would force even the most ribald and light-minded to respect Miss Kezia Faunce.

This obsession about Martha, which she had hoped a sight of her would efface, grew, on the contrary, from day to day, until it became almost unbearable.

“I suppose it will go on for years and years,” she thought, with a sense of panic, “I used to think I saw her sitting at table with me, walking beside me in the garden, and even through the woods and the orchards; meeting me in the village and coming into my bedroom at night. But I always saw her as I remembered her — a young girl in a muslin frock, doeskin slippers, and long curls falling from under a chip straw bonnet. Well, I have got rid of that image, but it has been replaced by another. I see her now as I saw her in that detestable red plush and gilt drawing-room in the Paris hotel, in that vulgar interchangeable blue and red silk, in those diamonds — yes, I believe they were real — in that lace, I was sure it was genuine, on her bosom, with her hair dyed and her face painted, and the little hat with the crimson feather placed so elegantly on her curls; looking, I must confess, no more than thirty-five, and yet I thought that towards the end of the interview she looked as old as I do. Yes I see her like that now. It is quite unescapable. I don’t know what I shall do. It must be some kind of an illness.”

And she wondered passionately if Martha were haunted by her, if Martha, at the theatre, in her choice little apartment, in her tilbury, driving in the Bois in the midst of her little supper parties, saw her, Kezia Faunce, in her plain frock, cut by a provincial dressmaker, with her grey hair in the chenille net, with her uncared-for complexion and dull eyes, with her keys at her waist, and her account or receipt book in her hand, going from still-room to closet, from kitchen to dairy, through all the handsome well-kept, unused rooms of Stibbards.

“It is grotesque, it is absurd.” With all the force of her strong mind she endeavoured to shake off the obsession, and threw herself with suppressed and burning energy into good works.

Her charities, always considerable, became lavish; she gave away blankets and coals, medicines and foods, until the vicar protested that she was spoiling his parishioners. She bought a new organ for the church, although she cared nothing about music, and she spent many hours on her knees in her high pew with the green curtains though she knew nothing about prayer.

She began several letters to her sister, formal epistles, asking after her health, and the drama that she was appearing in, and asking, vaguely, for news.

But she sent none of these.

Towards September she felt much more at ease and she began to think with a great thankfulness that the haunting, as she secretly named it to herself, had ceased. She could not, of course, forget Martha, but the figure of the actress became vague and blurred in her mind, and for hours together, when she was absorbed in some task or in some outside interest she would not think at all of the woman in the full, be-ruffled, changeable blue and red taffeta, in the little hat and the crimson feathers.

She began to cease wondering how Martha was employing her time, to cease turning over in her mind, so ignorant of such affairs, the possible various episodes of that alien yet closely connected life. She ceased to wonder and to brood over these coquetries, the wickednesses, the successes of Martha. She was soothed by a sense of being more fairly treated than she had hitherto been, for it had always seemed to her grossly unjust that she, the virtuous, the spotless, the irreproachable, should have been troubled in the slightest by any thought of the worthless, the degraded, the contemptible.

Surely the reward for her noble life of complete self-sacrifice should, at least, have been complete peace of mind.

“God,” she thought, “should have seen to that.” And now she felt that He had done so, for when she did think of her sister it was in a vague, compassionate fashion. She would still wake up suddenly in the night, alert, and full of exasperation, expecting to be challenged by that thought of Martha. But now there would be emptiness, merely her large, handsome, silent bedroom with the harvest moon showing through the unshuttered windows, and a sense of security all about. She would think of Martha, certainly, but only of someone very far away who did not concern her in the least.

She would lie contentedly in the large bed considering her own possessions, Stibbards, full of her furniture, her silver, her pictures, her china; the stables, with her horses in them, the park full of her timber and sheep and cattle; her farms, well stocked, prosperous. All hers, glorifying her, supporting her, giving her honour, dignity and importance, while Martha had no part in any of them. Martha had run away from all this thirty years before, when she had gone through the garden perfumed by the early currants, and slipped away to her worthless young soldier, to whom she had not been for very long faithful.

In the first week of September, Miss Kezia Faunce superintended the making of pickles, sauces, and relishes from the early unripe fruit. Never yet, since as a girl of ten or so she began to help her mother in these domestic duties, had Miss Kezia missed the different picklings, preservings, jam and wine making as they came round at their several times of the year. The cupboards, closets, and presses of Stibbards were filled by the products of her industry; perfumes, lotions, preserves, balm, aromatics, sweet waters, washes, and confections, more than she would be able to use in the rest of her life, stood stocked in the darkness that they filled with a musty fragrance.

This year, when the last day of this work was over, Kezia Faunce felt suddenly tired, almost as if she were going to be ill. She walked out into the garden about the time of sunset in a lassitude that was too indifferent to seek rest. The evening was cloudless, overwhelming in spacious gold, the landscape was transfigured by the pure uninterrupted light of the western sun; the air was full of Autumn fragrances, and from the house came the mingled sour-sweet smell from the preserving-pans, still redolent of hot spices and sugared fruits.

The large house was silent, as if everyone rested after the day’s labour. There was no one in the wide trim gardens but Miss Kezia Faunce herself. She wiped continually with a delicate handkerchief the last sparkles of sugar from her fingers. She felt a mingled sensation of excitement and apprehension, but she did not think of Martha at all. She went to the herb garden and noted how the various plants, hot and cold, moist and dry, were growing in the warm air. Everything grew well that year. It seemed as if there was going to be a splendid harvest of every kind of fruit, a thing that Miss Kezia Faunce could not remember having happened before — everything in fruitage at once. She found herself trembling and she sat down on the circular stone seat beside the great beds of thyme, rosemary, and lavender, all silver grey in that increasing golden light, for, as a lamp will flare up at the last before it goes out, so as the sun finally sank it seemed to give out a more powerful glow.

Miss Kezia Faunce thought that never before had she noted so much light. She sat there on the semi-circular stone seat, between those high, silver-grey plants of rosemary, lavender, marjoram; she felt her senses becoming slightly confused and she had a sensation of light-headedness, as she had often experienced before a severe thunderstorm. Her glance fastened on a large rose bush in the bed opposite, which looked unnaturally tall and seemed to have uncommonly large red thorns. There were no flowers now on this bush, but she knew that it bore crimson blooms, the last of which had fallen about a week ago.

She thought then, not definitely of Martha, but of a bill poster that she had seen stuck up on an ugly brick wall in Paris as she drove to the station. An actress with a nose and mouth something like her own, holding a large bouquet of crimson roses with a white paper frill. The garden seemed too large and the sky too vast, and the bright light of the sunset too overwhelming for Miss Kezia Faunce’s senses.

She turned and walked back towards the house as one seeking a refuge. She had not quite reached the large terrace when she saw Sarah, the new kitchen-maid, coming hurriedly towards her.

Miss Faunce frowned. It was not part of Sarah’s duties to run errands or take messages to her mistress and she certainly had no business to be in the garden in the print dress and the white apron, now slightly sticky, which she had worn to help in the pickling and the preserving.

Miss Kezia Faunce hastened her step with a rebuke ready on her lips, but what Sarah had to say was so curious that Miss Faunce forbore her reproof.

The little kitchen-maid, who spoke rather breathlessly, had, she said, been standing at the kitchen door scouring out the last of Cook’s pots when she had looked up and seen a lady standing just before the square of potherbs. She had stared at Sarah, smiled, turned away without a word, and gone through the gate in the privet hedge towards the house. Sarah had run after her, but lost sight of her. Then, seeing Miss Faunce in the distance, she had thought that she should tell her of this stranger.

“What was there strange in it?” asked Miss Kezia quickly. “It was some visitor who had lost her way and come to the side kitchen door instead of to the front entrance. I can’t see anything peculiar about it, Sarah.”

“But she was so odd, ma’am, and not like anyone round here.”

“What was she like, child? Don’t make so many words about nothing. What was this lady like?”

“She was very finely dressed, ma’am, and had a queer look of you.”

“A look of me? What do you mean, child? Express yourself better. Do you mean that she was like me?”

The kitchen-maid became confused under this severity.

“She was something like you, ma’am. I don’t know. She made me think of you. She had a big nosegay in her hand.”

Miss Kezia’s lips pinched themselves together.

“Run away and finish your duties, Sarah. This lady has no doubt gone into the house, where she is waiting for me.”

Dismissing the kitchen-maid, Miss Faunce continued her slow walk towards the terrace.

So, Martha had come to Stibbards. Now, why? And in what devilish mood of mockery and spite? Was she going to be married or to enter a convent? Was she at least leaving the stage and her disgraceful manner of life? Miss Kezia felt her thin cheeks flush. Martha had come, bringing with her the bouquet.

The last bouquet?

“She means to disgrace me, I suppose. To make a scandal and a talk all over the place. Perhaps she has lost all her money and may be dependent on me, after all.”

Her thoughts full of hate, Miss Kezia Faunce entered the house which seemed to her more than usually quiet. If Martha had left the side kitchen door and gone through the gate in the privet hedge and then been lost sight of by Sarah, she must have entered the house by the front door. So Miss Kezia Faunce went directly to that and looked in the hall.

This was empty.

“I suppose that she would, even after all these years, remember the place very well. She has probably gone to the green parlour, where she used to sit and do her lessons with Mamma.”

So Miss Faunce opened the door of the green parlour, a room that, though kept spotlessly clean, swept and dusted, had been long since shut up and disused. The slatted dark-green shutters were closed now and the strong last sunlight beating on them filled the room with a subdued glow, almost as if it were under water.

The walls were painted an old-fashioned, dull green; the carpet was green and so were the rich curtains, the damask covered chairs. Everything was the same as it had been when Martha and Kezia used to have their lessons there with their mother.

There was the desk at which they had worked, the piano at which they had practised, and on the walls still hung some of the watercolours of moss roses, birds’ eggs in nests, and white rabbits which they had drawn and painted together.

The room smelt slightly of musk and Miss Kezia, whose mind was not working very alertly and who felt some vagueness over all her senses, thought:

“I must have the shutters opened tomorrow and a little sun and air let in. I had forgotten quite how long it was since the room was used.”

And then she saw Martha standing up close against an inner door, looking at her over her shoulder, holding rather stiffly in both hands, a large bouquet of crimson roses, exactly as she had held them in the poster which Miss Kezia had seen the day she drove to the railway station in Paris.

“Martha,” said Miss Faunce stiffly, “so you’ve come home at last. To give me the bouquet?”

Still smiling and still without speaking, Mme. Marcelle Lesarge’s delicately gloved hands held out the crimson bouquet.

Kezia Faunce took it, and as she did so all the roses turned to blood and emptied themselves into her bosom.

III

Miss Kezia Faunce was found dead in the green parlour where she and her twin sister Martha so often had lessons with their mother. She had fallen, and her head had struck the harp, an instrument that she used, in her girlhood, to play very well.

She had been dead several hours when she was found. The doctor said that her heart had always been weaker than he dared to tell her. She had, of late, been wearing herself out with good work and had been labouring in the kitchen on that particular day. She might have fallen, when unconscious, and killed herself by the blow given her by the harp.

There was no mystery about the affair and not much mourning.

Sarah, the kitchen-maid, did not dare to tell anyone about the lady who had come to the kitchen door with the bouquet. She feared that she would get into severe trouble for an untruthful romancing girl.

IV

Mme. Marcelle Lesarge died in the same hour precisely as her twin sister, but not in so agreeable a manner.

She had lately become rather desperate in her choice of admirers, and on that September evening she had taken home to her apartments a worthless young rake who for some while had been flattering her.

What passed between them on this particular evening no one would ever exactly know, though it was not difficult to guess, for in the morning she was found murdered, her room robbed and rifled, all her jewellery stolen, and nothing left but the large bouquet of crimson roses, which were found flung down carelessly on her bosom, profaned, drooping, and dappled with her blood.

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

LOVE-IN-A-MIST
writing as
JOSEPH SHEARING

Mary Fryer made three entries in her commonplace book: Item; to speak to Agatha about her high heels. Item; to have the old bridge in Croom Wood repaired. Item; to replenish the beds below the terrace with Queen Anne’s lace and Nigella (Love-in-a-Mist).

None of these things was of much importance, but Miss Fryet was a very methodical woman and it worried her when some trifle slipped from her keen memory only to re-occur at some inopportune moment. When she had last been in Croom Wood she had noticed that the wooden bridge across the sleep water-break and rapid stream was rotting and, in fact, quite dangerous. But as it was very seldom used — Croom Wood was the loneliest part of her estate — she had forgotten about it until John Portis, the underkeeper, had reminded her of it yesterday.

Then, the flowers — that bed beneath the terrace — required, she thought, a blue colour against the stone, not those hot-hued celosia the gardener put in year after year.

Agatha was one of the housemaids, and Miss Fryer, who kept many servants, did not often see her; but it was an acute, if occasional, irritation to hear the tap, tap of those high heels along the wide corridors. Miss Fryer had already spoken to the girl, who, however, continued the offence. There must be an end of that annoyance, Miss Fryet decided; she would herself buy for her a pair of comfortable flat-heeled, wide-toed shoes, summon the girl into her presence, then tell her she must wear them and not the foolish, uncomfortable French shoes which must have cost far more than she could possibly afford.

The acute mind of Mary Fryer made a connection between the bridge and the vanity of the housemaid. Agatha was one of the few people who went through Croom Wood, which was a short cut to her grandfather’s form at Lyston, and if she, foolish as she was, tried to cross the bridge instead of going round over the head of the water-break, it was quite feasible that she might catch one of those ridiculous heels in the broken planks and fall onto the stones below. The current was strong, deep, and swill, and no one would hear the cries or see the struggles of Agatha, for the spot was quite forsaken.

“I must warn the girl.” Then Mary Fryer smiled. “I suppose that is why Portis reminded me of the bridge.”

The underkeeper was going to marry Agatha in the winter. Miss Fryer had taken a great interest in the improving and garnishing of the cottage which the young couple would occupy. And the dressmaker at Lyston was making, at Miss Fryer’s expense, a generous outfit for the bride.

This was not being done for the sake of the girl, who was treated with great coldness by her mistress and kept at the same distance as all the other servants, but because of Mary Fryer’s concern with John Portis.

She shut up her commonplace book and locked it in her desk. A full day’s work and leisure was before her, for the autumn morning had just begun. It was a pleasure to her to sit in the handsome, gracious room and look out through the long French windows on to the well-kept, carefully cherished gardens with park, meadows, and fields beyond — all belonging to Mary Fryer. She was a happy woman. It did not trouble her that she had missed husband and children, that she was fifty years old and had never been either beautiful or charming. She owned Fryer’s Manor, she was in her proper place, part of a satisfying continuity; she relished, with a keen zest, every detail of her life, she enjoyed her pride of place, her talent for management, the great respect everyone gave her, the comforts and luxuries she could afford to give herself. She continually rejoiced in her possessions, from the rich Manor itself to the least of her frail Worcester tea cups; she was healthy, strong-minded, and had never known a regret.

Without blenching she contemplated, every time she went to church (and on no reasonable occasion was her impressing pew empty), the graves of her ancestors and the place where she would lie herself. These dead Fryers were all living to her; their portraits were on her walls, their names and stories in her heart and often on her lips. She rather believed that if you were a Fryer of Fryer Manor, it did not much matter if you were alive or dead.

In the same spirit of placid and generous pride she regarded her heir, a younger sister’s son; everything would be his with the one proviso — that he took the name of Fryer.

She carefully altered the date on the calendar — September 1st, 1861. September, a delicious month; she looked forward to days and days of delight, to years and years of enjoyment, for she was so strong, healthy, and equable in her temperament — yes, she was sure that she would relish life to the last minute of it, as she relished her father’s good port to the last drop on the tongue.

She was in a mellow mood and counted her blessings. How fortunate it was that she had always been able to indulge her sense of power, over servants, tenants, villagers, over the vicar and curate, over nearly all her friends and acquaintances. She was just, benevolent, and impartial, but she would have loathed to have been an underling. Even now she sometimes felt that her great capacity for command, for courage, for quick decision, for all the qualities of leadership, had not been fully used. A crisis — that now she would really rather like to be faced with a crisis, just to show herself what she could do.

“How absurd I am being. As if anything like that would happen to me! And what a bother if it did! Now, what have I to do this morning? Four letters to write, three visits to make—” She rose and opened the window, allowing the uninterrupted sunshine to fall over the handsome furniture, the rich carpets, the spotless silver, and all the other evidences of long established wealth and decorum.

Mary Fryer was a short woman with an aquiline nose and slightly prominent grey eyes; her complexion was very good and she had pretty hands, She wore a frilled dress of grey bombazine; her hair was the colour of hay, very smoothly dressed in a net of black chenille. At her waist hung a multitude of small keys (the large keys she carried in a flat basket) and in her close-buttoned bodice was her father’s gold watch on a thick gold chain, which passed several times round her neck.

As she stood there, in the house where she had been born and where she would die, looking over the land that seemed part of herself — as if she had been actually moulded from the warm earth — this little woman thrilled to a sense of her own power — a power over others and, more triumphant still, power over herself.

In this matter of love, for instance. she had won a notable victory, In her youth she had coolly decided to marry no man unless he came up to her secret standard of what her husband should be. Not having found her ideal, she was quite content to leave that aspect of life alone. And then, when, too late she had met the man who would in every particular have satisfied her, she had been able to regard the situation with ironic amusement, able not to betray herself by a sign, able to preserve her happiness unblemished.

A timid tap at the door brought her out of her self-satisfied musing.

“Come in.”

It was Agatha who entered, One glance at her showed Miss Fryer that the girl was in the deepest distress.

“What is the matter, Agatha? Come into the room, child, if you please, and sir down.”

Miss Fryer closed the window and returned to her seat by the desk. The girl obeyed and took the high, stiff chair with the white and black bead-embroidery.

“A chance to tell her about her heels,” thought Miss Fryer, but, as usual, kindly and reasonable, she waited for Agatha to speak. And while she waited looked at the girl with that poignant gaze she turned on her whenever she saw her, which was not often.

Agatha Lerder was eighteen years old with not very good features and a common, silly air. But she had the bright colouring, the starry eyes, the red lips, and the abundant fair hair which in her class passes for prettiness. She was easily excited and could be very pert and rude, but she was also good-natured and gentle.

Miss Fryer despised her with an intensity of contempt that often surprised herself.

“Well, Agatha, what is it?” she asked very pleasantly. “You look quite ill. It must be something serious, surely, for you to have disturbed me iii the middle of the morning.”

Agatha did not reply; she sat slack and helpless, twisting the buttons on the cuffs of her lilac-sprigged gown; her face was blotched pink and white and her hazel eyes bulged like the eyes of a rabbit Miss Fryer had once seen caught in a trap.

And then, suddenly, terror gave a fixity to Miss Fryer’s serene gaze. “Not — some accident — with Portis? A gun—”

“No, ma’am. He’s all right.”

“Well, then,” said Miss Fryer rather sharply, “tell me please, what is the matter. I am busy.”

The girl’s lace puckered up. She began to weep.

Miss Fryer felt the keenest contempt for her in the world, that of an intelligent woman for a silly one, when it is softened by neither chivalry nor humour.

“Please stop crying. Agatha. If you upset yourself like that you will not be able to tell me anything, and I suppose that you wish me to help you? Very well, then. Now, you see I am calm. You want to confess something?”

Agatha nodded.

“Don’t pull like that at your cuffs. You have broken something? Spoiled something?” As Agatha continued to sob Miss Fryer added: “I hope, that you haven’t stolen anything?”

“It’s not as important as that to you. ma’am,” whispered Agatha, writhing. “I haven’t touched anything of yours. It’s — the twenty-five pounds — that John gave me — his savings.”

“I see. The savings of John Portis. And he gave them to you, like a fool, to buy some things for your house. And you spent them, these savings, on finery in Hereford, I suppose?”

“No. It’s worse than that — ma’am.”

“Worse?”

The fan head sunk lower and lower, the pretty, hot, swollen lips stammered out:

“I gave — it — to Ted — he gambled it away, market day.”

“Ted? Who is he? You haven’t got a brother, have you? I don’t know very much about you, really. Please speak clearly.”

“Oh, Miss! How am I to make it clear! It’s Ted Branston, what used to be the carter here—”

“But I dismissed him for drunkenness. He is a good-for-nothing!”

“So they call him — but I—”

“Yes, you? — look at me, Agatha!”

The girl, timidly, yet not daring to refuse, raised her tear-sodden face, which quivered with terror at the sight of those pale, prominent eyes turned on her with so implacable a stare.

“Oh, ma’am! I’m a wicked, wicked girl! There’s no hope for me, that I well know. He had the money out of me afore I knew, his talk so tender and his ways so sweet—”

“Did he have anything from you beside the money?” Miss Fryer was caressing her watch-chain with quick movements; her gaze fell to the girl’s high, silly heels … pretty shoes, pretty feet, though.

“I used to meet him in Croom Wood. He’s not a man to respect a girl — like John. He used to frighten me, too. I gave him the money to go for a sailor — I hoped it would never be found out. But it will. I can’t go on. I feel ill, oh, so sick. Miss—”

“Stop, please, Agatha. What are you trying to tell me”

“Oh, I haven’t the courage to tell you! If you was a married lady—”

“I think that I understand, even if I am an old maid, Agatha. You are going to marry John Portis, but you are going to have Ted Branston’s baby, and you gave John’s money to Ted. And now be is asking about the money and perhaps wondering why you aren’t well — and you are frightened, eh?”

Agatha passionately wept.

“Stop crying! How am I to help you if you make yourself ill? What do you exactly want?”

“The money. I’d work my fingers to the bone to repay—”

“Never mind that. You want twenty-five pounds. What else?”

“If I could be hidden somewhere — if you could think of something. I don’t know much about it — I’m scared!”

“I see. You want to deceive Portis. You intend to marry him, just the same.”

“It ’ud break his heart if he knew.”

“He — loves you — so much?”

“He’s fair set on me. Different from the way Ted was — if he were to find nut he’d fair kill me—”

“And the other man — this drunken carter — what are your feelings there, Agatha?”

“I don’t care for him no more.”

“I see.” Miss Fryer continued to play with her watch-chain. “And Portis — do you care for him?”

“He’s a good man,” sobbed Agatha.

“Be quiet. You’ll be heard outside the door. Now listen, Agatha. I don’t pretend to be concerned much with you. I’ve met so many girls like you. Natural sluts! But John Portis is a good servant, I value him very highly. I intend to promote him. I’ve been kind to you because of him.”

“I know, that is why I came to you — because of what you think of John, ma’am.”

Miss Fryer’s hand paused on her chain; she thought that she detected a fleeting look of cunning on the pretty, distorted face.

“I see. Well, I could help you quite easily, Agatha. The money is no more than I intended to give you as a wedding present. And I could think of quite a good excuse to take you away, or to send you away. No one would suspect me of anything like that. You would be quite safe.”

“Oh, Miss! I couldn’t ever thank you — it ’ud be life to me!”

“Don’t thank me yet. I don’t know it I shall do it. I don’t know if it would be right. John Portis is far more important than you are, and I don’t know if it would be fair to him. I must think it out.”

Agatha again began to weep and implore. Miss Fryer checked her by rising. And instinctively the servant also rose.

“Don’t bother me any more. I quite realize the necessity for a quick decision. And it doesn’t take me long to make up my mind.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t be cruel, Miss! You are so charitable!”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ll tell you this evening exactly what I shall do. Now, control yourself — go upstairs and lie down. I shall tell everyone you have a little chill.”

“It’s my half-day, ma’am. Granny ’ud think it queer if I didn’t turn up.”

“Very well. But rest till then.”

Agatha, rubbing her face with a large, coarse white handkerchief, turned to leave; Miss Fryer stopped her at the door.

“Portis — doesn’t suspect?”

The girl’s tears gushed anew.

“Oh, God! I hope not! But he seemed queer like, yesterday—”

“Well, leave it to me. And stop crying, you poor little fool.”

The heavy door closed on Agatha. Miss Fryer was alone with the greatest problem of her life. It was this: Would the happiness of John Portis be best served by allowing him to marry the woman whom he so passionately loved, or by revealing to him the trash that she was? The happiness of John Portis was Mary Fryer’s sole concern in I his business; for the girl she cared not one jot.

But he — he was the man whom she would have loved, if he had been a gentleman and if he had been her own age. She had known that when he had first come from Ross five years ago and she had employed him on her estate. Recognized the fact with irony, without regret, even with pleasure in the realization that the world did contain one such man as she had dreamed of in her youth.

But — the son of a small farmer and twenty years her junior. She had not betrayed herself by a flick of an eyelid, nor sacrificed her justice, her serenity, her dignity by an iota. The man had not been unduly favoured nor rewarded — she was generous with all her servants. She had been glad of his happiness with Agatha; that she regarded tenderly, like a mother watching a child absorbed in the delight of a cheap, silly toy that to him is beautiful and necessary. Nor did her secret passion trouble her content. She often faced ii squarely with good humour and irony; she would not name it love — Mary Fryer could not love a man in her employ — but she admitted: “If it bad been different I should have loved him.” And looking at her beds of nigella she would think that their Country name suited her emotion. Love-in-a-Mist! Not clear, warm, radiant, but shining through other emotions that beautified and dimmed. A mist, like that which sets aside the world from the sun and from reality.

But there were no gracious veils about her passion now as she turned over Agatha’s confession in her alert mind. She was astonished at the heat and fury of her protective love for the man, her bitter scorn of the girl. She had felt no jealousy when he had chosen the soft, fondling fool, but now she regarded with hatred the false, cowardly, selfish, stupid slut who had contrived to entangle John Portis.

“A man like that!”

Her pale glance crept to the stiff painted faces of her ancestors in the portraits on the walls, as if she asked advice from their embattled presences. A Fryer ought to know what to do. But for the first time in her life she felt at a loss.

Would he rather be deceived or enlightened?

She knew well enough, from instinct and close, furtive observation, how he doted on the wretched creature! Should she, as she so easily could, help the girl to appear what he thought her? Leave him to find out gradually, when his own passion was spent, what bad fruit be had plucked? Or perhaps never find out at all. Agatha might be frightened into future honesty or she might be cunning enough to deceive him forever.

Or should she, Mary Fryer, tell him the truth, watch him through his rage and grief, and then richly compensate his disappointment?

She did not allow ii to interfere with her habits; the sunny day proceeded as usual, leisurely, well-ordered; she had her good meal and drank two glasses of port instead of one, she wrote her letters and paid her visits in the village.

And at the back of her mind the question — “What shall I do?” — lay perpetually coiled.

As she returned from the village about four o’clock, she saw Agatha in a black-and-white plaid shawl and black straw bonnet leaving the Manor garden by the servants’ entrance and walking, heavily, towards Croom Wood.

“She looks quite calm,” thought Miss Fryer. “I suppose she is trusting my womanly pity. How little she guesses!”

But then Mary Fryer remembered that fleeting look of understanding across the girl’s face, as if she had guessed. “But it is impossible. She is a fool. And I haven’t given myself away. I never told her about those high heels, after all. I ought to. It is doubly dangerous in her condition. I suppose, if I tell him, she will drown herself or something of that kind. Thai wouldn’t matter at all.”

Miss Fryer went into her parlour and sat down without taking off brown silk shawl and the close little hat with the russet ostrich tip and veil that fitted so neatly to her close, smooth chignon. She was always very careful of appearances; even this afternoon, in her great absorption, she had selected a pair of fresh kid gloves; she like to see them on her small hands. She felt very restless and full of energy, ready to undertake any prodigious action for the sake of John Portis. She was much excited to realize how strong her passion was, how bold, resolute and daring it made her — but, what to do?

Certainly she could not stay in the house; she would go for another walk, away from the village, away from everyone.

She took up her reticule and her parasol and went out from the afternoon hush of the house into the sunny loveliness of the park.

Mary Fryer turned where there were no horizons — into the woods She was veering towards her decision — not to tell. Her painful and passionate concentration on the case had evolved this judgement: that he would prefer any future disaster to that of being cheated of his present felicity.

Miss Fryer walked quickly, absorbed in plans for helping Agatha, for preserving intact John Portis’s illusion of happiness; her mind worked busily over all the details and she did not notice where she was going until a sound of water disturbed her and she realized that she was in Croom Wood.

She was pleased that she had, as it were, come naturally into this solitude where she was not likely to be disturbed. A space of harsh bracken, deep tresses of broken weeds, and long brambles with withered leaves and green berries spread between spare, high pines that quite shut out the upper air; there was rising ground on either hand and the sound of water falling on stones. She could just see the bridge as she ascended the hilly path.

“I must remember those repairs — I mustn’t let this interfere with my duties.”

Then she stood still, listening. There was another sound beside that of the tumbling water. Something being dragged — a village child stealing an old, dry bough, perhaps. She strained her ears, which were a little stunned by the incessant roar of the water, and walking forward through the bracken almost stumbled on a spade resting against one of the straight, fine trunks.

She concentrated on this for a moment, frowning, wondering, considering; when she looked round suddenly and saw John Portis a few paces away, he was absorbed in the task of dragging along the body of Agatha. Miss Fryer knew at once the black-and-white check shawl, the black chip straw bonnet. He had not seen her and she could have easily fled, but she never thought of doing so. Her whole being veered towards and settled on this brutal solution of a problem with which she need no longer concern herself; she felt lifted up, out of herself.

“John Portis.”

The man turned, at once alert and cautious, as if his attendant devil had spoken.

She went towards him.

“There has been an accident.” He straightened himself; Agatha, looking very small, lay at his feet ; one of her shoes had come off.

Mary Fryer looked at the young man and smiled; faced by this complete understanding he said: “I waited for her. She always came this way to Lyston.”

“You knew?”

“I suspected. When I faced her with it she couldn’t deny it. A dirty drab! Begging your pardon. Miss Fryer.”

“I don’t mind. It is true. She told me.”

“I swore last night I’d do it — if it were true. I don’t mind swinging.”

“Why should you be — punished — for an accident?”

“An accident ? I—”

He broke off and they both stared down at Agatha. The girl had been strangled; everything was hideous about her except the long, loose fair locks that fell out of her crushed bonnet.

“Why did you fetch the spade. Portis?”

“I ran back for it to the woodman’s hut — I was taking her to where there’s space enough — and the ground not so hard.”

“That is all foolish. The bridge is broken and she would wear those high-heeled shoes. How natural for her to fall into the stream! No one would enquire further than that—”

The man’s rigid face became full of light and energy; it was like a mask coming to life. “My God! — I never thought of that!”

“Cover up her eyes, Portis — they tell too much. Though I dare say by the time she’s been dashed from one rock to another—”

Miss Fryer dropped her clean, fragrant handkerchief and walked ahead without looking back, towards the broken bridge. She heard him busy with his burden, behind; she wondered if his will or her own was animating him.

She went on to the bridge and still she did not look at what he was about, He broke away some of the rotten wooden railings and kicked some pieces of the powdering planks and cast them down into the powerful stream.

“Now they will see that these are fresh marks—” She looked below and saw the check shawl, black bonnet, far down the glistening rocks. He was adroit and powerful. She descended from the frail bridge and picked her way to where he stood dumb on the edge of the swift waterfall, gazing after his victim. He was strong, ruthless, magnificent as the roaring water itself; her pale glance caressed every line and hue of his vigorous manhood.

“You have disturbed some bracken and bought. You will be able to put that right? And put that spade back. Quickly!”

He turned to stare at her and her love was perfected by his complete absence of subserviency.

“Why did you do it, ma’am? I didn’t mind taking the penalty. It was because of the flies I was going to bury her — not to hide it.”

“Yet you were glad of my suggestion?”

“Yes. It seemed an escape — but I don’t know.”

“I do, This ends everything. She won’t be disgraced either.”

“It seems better like this. The law don’t touch a thing like this either, does it, ma’am?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You see, she was mine. Do what I liked with. If it were any but that filthy carter — spending my money, too — and here, in this wood — where we used to meet — he and she — again asking your pardon, ma’am.”

“You needn’t, I thought of it too. And wondered, too. I don’t understand these women who are just animals.”

His handsome face settled into woe. “Why couldn’t she like me?”

“She was a fool, Portis. We had better go.”

He trudged heavily beside her until they reached the path; out of sight of the stream and what the tumbling waters played with….

“This is my land. Portis, I have the right to decide for you — you are in my employ, I feel that you are mine, to do what I like with.” Miss Fryer was rather breathless. “I suppose you would prefer to gel away — from Croom Wood? I could find you work with a friend of mine in Dorset.”

“Thank you, ma’am, that would be better,” he replied absently.

She touched his corduroy sleeve and asked very delicately: “How do you feel, Portis?”

“Numb. As if my heart and all the feeling in it had been cut out of my body.”

“It’s good — after all the — pain. You’ll come to life again. There are other women. I’ll look after you, as long as you like.”

He peered at her blankly.

“Why, ma’am?”

“You are a good servant. I have no fault to find with you.” She looked curiously at the strong hands that now hung slackly by his side, but that had, a little while before, crushed the life out of Agatha; and she smiled again. “Goodbye! Do not forget the spade. Remember to be careful. And you must live — and forget.”

He touched his forelock mechanically and turned away. She watched him fetch the spade, return to the path, and disappear up the rising ground; she felt that her will, not his, was doing this.

There was still something for her to do. That oilier shoe…. She searched for it, found it, returned to the bridge and threw it over into the water. Silly, cheap, high-heeled shoe — she had never before touched an intimate article belonging to a servant. She was sorry she had given him t,he handkerchief; but even if it were found, she could explain it away….

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Miss Fryer returned home; she had a great sense of ease, of liberation, as if life had reached a climax, as if she had fulfilled an imperative need; she had not failed herself.

The first fire burned on the spacious hearth; there was a delicious smell of pastry, of roast meat — preparing for her dinner; her nostrils expanded with relish; she drank two glasses of sherry from the heavy decanter on the sideboard.

Would he be able to carry it through?

She trusted him. And for herself? There might, she supposed, be nights when she would dream of Croom Wood and what might be muttering and wailing there. There might be moments when she would wonder at herself and him. At present she felt exalted. She took off and threw into the lire her gloves soiled with powderings of dry wood ; her pale eyes looked round at the protective faces of her ancestors. A Fryer would know what to do.

She had known — without hesitation or a single slip.

Now she was tired; she sank into her comfortable chair without removing her neat hat. Her mind, not functioning quite normally, reverted to the last three items in her commonplace book. She could put her pen through that relating to Agatha’s high heels — the bridge would certainly be repaired now. Nor was she likely to forget the blue flowers, emblem of a veiled, an obscure passion — Love-in-a-Mist.

She smiled in triumph. How completely he had accepted her help without question, or thanks. She had been right ; he was the man whom she ought to have married.

“Pall Mall Magazine” Jan. 1933, as by Joseph Shearing

MADAM SPITFIRE

A roofless house in the middle of a grove of firs, always in shade from the blue-black foliage, and further darkened by a huge cypress. Who planted this sombre, exotic tree so near a mansion of austere grey stone? One of gloomy tastes, surely; perhaps, in a mood of heartbroken penitence, some wrongdoer brought a long jade-coloured cone from the Holy Land in his pocket and dropped it in this lonely place when, suddenly, the devils he had not been able to placate, sprang up and pursued him through the haunted wood.

Roofless is this bluish granite mansion; from the broken hearth-stones stinging-nettles grow thickly, and in the fallen doorway is an ash sapling, that ill-omened tree; the window-spaces all open on to the darkness of the trees; even from the top of the tower (more ancient, more stoutly built than the house) up to which you may still mount by worn steps, weeds sprout in every crack of stone, there is no prospect only the upper branches of the firs, the flat boughs of the cypress, and the pale sky between appears very lonely, very far away.

This was the jointure house; the vast mansion to which it was attached has disappeared; only a sloping smoothness in the turf of the deserted park shows where the terraced lawns sloped down to the artificial lake; only a broken row of ancient chestnut trees shows where a grandiose avenue led to lordly portals of stone and iron.

Many widowed women lived and died in the jointure house, retiring there after handing over their keys to a son’s or an heir’s wife; but there came a time when it was shut up and another dower house was built on the other side of the spacious grounds.

This was because of Madam Spitfire; no one (they say) cared to live in the old one after her; the house was avoided, it fell into decay; even when the great mansion was pulled down later for building materials the old jointure house was left alone… not that it had any reputation of ghost or goblin; it was simply ignored. By then the tale of Madam Spitfire had worn thin, to a mere pale tradition; now it is nearly forgotten altogether.

No one knows where she is buried; some say it is under the rank patch of nettles on the broken hearth at which she used to sit; some that it is under the heap of bricks and stone where the old Mausoleum once stood; at least it is certain that she does not rest among her husband’s kin in the solitary little church on the edge of the estate, which stands among white grave-stones like an old shepherd among a crowding flock.

I do not know when she lived, and if I did I would not care to give this story dates; it is simply a long time ago; the colours in it are faded like the yarns in an old needlework piece which have changed to a uniform mignonette green and indigo blue with here and there the dim russet of a fox, a pard, an acorn.

Why am I impelled to relate the tale of Madam Spitfire? Why does it come to me with such poignant clarity as I linger within the four walls of the old jointure house and watch the rays of light cut through the cypress boughs and show on the old dark stone where the tenacious ivy clings with threadlike tendrils and glossy leaves?

Madam Spitfire was married when she was not so very young; she came in her full pride to the proud Hall in the great park and everything was refurnished for her reception; the Squire was very much in love with her and — “under her thumb” as his people said.

From the first there was hostile talk; neither her family nor her past was known; some cried her down as a foreigner or even a play actress, but nothing could be proved, and she was well enough bred.

Yet almost at once her sharp ways with the servants and tenants gained her the name of Madam Spitfire; she was soon hated by her inferiors, and few of her equals came to the vast mansion whilst she ruled there; she stood between her husband and all his old friends and ways. He was a very good-natured man and spared no expense to keep his wife in a pleasant mood; she was costly in everything; I can see her going to church in a coach new gilt, wearing a cherry-coloured satin that flares impudently against the sober, lordly pew.

Two people beside her weak husband concerned Madam Spitfire. One was a young woman named Agnes who occupied a sad enough place in the opulent household; a dependent but not a servant; subject to all the insolence and caprice of a mistress, but unpaid and unable to leave if tyranny became intolerable. It was believed she was the Squire’s daughter, but he never acknowledged this, though he endeavoured to be kind to her in a secret feeble fashion. It certainly appeared, at least, that she was an orphan, helpless, alone, entirely at the mercy of those on whose charity she existed; she was pretty and gentle and happy enough in a thoughtless fashion; her character was weak, and she was uneducated save in household work.

The other personage who concerned Madam Spitfire was Mr Jenniston, the steward; though he was agreeable with all, he was suspected of underhand villainies; he was middle aged, ugly, elegant, and did what he would with his master. Abroad, he affected to deplore the harsh temper, the greedy extravagance of Madam Spitfire, but it was believed that they understood each other very well.

You may believe that this passionate woman’s intense hope was to have children, to have an heir to secure her position and assure her future. She remained barren and that sharpened her fiery disposition; she conceived such a hatred for the heir-at-law, Mr William Garnet, her husband’s nephew, that he never dared visit the Hall; the spiteful servants watched her closely, for they thought that she would not hesitate to introduce a false child as her own, if she had the least opportunity.

If she were indeed waiting for such a chance the more horrible must have been her disappointment when her husband was one day brought in dying from a hunting accident.

Her face was frightful to see as she ran into the painted chamber where they had laid him; the girl Agnes was on her knees by his side; the western sun poured through the huge window and showed her white dress, her misery, her piteous, childish fear.

“Remember,” slowly whispered the dying man, “to keep very carefully what I gave you, Agnes.”

Madam Spitfire snatched the girl aside and stared down at her husband; the last sunlight tinged with red the yellow ribbons in her hair.

“I’m done for,” he murmured; a smile of apology spread over his fat white face.

“I’ll never forgive you!” she cried furiously.

The bystanders, in horror, drew her out of the room; Agnes crept back to the couch, crying and wringing her hands.

Well, that was the end of the reign of the proud, selfish woman; she was then Madam Dowager and must go to the jointure house; she was not poor; her marriage settlements were generous enough — but to be a childless widow in the Dower House, while another ruled at the Hall, you may guess what that meant to this fierce creature.

The day of the funeral she called to her side the trembling Agnes.

“What was it my husband told you to keep so carefully?”

“A bond, madam. For a thousand pounds, payable when I am of age.” Seeing the other’s look of fury, the weeping girl added: “It is my sole fortune, madam!”

“And a very fine fortune, too, for a nameless charity brat like yourself! But you are only eighteen; who is to look after you, feed and clothe a lazy, stupid chit like you?”

“Indeed, I don’t know. But Mr Barton” (she named the clergyman of the parish) “said he would perhaps take me in—”

“That don’t suit me. It would be to make me appear unnatural — no, you’ll come to the Dower House with me. Give me the bond to keep for you.”

Agnes said that she had already put it in the hands of Mr Barton to lock away among the church papers.

“Cunning slut!” cried Madam Spitfire, giving the girl a blow on the side of her face; but she insisted no more for she had other affairs to occupy her; on the very day that the Squire was laid in the Mausoleum, Mr William Garnet had declared that he wished immediate possession of the Hall.

“It will be ready for him in a week,” declared the angry widow, “and not before.”

He gave her so much grace; to his undoing, for when he came to reside in the great mansion it was stripped bare; tapestries, porcelains, plate, pictures had been moved to the Dower House; only a few poor hacks were in the stables, and by an unaccountable accident a sudden fire had burnt out the coach-house and destroyed the carriages, while the glass-houses having been left open a sharp frost had destroyed the orange trees and other costly shrubs.

Mr Garnet lost no time in going to law; but by the time he had won his case the property could not be traced; some she had sold, some hidden; in everything she was helped by Edmund Jenniston, the steward, who had been instantly dismissed by the new Squire, and found employment with the widow.

It is easy to imagine the furious bad blood between the great Hall where Mr Garnet, a jolly young man, entertained his town friends, and the Dower House where Madam Spitfire sulked.

This part of the tale is dark with evil passions, fierce ruminations, the black clash of a high tide of bitterness, which one can no longer distinguish in detail.

It might have been supposed that the disappointed and furious woman would have gone to town or abroad; but, like many vindictive spirits, she chose to remain on the scene of her defeat and plague her successor in her lost honours.

It seems that she made life almost intolerable for Mr William Garnet and soured his pleasant nature to bitterness and an angry desire for revenge; the climax of her tormenting was that she was able, by the most subtle and underground intrigues, by secret slander, to break off the match between the Squire and the amiable daughter of a wealthy neighbour.

At this, her satisfaction was as sharp as his deadly resentment.

She became, for a while, even agreeable to poor Agnes, whom she turned into a slave as hard worked as any on the Plantations.

The meek girl, profoundly unhappy, would kneel, where the nettles grow now, latching the vixen’s shoes or holding a screen between the fire and her sullen brooding face.

Is it not odd to imagine the flames flickering on that damp stone, a Persian cloth where the parsley and sorrel flourish, a warm light where the shadows of the trees fall so thickly? No one has seen a ghost here, but something is wrong with the place, surely.

These people are now all lost on the endless sweeps of eternity, and it is strange that even I recall their story which still vibrates in the air, in the shiver of the cypress boughs, in the movement of the shadows among the weeds, in the sighs, almost imperceptible, that come across the lonely park.

The figure of Edmund Jenniston loomed more important in the tale after the final and deadly breach with the Hall; there was much land and several farms attached to the jointure house and he managed all; affecting to deplore the harshness and unjust exactions of his employer, lamenting her greed and penury, but in reality he was only her faithful agent.

Of course it was said that he was more than her servant; her lover, or her unacknowledged husband; it was certain that he lived in the jointure house and bore himself as master, for all his cringing, humble ways.

The servants who came and went so frequently reported angry whispers from behind locked doors, the low sounds of suppressed quarrels when Madam and her steward came to a disagreement; they also gossiped over the constant weeping of Miss Agnes; often she sobbed half through the night in her mean upper room; it must have been where the tuft of pink stonecrop now grows out of the loosened blocks of granite and at evening the solitary night-jar gives his rude cry; the cypress boughs sweep close to the masonry here, and when the wind is strong the sound of their swaying is not unlike a womanish lamenting; the constant fall of the dry mortar and dust on to the leaves sounds like the rustle of a gown.

Shortly one of Madam’s farms came into the market and such was her reputation that Mr Jenniston had difficulty in finding a tenant.

At length a stranger applied for it, readily agreed to the bad terms, had the best of credentials, and was duly installed at Summerbrayes.

This man’s name was Francis Rowe and he came from a far part of the country, being minded, he said, to try fortune on his own, away from friends and favour; he was a gentleman and it was at once assumed that he was escaping some failure or disappointment that had clouded him at home.

But all doubt of him was soon forgotten in the enchantment of his address and the unusual attraction of his person, which was of an elegance that appeared odd among the rustical farmers of the neighbourhood.

From the first Madam distinguished him with kindness, received him as an equal, invited him often to the jointure house, favoured with regard Summerbrayes above her other tenancies, and soon flattered and caressed him.

She was as passionate as she was cruel; her husband had been no more than a shadow to her; she was in the prime of life still, all her emotions were unsatisfied; hateful as she was, I think here she was to be pitied for she was invaded in her sullen retreat, defenceless and unprotected as she was, by a man irresistible to women.

If Edmund Jenniston was jealous he did not show it, he remained smiling in the background and warmly praised the new favoured tenant.

Mr Rowe had the gift of music; there, near that broken stone window-frame where the valerian blooms in June through the cracks in the sunk sill, stood the harpsichord, and there Mr Rowe would play a musetteor rigadoon, or sing — “As Vesta was from Latmos Hill descending—” or “Flora gave me fairest flowers—”

Madam (here again you must see her where the nettles grow, pure small white flowers gathering under the rank vicious leaves, on the hearth place), listening with secret rapture, was eager to give him any blooms she had in her posy; nervous and restless she was for his approach, his embrace.

She had long thrown off her mourning, her gowns were bright and glossy; she affected the most brilliant colours, the most sparkling gems, her vivid carnation needed no paint; to Francis Rowe she was soft and melting, showing none of her tempers. She would ride with him through the park, flaunting the Squire with this cavalier who was in all his superior; Mr Rowe had a fine seat, easy, well back in his saddle, his mount was fastidiously chosen; all believed that he would turn his graces to good account and marry the widow, ay, and master her too.

But another figure, hitherto effaced, enters the drama; Agnes, from the window where the stonecrop now shows succulent rosy leaves, watched the riders go forth towards the now broken chestnut avenue then very straight and lordly. Agnes, on her humble stool on this sunken hearthstone, also listened to the music of Mr Rowe and let her heart be stolen without an effort to save it; she knew nothing but unhappiness and she had no friends but the servants and the purblind old parson.

But, and here an ironic bitterness flavours the tale, she was lovely; her prettiness had opened into a beauty brilliant in freshness, she had abundant charms, and, despite her miseries, also a stately air, that was more than chance innocence; it was impossible to associate her with anything vulgar or mean.

Madam was quick to sense a secret rival though she could not, with all her cunning, detect any response on the part of her tenant, any indiscretion on the part of Agnes who pined in silence and wept more abundantly, for her tyrant’s humours increased to a dreadful degree of sharpness. If the deep blue eyes of Francis Rowe flickered for an instant to the poor dependant, if his soft voice addressed her but one casual word, she had to pay for it in dismal torments.

She was then nearly twenty-one years of age and looked forward with breathless impatience to the redeeming of her bond.

Madam demanded:

“What will you do, friendless, nameless, when you have this money?”

“Madam, I shall go from here — Mr Barton will find me some other place—”

As the woman jealously studied the girl’s fair features she saw there a dreadful resemblance to her dead husband, a repetition of that softness, that gentle kindness she had so despised; her hatred was increased, nor was it a little untouched by fear.

For of all the evil whispered of Madam Spitfire this was always accounted the most awful — that she had said to a dying man to whom she owed everything — “I will never forgive you.”

Many regarded her, because of this, with a kind of awe; men believed in Hell fire then and there were those who thought that the woman who could have uttered those words was damned; she was aware of this and shivered a little before the dead man’s look in the living girl.

And Agnes suffered.

Continually Madam tormented her to show her the bond.

“It may be a flam for all I know. I would like to see if it is the signature of my dead husband—”

One darkening winter day the girl brought to her the precious paper, which, she said, Mr Barton had reluctantly delivered to her…

Madam tore off the signature and threw it into the fire with a grin of triumph.

Agnes did not appear so perturbed as she should have been at this loss of her fortune, and Madam soon got at the truth, for Mr Barton, mistrusting her, had sent a careful duplicate of the bond, charging the girl not to divulge this; but she, poor fool, was no match for Madam, and greatly she had to suffer for what her tyrant termed her incredible insolence.

But Madam Spitfire felt oddly defeated; torment the girl as she would, Agnes seemed every day to bloom more radiantly, to endure her miserable life more patiently; Madam, watching her keenly, even saw her secretly smile, even heard her secretly sing; was it possible that she was cherishing some joyous secret?

But the sharp, shrewd widow could surprise nothing; she could not believe that Francis Rowe was such a consummate deceiver as to be able to woo the girl under her nose and she not know it; why, that would have taxed the ingenuity of a town libertine, and he was, after all, a country farmer.

But she mused as to whether this were a correct description of him — she liked to think there was some romantic mystery attached to him, she liked to think him in all more splendid than he was; but in truth the man was too fine for his station; his farm did not prosper, his lease was short and against his interests, he declared all his hopes lost in the venture—

“Why don’t he offer himself?” thought Madam in an agony of waiting; she longed to feel his fingers on her breasts, his smooth face so close to her that she could detect the flecks of darker blue in his azure eyes.

She stared at herself in her mirror till her sight ached; she spent extravagantly on adornment, on entertainment, and yet he checked his wooing (if wooing it was) at a certain point, though she gave him opportunity after opportunity.

One night Edmund Jenniston sneered:

“He is fooling you.”

“Bah, with you and I to watch them?”

“Them? Of whom are you thinking?”

“Why should he fool me? He ought to be mad with gratitude that I notice him!”

“Don’t you see how pretty Agnes is? And so young!”

Madam Spitfire threw a paper-knife that gave him a broken bruise on the sallow cheek; she thought:

“My God! In a few months she will have a thousand pounds. Are they waiting for that? She will be free, free. I shall have no hold on the slut—”

She hastened to the parsonage (the modest house yet stands behind the grey church, the grey graves) and so intimidated the poor old clergyman that he delivered up the true bond to her keeping, but not before he had made her swear on the altar to keep it safely, and menaced her with the law if she did not.

“Take care, madam; now everyone trembles before you, but the day will come! If you break this oath your husband will surely return to punish you—”

“My husband?” Standing among the dead she curbed her temper.

“Ah, madam, it was an awful thing to say to a dying man — ‘I will never forgive you—’”

Madam hastened home with the precious bond; Mr Rowe was in her parlour; he was singing to himself — “Sombre Woods”; his voice came gently to her as she opened the door; “ — then I shall meet my beloved, then I shall keep her for evermore…”

Singing to himself? Madam Spitfire thought she had heard a step on the stair as if someone had fled at her approach.

She did not know what to say or do for passion; sank on to the low chair by the hearth and told him how she had got the bond from the old, senile fellow — “who might lose it, or destroy it — if he dies of a sudden where are we? But with me the poor child’s little fortune is safe.”

Mr Rowe’s fingers lingered on the keys; he eyed her, smiling.

“Is she not old enough to have charge of it herself?”

“When she is of age, perhaps — though, Lord knows, I think her feeble-minded.”

“What do you intend, madam, for this poor friendless creature? ’Tis a sad case.”

“I will keep her till she marries some fellow of her own station; she is useless — lazy, stupid, ill-tempered, but perhaps with the money some rustic may take her—”

While she spoke she was thinking: “Why don’t he cross the room, why don’t he take me in his arms? Oh, God, how long am I to endure this?”

But Mr Rowe made no definite advances; when he had left the room Edmund Jenniston told her that she was being “talked about”, that people laughed at her gross infatuation; if the man had offered to marry her, why, very well, but she seemed to woo him in vain — why didn’t she put an end to it?

How could she put an end to it?

Mr Jenniston reminded her that Francis Rowe was at her mercy — it was not likely that he would be able to pay his rent, he had a wretched lease — it was a wonder that he had signed it—

“I know all that, you fool. Tell me,” her jealousy burst all decorum, all discretion, “have you noted anything — about Agnes?”

“That she is a beauty.”

“I did not mean that, and you know it, rogue—”

“Ah, with regard to this spark? Well, I do feel something in the air.”

“You have felt that, too? Tell me, Edmund Jenniston, we have been good friends in our way, am I still a beautiful woman?”

He gave her a smiling glance that blasted her as surely as if he had uttered a potent curse.

“You look your age and that is more than even your enemies guess.”

He was amused at her overthrow; she turned speechlessly and stared at the wall where the spiders now creep in and out of the crannies; a mirror hung there then.

After that the position became still more terrible; what fearful passions, what desperate emotions did not this roofless house then contain! What black midnight meditations, what evening tears, what prayers at morning, what ill-suppressed furies and half-hidden fears!

Only a little thing was needed to send Madam Spitfire into an open tempest, for Mr Rowe still dallied; and that little thing she soon found.

She came upon Agnes practising a melody by Dowland which Francis Rowe had played — named suitably enough “The Sorrowful Pavane” — Lachrimae Pavan.

The girl sank before the abuse heaped on her; Madam withered her with insults, branded her with the word then easily used for love children, snatched the music and tore it up, accused her of all her own lascivious desires, her own bitter miseries, her own consuming jealousies, revealed her own lustful heart in such a torrent of horrible self-revelation that the girl, who understood nothing of all this, started up suddenly, in the extreme of terror, like the hare when the hunter is near his form and concealment is no longer possible, and ran out into the frosty night in her poor darned dress, with her thin patched shoes. It is not easy for simple, romantic childish first love to endure the hot face of lust violently revealed.

When twilight falls the nettles give out a rank sickly odour, it is then that you may believe that Madam Spitfire is buried beneath them.

Old Mr Barton, the parson, by his winter fire, heard a tapping and saw a frantic face pressed against his window.

“Let me in, Mr Barton! Let me in!”

Agnes, on his hasty opening of the door, came cowering to the hearth and could not speak a word; she bit her forefinger and her eyes were scared.

For a while in the reaction that followed the opening of her evil heart, Madam was scared too; she went upstairs to destroy the bond and could not do it; her sworn oath rose up, like a tangible object, and checked her wicked desire.

“But I did not swear to deliver it up, only not to destroy it.”

And she locked it securely into a casket that she placed in the press in Agnes’s room.

“If she wants it, let her come for it—”

But Agnes would not enter that house again, be the scandal what it might; and soon Madam heard that Francis Rowe was visiting the parsonage.

Mr Jenniston laughed.

“Well, they are in your power, you can turn him out of his farm in March — he’ll be ruined if you take all his stock for rent. And you’ve got the slut’s fortune.”

This did not assuage her agonies; the thought of the two possible lovers, beyond her ken, beyond her spying, was Hell fire to her; she resolved to make away with the bond for which Mr Barton had already asked in vain.

When she had come to this resolution she was in her bed (in the room with the great window through which the cypress bough now enters with the tips of black foliage); mighty with wrath and hate she no longer felt afraid of anything.

But she was powerless before a dream.

She did not move, in this dream, from the heavy bed with the dark baldaquin and stiff curtains; she still saw the glow of fading firelight on the floor; then, moving across this, she observed what she thought to be a fat dog, wheezing, uncomfortable; but a closer glance showed that this creature trailed drapery, knotted like a bunch of leaves above the head; it was her husband. He appeared to be nosing round the room on a tense quest.

“It is not here,” she jeered. “You won’t find it—”

He rose; his sagging body was stout and flabby as she remembered it, but his legs had dwindled to mere bones, his shroud tied on the top of his skull was rotted into tatters, his face was shapeless; she saw the dying fire through a hole in his cheek; his decayed eyes had the glitter of foul, stagnant water. Madam wanted to take back her last words to him; she wanted to say:

“I forgive you now, do you hear?”

But she could not speak, and abruptly he came at her, gathering together his corrupted members for a leap on to her sumptuous bed.

A fury of terror woke Madam; she scrabbled aside her curtains for air and knew that she would not be able to destroy the bond.

The next morning she rode through a fog frost to the parsonage. Agnes must come home, this was a scandal, she would not endure the reflections cast on her by the whims of a stupid girl; her face, usually so warmly coloured, was palely vehement, but Mr Barton resisted her importunities; he had not only public opinion on his side, but the Squire; Mr Garnet had declared that the girl might be his cousin for all he knew, that he would not have her tormented, and that when he married she might come to the Hall to goffer his wife’s frills and comb her lapdog; he knew of the bond, too, and swore he would see it redeemed.

Madam had gone too far, but the horror of her defeat was softened by comforting information she wormed out of the foolish, agitated old man.

Agnes had taken a queer aversion to Francis Rowe; she refused to see him, she blushed painfully when he was mentioned, she spent much time in church and seemed every whit as unhappy as she could possibly have been at the jointure house; Mr Barton even feared for her mind; surely she was suffering from some nervous disorder?

The sound of Mr Rowe’s step or the clatter of his horse’s hoofs was enough to send her into convulsions… What had Madam done to her?

Madam rode home, not ill satisfied; she smiled into the frost fog that hung between the bare boughs of the chestnut avenue; she understood very well what she had done.

Her instinct had been right; of course the girl had begun to cherish a delicate, tender, unavowed passion for the sumptuously handsome young man — but she, the voluptuous woman, had poisoned that by accusing the girl of her own sufferings.

“You want him to take you in his arms, you want him to cover you with kisses — you can’t rest for thinking of it—”

Very openly, very crudely had she spoken in her fury; the soul of Agnes was destroyed like a bud pulled open before its time is destroyed before it has bloomed.

Madam sent for Mr Rowe; she had her account books under her hand.

“My steward tells me that you are in trouble with your farm.”

“I have not complained.”

“I might. You are an ill tenant; it is clear that you’ll not be able to pay in March and the property is abused by your neglect.”

She was nettled by his indifference.

“I do what I can, madam.”

“No; you don’t! There is one thing you could very easily do that would make your fortune.” Her golden eyes, delicately suffused with blood, boldly invited him; she had drawn the curtain between herself and the winter light to give herself an illusion of youth; her bosom, still fair, was much exposed above a gleaming bodice of saffron-coloured satin. As he did not answer, her hand trembled on the books filled with the labours of Mr Jenniston. “You know what I mean.” She looked at his fine forehead, the sweep of his dark brows, the arch of his upper lip.

“I am a wealthy woman, Francis—”

She was aware that he must have known that he could have had her, not only for a wife but for a mistress, a creature to do what he pleased with… but he left her with some casual courtesy.

A few days after this Agnes came of age; both the Squire and Mr Barton demanded the bond.

“Let Agnes come herself for it,” said Madam, who was by then as vicious as a pursued beast speared against a wall.

But no one knew better than she that on those conditions she was safe to keep the bond till Judgement Day.

On an afternoon of drizzling rain and low clouds Francis Rowe came again to the jointure house and what he said was beyond computation amazing to Madam.

He demanded the bond in the name of his future wife; he intended to marry Agnes; he must have been a very fearless man to bring this news to Madam Spitfire; she instantly resolved to, somehow, destroy them both, and consoled by this, contrived a fair front.

“Ah! But I thought she was disordered in her mind and would not even see you—”

He gave her a distressed, a suspicious look.

“Assuredly I shall overcome that. And must if it takes years. I know she did not regard me with aversion — and this unaccountable — timidity—”

He knew she had favoured him, the traitor, the serpent, he had contrived, then, to elude her spying — he and Agnes; she had been deceived, mocked… all the worse should be her revenge.

“How are you going to live? Your farming has failed.”

“Agnes has the thousand pounds.”

“I refuse to give it to you.”

“Very well, madam.”

He left her with no pleading or argument; she called, in her agony, Edmund Jenniston.

“Can you take your gun, go out and shoot that man? The scoundrel wants to marry Tom’s crazy wench—”

“And you must be content with my lean visage that is certainly beginning to wear out.”

“Put a bullet through him, d’ye hear, rogue?”

“I’ll not hang to please you. Be patient — the fool is ruined and she half out of her mind. And you have the bond — damned poor, that’s what they’ll be — that will cool his ardour — stark poverty.”

That night Madam could not sleep for anguish, for terror of dreaming of her husband, for longing for Francis Rowe.

And in the depth of the winter cold and dark she heard a sudden fracas, and ran out with a candle and a chintz robe huddled on.

On the half-lit stairs Mr Jenniston was struggling with Francis Rowe, who looked wild and dishevelled and had a short sword in his hand.

“A low ruffian after all!” she screamed, and shouted up the servants as the younger man cast off the steward and sent him down the stairs; in his roused strength and rage he was, in her eyes, even more admirable; she felt a great pleasure at his overthrow of Edmund Jenniston. “So you break into my house?”

He pulled his torn shirt together at his throat.

“Madam, you have received me with that kindness which made me think I might not be unwelcome.”

He regarded her boldly, tossing back the loosened hair from his brow; she knew then that she had never known him, that he had always been on his guard, even in disguise before her; she approached him, laughing with excitement.

“Is it true you came to see me?”

The infatuate woman took no heed of the groans of Mr Jenniston from the well of the stairs, of the gathering of the maids along the corridors.

“Should not you and I meet like this instead of formally? But your watch dog is too shrewd, damn him!”

Francis Rowe was breathing heavily; she seized his arm; he smiled down at her, yielding at last; she was about fiercely to order away the steward and servants, even to say the man was there at her summons, when, leaning towards him, she saw something familiar obtruding from the pocket of his full skirt coat; it was the box in which she had locked the bond.

In one second the miserable woman realised that the fellow had broken into her house with reckless daring to secure the fortune of his future wife and that in desperation he had played his last card — her insensate passion, affecting the lover to save his neck.

She shrieked out in fury.

“Thief! Murderer! Take him, you gaping fools! He was in my room, rifling my jewels, he tried to murder Mr Jenniston! I saw him with his sword at his throat!”

She whirled into her chamber, snatched up what ornaments she had loose, ran back with them, screamed that she had dragged them from the pockets of the miscreant; the steward limped upstairs to corroborate her tale; hideous in his night attire he showed blood on his hand, a bruise on his breast… unarmed, half naked, he had been villainously attacked.

“Blasted liars!” shouted Mr Rowe, struggling with two bewildered grooms. “A trull and her jackal! I would I had put you both where you belong long since!”

“I’ll put you where you belong, my pretty fellow — and that’s the gallows!”

“Robbery with violence,” grinned Mr Jenniston. “Nothing can save you, popinjay!”

Still resisting his captors, Mr Rowe passionately declared “he had but come to take what was unlawfully withheld and had offered no violence, only striving to escape when surprised—” Then he groaned, as if suddenly fully realising his miseries. “I am not what you take me to be,” he said, and added that it was “a dirty game at best and he would he had not meddled in it—”

“He has lost his wits like his doxy,” said Madam. “Trull did ye call me! You’ll soon be carrion,” and she struck the helpless man, pinioned by the weight of three others, full in the flushed face.

But her own last word sobered her; “carrion” reminded her of her dream of her husband; she staggered into her room and closed the door; the prisoner was dragged away.

And Mr Jenniston, alone on the landing, laughed with real amusement.

Now, a butterfly (though butterflies rarely come here) could fly in a few seconds across the roofless mansion, and now it is strange to think of it as it was on that fearful night, the many dark rooms and corridors, the whispering, frightened servants, the agonies of the woman locked in her bedchamber, Mr Jenniston’s rank humour, the young man dragged away; the darkness flowing in from the wood and flecked with hastily lighted candle and lamp.

Madam was assured of her revenge; he would hang; Agnes would go mad in truth, no doubt; at least they would never lie in each other’s arms.

Early in the morning Mr Barton, much overcome, waited on her, appealing for mercy.

“He is no criminal — a reckless fool, no doubt, but you had no right to detain the bond.”

“He shall hang.”

“Ah, madam, do you want two injured souls waiting for you on the other side?”

She knew he referred to her husband, and she squinted dangerously.

“He shall hang—”

Close after the clergyman came the most unexpected visitor; one who had never crossed her threshold before; the Squire; this robust young man seemed in the most intolerable distress of mind; he stammered and sighed, and blurted out his errand with a painful effort.

“Madam, you must withdraw the charges against Francis Rowe.”

“He shall hang.”

“Do you know what that means? A strong fellow to hang by the neck?”

She knew — to strangle by one’s own weight; she knew what he would look like afterwards; nothing less would satisfy her.

“A scoundrel, a villain, he corrupted my ward, he corrupted my maid — the slut confessed this morning she had let him in and told him where the bond was. He shall hang.”

“No,” said Mr Garnet. “Not if I have to go to the King myself about it—”

At that she flew into a tearing passion.

“What the devil has this got to do with you?”

“I must tell you though ’tis the most awkward tale a man ever took on his tongue—”

This was the story that Mr Garnet, miserably enough, confessed to Madam:

Francis Rowe was an assumed name; the young man was no farmer, but a city gallant of a noble family and wild reputation, a close friend of the Squire, who had agreed to play this part to avenge Mr Garnet on the widow; he was to make her ridiculous, wither her reputation, even to lead her as far as the altar, anything, before he dropped the mask — it had all been a plot, a jest such as were then à la mode, ungentlemanly, vile, what you will, but the taste of the times was coarse and Madam had pushed the Squire very far.

“But all was spoilt by the rogue taking a fancy to the girl — he’s done no harm there, I swear, and he wants to marry her.”

Madam sat silent (surely her ghost crouches sometimes among those nettles, on the very place of her hearth-stone), she realised what an easy prey she had been to the wicked devices of the young men, what an abject fool she had made of herself, how rustical she was not to have guessed the quality of Francis Rowe — how he had never been at her mercy through the farm lease…

“Has he money?”

“He will have — with the title — he lacks nothing now.”

“Why did he come to my house — stealing?”

“He was beside himself at your refusal to deliver the bond — he had set his heart on earning the gratitude of Agnes by coming to her with it in his hand—”

“He shall hang.”

Does it not sometimes seem when the trees send their whispers through the empty, roofless house that these words sob through the swish of their boughs — “he shall hang—”?

Mr Garnet pleaded; he humbled himself, took all the blame of the malicious trick, offered what reparation she would — he dwelt on the noble family of the reckless youth — on the horrible ignominy of a felon’s death — she had only to say — “I asked him to the house. I gave him the bond.”

But Madam only revelled in the distress, the humiliation of the Squire, only rejoiced that it was in her power to so utterly avenge herself.

“Leave my house. I will never forgive him — or you—”

Then Mr Garnet on his side flew into a fury.

“Take care — you said those words to a dying man before. You are an evil woman, you blight all you meddle with!”

He rode away, grey of face; he believed that he must see his friend hang; he had sworn not to reveal who he was, so that the scandal might be kept from the world, so little or no influence could be used for the unfortunate wretch.

All Madam’s servants left her, save an ancient couple, cut off by deafness from gossip; she and Edmund Jenniston were alone in the jointure house the day before the trial, when Mr Barton came to make a last appeal.

“Will you dare, madam, to go tomorrow and bear false witness? For you know that he did not come for your jewels and had no intention of murdering Mr Jenniston—”

“I shall say the truth and put the rope round the neck of a villain,” she declared; then, as he was leaving she asked him for a copy of the Book with a wafer on the cover.

“You must be in great extremity to ask me that—”

“I dream. I think I see the spectre of my husband. I want to say — ‘I forgive you — go to your rest’, but I cannot speak. I thought if I clasped the Book when he appears my tongue might be loosened.”

“It will not be till you have come to a sincere repentance.”

Then Madam jeered and said she had spoken in a wry jest and was afraid of nothing; she asked after Agnes, hoping the girl was dead or crazed; but Mr Barton said:

“There has been a great change in the young woman, she has lost all her timidity and terror of Mr Rowe. She declares she is betrothed to him and has taken a lodging near the jail. If you would have mercy, madam, they would be a very happy couple.”

He fled before her dreadful face, away into the grey mist of the park; I think I can see him now, on his ambling pad, hastening through the chestnut avenue — averting his face as he passes the uncertain shape of the Mausoleum where the late Squire’s body mouldered… but his spirit, where was it?

The poor parson put up a prayer to this wretched ghost which might be, for all he knew, wandering in the neighbourhood, and bade him, if he could, save his innocent daughter and her lover… and he believed that he saw an errant shape, like a globe of pale wavering light, start through the ground mist and float towards the jointure house.

Madam and Mr Jenniston were very silent that evening; she had prepared his false evidence, all the lies he was to swear to, and presently went up to her chamber, giving him a silent insult by her last look.

The steward sat alone where the nettles now grow and tried to warm himself, but the fire seemed to give out no heat.

And as he sat there he heard a tapping on the window and rose and drew the curtains fearfully.

There was a dim light showing without, as if one held a candle in the fog, then Edmund Jenniston, peering closer, saw it was no light, but the fat face of the dead Squire, luminous with charnel damps.

As he recoiled into the room he heard a squeaky voice say:

“Edmund Jenniston, wilt thou be damned for this wicked woman?”

The steward did not go to bed that night, but sat crouched over the flames, thinking of many things not pleasant to consider even in the daylight.

On the morrow he took in Madam pillion to town (the Assizes being on) and there she gave her false witness without a blush or a falter; had she needed an incitement to her evil purpose she would have found it in the presence of Agnes who sat close beneath the dock where the prisoner stood.

Then came the turn of Edmund Jenniston; there seemed, then, no hope for Francis Rowe (the tale knows not his real name and rank) and I recall that in those days a man went straight from his trial to his hanging, with the utmost grace of about twenty-four hours… Madam had engaged a room at The Black Horse that she might witness the execution.

But the steward’s evidence changed all; he said that Madam had asked Mr Rowe to the jointure house and that he had taken the message, that the young man had come for the sake of the bond, that Madam had made love to him and, on his coldness, staged the fracas.

The prisoner interrupted — “this was not true — he had had no such invitation” — but his words were unheeded; what Edmund Jenniston had said was what everyone wanted to hear; any evil was eagerly believed of Madam, and her infatuation for the prisoner was well known, while the young lovers had the sympathy even of the roughest; the verdict was “Not Guilty”, and the Judge sternly ordered Madam to deliver up the bond.

The wretched woman fainted as she saw Francis Rowe leave the dock and take Agnes in his arms, Mr Garnet, the parson, all the neighbours crowding round them; they left her alone to recover as best she might.

When she got her senses, she cried out:

“Edmund Jenniston, take me home—”

“Nay,” he grinned. “I do not like the company you keep.”

“How could you betray me?”

“I don’t fancy Hell fire.”

He pushed through the crowd and was gone; to Canada, they said; he had amassed a pretty fortune while in the service of Madam.

And she, abandoned by all, rode back alone through the winter evening to the jointure house.

At the Mausoleum the horse shied violently; she believed that a hand caught at the bridle; it was getting very dark.

“Beatrice, say you forgive me for dying.”

“I cannot, my lips are sealed on those words.”

Her spirit was broken and her passion dead within her; not even the embraces of Francis Rowe could have warmed her then, as she stumbled over the threshold where the ash sapling now waves and the toads hide beneath flat stones.

Not even Edmund Jenniston for company that night and her utter defeat heavy on her; the two old servants avoided her, frightened of her look.

She went up to her chamber with the bowed back and slow step of an old woman; she was forced to go up, though she knew what awaited her there.

Only one person pitied Madam Spitfire; and that was Agnes, healed by love, happy in all that makes life beautiful; she had persuaded her lover to take her to the jointure house.

“We will ask her to forgive us — we will bring people, friends, round her again—”

They came through the bare woods, he reluctant, she full of foolish hope.

The jointure house was empty save for the two old servants who were, they muttered, leaving; nothing could be got out of them; they did not know what had become of Madam.

No one ever saw her again, alive or dead.

Agnes, clinging to her lover, saw on the parlour table the bond signed by her father; it was weighed down by a heavy gold signet ring the Squire was known to have worn when he was buried in the Mausoleum.

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

INCUBUS

The guide said that it was very late in the year for visitors, but he allowed us to enter; the tall iron gate was slightly rusty and over it was a coloured statue with a starry crown. The sombre woods came down so close.and thick to the garden wall that they seemed to be pressing into the walks and to be held back only by force.

This gloomy spot was, our guide said, hallowed; a heathen temple had stood there before the building of the monastery, and that was a long, long while ago. A deep restless curiosity had brought me to the place; I had been there for nights in succession in dreams, when the black forest had been flowing about me like waves and I had searched in vain for the walled vineyards, the long deserted buildings, the desecrated chantry with the echo, the church where the great wine butts stood.

It had been a sad journey through the mist, along the sodden ways, under the dark trees; the motion of the lopsided hired carriage had almost lulled me back into my dream; the row through the wood was very obscure owing to the blue-black leafage of the firs-the pale light over the monastery grounds seemed startling by contrast. The vintage was over and the place was desolate; the sullen guide clanked his keys and hunched his shoulders as he preceded us. I looked at my companions; they had no interest in the scene and seemed detached from it; I soon evaded them, leaving them standing, gaping, with their handbooks grasped in cold fingers, irresolute in the garth where the dry sticks of dead flowers thrust above the stagnant grass.

I was anxious to find some of the melancholy places familiar to me from my dreams; I heard the guide’s voice calling after me peevishly, but took no heed as I hastened away down the cloisters. He was soon distanced, and I was free of the desolate covered walk. I found a poignant interest in noticing the difference between the reality and illusion; in my dream the place had been larger, but not more mournful, the forest had come down even closer, the facade of the long dwellings, the pillars of the cloisters had been interchangeable with the strong moist trunks of the trees, and the twisted undergrowth or shrub that was tangled into sombre recesses fit for a wild animal’s lair.

I found a bitter satisfaction in confirming the solidity of my surroundings; the harsh walls were cold and damp to the touch, the cracked pavement rang beneath my feet, the dismal vistas followed the laws of perspective and did not dissolve and blend into the forest as I had feared they might do. Someone had told me of the little sunken chantry with the powerful echo; I found it and entered.

It was very dark; a dull light streamed through the broken tracery of the narrow windows. There were mutilated masks on the spandrels, thick toadstools grew on the stone seats of the monks and showed like stale foam on the entablatures. I tested the echo, whispering: “Who has been worshipped here?” There came back to me like the roll of muffled drums — “worshipped here!”

I had heard tales about what used to try to come in from the woods, and the prayers the monks put up to keep them out; a nameless altar, deep in corruption, had been discovered beneath the old wall that kept out the woods, and there was no reasonable explanation of some of the carvings in the dormitories — who was the woman with the two children seated on the waxing moon and who might be the thin morose man with the boar’s head on his shoulder who lowered in his niche by the north door? I had heard tales, but I could not sort them one from another then — I was too eager to quench my curiosity while I had the opportunity. The echo pursued me as I hastened out of the chantry along the cloisters and out into the open air again.

The comfortless sky was veiled, the surly air heavy, round about me glided the dead leaves from the decayed limes supported by iron props and chains that edged the great courtyard where I found myself; the cold increased and I thought by the crackle under my feet that the ground was glazed with ice.

On three sides of me were the fronts of the monastic buildings with windows that looked into empty rooms; they had used the convent for a prison after the monks were expelled, and then for a hospital for lunatics; there were chains fastened to the walls in every cell, they said; on the fourth side of me was the church; the last of the dried and frozen refuse of the grapes was over the steps, the red imprint of the grape-crusher’s feet showed on the dusty stone, the hooded steeple went up very high, I thought, into the cold vapours that were hastening up from the unseen river.

I was afraid, now that I had after exceeding toil reached my goal, that I should find the great door closed, but it yielded to the pressure of my hand and I slipped into the church.

The huge wine-presses stood between the pillars and cast shadows that met in the centre of the aisle; clear glass had been put in the windows, but the visionary light seemed, with every second, to fade. Nothing remained of the holy furnishings that I remembered so well but the statues painted life-like that rested against the eastern wall; they appeared to be sainted bishops with mitres and haloes, vestments and croziers, but to look behind them was to discover the fraud-they were sawn trees and hollow with age and decay. Like the midnight music with which I was so familiar was a potent whispering in my ears — I supposed that it came from those chained lime-trees without. On the site of the altar I found him; how could I have forgotten the appointment we had? — I, who had prided myself on my constancy. This meeting had been the purpose of all my dreams; a dreadful anxiety pinched my heart that, after all, everything might go amiss.

He was stretched patiently on his tomb, sprigs of hay were scattered over his stone cloak as if they had bedded some animal by his side, the stale musty perfume of the vintage lees was in the air — or was this the scent of the dregs of the wine that had once spilled from the altar chalice?

A sense of my unutterable loneliness overwhelmed and dismayed me; I had wandered so far, I had been lost for so long; I had no hope that any anodyne would ever assuage the deadly nostalgia that tormented me. If I could have had either complete oblivion or perfect memory! But how could I endure this twilight of distorted recollections and uneasy slumbers? I was at the dead neaptide of joy.

It was the sense of eternity that was so oppressive, time seemed to hang on me like a lead weight, so that though I had arrived where I might never be again, I was too burdened to rejoice.

I touched his tomb; that was solid, the corners of the stone hurt the palms of my hands when I pressed them there; I could see the rude marks where some instrument had defaced his name — how anxious they were to conceal him from me and even from a casual, curious gaze! I picked up a handful of hay — this had been a daisy and that a cornflower, that a blade of grass, that red-leaved sorrel.

The acorn is not yet formed that shall grow the oak that shall make the cradle to rock the wise man who shall solve my bewilderments for me. I was aware of his loneliness impinging on my own ; his utter desolation touched my sorrow like flame on a wound.

Forgotten by everyone but myself and I could not reach him; this was more than love, an essence too fine for the crucible of humanity that must escape in vapour or break the vessel that contained it; I looked at my hand laid on the tomb and was startled to see that it was, after all, the hand of a mortal woman.

The guide was calling outside the church; I heard his wheezy voice lamenting that dusk was falling and he could not clear the desolate grounds of the straggling sightseers.

I felt myself recede from his tomb as the shadows recede from the light — the sound of the human voice had cast me away from him to where I belonged.

Yet he had stirred too, raised himself to one elbow, and taken his head in his hand as if he would, at last, separate himself from his grave; but at the harsh rasp of the summoning voice he had chilled into stone again. I made a garland of the hay and wished the twisted flowerets would freshen into sap and lustre at my touch; I laid this wreath over his alabaster brows and left him; the shadows were now clustering in a thicket of fear behind the wine butts; I thought I saw nimble creatures moving there, keeping stealthily beyond my observation.

As I passed out of the church I saw the guide shambling ahead of me, shouting in a raucous voice into the swiftly falling dusk; the buildings looked sombre and rigid in the last light and an insistent wind was tugging at the chains on the drooping lime-trees.

I hastened after the guide, for I thought that some invisible menace was driving me forth, and that, for his sake, it would be better for me to go.

The guide greeted me sourly.

“You left it too late,” he said. “You might have been locked in here for the night — and how do you think you are going to pass through the forest in the dark?”

I did not answer and he began to complain, childishly, of the things that came up out of the forest after nightfall; I smiled to think how little he knew of me.

The other visitors had gone; my carriage waited in the lee of the gate, man and horse asleep. The mist had lifted from the crystalline upper air. A heavenly star glittered in the midst of the chaplet of gilt metal constellations round the brow of the statue above the twisted ironwork.

The wood appeared so dense that it might have been solid; the trees were certainly pressing on the monastery garden walls as if they would invade and overwhelm the sacred, profaned place; one night, I thought, the trees will break through and in the morning there will be nothing but the forest, with no trace to mark where the monastery had been. Who then will find where he lies, sunk beneath so powerful an onslaught?

My driver lit his lanterns; he knew his way through the forest very well, and could, he said, find the road easily, even in the twilight hour. It was very cold, but I would not have the hood up — the wool rug on which the dead leaves had fallen was sufficient for me; how odd to hear the old man lock the gates behind me, as if that could keep me out.

“Does he live alone in that vast, empty place?” I asked the driver.

“Not what you would call alone,” he replied, “though there is not much human company.”

We started off briskly — the glimmering light held until we reached the forest; there were fields either side, divided from the road by old apple trees; the fruit had long since been plucked and the boughs looked stark against the sky, which was the colour of dead lilac flowers and pellucid as running spring water.

When we reached the wood it was different; with every roll of the wheels something scuttled out of our path into the blackness under the trees; the widening spokes of light from our lantern showed me strange creatures on the lower boughs of the firs or crouching on the ground.

I thought that they pitied my loneliness and my flight, yet I knew them to be utterly unsubstantial, mere wraiths of shade.

My driver spoke over his shoulder to bid me listen to the sound of the vesper bells that floated to us from a neighbouring village, but I could not hear them. The increasing darkness pleased me; I seemed to be travelling to the very centre of loneliness where I should meet him and our different desolations would be resolved at last into a common ease.

The light of the carriage lamps fell over the front of the inn where I was staying and showed all the mottoes written in black Gothic letters over the stucco front beneath the carved gables and the wooden balconies.

I left the carriage and entered the inn; everyone was abroad; they would be, I knew, far away at some bright festival in a Christian fane where there would be scented lights, organ music, and grand singing; I thought of them with awe and dismay.

They had left a taper and candle for me in the entrance; I heard the carriage drive away into the forest as I saw the little flame spring from the hard wax; I went upstairs to my room; they had not closed the shutters and at every window I passed I saw the pine-trees, blackness on blackness with no chink to let in the starlight.

My casement was open on the forest; as I went to close it I saw him on the balcony, the garland of perished wildings still about his hard brows, his stone mantle covered the threshold of my room and he was much taller than he had looked lying on his tomb; a disc of light was between his eyes. I knew then that this was no waking hour and the disappointment was profound, for I had resolved to put all to the test of reality.

“This is another dream,” I sighed as I turned on my hard, straight bed and felt the memorial stone above me.

“Yes,” he whispered. “But whose dream? Yours or mine?”

My Grimmest Nightmare (1935)

ONE REMAINED BEHIND

A ROMANCE
À LA MODE GOTHIQUE

Rudolph quarrelled fiercely with M. Dufours, the antique dealer, but in low tones so as not to be overheard in the street.

“If you do not sell it to me — and cheaply — I shall report you to the police,” he whispered, firmly clasping the large book bound in wood and brass that he had found on a top shelf in the little room at the back of the shop.

“I do not think, M. Rudolph, that you would care to go to the police,” retorted the old man, sucking in his toothless mouth with fury. “I would not part with the grimoire, no, not for fifty thousand francs.”

“You will, however,” sneered Rudolph, “sell it to me for fifty francs. I have no objection to informing the police that you are a receiver of stolen goods, a moneylender at an exorbitant rate of interest, a dealer in dangerous drugs, charms and black magic—”

“Ah, indeed,” replied the shopkeeper, trying to be sarcastic but really rather uneasy. “And pray what are you, M. Rudolph? Unless I am very much mistaken your reputation is none too pure.”

“Bah! What does it matter about my reputation? The police have nothing against me. I am a poor student, a poet, a philosopher, and I intend to have this treasure that I have discovered on your shelf.”

“You admit that it is a treasure!” raged the old man. “And yet you offer me a miserable fifty francs for it!”

“It is no treasure for you,” replied Rudolph scornfully. “You are a pitiful dabbler in the black arts. You would never have the courage to proceed far along this dangerous, fascinating road! You do not even understand the secrets concealed here!” He tapped with elegant soiled white fingers the cover of the disputed book. “I doubt if you can even read the title.”

Overcome by curiosity, the old man asked:

“What is this volume that you think so highly of, M. Rudolph?”

“Ha! ha! And just now you said you wanted fifty thousand francs for it!”

“Well, I know that it is an ancient grimoire, and therefore valuable.”

“It is,” sneered the student. “The Grimoriam Veram, written by Alibeck the Egyptian and printed at Memphis in 1517 — together with this are bound several other treatises exceedingly rare.”

“What do you want with these things?” demanded the antique dealer suspiciously. “You have no skill to interpret those signs and wonders—”

“Nor have you, or you would not be living here in this shabby shop, existing by petty crimes!”

“I might say the same of you, M. Rudolph! It is obvious that the study of black magic has not done you much good — your shirt is darned, your coat shiny at the elbows, your trousers are ragged round the hems, and one of your shoes is split!”

The student’s eyes gleamed with malice.

“Nevertheless, perhaps I might surprise you, sordid old miser that you are! Please have the goodness to look into this!”

Still retaining the grimoire under his arm, the young man whipped out a small mirror that seemed to be of polished metal from his breast and flashed it in front of the reluctant gaze of M. Dufours.

He found, however, that it was impossible to avoid the metallic disc; his bleary eyes, worn by age and counting over the contents of his money-bags, stared, without his volition, into the magic mirror.

On the surface of this appeared a little cloudy figure, curled up like a bird in the nest, that gazed back at the old man with small black eyes that glittered vindictively.

“There is nothing in my shop,” muttered the curio dealer drowsily, “like that — what can it be a reflection of?”

The student laughed and the little figure flew out of the mirror and hung between it and the frightened face of M. Dufours; then, with a buzz like that of an angry insect, it rushed at the curio dealer’s nose and pinched it violently until the old man howled with fear and pain. Rudolph laughed and returned the metal disc to his pocket, upon which the spirit vanished.

“It was some wasp or bee flew in,” muttered M. Dufours, rubbing his red, smarting nose.

“Was it?” sneered the student. “Kindly look round your filthy shop.”

The old man obeyed, fascinated by the brilliant black eyes, pallid face and mocking lips of M. Rudolph.

His jaw dropped and a trembling ran through all his shrunken limbs at what he saw — every object in his shop was transformed into something devilish. The old coats on their pegs waved their sleeves at him, the pawned trousers kicked as if prancing in a polka, grimacing faces peered from the blotched, cracked mirrors, the cupidons on the tarnished candelabra that hung from the cobwebbed rafters began to fly about like pigeons, and a lady in a very bad portrait by Legros, the art student, winked rudely at M. Dufours and shook at him her bouquet of miserably drawn roses which really resembled pickled onions.

M. Dufours rubbed his eyes and when he looked round again everything was normal.

“You see,” remarked Rudolph, “that I know a few tricks. I shall keep the grimoire and owe you the fifty francs.”

With an air of disdain he picked up his dusty, frayed beaver hat, that he thrust on the side of his head jauntily above his long jet-black locks, and strode into the street; M. Dufours shook a lean fist after him, but dare not raise a hue and cry. There was really something Satanic about M. Rudolph — that nip on the nose, now, surely he had not imagined that!

The student went gloomily along the street, the grimoire clasped tightly under his arm; the sky was a pale violet colour above the roofs that were shining wet from a shower of rain, and a delicate breeze from the hills beyond the town stirred the rubbish in the gutter.

Outside the wine-shop several students were sitting over their pints of claret, discussing their work and love affairs, joyously speculating as to their chances of prizes, of kisses, of distinction, and of monies that might be sent from their relatives.

As Rudolph strode past without taking any notice of them, they fell into a silence and stared after him. How poor and proud he was! No one knew much about him and everyone was slightly afraid of him; he was morose, haughty and had no friends — how was it that he could afford to pay for the courses at the University?

He was brilliant at his work, but was not likely, the professors said, to be successful, for he attended so few of the lectures.

How did he spend his time?

The students often asked one another this question and were afraid to answer it; the rumour was that Rudolph wasted his days and imperilled his soul by studying the forbidden arts.

They craned their necks after him in awe and admiration; he was so handsome with his high brow, black hair and cavernous eyes; every Fifi and Mimi in the town was in love with him and he never as much as glanced at any of them.

The other students admired his courage, too; he never concerned himself with any kind of civility and they were envious of his top hat — that chapeau en haute forme that he wore instead of the usual college cap.

True, this fashionable headgear was old and had probably been bought second-hand chez Dufours, but it had the address of a maker in the rue St. Honorè inside the brim and was undoubtedly elegant.

Sourly gratified by these admiring glances that he affected not to notice, Rudolph proceeded to his poor lodgings, which were in an inconvenient part of the town, a long way from the University.

Not only poverty, however, persuaded Rudolph to live in this remote quarter; he liked the solitude of the deserted street where the tumbledown houses huddled beneath the broken walls of the town, where at night it was silent save for the hoot of an owl or so that strayed in from the woods and brooded on the rooftops, and dark save for the yellow spurts of light from the few dirty street lamps.

Holding the grimoire tightly, he mounted the twisting staircase to his attic; he was the sole lodger in the ancient house. An old woman and her grandchild owned the crazy building and dwelt on the ground floor.

Rudolph locked his door (he had fashioned the lock himself and carefully fixed it in place of the rude latch), and seating himself by the window in the lean-to roof, began to read his book eagerly.

There were many curious objects in the attic, stacked away in dark corners and under the dusty chairs and truckle-bed; on a bare table stood a lamp, a desk, on a shelf was a row of books; there were hanging cupboards, pegs for clothes and a number of boxes.

Rudolph read long in the grimoire, until the sun declined behind the roofs of the town, dusk filled his garret, and Jeanette, the landlady’s grandchild, knocked at the door, crying out, in her thin, piping voice, that she had brought up the supper.

Rudolph, startled from his self-absorption, whispered a malediction, tossed the tangled hair from his eyes, rose and unlocked the door.

The little tin lamp on the stairs had been lit; this feeble light showed the broken banister rails, rotting floor boards and dust everywhere.

Jeanette, who looked like a white rat, hurried timidly into the room and placed Rudolph’s supper on the table — a pint of wine, two slices of black bread, a dish of salted ham and pickled onions, and a withering apple; she then lit his lamp.

“Ha, little misery!” exclaimed the student wildly. “How is it that thou canst continue this wretched existence, unworthy of a human being who owns a mortal soul?”

“Indeed, Monsieur, I don’t know,” stammered the girl, trying to drop a curtsey; her skirts were so scanty that she could not achieve much elegance, and when she bent her knee it stuck through a hole in her rags. “Grandmother says that if you could pay the rent—”

“Begone,” scowled Rudolph, waving his elegant hand. “I have my studies awaiting me.”

Jeanette hurried away, glad to escape, and Rudolph pondered deeply on what he had read in the grimoire.

It certainly was a treasure, that book! It contained secrets that he had long been seeking to discover and directions for conjurations and divinations that he longed to try immediately. Unfortunately all these required expensive materials, newborn infants, kids, black or white cocks, costly drugs, shew stones, tables of sweet-wood and squares of undyed wool taken from a spotless lamb and woven by a maiden.

Rudolph knew a great deal about black magic, but he had never made any money from either that or the poetry which stood in dusty stacks against the walls; indeed, most of his meagre substance had gone in buying ingredients or articles for his forbidden studies.

He frowned gloomily, staring with disgust at the coarse food on the table. How he longed for luxury, a splendid castle, troops of liveried servants, a carriage with six white horses, a superb mistress clad in Venetian velvet!

Again he opened the grimoire and carefully re-read something that had greatly taken his fancy; as he perused the badly printed page his pallid face gradually assumed a diabolical expression, for Rudolph wished evil to all mankind, and all his experiments — mostly taken from the Clavicle of King Ptolomeus — had been of the following kinds: “Of hatred and destruction” — “Of mocks and gainful seeking” — “Of experiments extraordinary that be forbidden of good men.”

What fascinated him now was the description of certain rites whereby four strangers could be brought to the celebrant’s room and one of them forced to do his will — even to the revealing of hidden treasure, the gift of luck at cards and success in a chosen career.

Rudolph nibbled an onion and brooded over this prospect; he decided at once on three of the people whom he would summon in this manner, so humiliating to them and so gratifying to himself.

First he would force Saint Luc, the arrogant young aristocrat who had so often sneered at him and whom he so greatly detested, to appear in his wretched garret; second he would bring the vicious old professor, Maître Lachaud, who had so often told him, Rudolph, that he was idle, stubborn and a disgrace to the University; and third he would drag along by his magic spells M. Lecoine, the fat banker who had laughed in his, Rudolph’s face, when he had asked for a loan.

But here again expensive materials were required, and the experiment might fail and all the money and effort be wasted.

Rudolph ate his bread and ham, then went to the window and glared out at the sky from which all daylight had now receded. A full moon was appearing above the housetops and a few dark clouds that might have been witches impatiently flying off for nocturnal delights showed beneath it. As Rudolph gazed a great longing took possession of him to make the experiment of which he had read in the grimoire; not only did he earnestly desire to vex and terrify three people whom he detested, he was dazzled by the hope of luck in cards, in his career, and the finding of a hidden treasure.

“I shall be the greatest poet in the world and I shall have more money than any man ever had before.”

Such a prospect was worth a large sacrifice.

Rudolph turned back into the room and dragged an ancient carpetbag from under his bed; he opened it, unfastening the cumbrous lock, while he sighed deeply and from swathes of old silk rags he took out a large golden ring set with a pale stone that gave out more light than the dirty lamp fed by cheap oil.

This jewel had been given to Rudolph by his great-grandfather with strict charges never to part with it — “except from the purest motives” the old man had said. He had been a famous roué in his time and had squandered all the family fortune on English jockeys, boxers and Italian dancers.

Rudolph disliked the thought of parting with the ring because the possession of such a gem increased his self-esteem and also because he was afraid of his great-grandfather’s curse; he decided, however, to do so, and thrusting the ring in his bosom left the attic and turned to the fashionable part of the town beyond the University buildings that, rising directly in front of the moon, looked as if they were cut out of black paper.

The shutters were just being put up in front of the shop of M. Colcombet, the jeweller, but Rudolph dashed through the door and laid his ring on the counter, on the length of black velvet that covered the glass that contained flashing parures in heart-shaped boxes lined with satin.

“This is a family piece,” said the student haughtily. “It is worth a good sum.”

M. Colcombet was doubtful, however, both of the ring and the customer; he peered suspiciously, first at the sardonic young man, then at the white jewel which was brighter than any diamond in the shop.

“It is a beryl,” he remarked.

“Not an ordinary beryl,” replied Rudolph, contemptuously flashing the ring about in his hand so that in the light of the well-trimmed silver lamp the stone cast out flames of blue, green and crimson.

“Well,” admitted M. Colcombet, who seemed fascinated by the stone, “I daresay the Comtesse Louise would like it for her wedding toilette.”

“Ha, is the Comtesse Louise to be married?” asked Rudolph, who remembered with anger this haughty beauty who had stared through him when her carriage has passed him in the street, covering him with mud.

“Yes, to the Prince de C———; it is to be a splendid affair,” gossiped the jeweller. “At her father’s château, you know — the chapel is hung with cloth of gold and there is to be a festival for all the neighbourhood. Many of the students have had cards of invitation, and some of them have been in here to buy their presents — M. le Marquis de Saint Luc, for instance. You perhaps yourself, Monsieur?” he added with an inquisitive glance at Rudolph’s shabby clothes.

“What do you offer for the ring?” demanded the student fiercely.

“It is white,” said the jeweller, “but not, I am sure, a diamond — reset it would look very handsome, perhaps in the centre of a tiara or on a corsage ornament—”

“How much? I am in a hurry.”

M. Colcombet, who felt rather embarrassed and confused, stammered:

“Two thousand francs, Monsieur.”

“It is worth far more, but I was not born to bargain — give me the money.”

As Rudolph flung down the ring he disarranged the black cloth over the show case and revealed a set of pearl and diamond ornaments in cases of pale blue satin.

“It is the wedding parure of the Comtesse Louise,” said M. Colcombet as he counted out the notes from his pocket-book; Rudolph took up the money and passed out into the street that, when the shutters were all up in front of the shops, was lit only by the light of the rising moon; the small dark clouds had now disappeared and the sky was pale and pure.

The student returned in a melancholy, bitter mood to his lodgings; although he had two thousand francs in his pocket he felt poorer than when he had been in possession of the beryl ring.

The mention of the Comtesse Louise had considerably vexed him; how he detested that proud girl with her little sneering mouth and large, slightly prominent blue eyes! He had several times seen her driving in the town, and once he had come face to face with her in a bookshop where she was buying foolish novels and he was trying to sell some Aldine volumes with superb sepia-coloured initials; on that occasion he had held open the door for her, and she had passed him with the most icy of unspoken rebukes in her lofty carriage and set sweetness of glance.

He had, however, seen her leaning on the arm of Saint Luc, that ostentatious dandy who spent more in a year on his trousers and giletsthan the whole of Rudolph’s annual income.

Hatred and another dark emotion that was almost despair inspired the student with a diabolic plan; absenting himself from all classes and lectures he devoted all his time to carrying out precisely the instructions in the grimoire published at Memphis in 1517.

He made his plans carefully and arranged for his great experiment to take place on the evening of the wedding day of the Comtesse Louise and Prince de C——.

First he provided himself with a magic wand by going into the woods and cutting two twigs, one of hazel and one of elder from trees that had never borne fruit; at the end of these he placed steel caps magnetized with a lodestone; then he took from the carpetbag some ink made from sprigs of fern gathered on St. John’s Eve and vine twigs cut in the March full moon which had been ground to powder and mingled with river water in a fair glazed earthen pot; this mixture had been boiled up over a fire of virgin paper.

Rudolph also possessed a phial of pigeon’s blood and a male goose quill and a bloodstone which possessed the virtue of protecting the wearer from evil spirits; he had always found this a very necessary precaution.

On the third day of the new moon Rudolph purchased a black cock and a white cock from the market place and kept them in his garret until nightfall; he then put the birds in a wicker cage, his paraphernalia in the carpetbag, and set out beyond the town, beyond the woods until he came to an open space that surrounded the ruins of an Abbey reputed to be haunted by the spirits of monks who had been unfaithful to their vows.

Here the grass was short and scarred by stones and rocks; an ancient thorn tree, sacred to heathen deities, stood bleak and twisted by a small pool. The Gothic windows of the Abbey showed a black framework against the luminous sky; the bats flew in and out of the crisp, dark ivy; several noxious fungi grew round the pool, which was covered by a dull red floating weed so that it did not reflect any light.

Rudolph had often visited this place before; it was exactly what the grimoires said was required for infernal rites — “a desolate spot free from interruptions.”

With mutterings to himself, while the sweat gathered on his high, pallid brow, the student made the grand Kabbalistic circle. From his carpetbag he took out his rods, a goatskin, two garlands of Vervain, two candles of virgin wax made by a virgin — Jeanette whose meagre charms guaranteed her chastity — a sword of blue steel, two candlesticks of massive silver, two flints, tinder, a flask of eau-de-vie, some camphor, incense, and four nails from the coffin of a child — which last item Rudolph had paid Pierre, the coffin-maker, very highly for, for it had been necessary to go to the burial vaults of Saint Jean to obtain them.

With this material Rudolph made his grand circle of goatskin, sprinkling the incense and camphor in a wheel shape and kindling his fire of wood (that he fed with the cognac) in the centre, then, with his right arm bared to the shoulder, he sacrificed the two cocks, burning them on the fire while he muttered his evocations.

The bats and owls fled from the ruins, the moon veiled in the sky, the earth shook, the red scum of weeds on the lake became agitated; Rudolph pressed the bloodstone to his cheek and muttered an even more powerful spell.

The water was troubled furiously and a lovely boy rose to the surface of the lake and in a pleasant voice demanded of the student what he wished.

Rudolph was not deceived by this civility; he knew that the apparition was Lucifer himself, the most violent of the evil spirits who would tear the celebrant to pieces if he were to step out of the circle or to drop his bloodstone. Astaroth came, Rudolph was well aware, in the shape of a black and white ass, Beelzebub in hideous disguises, Belial seated in a flaming chariot, and Beleth on a white horse preceded by a company of musicians.

“What is your will?” asked Lucifer gently, but puffing out his red cheeks with rage.

“Monsieur,” said the student respectfully, “I am about — at the end of the month, to be exact — to make a great experiment, that described on page twenty-three of the Grimoire of Alibeck the magician, published at Memphis in 1517.”

“A rare edition,” remarked Lucifer. “You were fortunate to find it.”

While he spoke he was carefully watching to see if the student made the least mistake, so that he might seize him and pull him to shreds, but Rudolph was prudent and kept well within the centre of the magic circle with the bloodstone pressed to his cheek.

“I want to know, Monsieur, if you will assure me that the experiment will be successful?”

“You seem to know a few tricks,” smiled the fiend. “No doubt, if you will fulfil all the requirements given in the grimoire, the experiment will be successful. You will take the consequences, of course.”

“If I can have four strangers in my room to do my bidding, discover a hidden treasure, become a famous poet and lucky at cards, I shall require nothing more,” sneered Rudolph, who even when talking to a devil could not for long maintain a submissive tone.

“All that you shall have,” promised the lovely child in a sweet voice, but his pretty little eyes were sparkling with fury at this insolence.

“I ask no more!” cried Rudolph, shaking his magic hazel wand at the lake. “Foul fiend begone!”

With a dreadful hiss the boy sank into the lake, the red weed closed over the place where he had been, the moon came to a standstill in the sky, the bats and owls flew back to the ruins, and the student stepped out of the magic circle and began to pack away his materials into the carpetbag.

When he returned through the town he heard the violinists above the music shop of M. Kuhn practising for the wedding festivities of the Comtesse Louise.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

As the time drew near for the great experiment Rudolph made his final preparations; these had cost him nearly all the money he had received for the beryl ring and the suspicious looks of his fellow students.

He had paid his rent and given Jeanette a present to bribe her to sweep and clean out his chamber so that no dirt remained anywhere; he had then perfumed it with mastic and aloes and hung clean white curtains at the window, furnished the bed with fair linen, woollen coverlets and a mattress of goose down.

He bought also a table and four chairs of plain white wood, four platters of white damask. To rid himself of the curiosity of Jeanette he declared that these preparations were for a visit from his mother and two sisters that he was expecting.

For three days before the date fixed for the wedding of the Comtesse Louise, Rudolph fasted and looked to his room, making sure that there were no hangings, nor indeed any objects, set crosswise, that no clothes were on pegs, that there was not a birdcage in any corner of the room, and that everything was scrupulously clean.

On the evening of the great day itself the student set his four chairs round his table, placed out on the fair damask cloth the four platters with a wheaten loaf on each, and the four glass beakers full of clear water. Beside his bed he set his old armchair, and the windows he opened wide onto the moonlit night.

In the centre of the table he placed a shaker of goatskin, three black and one white bean, then, everything being in readiness, he cast himself on his knees and uttered the powerful conjuration given in page twenty-three of the grimoire of Alibeck. Then he lay down on his bed, wearing a handsome chamber-robe that he had bought for the occasion.

He heard the church clock strike midnight, and then the moonlight in the attic began to quiver a little and Professor Lachaud floated in through the open window, not moving his feet nor looking to right nor left, but stiffly passing along; taking no heed of Rudolph, the dry little savantseated himself at the table and gazed in front of him through his silver-rimmed spectacles.

The next arrival was the banker, M. Lecoine; with an expression of surprise on his chubby face he floated in from the outer moonlight, a table napkin tucked under his chin and a pen in his hand; without speaking he seated himself opposite Lachaud. Almost at once the window was darkened again as M. Saint Luc appeared wearing a fashionable evening costume with a superb gilet of sky-blue moiré anglaise, in silence he occupied the third place at the table.

Rudolph felt ill with excitement; the white curtains blew out in the moonlight and a lady all in white entered — the Comtesse Louise, or rather the Princesse de C———, in her bridal gown of silver and satin with her wreath of myrtle and her parure of diamonds and pearls; on the thumb of her right hand was the beryl ring.

She took the fourth place at the table and the four strangers began to eat and drink; their movements were stiff and jerky like those of automata, and they were silent, without seeming to notice anything.

“One remains behind,” whispered Rudolph from the bed. “One remains behind.”

The four strangers ate the wheaten loaves to the last crumb and drank the crystal water to the last drop; then the professor took up the goatskin shaker and put inside it the three black and one white bean, so that they might draw lots as to who should stay behind.

It was the lady who took out the white bean; the three men then rose and, still in silence, floated out of the window one after the other, the professor’s robe, the youth’s frac coat and the banker’s napkin fluttering for a second in the night breeze as they disappeared into the moonlight.

The Comtesse Louise then rose, and crossing the room without moving her feet, seated herself in the armchair beside Rudolph’s bed. There were many things that the student would have liked to have asked the bride, but he remembered the danger of deviating from the formula of Alibeck, so he said:

“Confer on me luck at cards.”

She slipped the beryl ring off her thumb, handed it to him and replied:

“As long as you wear this you shall have luck at cards.”

“Confer on me the gift of fame.”

“You shall be the most famous poet alive.”

The lady answered clearly and promptly, but she ignored Rudolph as utterly as she had ignored him when she had met him in the bookshop or the street; this angered him and he made his third demand very haughtily:

“Reveal to me some hidden treasure.”

She rose.

“Come with me.”

The student left his bed and followed her out of the window, walking on the air as if it had been curdling foam with firm sand beneath it. They passed over the housetops, Rudolph in his bed-gown that floated out behind him and his pearl-grey trousers, the lady in her bridal dress and the long veil that billowed into the moonlight until it seemed part of the silver vapour of night.

When they reached the market square the lady descended like a ray of light and paused before the great iron-studded door of the Church; when she saw that Rudolph was behind her, she passed through the door, and the student found no difficulty in doing the same.

The Church was cold and dim; as these two entered all the lamps before the shrines burnt very low, but the spell held.

The Comtesse Louise paused on a gravestone in the chancel; it sunk beneath her, and Rudolph, who was close behind, descended with her to the vaults.

Here the only light was that which emanated from the brilliant figure of the bride, who hovered over the rows of coffins like a will-o’-the-wisp.

Over one of these that was covered with a rotting pall cloth she hung motionless, and her voice, hollow as an echo in a shell, broke the silence of the vault.

“Here is your treasure.”

Rudolph wrenched at the wooden wooden coffin lid, then at the leaden shell beneath, and found that both came away like paper in his hands; the supernatural light cast by the Comtesse Louise enabled him to see a skeleton, livid with the hues of decay, lying in a tattered shroud; under the skull was a cluster of diamonds and sapphires arranged like a pillow; these had been enclosed in a silken case which had frayed to a few faded threads.

The student despoiled the coffin, filling the pockets of his robe de chambre, of his waistcoat and trousers with the gems. When he had grubbed up the last of the jewels he harshly told the lady to lead him back to his garret.

She instantly rose through the stone floor of the Church and passed down the aisle, through the wooden door and into the public square; without moving her feet, without speaking, without glancing to right or left, she led him over the roofs to his garret.

Rudolph did not think of her at all until he had packed all the jewels into his carpetbag and hair-cord trunk; then he looked at her standing immobile in her wedding splendour, gazing in front of her with her blue, slightly prominent eyes, and he felt a twinge of compassion for her.

“You may return to your bridegroom,” he said disdainfully.

She did not, however, move, and Rudolph could not recall what the formula of dismissal was in this conjuration.

He searched in the grimoire and could find nothing on this point: “One remains behind” was all that was written in the instructions.

The student did not greatly concern himself about this, however; he felt very drowsy and cast himself on his bed. “No doubt she will be gone in the morning.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

When Rudolph awoke the sun was bright in his room and Jeanette was at his bedside with coffee and rolls; on the tray was a letter with the Parisian postmark.

The student tore the envelope open and found inside an enthusiastic letter from a publisher to whom he had submitted his poems a year ago. This gentleman had, it seemed, printed the poems without telling the author, and the thin volume had been a succès fou. “You are acclaimed as the greatest poet of the century, far beyond Lamartine or Byron.”

Rudolph sprang out of bed in an excess of joy, which was checked however when he saw the bride still standing where he had left her last night, erect by the table staring in front of her with her blue, slightly prominent eyes.

He now perceived that she was as transparent as the lace that she wore and that she looked as if sketched with white chalk on the dark background of the room; he saw also that she was perceptible to himself only, since Jeanette had not only taken no notice of her, but, in leaving the room, had walked right through her. Rudolph then realized that the four strangers had been spectres or phantoms, not, as he had thought, the human beings themselves.

He felt that he had humiliated the lady sufficiently — besides, he was becoming bored with her company; so he again commanded her to depart, and, when she took no heed of him, he once more consulted the grimoire. This authoritative work, however, had one serious defect — it offered no advice on how to be rid of spirits, ghosts, wraiths or supernatural appearances that had outstayed their welcome.

Rudolph was however too excited and too anxious to put his good fortune to the test to concern himself very much about the phantasm that had already done him such good service.

“Pray please yourself, Madame la Princesse,” he said with a sarcastic bow, and hastened into the street, the lady floating behind him with feet that were motionless and with a fixed gaze.

As he passed the University the student saw a knot of his fellows gathered round the steps. One of them hailed him:

“Rudolph, have you heard the news?”

“About the success of my poems?” asked the student haughtily.

“Your poems? No, indeed — poor Professor Lachaud died suddenly last night. He was shut up in his library to study as usual, and this morning he was found stiff in his chair!”

Rudolph passed on in silence; he felt rather disturbed.

M. Colcombet and some friends were gossiping outside his shop.

“Oh, M. Rudolph, have you heard, what a dreadful tragedy? Last night, just as the bride — the Comtesse Louise — was being conducted to the bridal chamber, she fell down dead! Yes, dead as a stone! And what do you think, at the same moment one of the guests, M. Saint Luc, had a stroke of apoplexy, and he too fell dead, with a glass of champagne in his hand!”

Rudolph looked over his shoulder at the phantom, that gazed ahead serenely; he though — “the grimoire did not state that the spell would cause the death of the four strangers. But perhaps if it had I should not have hesitated.”

As he passed the Bank he saw the black shutters being put up; in the doorway were clerks fastening black bands to their arms. “Someone dead?” asked Rudolph drily.

“M. Lecoine himself! He retired to his counting-house, as he always does on Friday evenings, at ten minutes to twelve — old Auguste took him in his cup of soup, and he was alive then — this morning he was dead in his chair, with his napkin under his chin and his empty cup on his desk!”

“What a number of deaths in this town!” remarked Rudolph sarcastically. “I hope that it isn’t the plague!”

Although at first he had been shocked to learn of the dreadful results of his spell, he soon consoled himself; the four dead people were all detestable — perhaps one might be a little sorry for the bride, until one remembered how cold and haughty she had been, how insulting with her icy looks.

No, everything was as it should be; the only difficulty was how to be rid of this phantom that followed him so closely — “One remains behind.”

“Eh, well,” thought Rudolph, “no one can see her but myself, and no doubt she will soon tire of following me about or I shall be able to find a spell to dismiss her.”

So, being strong-minded as well as hard-hearted, he contrived to forget the filmy-white shape that was the dead bride, and that never left him, day or night. Everywhere that he went she accompanied him, and when he returned home in the evenings she seated herself by his bed in the worn armchair.

The phantom was the last thing he saw at night, the first thing he saw in the morning, and though he searched his whole library through he could not discover any spell to be rid of her; he was also debarred from any magical ceremonies, divinations or conjurations, for it is well-known that the company of a ghost is fatal on these occasions.

His good fortune, however, prevented him from troubling much about this inconvenience; not only had he the treasure taken from the vaults of Saint Jean, but his fame as a poet spread over the entire country, and he found that whenever he played at cards, when wearing the beryl ring he was lucky, so that his winnings at play afforded him a considerable income.

He soon moved to Paris, where he became the centre of a crowd of admirers; all the ladies were singing his verses to harps or guitars, all the gentlemen copied his waistcoats and the manner in which he tossed his long black hair off his pallid brow.

The student now enjoyed almost everything that he had ever wished for; he had a handsome apartment, liveried servants, a smart phaeton — but he had no mistress.

All the women adored him, but if he tried to make love to any one of them, she seemed repelled, frightened, and always ended by running away.

Rudolph cursed and wished that he had asked for luck in love instead of luck in cards, for the sale of the treasure trove would supply him with all the money he needed. He knew why the women avoided even the slightest intimacy with him — they could not perceive the ghost of the bride, but they felt it, a miasma of death that killed their rising passion, a bitter chill that cooled their warm hearts and withered the kisses on their lips.

The student used all the arts at his command in the hope of destroying the phantom, but nothing was of any avail; sometimes she was so pale as to be scarcely visible, sometimes she was as solid as a living woman; but she was always there and Rudolph’s nerves began to quiver every time he looked over his shoulder — “One remains behind” he would mutter, gazing up into her glassy eyes. He tried to argue out the matter with her, to appeal to her compassion, even to make love to her, but she never took any more notice of him than she had taken when she had passed him in the bookshop or in the streets of the University town.

There were other flaws in the student’s good fortune; his publisher continually implored him to write some more poems.

“You know there are only ten poems in that little volume, and everyone in France knows them by heart! Soon people will begin to say that you are incapable of writing anything else!”

This was precisely what had happened; whenever Rudolph sat down to write, the spectre of the bride glided round to the other side of the table, and seated there, stared at him with her blue, slightly prominent eyes, and while she gazed at him he found it impossible to compose a single line.

With relief he remembered the sheaves of paper, all covered by verses, that he had, in his excitement, left behind in his garret, so he wrote to Jeanette telling her to send them at once. The girl had, however, used the papers to light the kitchen fire, and the student uttered a bitter malediction when he received the ill-spelt letter in which she gave him this news.

Gradually his popularity waned; the Parisians became tired of his ten poems, of his gloomy, preoccupied airs, and began to laugh at his failures in love. He was too successful at cards, and so found himself avoided, not only at the gambling parties in private houses, but even at the halls in the Palais Royal.

One morning he was seated over his coffee pondering how he should be rid of the phantom when his eye caught a line in the Gazette that his English valet had left on the table beside his service of coffee, rolls and fruit.

In the University town of S——— a horrible outrage had been discovered; a sacrilegious robbery had been committed in the Church of Saint Jean — a tomb had been broken open and a vast treasure was stolen.

The student read this account with a good deal of interest.

“I never heard any of this,” he commented bitterly, “when I was in that detestable town.”

The ancient Church, it seemed, possessed a vast treasure, largely consisting of offerings at the miraculous shrine of Ste. Pelagie, which had been hidden in the coffin of that saint during the dangers of the late revolutions; all record of this had been lost, and for a generation people had searched in vain for the hidden treasure; then a paper found in the sacristy had given them the clue and the coffin with the gems had been discovered.

They had been left there while the Bishop was consulted as to the propriety of moving them; His Grace had not only given his consent to this, but had come in person to see this remarkable discovery — only to learn that the jewels had been stolen by thieves who had broken into the vault. At first the police had kept the matter hushed up in order that they might pursue their investigations more at ease, now they decided to make the matter public.

“Ah, Madame!” cried Rudolph, addressing the phantom that hovered over his breakfast table. “You have deceived me grossly!”

He morosely decided to leave Paris. The jewels might be traced and he did not dare to try to sell those that he had left; on consulting with his major-domo he found that he was short of money — he had been living most extravagantly, spending thousands of francs on horses, dogs, furniture, pictures and other things that he did not care for in the least.

So in order to raise the money for his travelling expenses, he put on the beryl ring and went to one of the worst gambling dives in Paris where accomplished gamblers nightly stripped newcomers to the capital.

Rudolph entered this den of vice. As he threw off his long black cloak there was a murmur of admiration for his superb blue gilet in moiré anglaise.

He was not, however, very welcome even in that dreadful place, for even these hardened gamblers, coarsened by debauchery, felt uneasy in his presence; the phantom spread a chill about her that surrounded Rudolph like a cold sea mist and caused those who came near him to shiver. These scoundrels, however, could not for long resist the lure of the piles of gold that the student flung down on the long green baize table — these represented the last remnants of his ready money, the rest of his fortune was contained in the stolen treasure that he dare not dispose of in France.

When he had been playing and winning for an hour, a huge pile of gold pieces was massed in front of him, and hellish looks of black hatred were cast on him by the habitués of the gambling dive.

Rudolph felt depressed and took little pleasure in his fortune, that was more than sufficient to take him to Vienna or Rome or some other city where he could sell the stolen gems; his head ached and the flames of the ring of candles above the table seemed to penetrate his brain like hot nails, all the vicious, greedy faces sneering about him seemed to float detached from their bodies in the thick, foul air.

The phantom of the bride had become quite solid; it seemed impossible to Rudolph that she was invisible to the company as she hovered over the piles of dirty cards, her wedding splendour floating about her like a cloud of moonshine.

“Madame,” he said between his teeth, “have the goodness to leave me — this is not a fit place for a gentlewoman. But, if you do not cease plaguing me, I shall take you to worse—”

“What are you muttering?” asked his companion, a stout man whose face was covered by carbuncles and whose breath was hot as flame.

“Oh, nothing, I was merely counting my winnings,” sneered Rudolph with his hands over the pile of gold.

“Pray,” said he of the carbuncles, “have another cast of the dice with this young gentleman,” and he nudged the student in the ribs to let him know that here was another pigeon to be plucked.

Rudolph saw a spruce youth with a baby face bowing before him, and he thought: “This is a fool fresh from college, he reminds me of Saint Luc. I may as well have his money.”

So he agreed to play with the young stranger, who had a pleasant lisping voice, a cheek as smooth as a girl’s and slightly reddened eyes.

“Surely,” thought the student, “I have seen him before.” He was tormented by this likeness to someone whom he had once known and so did not observe that the bride had made a movement for the first time since she had followed him; always she had moved through the air in one piece, like a floating statue, now she leaned forward and drew from his finger the beryl ring.

The student played carelessly, certain of his luck, and lost all his winnings to the youth with the baby face.

“Ah!” he shrieked, “I have been deceived!”

He stared closer at the young man who was gathering up the gold; now he recognized him — it was Lucifer who had appeared to him on the weed covered pond outside the ruined abbey.

With a yell echoed in the mocking laughter of the gamblers, Rudolph rushed into the street, the bride floating after him, the great beryl glittering on her pale finger.

When the student reached his luxurious apartment he found that the police were in possession; the stolen jewels had been traced to him. His publisher was also waiting for him in the antechamber.

“You are a cheat as well as thief, M. Rudolph,” he declared severely. “I do not believe that you wrote those poems, or you would be able to write others. Ah, he could rob a church, the dead, is capable of anything! Tomorrow I shall publish a statement in the Gazette to the effect that you are not the author of the poems, and you will be the laughing stock of Paris!”

Rudolph did not stay to hear these indignant words; he fled out into the night with the agents de police lumbering after him, and reeling along under the moon that shone above the housetops, reached the river that dark as ink flowed between houses white as paper.

The phantom pressed close to the student, like a cold fog in his lungs. For the first time she spoke:

“You cannot complain. All the promises in the grimoire have been fulfilled.”

“Do not let us, Madame, waste words,” replied Rudolph. “Will you return me my beryl ring?”

“Never!”

“Will you leave me?”

“Never! One remains behind!”

The student then perceived that he had come to the end of his story; he jumped into the river. As he sank he raised his top hat and said politely:

“Goodbye, Madame la Princesse de C———.”

The phantom remained hovering over the spot where he had disappeared, then slowly dissolved into air, her pearls and diamonds turning into drops of rain, her veils and laces into wisps of vapour, the beryl ring being caught up into a shaft of moonshine.

This romantic suicide made Rudolph very popular again in Paris; it was believed that he had written the poems after all, and the fashionable colour for that season became a faded green named vert Rudolph. The police became disliked for their hasty action in raiding the apartments of the sensitive poet, for it was discovered that the so-called gems in his possession were mere paste and had nothing to do with the treasure trove in the vaults of Saint Jean.

M. Dufours travelled to Paris and bought back the grimoire from the sale of Rudolph’s effects and returned it to the shelf at the back of his shop where it soon became again covered with dust.

“Help Yourself! Annual” 1936

THEY FOUND
MY GRAVE
writing as
JOSEPH SHEARING

Ada Trimble was bored with the sittings. She had been persuaded to attend against her better judgement, and the large dingy Bloomsbury house depressed and disgusted her; the atmosphere did not seem to her in the least spiritual and was always tainted with the smell of stale frying.

The medium named herself Astra Destiny. She was a big, loose woman with a massive face expressing power and cunning. Her garments were made of upholstery material and round her cropped yellowish curls she wore a tinsel belt. Her fat feet bulged through the straps of cheap gilt shoes.

She had written a large number of books on subjects she termed “esoteric” and talked more nonsense in half an hour than Ada Trimble had heard in a lifetime. Yet madame gave an impression of shrewd sense and considerable experience; a formidable and implacable spirit looked through her small grey eyes and defied anyone to pierce the cloud of humbug in which she chose to wrap herself.

“I think she is detestable,” said Ada Trimble; but Helen Trent, the woman who had introduced her to the big Bloomsbury Temple insisted that, odious as the setting was, odd things did happen at the sittings.

“It sounds like hens,” said Miss Trimble, “but séances are worse.”

“Well, it is easy to make jokes. And I know it is pretty repulsive. But there are unexplained things. They puzzle me. I should like your opinion on them.”

“I haven’t seen anything yet I can’t explain, the woman is a charlatan, making money out of fools. She suspects us and might get unpleasant, I think.”

But Helen Trent insisted: “Well, if you’d been going as often as I have, and noticing carefully, like I’ve been noticing…”

“Helen — why have you been interested in this nonsense?”

The younger woman answered seriously: “Because I do think there is something in it.”

Ada Trimble respected her friend’s judgement; they were both intelligent, middle-aged, cheerful and independent in the sense that they had unearned incomes. Miss Trimble enjoyed every moment of her life and therefore grudged those spent in going from her Knightsbridge flat to the grubby Bloomsbury Temple. Not even Helen’s persistency could induce Ada to continue the private sittings that wasted money as well as time. Besides, Miss Trimble really disliked being shut up in the stuffy, ugly room while Madame Destiny sat in a trance and the control, a Red Indian called Purple Stream babbled in her voice and in pidgin English about the New Atlantis, the brotherhood of man and a few catch phrases that could have been taken from any cheap handbook on philosophy or the religions of the world.

But Helen persuaded her to join in some experiments in what were termed typtology and lucidity that were being conducted by Madame Destiny and a circle of choice friends. These experiments proved to be what Ada Trimble had called in her youth “table turning”. Five people were present, besides Ada and Madame Destiny. The table moved, gave raps, and conversations with various spirits followed. A code was used, the raps corresponding in number to the letters of the alphabet, one for “a” and so on to twenty-six for “z”. The method was tedious and nothing, Miss Trimble thought, could have been more dull. All manner of unlikely spirits appeared, a Fleming of the twelfth century, a President of a South American Republic, late nineteenth century, an Englishman who had been clerk to residency at Tonkin, and who had been killed by a tiger a few years before, a young schoolmaster who had thrown himself in front of a train in Devonshire, a murderer who announced in classic phrase that he had “perished on the scaffold”, a factory hand who had died of drink in Manchester, and a retired schoolmistress recently “passed over”.

The spirit of a postman and that of a young girl “badly brought up, who had learnt to swear”, said the medium, also spoke through the rap code. These people gave short accounts of themselves and of their deaths and some vague generalizations about their present state. “I am happy.” “I am unhappy.” “It is wonderful here.” “God does not die.” “I remain a Christian.” “When I first died it was as if I was stunned. Now I am used to it—” and so on.

They were never asked about the future, who would win the Derby, the results of the next election or anything of that kind. “It wouldn’t be fair,” smiled Madame Destiny. “Besides, they probably don’t know.”

The more important spirits were quickly identified by references to the National Dictionary of Biography for the English celebrities and Larousse for the foreign. The Temple provided potted editions of each work. These reliable tomes confirmed all that the spirits said as to their careers and ends. The obscure spirits if they gave dates and place names were traced by enquiries of Town Clerks and Registrars. This method always worked out, too.

Madame Destiny sometimes showed the letters that proved that the spirits had once had, as she hideously quoted “a local habitation and a name”.

“I can’t think why you are interested,” said Ada Trimble to Helen Trent as they drove home together. “It is such an easy fraud. Clever, of course, but she has only to keep all the stuff in her head.”

“You mean that she looks up the references first?”

“Of course.” Ada Trimble was a little surprised that Helen should ask so simple a question. “And those postmen and servant girls could be got up, too, quite easily.”

“It would be expensive. And she doesn’t charge much.”

“She makes a living out of it,” said Ada Trimble sharply. “Between the lectures, the healings, the services, the sittings, the lending library and those ninepenny teas, I think the Temple of Eastern Psycho-Physiological Studies does pretty well….” She looked quickly at her companion and in a changed voice asked: “You’re not getting — drawn in — are you, Helen?”

“Oh no! At least I don’t think so, but last year, when you were in France, I was rather impressed — it was the direct voice. I wish it would happen again, I should like your opinion—” Helen Trent’s voice faltered and stopped; it was a cold night, she drew her collar and scarf up more closely round her delicate face. The smart comfortable little car was passing over the bridge. The two women looked out at the street and ink-blue pattern of the Serpentine, the bare trees on the banks, the piled buildings beyond, stuck with vermilion and orange lights. The November wind struck icy across Ada Trimble’s face.

“I don’t know why I forgot the window,” she said, rapidly closing it. “I suggest that we leave Madame Destiny alone, Helen. I don’t believe that sort of thing is any good, it might easily get on one’s nerves.”

“Well,” said Helen irrelevantly, “what are dreams, anyway?”

Ada remembered how little she knew of the early life of her cultured, elegant friend and how much she had forgotten of her own youthful experiences that had once seemed so warm, so important, so terrible.

“Come next Tuesday, at least,” pleaded Helen as she left the car for the wet pavement. “She has promised the direct voice.”

“I ought to go, because of Helen,” thought Ada Trimble. “She is beginning to be affected by this nonsense. Those rogues know that she has money.”

So on the Tuesday the two charming women in their rich, quiet clothes, with their tasteful veils, handbags, furs and posies of violets and gardenias were seated in the upper room in the Bloomsbury Temple with the queer shoddy folk who made up Madame Destiny’s audience.

Ada Trimble settled into her chair; it was comfortable like all the chairs in the Temple and she amused herself by looking round the room. The Victorian wallpaper had been covered by dark serge, clumsily pinned up; dusty crimson chenille curtains concealed the tall windows. Worn linoleum was on the floor, the table stood in the centre of the room and on it was a small, old-fashioned gramophone with a horn. By it was a small red lamp; this, and the light from the cheerful gas fire, was the only illumination in the room.

A joss stick smouldered in a brass vase on the mantelpiece but this sickly perfume could not disguise the eternal smell of stew and onions that hung about the Temple.

“I suppose they live on a permanent hot-pot,” thought Ada Trimble vaguely as she looked round on the gathered company.

The medium lay sprawled in the largest chair; she appeared to be already in a trance; her head was sunk on her broad breast and her snorting breath disturbed the feather edging on her brocade robe. The cheap belt round her head, the cheap gilt shoes, exasperated Ada Trimble once more. “For a woman of sense—”, she thought.

Near the medium was a husband, who called himself Lemoine. He was a turnip-coloured nondescript man, wearing a dirty collar and slippers; his manner hesitated between the shamefaced and the insolent. He was not very often seen, but Ada sometimes suspected him of being the leader of the whole concern.

She speculated with a shudder, and not for the first time, on the private lives of this repulsive couple. What were they like when they were alone together? What did they say when they dropped the gibberish and the posing? Were they ever quite sincere or quite clean? She had heard they lived in a “flat” at the top of the house and had turned a bleak Victorian bathroom into a kitchen and that they had “difficulties with servants”.

Beside Mr Lemoine was Essie Clark, a stringy, cheerful woman who was Madame Destiny’s secretary, and as Ada Trimble supposed, maid-of-all-work, too. She had been “caught” sweeping the stairs and Ada thought that she mixed the permanent stew.

Essie’s taste had stopped, dead as a smashed clock, in childhood and she wore straight gowns of faded green that fifty years before had been termed “artistic” by frustrated suburban spinsters, and bunches of little toys and posies made of nuts and leather.

The circle was completed by the people well known to Ada: a common overdressed little woman who called spiritualism her “hobby” and who was on intimate terms with the spirit of her late husband, and a damp, depressed man, Mr Maple, who had very little to say for himself beyond an occasional admission that he was “investigating and couldn’t be sure”.

The little woman, Mrs Penfleet, said cheerfully: “I am certain dear Arthur will come today. I dreamt of him last night,” and she eyed the trumpet coyly.

“We don’t know who will come, if anyone,” objected Mr Maple gloomily. “We’ve got to keep open minds.”

Mr Lemoine begged for silence and Miss Clark put on a disc that played “Rock of Ages”.

Ada Trimble’s mind flashed to the consumptive Calvinist who had written that hymn; she felt slightly sick and glanced at Helen, dreamy, elegant, sunk in her black velvet collar.

Ada looked at the trumpet, at the medium, and whispered “Ventriloquism” as she bent to drop and pick up her handkerchief, but Helen whispered back: “Wait.”

Essie Clark took off the record and returned to her chair with a smile of pleased expectancy. It was all in the day’s work for her, like cheapening the food off the barrows in the Portobello Road. Ada Trimble kept her glance from the fire and the lamp, lest, comfortable and drowsy as she was, she should be hypnotised with delusions — “Though I don’t think it likely here,” she said to herself, “in these sordid surroundings.”

There was a pause; the obviously dramatic prelude to the drama. Madame Destiny appeared to be unconscious. Ada thought: “There ought to be a doctor here to make sure.” A humming sound came from the painted horn that had curled-back petals like a metallic flower. “Arthur!” came from Mrs Penfleet and “Hush!” from Mr Maple. Ada felt dull, a party to a cheap, ignoble fraud. “How dare they!” she thought indignantly, “fool with such things — supposing one of the dead did return.” The gramophone was making incoherent noises, hummings and sighings.

“The psychic force is manifest,” whispered Mr Lemoine reverently in familiar phrase.

There was another pause; Ada Trimble’s attention wandered to obtrusive details, the pattern of the braid encircling Madame Destiny’s bent head, a dull yellow in the lamp’s red glow, and the firmness with which her podgy fingers gripped the pad and pencil, even though she was supposed to be in a state of trance.

Suddenly a deep masculine voice said:

“Beautus qui intelligit super egenum et pauperem.”

Ada was utterly startled; she felt as if another personality was in the room, she sat forward and looked around; she felt Helen’s cold fingers clutch hers; she had not more than half understood the Latin; nor, it seemed, had anyone else. Only Mr Lemoine remained cool, almost indifferent. Leaning forward he addressed the gramophone:

“That is a proverb or quotation?”

The deep voice replied:

“It is my epitaph.”

“It is, perhaps, on your tomb?” asked Mr Lemoine gently.

“Yes.”

“Where is your tomb?”

“I do not choose to disclose.” The voice was speaking with a marked accent. It now added in French: “Is there no one here that speaks my language?”

“Yes,” said Ada Trimble, almost without her own volition. French was very familiar to her and she could not disregard the direct appeal.

“Eh, bien!” the voice which had always an arrogant, scornful tone, seemed gratified and ran on at once in French. “I have a very fine tomb — a monument, I should say, shaded with chestnut trees. Every year, on my anniversary, it is covered with wreaths.”

“Who are you?” asked Ada Trimble faintly, but Mr Lemoine gently interposed:

“As the other members of our circle don’t speak French,” he told the gramophone, “will you talk in English?”

“Any language is easy to me,” boasted the voice in English, “but I prefer my own tongue.”

“Thank you,” said Mr Lemoine. “The lady asked you who you were — will you tell us?”

“Gabriel Letourneau.”

“Would you translate your epitaph?”

“Blessed is he who understands the poor and has pity on the unfortunate.”

“What were you?”

“Many things.”

“When did you die?”

“A hundred years ago. May 12th, 1837.”

“Will you tell us something more about yourself?”

The voice was harsh and scornful.

“It would take a long time to relate my exploits. I was a professor, a peer, a philosopher, a man of action. I have left my many works behind me.”

“Please give the titles.” Mr Lemoine, who had always been so effaced and who looked so incompetent was proving himself cool and skilful at this question and answer with the voice.

“There are too many.”

“You had pupils?”

“Many famous men.”

“Will you give the names?”

“You continually ask me to break your rules,” scolded the voice.

“What rules?”

“The rules spirits have to obey.”

“You are a Christian?”

“I have never been ashamed to call myself so.”

“Where — in the Gospels — is the rule of which you speak?” asked Mr Lemoine sharply. “There are special rules for spirits?”

“Yes.”

So the dialogue went on, more or less on orthodox lines, but Ada Trimble was held and fascinated by the quality and accent of the voice. It was rough, harsh, intensely masculine, with a definite foreign accent. The tone was boastful and arrogant to an insufferable extent. Ada Trimble detested this pompous, insistent personality; she felt odd, a little dazed, a little confused; the orange glow of the gas fire, the red glow of the lamp, the metallic gleams on the horn fused into a fiery pattern before her eyes. She felt as if she were being drawn into a void in which nothing existed but the voice.

Even Mr Lemoine’s thin tones, faintly questioning, seemed a long way off, a thread of sound compared to the deep boom of the voice. The conversation was like a ball being deftly thrown to and fro. Mr Lemoine asked: “What do you understand by faith?” And the voice, steadily rising to a roar, replied: “The Faith as taught by the Gospel.”

“Does not the Gospel contain moral precepts rather than dogma?”

“Why that remark?”

“Because narrow or puerile practices have been built on this basis.”

“A clear conscience sees further than practices.”

“I see that you are a believer,” said Mr Lemoine placidly. “What is your present situation?”

“Explain!” shouted the voice.

“Are you in Heaven, Hell or purgatory?” rapped out Mr Lemoine.

“I am in Heaven!”

“How is it that you are in Heaven and here at the same time?”

“You are a fool,” said the voice stridently. “Visit my grave and you will understand more about me.”

“Once more, where is your grave?”

The horn gave a groan of derision and was silent; Mr Lemoine repeated his question, there was no answer; he then wiped his forehead and turned to his wife who was heaving back to consciousness.

“That is all for today,” he smiled round the little circle; no one save Ada and Helen seemed affected by the experience; Mr Maple made some gloomy sceptical remarks; Mrs Penfleet complained because Arthur had not spoken and Essie Clark indifferently and efficiently put away the gramophone and the records.

When the red lamp was extinguished and the light switched on, Ada looked at Madame Destiny who was rubbing her eyes and smiling with an exasperating shrewd blandness.

“It was Gabriel Letourneau,” her husband told her mildly. “You remember I told you he came some months ago?” He glanced at Ada. “The medium never knows what spirit speaks.”

Ada glanced at Helen who sat quiet and downcast, then mechanically gathered up her gloves and handbag.

“Did you find this person in Larousse?” she asked.

“No. We tried other sources too, but never could discover anything. Very likely he is a liar, quite a number of them are, you know. I always ask him the same questions, but as you heard, there is no satisfaction to be got.”

“He always boasts so,” complained Mr Maple, “and particularly about his grave.”

“Oh,” smiled Mr Lemoine rising to indicate that the sitting was at an end. “He is a common type, a snob. When he was alive he boasted about his distinctions, visits to court and so on; now he is dead he boasts of having seen God, being in Heaven and the marvels of his grave.”

When they were out in the wind-swept evening Helen clasped Ada’s arm.

“Now, what do you make of that? Ventriloquism? It is a personality.”

“It is odd, certainly. I was watching the woman. Her lips didn’t move — save just for snorting or groaning now and then.”

“Oh, I dare say it could be done,” said Helen impatiently. “But I don’t think it is a trick. I can’t feel that it is. Can you? That is what I wanted you to hear. There have been other queer things, but this is the queerest. What do you think?”

“Oh, Helen, dear, I don’t know!” Ada was slightly trembling. “I never thought that I could be moved by anything like this.”

“That is it, isn’t it?” interrupted Helen, clinging to her as they passed along the cold street. “Moved — and what by?”

“Intense dislike — the man is loathsome!”

“There! You said man. It was a voice only!”

“Oh, Helen!”

They walked in silence to the waiting car and when inside began to talk again in low tones, pressed together. No, there was no explanation possible, any attempt at one landed you in a bog of difficulties.

“He spoke to me,” sighed Ada Trimble, “and, you know I quite forgot that he wasn’t there — I wish that I could have gone on talking to him, I feel that I should have been sufficiently insistent—”

“To — what, Ada?”

“To make him say something definite about himself—”

“It’s crazy, Ada! It lets loose all kinds of dreadful thoughts. He might be here now, riding with us.”

“Well, he can’t talk without the trumpet.” Then both women laughed uneasily.

“My dear, we are getting foolish!” said Helen, and Ada answered: “Yes. Foolish either way — to talk of it all if we think it was a fraud — and not to be more serious if we don’t think it a fraud.”

But as people usually will when in this kind of dilemma, they compromised; they discussed the thing and decided to put it to the test once again.

They became frequent visitors to the Bloomsbury Temple and began to pay to have private sittings with the direct voice.

Busy as they were, Madame Destiny and Mr Lemoine “fitted in” a good number of these and the harsh voice that called itself Gabriel Letourneau usually spoke, though there were annoying occasions when Persian sages, Polish revolutionaries and feebleminded girls of unknown nationality, insisted on expounding colourless views.

By the spring the personality of Gabriel Letourneau was complete to Ada and Helen. They had been able to build him up, partly from details he had supplied himself and partly out of their own uneasy imaginations. He had been — or was now, but they dare not speculate upon his present shape — a tall, dark, gaunt Frenchman, with side whiskers and a blue chin, the kind of brown eyes known as “piercing” and a fanatical, grim expression.

Ada had often spoken to him in French but she could never penetrate his identity. A professor, a peer in the reign of Louis Philippe? It was impossible for her to attempt to trace so elusive a person. At first she did not try; she told herself that she had other things to do and she tried to keep the thing out of her mind, or at least to keep it reduced to proper proportions. But this soon proved impossible and sensible, charming, broad-minded Ada Trimble at length found herself in the grip of an obsession.

The voice and her hatred of the voice. It was useless for her to tell herself, as she frequently did, that the voice was only that of the woman who called herself Astra Destiny and not a personality at all. This was hopeless, she believed in Gabriel Letourneau. He had, she was sure, a bad effect on her character and on that of Helen. But opposite effects. Whereas Helen became limp, distracted, nervous and talked vaguely of being “Haunted”, Ada felt as if active evil was clouding her soul.

Why should she hate the voice? She had always been afraid of hatred. She knew that the person who hates, not the person who is hated, is the one who is destroyed. When she disliked a person or a thing she had always avoided it, making exceptions only in the cases of cruelty and fanaticism. There she had allowed hate to impel her to exertions foreign to her reserved nature. And now there was hatred of Gabriel Letourneau possessing her like a poison. He hated her, too. When she spoke to him he told her in his rapid French that Helen could not follow, his scornful opinion of her; he called her an “ageing woman”; he said she was pretension, facile, a silly little atheist while “I am in Heaven.”

He made acid comments on her carefully chosen clothes, on her charmingly arranged hair, her little armoury of wit and culture, on her delicate illusions and vague, romantic hopes. She felt stripped and defaced after one of these dialogues in which she could not hold her own. Sometimes she tried to shake herself out of “this nonsense”. She would look sharply at the entranced medium; Ada had never made the mistake of undervaluing the intelligence of Astra Destiny and surely the conversation of Gabriel Letourneau was flavoured with feminine malice?

Out in the street with Helen she would say: “We really are fools! It is only an out-of-date gramophone.”

“Is it?” asked Helen bleakly. “And ventriloquism?” Then she added: “Where does she — that awful woman — get that fluent French?”

“Oh, when you begin asking questions!” cried Ada.

She examined the subject from all angles, she went to people who, she thought, “ought to know”, but she could get no satisfaction; it was a matter on which the wisest said the least.

“If only he wouldn’t keep boasting!” she complained to Helen. “His grave — that now — he says it is a marvellous monument and that people keep putting wreaths on it, that they make pilgrimages to it — and Helen, why should I mind? I ought to be pleased that he has that satisfaction or — at least, be indifferent — but I’m not.”

“He’s been hateful to you, to us,” said Helen simply. “I loathe him, too — let us try to get away from him.”

“I can’t.”

Helen went; she drifted out of Ada’s life with a shivering reluctance to leave her, but with a definite inability to face the situation created by Gabriel Letourneau. She wrote from Cairo and presently did not write at all. Ada, left alone with her obsession, no longer struggled against it; she pitted herself deliberately against the voice. Sometimes, as she came and went in the Bloomsbury Temple, she would catch a glint in the dull eyes of Mr Lemoine or the flinty eyes of Madame Destiny that made her reflect how many guineas she had paid them. But even these flashes of conviction that she was being the worst type of fool did not save her; she had reached the point when she had to give rein to her fortune.

In September she went to France; countless friends helped her to search archives; there was no member of the Chamber of Peers under Louis Philippe named Letourneau. She wrote to the keepers of the famous cemeteries, she visited these repulsive places herself; there were Letourneaus, not a few, but none with pre-name Gabriel, or with the inscription quoted by the voice. Nor was there anywhere an imposing monument, covered with wreaths and visited by pilgrims, to a professor peer who had died in 1837.

“Fraud,” she kept telling herself, “that wretched couple just practised a very clever fraud on me. But why? What an odd personality for people like that to invent! And the deep masculine voice and the idiomatic French — clever is hardly the word. I suppose they got the data from Larousse.” The courteous friends helped her to make enquiries at the Sorbonne. No professors of that name there, or at any of the other big universities.

Ada Trimble believed that she was relieved from her burden of credulity and hate; perhaps if she kept away from the Bloomsbury Temple the thing would pass out of her mind. She was in this mood when she received an answer to a letter she had written to the keeper of the cemetery at Sceaux. She had written to so many officials and it had been so long since she had written to Sceaux and she had such little expectation of any result from her enquiries that she scarcely took much interest in opening the letter.

It read thus:

Madame, In reply to your letter of November 30th, I have the honour to inform you that I have made a search for the Letourneau tomb which fortunately I found and I have copied the epitaph cut on the tomb.

Gabriel Letourneau
Man of Letters
Died at Sceaux June 10th 1858.
Beatus qui intelligit
Super egenum et pauperem.

This neglected grave was in a miserable condition covered by weeds; in order to send you the above information it was necessary to undertake cleaning that occupied an hour, and this merely on the portion that bears the inscription. According to the registry this Letourneau was a poor tutor; his eccentric habits are still remembered in the quarter where he lived. He has become a legend — and “he boasts like a Gabriel Letourneau” is often said of a braggart. He has left no descendants and no one has visited his grave. He left a small sum of money to pay for the epitaph.

(signed) Robert, Keeper of the Cemetery at Sceaux.
231 Rue Louis le Grand,
Sceaux (Seine).

Ada Trimble went at once to Sceaux. She arrived there on a day of chill, small rain, similar to that on which she had first heard the voice in the Bloomsbury Temple. There was a large, black cemetery, a row of bare chestnut-trees overlooking the walls, an ornate gate. The conscientious keeper, M. Robert, conducted her to the abandoned grave in the comer of the large graveyard; the rotting, dank rubbish of last year’s weeds had been cut away above the inscription that Ada had first heard in the Bloomsbury Temple a year ago.

She gazed and went away, full of strange terror. What was the solution of the miserable problem? There were many ways in which the Lemoine couple might have chanced to hear of the poor tutor of Sceaux, but how had they come to know of the epitaph for years concealed behind ivy, bramble and moss? M. Robert, who was so evidently honest, declared that he never remembered anyone making enquiries about the Letourneau grave and he had been years in this post. He doubted, he said, whether even the people to whom the name of the eccentric was a proverb knew of the existence of his grave. Then, the shuffling of the dates, 1858 instead of 1837, the lies about the state of the grave and the position that Letourneau had held while in life.

Ada had a sickly qualm when she reflected how this fitted in with the character she had been given of a slightly unhinged braggart with ego mania. A peerage, the Sorbonne, the monument — all lies?

Ada returned to England and asked Madame Destiny to arrange another sitting for her with the direct voice. She also asked for as large a circle as possible to be invited, all the people who had ever heard Gabriel Letourneau.

“Oh, that will be a large number,” said Madame Destiny quickly, “he is one of the spirits who visits us most frequently.”

“Never mind, the large room, please, and I will pay all expenses. I think I have found out something about that gentleman.”

“How interesting,” said Madame Destiny, with civil blankness.

“Can she possibly know where I have been?” thought Ada Trimble, but it seemed absurd to suppose that this hard-up couple, existing by shifts, should have the means to employ spies and detectives. The meeting was arranged and as all the seats were free, the room was full.

The gramophone was on a raised platform; it was placed on a table beside which sat Madame Destiny to the right and her husband to the left. The red lamp was in place. A dark curtain, badly pinned up, formed the back cloth. Save for the gas fire, the room — a large Victorian salon — was in darkness. Ada Trimble sat on one of the Bentwood chairs in the front row. “He won’t come,” she thought. “I shall never hear the voice again. And the whole absurdity will be over.”

But the medium was no sooner twitching in a trance than the voice came rushing from the tin horn. It spoke directly to Ada Trimble and she felt her heart heave with horror as she heard the cringing tone.

“Good evening, madame, and how charming you are tonight! Your travels have improved you — you recall my little jokes, my quips? Only to test your wit, dear lady, I have always admired you so much—”

Ada could not reply, the one thought beat in her mind, half paralysing her, “He knows what I found out — he is trying to flatter me so that I don’t give him away.”

The voice’s opening remarks had been in French and for this Mr Lemoine called him to order; the usual verbal duel followed, Lemoine pressing the spirit to give proof of his identity, the spirit arrogantly defending his secrets. The audience that had heard this parrying between Lemoine and Letourneau before so often was not interested and Ada Trimble did not hear anything, she was fiercely concerned with her own terror and bewilderment. Then the voice, impatiently breaking off the bitter sparring, addressed her directly in oily, flattering accents.

“What a pleasure that we meet again, how charming to see you here! The time has been very long since I saw you last.”

Ada roused herself; she began to speak in a thick voice that she could scarcely have recognised as her own.

“Yes, one is drawn to what one dislikes as surely as towards what one hates. I have been too much concerned with you, I hope now that I shall be free.”

“Miss Trimble,” protested Mr Lemoine, “there are others present, pray speak in English. I think you said that you had been able to identify this spirit quite precisely.”

In French the gramophone harshly whispered: “Take care.”

“Well,” said Mr Lemoine briskly, “this lady says she found your grave, what have you to say to that?”

“I beg the lady not to talk of my private affairs”; voice and accent were alike thick, with agitation, perhaps despair.

“But you have often spoken of your tomb, the wreaths, the pilgrimages, you have talked of your peerage, your professorship, your pupils. As you would never give us corroborative details, this lady took the trouble to find them out.”

“Let her give them,” said the voice, “when we are alone — she and I.”

“What would be the sense of that?” demanded Mr Lemoine. “All these people know you well, they are interested — now Miss Trimble.”

“I found the grave in Sceaux cemetery,” began Ada.

The voice interrupted her furiously: “You are doing a very foolish thing!”

“I see,” said Mr Lemoine coolly, “you are still an earthbound spirit. You are afraid that something hurtful to your vanity is about to be revealed….”

“You should be free from this material delusion. We,” added the turnip-faced man pompously, “are neither noble nor learned. We shall not think the less of you if it is true you have boasted.”

“I am not a boaster!” stormed the voice.

“Your grave is in the cemetery at Sceaux,” said Ada Trimble rapidly. “You died in 1858, not 1837; you were neither peer nor professor — no one visits your grave. It is miserable, neglected, covered with weeds. It took the keeper an hour’s work even to cut away the rubbish sufficiently to see your epitaph.”

“Now we know that,” said Mr Lemoine smoothly, “we can help you to shake off these earthly chains.”

“These are lies.” The voice rose to a hum like the sound of a spinning top. “Lies—”

“No,” cried Ada. “You have lied, you have never seen God, either.”

“You may,” suggested Mr Lemoine, “have seen a fluid personage in a bright illumination, but how could you have been sure it was God?”

The humming sound grew louder, then the horn flew over, as if wrenched off and toppled on to the table, then on to the floor. Mr Lemoine crossed the platform and switched on the light.

“An evil spirit,” he said in his routine voice, “now that he has been exposed I don’t suppose that he will trouble us again.” And he congratulated Ada on her shrewd and careful investigations, though the stare he gave her through his glasses seemed to express a mild wonder as to why she had taken so much trouble. The meeting broke up; there was coffee for a few chosen guests upstairs in the room lined with books on the “occult”; no one seemed impressed by the meeting; they talked of other things, only Ada Trimble was profoundly moved.

This was the first time she had come to these banal coffee-drinkings. Hardly knowing what she did she had come upstairs with these queer, self-possessed people who seemed to own something she had not got. They were neither obsessed nor afraid. Was she afraid? Had not Gabriel Letourneau vanished forever? Had he not broken the means of communication between them? Undoubtedly she had exorcized him, she would be free now of this miserable, humiliating and expensive obsession. She tried to feel triumphant, released, but her spirit would not soar. In the back of her mind surged self-contempt. “Why did I do it? There was no need. His lies hurt no one. To impress these people was his one pleasure — perhaps he is in hell, and that was his one freedom from torment — but I must think sanely.”

This was not easy to do; she seemed to have lost all will-power, all judgement. “I wish Helen had not escaped,” she used the last word unconsciously; her fingers were cold round the thick cup, her face in the dingy mirror above the fireplace looked blurred and odd. She tried to steady herself by staring at the complacent features of Astra Destiny, who was being distantly gracious to a circle of admirers, and then by talking to commonplace Mr Lemoine whose indifference was certainly soothing. “Oh, yes,” he said politely, “we get a good deal of that sort of thing. Malicious spirits — evil influences—”

“Aren’t you afraid?” asked Ada faintly.

“Afraid?” asked Mr Lemoine as if he did not know what the word meant. “Oh, dear no, we are quite safe—” he added, then said: “Of course, if one was afraid, if one didn’t quite believe, there might be danger. Any weakness on one’s own part always gives the spirits a certain power over one.”

All this was, Ada knew, merely “patter”; she had heard it, and similar talk, often enough and never paid much attention to it; now it seemed to trickle through her inner consciousness like a flow of icy water. She was afraid, she didn’t quite believe; yet how could she even but think that? Now she must believe. Astra Destiny could not have “faked” Gabriel Letourneau. Well, then, he was a real person — a real spirit? Ada Trimble’s mind that once had been so cool and composed, so neat and tidy, now throbbed in confusion.

“Where do they go?” she asked childishly. “These evil spirits? I mean — today — will he come again?”

“I don’t suppose so, not here. He will try to do all he can elsewhere. Perhaps he will try to impose on other people. I’m afraid he has wasted a good deal of our time.”

“How can you say ‘wasted!’” whispered Ada Trimble bleakly. “He proves that the dead return.”

“We don’t need such proof,” said Mr Lemoine, meekly confident and palely smiling.

“I had better go home now,” said Ada; she longed to escape and yet dreaded to leave the warmth, the light, the company; perhaps these people were protected and so were safe from the loathed, prowling, outcast spirit. She said goodbye to Madame Destiny who was pleasant, as usual, without being effusive, and then to the others. She could not resist saying to Essie Clark: “Do you think that I did right?”

“Right?” the overworked woman smiled mechanically, the chipped green coffee-pot suspended in her hand.

“In exposing — the voice — the spirit?”

“Oh, that! Of course. You couldn’t have done anything else, could you?” And Miss Clark poured her coffee and handed the cup, with a tired pleasantry, to a tall Indian who was the only elegant looking person present. Ada Trimble went out on to the landing; the smell of frying, of stew, filled the gaunt stairway; evidently one of the transient servants was in residence; through the half-open door behind her, Ada could hear the babble of voices, then another voice, deep, harsh, that whispered in her ear:

“Canaille!”

She started forward, missed her foothold and fell.

Mr Lemoine, always efficient, was the first to reach the foot of the stairs. Ada Trimble had broken her neck.

“A pure accident,” said Astra Destiny, pale, but mistress of the situation. “Everyone is witness that she was quite alone at the time. She has been very nervous lately and those high heels…”

Orange Blossoms (1938) as by Joseph Shearing

THE CHINESE APPLE
writing as
JOSEPH SHEARING

Isabelle Crosland felt very depressed when the boat train drew into the vast London station. The gas lamps set at intervals down the platform did little more than reveal filth, fog and figures huddled in wraps and shawls. It was a mistake to arrive on Christmas Eve, a matter of missed trains, of indecision and reluctance about the entire journey. The truth was she had not wanted to come to London at all. She had lived in Italy too long to be comfortable in England. In Florence she had friends, admirers; she had what is termed “private means” and she was an expert in music. She performed a little on the harpsichord and she wrote a great deal about ancient musical instruments and ancient music. She had been married and widowed some years before and was a childless woman who had come to good terms with life. But with life in Florence, not London. Mrs Crosland really rather resented the fact that she was performing a duty. She liked things to be taken lightly, even with a touch of malice, of heartlessness, and here she was in this gloomy, cold station, having left the pleasant south behind, just because she ought to be there.

“How,” she thought, as she watched the porter sorting out her baggage, “I dislike doing the right thing; it is never becoming, at least to me.”

A widowed sister she scarcely remembered had died: there was a child, quite alone. She, this Lucy Bayward, had written; so had her solicitors. Mrs Crosland was her only relation. Money was not needed, companionship was. At last it had been arranged, the child was coming up from Wiltshire, Mrs Crosland was to meet her in London and take her back to Florence.

It would really be, Isabelle Crosland reflected, a flat sort of Christmas. She wished that she could shift her responsibility, and, as the four-wheeled cab took her along the dingy streets, she wondered if it might not be possible for her to evade taking Lucy back to Italy.

London was oppressive. The gutters were full of dirty snow, overhead was a yellow fog.

“I was a fool,” thought Mrs Crosland, “ever to have left Florence. The whole matter could have been settled by letter.”

She did not care for the meeting-place. It was the old house in Islington where she and her sister had been born and had passed their childhood. It was her own property and her tenant had lately left, so it was empty. Convenient, too, and suitable. Only Isabelle Crosland did not very much want to return to those sombre rooms. She had not liked her own childhood, nor her own youth. Martha had married, though a poor sort of man, and got away early. Isabelle had stayed on, too long, then married desperately, only saving herself by Italy and music. The south had saved her in another way, too. Her husband, who was a dull, retired half-pay officer, had died of malaria.

Now she was going back. On Christmas Eve, nothing would be much altered; she had always let the house furnished. Why had she not sold, long ago, those heavy pieces of Jamaica mahogany? Probably out of cowardice, because she did not wish to face up to writing, or hearing anything about them. There it was, just as she remembered it, Roscoe Square, with the church and graveyard in the centre, and the houses, each like one another as peas in a pod, with the decorous areas and railings and the semicircular fanlights over the doors with heavy knockers.

The streetlamps were lit. It was really quite late at night. “No wonder,” Mrs Crosland thought, “that I am feeling exhausted.” The sight of the Square chilled her: it was as if she had been lured back there by some malign power. A group of people were gathered round the house in the corner, directly facing her own that was number twelve. “Carols,” she thought, “or a large party.” But there seemed to be no children and the crowd was very silent.

There were lights in her own house. She noticed that bright façade with relief. Alike in the parlour and in the bedrooms above, the gas flared. Lucy had arrived then. That part of the arrangements had gone off well. The lawyers must have sent the keys, as Isabelle Crosland had instructed them to do, and the girl had had the good sense to get up to London before the arrival of the boat train.

Yet Mrs Crosland felt unreasonably depressed. She would, after all, have liked a few hours by herself in the hateful house.

Her own keys were ready in her purse. She opened the front door and shuddered. It was as if she had become a child again and dreaded the strong voice of a parent.

There should have been a maid. Careful in everything that concerned her comfort, Mrs Crosland had written to a woman long since in her employment to be in attendance. The woman had replied, promising compliance. But now she cried: “Mrs Jocelyn! Mrs Jocelyn!” in vain, through the gas-lit house.

The cabby would not leave his horse and his rugs, but her moment of hesitancy was soon filled. One of the mongrel idlers who, more frequently than formerly, lounged about the streets, came forward. Mrs Crosland’s trunks and bags were placed in the hall, and she had paid her dues with the English money carefully acquired at Dover.

The cab drove away, soon lost in the fog. But the scrawny youth lingered. He pointed to the crowd on the other side of the Square, a deeper patch amid the surrounding gloom.

“Something has happened there, Mum,” he whispered.

“Something horrible, you mean?” Mrs Crossland was annoyed she had said this, and added: “No, of course not; it is a gathering for Christmas.” With this she closed her front door on the darkness and stood in the lamp-lit passage.

She went into the parlour, so well remembered, so justly hated.

The last tenant, selected prudently, had left everything in even too good a state of preservation. Save for some pale patches on the walls where pictures had been altered, everything was as it had been.

Glowering round, Mrs Crosland thought what a fool she had been to stay there so long.

A fire was burning and a dish of cakes and wine stood on the deep red mahogany table.

With a gesture of bravado, Mrs Crosland returned to the passage, trying to throw friendliness into her voice as she called out: “Lucy, Lucy, my dear, it is I, your aunt Isabelle Crosland.”

She was vexed with herself that the words did not have a more genial sound. “I am ruined,” she thought, “for all family relationship.”

A tall girl appeared on the first landing.

“I have been waiting,” she said, “quite a long time.”

In the same second Mrs Crosland was relieved that this was no insipid bore, and resentful of the other’s self-contained demeanour.

“Well,” she said, turning it off with a smile. “It doesn’t look as if I need have hurried to your assistance.”

Lucy Bayward descended the stairs.

“Indeed, I assure you, I am extremely glad to see you,” she said gravely.

The two women seated themselves in the parlour. Mrs Crosland found Lucy looked older than her eighteen years and was also, in her dark, rather flashing way, beautiful. Was she what one might have expected Martha’s girl to be? Well, why not?

“I was expecting Mrs Jocelyn, Lucy.”

“Oh, she was here; she got everything ready, as you see — then I sent her home because it is Christmas Eve.”

Mrs Crosland regretted this; she was used to ample service. “We shall not be able to travel until after Christmas,” she complained.

“But we can be very comfortable here,” said Lucy, smiling.

“No,” replied Mrs Crosland, the words almost forced out of her. “I don’t think I can — be comfortable here — I think we had better go to an hotel.”

“But you arranged this meeting.”

“I was careless. You can have no idea — you have not travelled?”

“No.”

“Well, then, you can have no idea how different things seem in Florence, with the sun and one’s friends about—”

“I hope we shall be friends.”

“Oh, I hope so. I did not mean that, only the Square and the house. You see, I spent my childhood here.”

Lucy slightly shrugged her shoulders. She poured herself out a glass of wine. What a false impression those school-girlish letters had given! Mrs Crosland was vexed, mostly at herself.

“You — since we have used the word — have friends of your own?” she asked.

Lucy bowed her dark head.

“Really,” added Mrs Crosland, “I fussed too much. I need not have undertaken all that tiresome travelling at Christmas, too.”

“I am sorry that you did — on my account; but please believe that you are being of the greatest help to me.”

Mrs Crosland apologized at once.

“I am over-tired. I should not be talking like this. I, too, will have a glass of wine. We ought to get to know each other.”

They drank, considering one another carefully.

Lucy was a continuing surprise to Mrs Crosland. She was not even in mourning, but wore a rather ill-fitting stone-coloured satin, her sleek hair had recently been twisted into ringlets, and there was no doubt that she was slightly rouged.

“Do you want to come to Italy? Have you any plans for yourself?”

“Yes — and they include a trip abroad. Don’t be afraid that I shall be a burden on you.”

“This independence could have been expressed by letter,” smiled Mrs Crosland. “I have my own interests — that Martha’s death interrupted—”

“Death always interrupts — someone or something, does it not?”

“Yes, and my way of putting it was harsh. I mean you do not seem a rustic miss, eager for sympathy.”

“It must be agreeable in Florence,” said Lucy. “I dislike London very much.”

“But you have not been here more than a few hours—”

“Long enough to dislike it—”

“And your own home, also?”

“You did not like your own youth, either, did you?” asked Lucy, staring.

“No, no, I understand. Poor Martha would be dull, and it is long since your father died. I see, a narrow existence.”

“You might call it that. I was denied everything. I had not the liberty, the pocket-money given to the kitchen-maid.”

“It was true of me also,” said Mrs Crosland, shocked at her own admission.

“One is left alone, to struggle with dark things,” smiled Lucy. “It is not a place that I dislike, but a condition — that of being young, vulnerable, defenceless.”

“As I was,” agreed Mrs Crosland. “I got away and now I have music.”

“I shall have other things.” Lucy sipped her wine.

“Well, one must talk of it: you are not what I expected to find. You are younger than I was when I got away,” remarked Mrs Crosland.

“Still too old to endure what I endured.”

Mrs Crosland shivered. “I never expected to hear this,” she declared. “I thought you would be a rather flimsy little creature.”

“And I am not?”

“No, indeed, you seem to me quite determined.”

“Well, I shall take your small cases upstairs. Mrs Jocelyn will be here in the morning.”

“There’s a good child.” Mrs Crosland tried to sound friendly. She felt that she ought to manage the situation better. It was one that she had ordained herself, and now it was getting out of hand.

“Be careful with the smallest case in red leather: it has some English gold in it, and a necklace of Roman pearls that I bought as a Christmas present for you—”

Mrs Crosland felt that the last part of this sentence fell flat. “… pearl beads, they are really very pretty.”

“So are these.” Lucy put her hand to her ill-fitting tucker and pulled out a string of pearls.

“The real thing,” said Mrs Crosland soberly. “I did not know that Martha—”

Lucy unclasped the necklace and laid it on the table; the sight of this treasure loosened Mrs Crosland’s constant habit of control. She thought of beauty, of seawater, of tears, and of her own youth, spilled and wasted away, like water running into sand.

“I wish I had never come back to this house,” she said passionately.

Lucy went upstairs. Mrs Crosland heard her moving about overhead. How well she knew that room. The best bedroom, where her parents had slept, the huge wardrobe, the huge dressing-table, the line engravings, the solemn air of tedium, the hours that seemed to have no end. What had gone wrong with life anyway? Mrs Crosland asked herself this question fiercely, daunted, almost frightened by the house.

The fire was sinking down and with cold hands she piled on the logs.

How stupid to return. Even though it was such a reasonable thing to do. One must be careful of these reasonable things. She ought to have done the unreasonable, the reckless thing, forgotten this old house in Islington, and taken Lucy to some cheerful hotel.

The steps were advancing, retreating, overhead. Mrs Crosland recalled old stories of haunted houses. How footsteps would sound in an upper storey and then, on investigation, the room be found empty.

Supposing she were to go upstairs now and find the great bedroom forlorn and Lucy vanished! Instead, Lucy entered the parlour.

“I have had the warming-pan in the bed for over two hours, the fire burns briskly and your things are set out—”

Mrs Crosland was grateful in rather, she felt, an apathetic manner.

This journey had upset a painfully acquired serenity. She was really fatigued, the motion of the ship, the clatter of the train still made her senses swim.

“Thank you, Lucy, dear,” she said, in quite a humble way, then leaning her head in her hand and her elbow on the table, she began to weep.

Lucy regarded her quietly and drank another glass of wine.

“It is the house,” whimpered Mrs Crosland, “coming back to it — and those pearls — I never had a necklace like that—”

She thought of her friends, of her so-called successful life, and of how little she had really had.

She envied this young woman who had escaped in time.

“Perhaps you had an accomplice?” she asked cunningly.

“Oh, yes, I could have done nothing without that.”

Mrs Crosland was interested, slightly confused by the wine and the fatigue. Probably, she thought, Lucy meant that she was engaged to some young man who had not been approved by Martha. But what did either of them mean by the word “accomplice”?

“I suppose Charles Crosland helped me,” admitted his widow. “He married me and we went to Italy. I should never have had the courage to do that alone. And by the time he died, I had found out about music, and how I understood it and could make money out of it—” “Perhaps,” she thought to herself, “Lucy will not want, after all, to come with me to Italy — what a relief if she marries someone. I don’t really care if she has found a ruffian, for I don’t like her — no, nor the duty, the strain and drag of it.”

She was sure that it was the house making her feel like that. Because in this house she had done what she ought to have done so often. Such wretched meals, such miserable silences, such violences of speech. Such suppression of all one liked or wanted. Lucy said:

“I see that you must have suffered, Mrs Crosland. I don’t feel I can be less formal than that — we are strangers. I will tell you in the morning what my plans are—”

“I hardly came from Italy in the Christmas season to hear your plans,” replied Mrs Crosland with a petulance of which she was ashamed. “I imagined you as quite dependent and needing my care.”

“I have told you that you are the greatest possible service to me,” Lucy assured her, at the same time taking up the pearls and hiding them in her bosom. “I wear mourning when I go abroad, but in the house I feel it to be a farce,” she added.

“I never wore black for my parents,” explained Mrs Crosland. “They died quite soon, one after the other; with nothing to torment, their existence became insupportable.”

Lucy sat with her profile towards the fire. She was thin, with slanting eyebrows and a hollow at the base of her throat.

“I wish you would have that dress altered to fit you,” remarked Mrs Crosland. “You could never travel in it, either, a grey satin—”

“Oh, no, I have some furs and a warm pelisse of a dark rose colour.”

“Then certainly you were never kept down as I was—”

“Perhaps I helped myself, afterwards — is not that the sensible thing to do?”

“You mean you bought these clothes since Martha’s death? I don’t see how you had the time or the money.” And Mrs Crosland made a mental note to consult the lawyers as to just how Lucy’s affairs stood.

“Perhaps you have greater means than I thought,” she remarked. “I always thought Martha had very little.”

“I have not very much,” said Lucy. “But I shall know how to spend it. And how to make more.”

Mrs Crosland rose. The massive pieces of furniture seemed closing in on her, as if they challenged her very right to exist.

Indeed, in this house she had no existence, she was merely the wraith of the child, of the girl who had suffered so much in this place, in this house, in this Square with the church and the graveyard in the centre, and from which she had escaped only just in time. Lucy also got to her feet.

“It is surprising,” she sighed, “the amount of tedium there is in life. When I think of all the dull Christmases—”

“I also,” said Mrs Crosland, almost in terror. “It was always so much worse when other people seemed to be rejoicing.” She glanced round her with apprehension. “When I think of all the affectations of good will, of pleasure—”

“Don’t think of it,” urged the younger woman. “Go upstairs, where I have put everything in readiness for you.”

“I dread the bedroom.”

The iron bell clanged in the empty kitchen below.

“The waits,” added Mrs Crosland. “I remember when we used to give them sixpence, nothing more. But I heard no singing.”

“There was no singing. I am afraid those people at the corner house have returned.”

Mrs Crosland remembered vaguely the crowd she had seen from the cab window, a blot of dark in the darkness. “You mean someone has been here before?” she asked. “What about?”

“There has been an accident, I think. Someone was hurt—”

“But what could that have to do with us?”

“Nothing, of course. But they said they might return—”

“Who is ‘they’?”

Mrs Crosland spoke confusedly and the bell rang again.

“Oh, do go, like a good child,” she added. She was rather glad of the distraction. She tried to think of the name of the people who had lived in the house on the opposite corner. Inglis — was not that it? And one of the family had been a nun, a very cheerful, smiling nun, or had she recalled it all wrongly?

She sat shivering over the fire, thinking of those past musty Christmas Days, when the beauty and magic of the season had seemed far away, as if behind a dense wall of small bricks. That had always been the worst of it, that somewhere, probably close at hand, people had really been enjoying themselves.

She heard Lucy talking with a man in the passage. The accomplice, perhaps? She was inclined to be jealous, hostile.

But the middle-aged and sober-looking person who followed Lucy into the parlour could not have any romantic complications.

He wore a pepper-and-salt-pattern suit and carried a bowler hat. He seemed quite sure of himself, yet not to expect any friendliness.

“I am sorry to disturb you again,” he said.

“I am sorry that you should,” agreed Mrs Crosland. “But on the other hand, my memories of this house are by no means pleasant.”

“Name of Teale, Henry Teale,” said the stranger.

“Pray be seated,” said Mrs Crosland.

The stranger, this Mr Teale, took the edge of the seat, as if very diffident. Mrs Crosland was soon fascinated by what he had to say.

He was a policeman in private clothes. Mrs Crosland meditated on the word “private” — “private life”, “private means”. He had come about the Inglis affair, at the corner house.

“Oh, yes, I recall that was the name, but we never knew anyone — who are they now — the Inglis family?”

“I’ve already told Miss Bayward here — it was an old lady, for several years just an old lady living with a companion—”

“And found dead, you told me, Mr Teale,” remarked Lucy.

“Murdered, is what the surgeon says and what was suspected from the first.”

“I forgot that you said that, Mr Teale. At her age it does not seem to matter very much — you said she was over eighty years of age, did you not?” asked Lucy, pouring the detective a glass of wine.

“Very old, nearly ninety years of age, I understand, Miss Bayward. But murder is murder.”

Mrs Crosland felt this affair to be an added weariness. Murder in Roscoe Square on Christmas Eve. She felt that she ought to apologize to Lucy. “I suppose that was what the crowd had gathered for,” she remarked.

“Yes, such news soon gets about, Ma’am. A nephew called to tea and found her — gone.”

Mr Teale went over, as if it were a duty, the circumstances of the crime. The house had been ransacked and suspicion had fallen on the companion, who had disappeared. Old Mrs Inglis had lived so much like a recluse that no one knew what she possessed. There had been a good deal of loose money in the house, the nephew, Mr Clinton, thought. A good deal of cash had been drawn every month from the Inglis bank account, and very little of it spent. The companion was a stranger to Islington. Veiled and modest, she had flitted about doing the meagre shopping for the old eccentric, only for the last few weeks.

The woman she had replaced had left in tears and temper some months ago. No one knew where this creature had come from — probably an orphanage; she must have been quite friendless and forlorn to have taken such a post.

“You told me all this,” protested Lucy.

“Yes, Miss, but I did say that I would have to see Mrs Crosland when she arrived—”

“Well, you are seeing her,” remarked that lady. “And I cannot help you at all. One is even disinterested. I lived, Mr Teale, so cloistered a life when I was here, that I knew nothing of what was going on — even in the Square.”

“So I heard from Miss Bayward here, but I thought you might have seen someone; I’m not speaking of the past, but of the present—”

“Seen someone here — on Christmas Eve—”

Mr Teale sighed, as if, indeed, he had been expecting too much. “We’ve combed the neighbourhood, but can’t find any trace of her—”

“Why should you? Of course, she has fled a long way off—”

“Difficult, with the railway stations and then the ports all watched.”

“You may search again through the cellars if you wish,” said Lucy. “I am sure that my aunt won’t object—”

Mrs Crosland put no difficulties in the way of the detective, but she felt the whole situation was grotesque.

“I hope she escapes,” Mrs Crosland, increasingly tired and confused by the wine she had drunk without eating, spoke without her own volition. “Poor thing — shut up — caged—”

“It was a very brutal murder,” said Mr Teale indifferently.

“Was it? An over-draught of some sleeping potion, I suppose?”

“No, Ma’am, David and Goliath, the surgeon said. A rare kind of murder. A great round stone in a sling, as it might be a lady’s scarf, and pretty easy to get in the dusk round the river ways.”

Mrs Crosland laughed. The picture of this miserable companion, at the end of a dismal day lurking round the dubious dockland streets to find a target for her skill with sling and stone, seemed absurd.

“I know what you are laughing at,” said Mr Teale without feeling. “But she found her target — it was the shining skull of Mrs Inglis, nodding in her chair—”

“One might understand the temptation,” agreed Mrs Crosland. “But I doubt the skill.”

“There is a lovely walled garden,” suggested the detective. “And, as I said, these little byway streets. Anyway, there was her head smashed in, neatly; no suffering, you understand.”

“Oh, very great suffering, for such a thing to be possible,” broke out Mrs Crosland. “On the part of the murderess, I mean—”

“I think so, too,” said Lucy soberly.

“That is not for me to say,” remarked the detective. “I am to find her if I can. There is a fog and all the confusion of Christmas Eve parties, and waits, and late services at all the churches.”

Mrs Crosland impulsively drew back the curtains. Yes, there was the church, lit up, exactly as she recalled it, light streaming from the windows over the graveyard, altar tombs, and headstones, sliding into oblivion.

“Where would a woman like that go?” asked Lucy, glancing over Mrs Crosland’s shoulder at the churchyard.

“That is what we have to find out,” said Mr Teale cautiously. “I’ll be on my way again, ladies, just cautioning you against any stranger who might come here, on some pretext. One never knows.”

“What was David’s stone? A polished pebble? I have forgotten.” Mrs Crosland dropped the curtains over the view of the church and the dull fog twilight of evening in the gaslit Square.

“The surgeon says it must have been a heavy stone, well aimed, and such is missing. Mr Clinton, the nephew, her only visitor and not in her confidence, remarked on such a weapon, always on each of his visits on the old lady’s table.”

“How is that possible?” asked Mrs Crosland.

Mr Teale said that the object was known as the Chinese apple. It was of white jade, dented like the fruit, with a leaf attached, all carved in one and beautifully polished. The old lady was very fond of it, and it was a most suitable weapon.

“But this dreadful companion,” said Mrs Crosland, now perversely revolted by the crime, “could not have had time to practise with this — suitable weapon — she had not been with Mrs Inglis long enough.”

“Ah,” smiled Mr Teale. “We don’t know where she was before, Ma’am. She might have had a deal of practice in some lonely place — birds, Ma’am, and rabbits. Watching in the woods, like boys do.”

Mrs Crosland did not like this picture of a woman lurking in coverts with a sling. She bade the detective “Good evening” and Lucy showed him to the door.

In the moment that she was alone, Mrs Crosland poured herself another glass of wine. When Lucy returned, she spoke impulsively.

“Oh, Lucy, that is what results when people are driven too far — they kill and escape with the spoils, greedily. I do wish this had not happened. What sort of woman do you suppose this may have been? Harsh, of course, and elderly—”

“Mr Teale, when he came before, said she might be in almost any disguise.”

“Almost any disguise,” repeated Mrs Crosland, thinking of the many disguises she had herself worn until she had found herself in the lovely blue of Italy, still disguised, but pleasantly enough. She hoped that this mask was not now about to be torn from her; the old house was very oppressive, it had been foolish to return. A relief, of course, that Lucy seemed to have her own plans. But the house was what really mattered: the returning here and finding everything the same, and the memories of that dreadful childhood.

Lucy had suffered also, it seemed. Odd that she did not like Lucy, did not feel any sympathy with her or her schemes.

At last she found her way upstairs and faced the too-familiar bedroom. Her own was at the back of the house; that is, it had been. She must not think like this: her own room was in the charming house of the villa in Fiesole, this place had nothing to do with her at all.

But it had, and the knowledge was like a lead cloak over her. Of course it had. She had returned to meet not Lucy, but her own childhood.

Old Mrs Inglis — how did she fit in?

Probably she had always been there, even when the woman who was now Isabelle Crosland had been a child. Always there, obscure, eccentric, wearing out a succession of companions until one of them brained her with the Chinese apple, the jade fruit, slung from a lady’s scarf.

“Oh, dear,” murmured Mrs Crosland, “what has that old, that very old woman got to do with me?”

Her cases were by her bedside. She was too tired to examine them. Lucy had been scrupulous in putting out her toilet articles. She began to undress. There was nothing to do but to rest; what was it to her that a murderess was being hunted round Islington — what had Mr Teale said? The stations, the docks… She was half-undressed and had pulled out her wrapper when the front doorbell rang.

Hastily covering herself up, she was out on the landing. At least this was an excuse not to get into the big, formal bed where her parents had died, even if this was only Mr Teale returned. Lucy was already in the hall, speaking to someone. The gaslight in the passage illuminated the girl in the stone-coloured satin and the man on the threshold to whom she spoke.

It was not Mr Teale.

Isabelle Crosland, halfway down the stairs, had a glance of a sharp face, vividly lit. A young man, with his collar turned up and a look of expectation in his brilliant eyes. He said something that Isabelle Crosland could not hear, and then Lucy closed the heavy front door.

Glancing up at her aunt, she said:

“Now we are shut in for the night.”

“Who was that?” asked Mrs Crosland, vexed that Lucy had discerned her presence.

“Only a neighbour; only a curiosity-monger.”

Lucy’s tone was reassuring. She advised her aunt to go to bed.

“Really, it is getting very late. The church is dark again. All the people have gone home.”

“Which room have you, Lucy, dear?”

“That which you had, I suppose; the large room at the back of the house.”

“Oh, yes — that—”

“Well, do not concern yourself — it has been rather a disagreeable evening, but it is over now.”

Lucy, dark and pale, stood in the doorway, hesitant for a second. Mrs Crosland decided, unreasonably, not to kiss her and bade her a quick good-night of a forced cheerfulness.

Alone, she pulled the chain of the gas-ring and was at once in darkness. Only wheels of light across the ceiling showed the passing of a lonely hansom cab.

Perhaps Mr Teale going home.

Mrs Inglis, too, would have gone home by now; the corner house opposite would be empty.

Isabelle Crosland could not bring herself to sleep on the bed after all. Wrapped in travelling rugs, snatched up in the dark, she huddled on the couch. Presently she slept, but with no agreeable dreams. Oppressive fancies lay heavily on her and several times she woke, crying out.

It was with a dismal sense of disappointment that she realized each time that she was not in Florence.

With the dawn she was downstairs. Christmas morning; how ridiculous!

No sign of Lucy, and the cold, dismal house was like a trap, a prison.

Almost crying with vexation, Mrs Crosland was forced to look into the room that once had been her own. The bed had not been slept in. On the white honeycomb coverlet was a package and a note.

This, a single sheet of paper, covered an opened letter. Mrs Crosland stared at this that was signed “Lucy Bayward”. It was a childish sort of scrawl, the writer excused herself from reaching London until after the holidays.

The note was in a different hand:

I promised to let you know my plans. I am away down the river with my accomplice. Taking refuge in your empty house I found this note. The whole arrangement was entirely useful to me. I left the Roman pearls for Lucy, as I had those of my late employer, but I took the gold. No one will ever find us. I leave you a Christmas present.

Mrs Crosland’s cold fingers undid the package. In the ghastly half-light she saw the Chinese apple.

“The Illustrated London News” 18 Nov. 1948, as by Joseph Shearing

A STRANGER KNOCKED

No one knew who had admitted the old man. He was suddenly there, in the chimney corner, warming his hands before the glow of the Yule log. The guests were a little weary with singing and laughing. They had fallen on a silence disturbed only by the chatter of the children who sat on the floor playing with tinsel ornaments.

The Yule wreath hung overhead, stuck with apples, holly and candles. Everyone dreamed differently as they looked at it; some were too drowsy to dream at all.

One asked his neighbour: “Who is the old man?”

Another was curious enough to ask this question of the master of the house. He sent for the porter, who knew nothing. But then, the gates had stood wide all day; who could be refused admission during the Christmas Festival? The master of the house agreed, adding, “Perhaps he has come with one of the children, there are so many, one invites another—”

It was a large house, justly famous for its hospitality. For weeks the cooks had been baking biscuits, cakes and sweetmeats. The air was rich with the scent of spices, from open fires, symbolic of the offerings of the Magi.

The musicians had just left the upper gallery. There were no lights save the candles on the Yule wreath, whose flames tapered upwards into the darkness of the large room. The brocade curtains had not been drawn across the long oriel windows. Without could be seen the unceasing snow flakes.

The old man was handsome, upright and stately. Yet he continued to warm his hands as if he had come a long way, on a far cold journey.

The Master of the house approached him, offering him a cup of wine, as if, now he had perceived him, he welcomed him.

The old man declined, with a courteous inclination of his massive head.

Everyone was now looking at him, even the children who played on the floor.

“I like to spend Christmas in company,” he said in a voice touched with a strange, perhaps a foreign, accent. He glanced round the circle of faces. “Do you think of Christmas as merely a festival?” he asked.

No one answered the direct question.

“The twelve days of Christmas,” murmured a young girl, “it is a merry holiday.”

“Ah,” exclaimed the old man looking at her sharply. “Those pretty flowers you wear; it was I who brought them to England.”

The girl put her hands to the wreath as if she feared it would dissolve, like fairy blooms, and the company, smiling, conceded the old man’s whim, to describe himself as a magician.

But he continued quietly: “I am a botanist. Years ago, before you were born, my dear young lady, I brought some roots of that little blossom from Asia, and now it grows at Christmas in your stone houses.”

“You have earned your place at the fireside for that alone,” said the master of the house, smiling.

“No,” replied the old man. “I have my place out of charity.”

They all protested, languidly. He was harmless, perhaps distinguished. The master of the house thought: “Perhaps it was a stupid indiscretion not to have invited him.”

“I must explain myself. I am a professor of natural history. I have outlived all my friends, and I never married. Until last Christmas I found, however, company. This year I was obliged to come among strangers.”

“You are truly welcome,” cried the master of the house, glancing at his wife. And she half rose from her sofa and repeated, “You are truly welcome, but excuse me, sir, I do not remember seeing you in these parts.”

“I live the other side of the forest,” said the professor, “and I seldom go abroad. I amuse myself with writing, or with going over my collections. I have travelled, of course, over the whole world.”

“Some old fellow,” whispered a youth, “in his second childhood, and already forgotten by everyone.”

Yet the company seemed to circle round him, as if he were the person everyone had come to see. The snowflakes fell softly on the diamond panes of the window; the night showed purple beyond the warm lit room.

The small children fell asleep on their mother’s laps, and the older children stared at the professor of natural history.

His clothes were very old-fashioned, but neat and fresh. The Yule log was sinking into fiery particles; it had burnt for three days. The room was so hot that the master of the house did not order any more wood to be piled on the hearth. The steady glow filled the room, making warm shadows behind the group of people, glinting in glasses and decanters, shining in brown and gold locks and on the folds of silk and satin gowns.

They all wished that the old naturalist would go; he made them and their merrymaking seem foolish.

“Yesterday,” he said, “I was out alone, walking beyond the forest; all seemed dark, dead, sombre, with the snow coming on, and one solitary jay screaming, when I found some goldilocks moss, just at my feet. And it reminded me—”

“Ay, tell us a tale!” cried a boy looking up from a castle he was building of toy bricks.

“ — how I nearly became a murderer on Christmas Day,” added the old man.

Everyone was now silent. The mimic tower fell over. Time seemed to glide away swiftly as if all Christmas sports were now over. The mistress of the house rose quietly and drew the curtains over the storm. The wind had risen and a certain shudder was felt even in this serene room. The garlands of mistletoe, ivy and holly shivered in their places.

“The weather was like this,” said the old man. “A blustering storm rising, everything frozen, and, as I recall, a giant yew cast down in the churchyard. You know a fruit tree can be overthrown and then propped up, but a yew tree — never. It dies at once.”

“Where was the place and when was the time?” asked the master of the house.

“Far, far from here,” was the reply, “on the wild coast of Wales. And in time, I do not know how long; I have ceased to count the years.”

He settled himself to his tale, that he gave as a gift or offering, and as such they took it, while the gale increased and scattered the sparks on the hearth and struggled at the firmly bolted door.

The house was believed to be haunted, though no one spoke of that. But there were those in the group gathered round the fire who thought of this now, of invisible beings who might be peering over their shoulders or floating in the dark air above the circle of candles.

“I was coming home,” said the professor of natural history, “after several years of wandering. I had been in China and Tibet. There were some curiosities I was resolved to have.”

“You must,” said the master of the house, “have met with many adventures.”

“By land and sea. One can become obsessed, of course, by such a quest. I fell ill. I lost my basket of specimens. I was robbed.”

“All for a few flowers!” murmured the girl with the wreath. “And we have enough at home—”

“Who is ever content with what he has at home? Besides, I was not searching for new ornaments, but for medicinal plants — some gallant and universal balm.” He changed his tone abruptly, and added in a firm voice that seemed that of a much younger man, “But I always corresponded with Isabelle Blount.”

“A love story,” said the mistress of the house with a little sigh. Her own had been a very happy one but she was conscious of the passing of the years.

“We were betrothed.” The old man used the formal word with a flourish. “I had money and a fine house, and so had her brother; as children we played together. It was early understood between us that we were to be married as soon as my wanderings were over—”

“Ah, you were the tyrant and set the choice,” said one of the ladies thoughtfully.

“Not at all — she was willing to wait. Even wishful to prolong her childhood. At first there were her parents to be considered, then her brother. It was something we looked forward to — our marriage — as a golden certainty.”

“You must have been a sober pair,” said the master of the house.

“No,” said the old man distinctly, “we were full of zest and enthusiasm. I wished to fulfil my destiny as I was pleased to name it. Isabelle learned every accomplishment. Ours was to be a planned, a leisured happiness. She shared my interests. The stone house built for her was filled by the treasures I had brought home. Every month she wrote me accounts of our native flowers — even from the first of the year, the dark red nettle, the grass groundsell, the daisy — all manner of little conceits and fancies we shared. She would write to me of the prickly furze, glazed with the hoar frost, and I of a valley filled with azaleas the colours of corals and shells.”

“And did you write of nothing else?” asked one of the listeners.

“We wrote of everything else,” replied the old man with dignity. “Whatever peril or discomfort I might be in, I kept calm by the remembrance of Isabelle Blount. We intended to settle in our Welsh home and to live—”

“Happily ever after,” put in the boy with the bricks that he had now piled into the semblance of a palace.

“Why not?” asked the old man patiently. “There was no flaw in our scheme. I encountered much weariness. I have rested, exhausted, by an abandoned gilt pagoda in the jungle to think of Isabelle wandering among my native rocks to pick the sea mallow.”

“Very poetic, sir, but I think the lady was left too much alone.”

The old man looked coolly at the speaker, a brisk youth helping himself to wine.

“Isabelle was never alone. She had her family, her duties. I was successful and not without honour. I received awards, gold and silver medals. I lectured to distinguished audiences. She had reason to be proud of me, as my reputation settled into a steady brilliance.”

“Come, sir!” cried the young man finishing his wine. “This was to be a murderer’s story.”

The old man ignored this. He took a pair of spectacles from his forehead, polished them and set them on his nose.

“It was a settled frost when I said goodbye to her. We walked along the stream; the sedges sparkled with ice; the night before had been clear blue weather with a missel thrush singing. Now the wind parted her hair as she laid her hand in mine; mosses, such as I saw today, glowed on the twisted trunks of the oak trees. We renewed our vows. One year more — and I should be free.”

“It was a pretty picture,” said the mistress of the house.

And in truth the old man had that much art, that he could make them all, idle as they were, see the young lovers by the wintry stream.

“She went with me over my home, suggesting changes here and there, and said that if she were not mistress there by next Christmas, she would be by the Christmas after. She chose the room that should be hers, and I at once planned how I would see that it was always filled by the choicest plants I brought from the East. A kingfisher was startled from our path as we parted by the stream, halfway between her house and mine. I took that blue-winged flash to be an augury.

“I went to China and I found the plant for which I was searching.”

“Tell us what it was,” asked several idle voices.

“It has remained nameless and useless,” the old man replied. “Because — cannot you have guessed? The name it should have had was her name, and the benefits it should have conferred on mankind should have seemed to come from her—”

“Do you want to tell this story?” asked the mistress of the house gently. “Shall we not rather sing a hymn or a carol before we go in to dinner?”

“It is a tale that must be told,” insisted the old man. He folded his hands in the bosom of his coat, as if they were sufficiently warmed, or perhaps chilled beyond any hope of warmth.

The company was lulled; a servant appeared in the doorway with candles but was waved aside by the master of the house.

The glow of the Yule log was sufficient for the telling of this tale.

“I was captured by some imperious mandarins who supposed I had gazed too long at some rarities in their gardens. They enclosed me in a tower. From my window I could see some misty peaks, broken by dark hollows that made me long to set out on my explorations again.

“I was well fed, and, I suppose, discovered to be harmless, for after some months I was released. And not without some words of wisdom as to limiting my curiosity. And not without some reward for my patience under punishment. The mandarins had been through my specimens and declared that I had loaded myself up with trim weeds of no consequence. The package that they put into my hand as they set me on my way contained the exquisite plant of almost magical properties that I intended to name after my Isabelle.”

Each of the company sought to remember what this flower might be, but their thoughts were sluggish.

The candles flickered out on the Yule wreath where the red apples bobbed, and only the vast glow from the hearth lit the room.

The master of the house begged the old man to take a more comfortable chair, but he had settled in his chimney comer and continued in his tale.

“My precious plants, like so many dried anatomies, were placed in a sandalwood box, wrapped in mosses, and I set out for England.

“There were several delays in my journey. I cannot even call them to mind. Indeed, from the moment I left the hands of my considerate captors, my adventures took on a dreamlike quality. I seemed to meet with some very queer companions and to put up at some very odd places.”

“Do tell us!” cried one of the children, suddenly awaking.

The old man frowned.

“It was a long way and I lost count of time; there was winter, but no snow fell. I lost my servant; he was bribed away, I think, by a wealthy nabob, but of that I cannot be sure. Somehow there was always money in my pocket. I found myself in London the day before Christmas Eve.

“I had my treasured plants with me safely and as I looked on the magnificent array of jewels, laces, flowers and other costly gifts in the merchants’ displays, I was proud because I had something much rarer than those to offer my Isabelle.

“Owing to my rapid moving about I had not heard from her for several weeks. The greater surprise and delight should therefore mark our meeting. This time it would be never to part again.

“I stayed at a hotel in a street off the Strand where I was not known, and reposed myself after my fatigues and troubles. Snow fell in the evening, but the morning shone clearly over the Thames, and the people hurried up and down with their parcels, wreaths of holly and clusters of mistletoe.

“Imagination made my dried plants bloom. My musty chamber was filled with the scent of a thousand silver stars. This peculiar flower was said by the Chinese to be the flower of the dead that ghosts came to smell at. For the living it has no perfume. Think of me then, as alone in London, secure in this obscure hotel, with the great treasure in my possession, the wonderful plant that should bear the name of my beloved and bring me the final glory of my already honoured career.”

As he spoke these words the old man held up his head with an almost infernal pride and his frame, still powerful in outline, trembled with fatigue and passion. He seemed to observe the impression he made on his listeners and that they shrank a little from him.

“What is a man,” he demanded, “but a ruined archangel? I certainly felt that I was possessed of supernatural powers, having in that humble box I kept under lock and key, the powers of life and death.” Lowering his voice he added in a confidential tone that yet carried to every corner of the room, “But when I came to consult my calendar, I found I was out of my calculations. Most abominably deceived! Where had I lost the time?”

“Can one lose time?” asked the master of the house thoughtfully.

“I had lost two years. In prison, in travel, in hallucinations. I was that much out of my reckoning.”

“We never have as much time as we hope,” said the master of the house.

“But who realises that?” asked his wife with a sad tenderness.

“None of us,” put in the old man. “We play with delusions all the time.”

One of his listeners, secure in youth and happiness, protested with a smile. He was sure of himself, and the girl beside him and their future.

Ignoring this, the old man continued, with an increasing eagerness:

“Very few people make the miscalculations I did — I had lost two years—”

“Still, in so long a life—” murmured one of the youths pertly.

The professor of natural history took up the challenge.

“I should not miss them you think? But they were those particular years, you see, just those during which Isabelle was waiting for me.”

“Her letters?” asked the master of the house. “There must have been some confusion there.”

They all felt a kindness for this Isabelle, as if they would have liked to have asked her to join the circle, to draw up to the fire, and tell her side of the tale of all the years when she was waiting in a lonely home for a man greedy for wealth and honour.

“Yes, her letters,” agreed the old man slowly. “I told you there was a gap when I did not receive any at all. Then she had a habit of not putting dates — only Monday or Tuesday. Some must have been very much delayed; some I never got at all.”

He put aside this subject with impatience.

“I was talking of my stay in London. No one thought of anything but Christmas. The manager of the hotel put a ticket into my hand and told me a ball was being held in the house at the end of the street. I had a whim to go to this. Of course there were many people in London who would have been glad to receive me. But I felt shy. Perhaps I was changed. I did not know how to adjust myself to those lost years. I sent a letter to Isabelle, saying I would be with her on Christmas Day—”

“Did it not occur to you that she might be surprised, perhaps dismayed by your long disappearances?” asked the master of the house.

“Sir, it did not. I thought I had explained that we loved one another.”

“Oh,” cried a lady who had been half asleep, “if you think that covers everything!”

“I thought so then.” He gave a stiff bow. “I hope you think so now.” With a brusque glance at his host he added, “Perhaps you find my tale tedious?”

But no, everyone wanted him to continue. The story was like a spell to hold them together, an excuse rather for not moving, for not having the candles in, for not calling for wraps and going home. The horses were warm in the stables, the coachmen in the servants’ hall; it seemed a pity to break up the party.

So thought the visitors, while the host and his wife, who were childless, had no wish to be left alone in the house that was supposed to be haunted. If need be, everyone could be accommodated for the night. So the old man was encouraged to tell them of the ball he had attended, during the festival, so many years before.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

You can, he said, imagine my feeling, filled for so many years with Isabelle, rare plants, and the various incidents of my curious journeys. Who, I asked myself, were all these people? The women had hothouse flowers, quite dead, pinned with diamonds to their rich falls of laces; some of their little slippers were quite worn out; as they rested, I saw the fine satin rubbed through at the toes. The room had become overheated and someone had pulled back the curtains to let in the icy light of dawn. The sheen from the river was reflected in the mirrors, and in the drops from the candelabra, where the last candles were guttering. The musicians drooped in their places, but continued to scrape out waltzes, when they began on carols as a reminder that the dance was at an end. I made my escape. No one had noticed me. What humbug this festival is! I reflected. Of course I was soon proved wrong, and that is why I am telling you this story.

I secretly confounded all such gaiety where I had not been made welcome, and dwelt with pleasure on the self-contained lives that I and Isabelle would lead with our exclusive interests.

It was late on Christmas Eve when I arrived at my house. I had not remembered that it was in such a lonely situation. It had taken the contents of my wallet to induce a coachman to take me from the railway station.

There was no sign of welcome, but that was my own fault; I had sent no letters in advance. Still I had always pictured the house as ready and waiting for my return. Surely they could have, at least, kept a light in the hall. The hackney soon departed, leaving me and my simple baggage on the doorstep. I had to ring several times before a person unknown to me, with a tallow dip in his hand, cautiously responded to my bell ringing. He explained that he was the caretaker, I, that I was the master of the house.

Dubiously, he at length admitted me. What he had to say was trivial, but exasperating. My heirs-at-law, distant cousins whom I disliked, were claiming my property. My lawyers were playing a delaying game and had searched for me all over the world.

When it came to it, I had no recollection of having written to them for years. There was that unpleasant lapse of time, you see. My excellent steward, my good servants had all left. My lawyers would not be at their expense. As I passed from one room to another, partly dismantled, partly neglected, followed by my grim unwilling guide, I became angry, mainly with myself. Why had I not made a will, leaving everything to Isabelle? For the first time in my life, I admitted that I was an eccentric fellow and managed my affairs in a peculiar way.

Still, that was all over now. The house and the estate would soon be set to rights, and I should become a very decent member of the county.

My familiarity with the house had convinced the caretaker that I knew the place; the sight of my name on some foreign passports and letters satisfied him that I was indeed the owner. Or so he pretended, for I soon discovered that he had a reason for this complacence. Some plan had fallen through at the last moment whereby he had this charge alone, on Christmas Eve; high wage and some sense of duty had obliged him to keep trust. Now he saw his chance. He lived near — near to him who knew all the woodland paths — and as I had returned to claim my property, could I not excuse his service?

I at once granted this favour; before the man had spoken, I had resolved to exchange my forlorn dwelling for that of Isabelle and her brother. There, there would be warmth and light and probably merriment, for they must have had my letter.

So I gladly let the man go, and as he was eagerly lighting his storm lantern, I mentioned, for the pleasure of hearing it, the name of my beloved. The nature of our attachment had been kept secret, but I suppose there might have been some talk. My caretaker looked at me a little oddly, and told me that Isabelle had been married, for two years or more.

I detained him, grasping his greatcoat with a strength that seemed other than my own.

But, though utterly alarmed by my demeanour, he had little more to tell me. The brother was dead, the man she had married of a station below her own. They were living in her old home.

On hearing this, I at once knew what to do. Disguising my fury, I sent the caretaker off with a gold piece and good wishes.

The night was too wild for me to remain at the open door, but drawing aside the slightly tattered curtains of an upper window, I watched the light of the storm lantern disappear into the bare woods.

Thus it came that I was alone in my deserted home on Christmas Eve, determined on murder, and lit only by a rush light.

I had at once decided to kill Isabelle’s husband.’

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

“Being forsaken of God and man,” said the mistress of the house, glancing about to see if the children were all asleep. And so they were, save those who had crept away, and whose distant laughter could be faintly heard.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Yes, responded the old man vigorously. I believe I was thus forsaken. Consider how many curious circumstances had led to my being there, alone, at that precise hour, with that precise news. I was beyond reason. I merely recalled to mind several incidents of my travels that would be considered barbarous in England. I found I had become hardened to ideas of cruelty and violence. I was no longer the civilised creature I had been when I left Cambridge University. It seemed obvious that my supplanter was not fit to live, and that it was I who must remove him from the earth. I went into one of the kitchens, the place most likely to be furnished with what I needed. And there, indeed, I found food and wine and a long, thin knife, such as cooks use for the slicing of meat.

It had recently been in use and was well sharpened. I regarded it as put directly into my hand. My plan was simple. I would call on this faithless couple, and keep this weapon hidden in my cloak. Then I would kill him, in front of her. I had learned how such deeds were done. Indeed, although I had always acted in self-defence, I was no novice in the use of steel.

There was an oil lamp in the kitchen. I lit that, as the tallow candle was sputtering out and took it up to the great library I knew so well, and where some of my happiest hours had been passed.

I was disgusted to see that the caretaker had used this noble apartment as a sleeping place, for, in an alcove where I had kept an elegant Etruscan vase, a rude bed, with heavy blankets, had been rigged up.

I dropped the green moiré curtain, still in place though frayed, across the unsightly couch, and sat down at my familiar desk. I wished to be entirely cool, but really there was very little to think about. My victims would, of course, admit me joyfully or with pretence of joy, and in a matter of moments I should have my revenge. I recalled my letter, addressed to Isabelle in her maiden name and in endearing terms. Would that put them to an embarrassment? I doubted it. I doubted much, even if I had written that letter. That lapse of time — which would be argued in their defence — tormented me. I ran into the hall, half fearing I should find it empty, save for the mouldering furniture. But there was my modest luggage and sandalwood box. What was I to do with my precious plants? I took the box into the library and set it on the desk. Brooding over it, I imagined the dry anatomies it contained, spreading into a million stars or florets, like the glittering sparkles, like the diamonds worn by tired dancers, like the reflection in the mirrors in the riverside ballroom. Was there not a virtue in this plant that made it almost a universal panacea?

But now that I had lost Isabelle, I cared nothing for humanity.

At one time I had thought that the heavenly powers had directed me in my perils and labours; now I was about to tear open the box and destroy the contents, when a knock sounded through the house.

Already guilty in intention, I started fearfully. But I soon reassured myself. This could be no other than the stupid caretaker, who had lost his way in the wood, or forgotten something. I should soon be rid of him. So I went smoothly to the door, and there was an old fellow, a tramp or vagabond, hardly to be seen in the starlight or the gleam of the lamp I held.

“It is Christmas Eve,” he said. “Can you give me a lodging?”

I thought that I heard church bells in the distance, and this rather confounded me. As I hesitated, the old fellow had slipped into the hall. He looked so miserable that I said — what could the offer cost me? — “You may stay here with what hospitality you can find. As for me, I have an errand, I must abroad—”

“First show me the bed that in your great kindness you offer,” said he with a beautiful courtesy.

I led the way to the library. I thought it odd that a stranger knocked at such an hour.

I was a little jostled in my thoughts. Setting the lamp on the desk, I regarded him closely. Not only was he poor, dejected and old, but he seemed maimed as if beneath his ragged garments he was crushed or twisted. He shuffled along with difficulty to the bed in the alcove that I exposed by lifting the curtain. As he crept painfully under the coverlets, I said, “I shall go down to the kitchen and heat you some wine.”

“Can your errand wait, then?” he asked softly.

“As long as that,” I replied.

I took the lamp, leaving him in darkness, blew up the charcoal in the grate, heated the wine, and took it upstairs with some biscuits I found.

As soon as the lamp was replaced on the desk, I glanced at the alcove. The curtain still hung in place. I forced myself to think of Isabelle and what I intended to do. “How vexing,” I thought, “that the coming of this stranger should have diverted me, for one single instant, from what I had planned so instantly and so positively.”

“Yes, I am right,” I declared aloud. “I have been forsaken and betrayed.”

“Peace on earth to men of good will,” said my visitor.

“I thank you,” I replied, and I was surprised that there was anyone to give me this ancient greeting.

“Come and fetch your wine — I’ll not pamper you,” I said toughly, in order to harden myself against him. I began searching for the knife, but I could not find it. Compelled to be quite composed, I sat down, took my head in my hands and tried to think it all out.

First, I must find the knife. Perhaps I had left it in the kitchen. How foolish to allow myself to be disturbed by the fact that a stranger knocked.

Perhaps it would be best to destroy the plants first. I could do that with my bare hands.

I opened the sandalwood box.

How often I had gloated over those dry twig-like objects and the benefits to humanity they contained. How often I had dwelt on Isabelle’s rapture when she should bestow her name on the marvellous plant!

Now hatred should destroy what love had found.

I voiced that sentiment to myself, thinking how fine it sounded and seized the rootlets in their moss wrappings. They began to twist and swell in my grasp, as if they had been so many snakes.

I dropped them in a rage and heard myself crying out: “This is your doing!”

There was no answer from the alcove, now lapped in shadow.

Meanwhile the plants were becoming unmanageable. They twisted out of my hands, and flew upwards like rockets, into a shower of stars. Or so I thought — or so I thought! I retreated hastily from the desk, and pulled aside the curtain of the alcove. And there, calmly watching me, was the most beautiful, beautiful being — ’

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

The old man shaded his eyes and whispered to himself: “Such wings!”

“You think it was a dream?” asked the master of the house kindly.

The old man smiled to himself and shook his head.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

It was morning. I put my sandalwood box under my arm. It was Christmas morning, and I called on my old friend with a present. She was pleased to see me, for she had thought me dead long ago. She accepted the plants, now dry again in their dry mosses — and with them some hope, for her husband was dying of a lung disease.

The chemists compounded the roots, and they cured my rival. I forgot that I had ever hated either of them; we always used to spend Christmas Day together.’

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

“But who reposed in your alcove?” asked the master of the house. “It is he to whom you owe everything.”

“I never saw him again,” said the old man. “He might visit you any time. Especially I think when you feel most forsaken.”

“He was also a dream,” said one of the youths.

“No, sir, for look what I found on that humble pillow.”

He pulled out his watch chain and they gathered round to see a feather that seemed to be of the finest gold, but delicate beyond all mortal workmanship.

The Fireside Book of Yuletide Stories (1948)

THE GREY CHAMBER

Young Blendau was travelling to Italy in the suite of a German princess to whom he acted as secretary. Arrived in the town in the north of Germany where the princess had decided to remain several days, he obtained permission to visit a certain M. Rebmann, who then held the office of chancellor to an adjacent royal estate. This gentleman lived several miles from the town where the princess and her train had halted.

Blendau had been educated with him and had not seen him since he was fourteen years old, that is to say, for about seven years. He thought, therefore, that he would make this visit a surprise to this friend and his family, and as he knew the country perfectly well he hired a horse and set out alone across the forests although it was the middle of winter.

The weather was very fine in the morning, but in the afternoon he perceived that the sky became covered over, and towards evening a heavy snow began to fall. This caused a considerable delay to Blendau: the path became heavy, large snowflakes blew into his eyes and blinded him so that he could not guide his horse properly; he mistook his way several times, and though he calculated on reaching M. Rebmann’s early in the afternoon, it was not till nine o’clock at night that he at last arrived, cold and exhausted, at this friend’s, having made a detour of twenty miles.

M. Rebmann hardly recognised him, so much had he changed since he had last seen him. When, however, he discovered who was this late guest he received him with great pleasure and only regretted that his wife and children had gone to the neighbouring town on the occasion of the marriage of a relative and would not return for several days.

He ordered a good meal for his friend and some of the best wine in his cellar, and after Blendau had drunk three bottles of Meersteiner and gossiped over all that had happened to him during the last seven years he felt the fatigue and vexation of his long cold ride pass. Nevertheless, an extreme lassitude overcame his spirits and he was forced at last to break off the hilarious conversation and demand permission to retire to bed.

M. Rebmann admitted with a laugh that this put him in a difficulty. His lady was away and all the chambers save those occupied by the family were dismantled, while the prudent housewife had taken with her the key to the coffers which held the sheets, the coverlets, and the mattresses. On calling the old servant, Bridget, and putting to her his difficulty, she replied: “There is a bed already made in the Grey Chamber — you know, sir, the guest chamber. M. Blendau can sleep there if he pleases.”

“No,” replied Rebmann. “My friend Blendau would not wish to pass the night in the Grey Chamber, of that I am sure.”

“And why not, sir?” asked the old woman.

“What, in the Grey Chamber! Have you already forgotten the Lady Gertrude?” Mr Rebmann turned slyly to his guest.

“Bah! That’s such a long time ago that I thought no more of it,” cried Blendau. “What, do you think I am still troubled by such childish follies? Go along with you! Let me pass the night in this famous chamber. I am no longer afraid of ghosts or evil spirits, and if the beautiful Gertrude should come to keep me company I am so tired that I don’t think she’ll prevent me from sleeping.”

M. Rebmann gave the young man a doubtful glance.

“Well, my friend, you’ve certainly singularly changed. Seven years ago nothing in the world would have made you consent to sleep in the Grey Chamber, even if you’d had two people to keep you company. Where did you find so much courage?”

“Seven years ago is seven years ago,” laughed Blendau. “I have grown up since then. For five years I have lived in the capital, remember. Believe me, I now know too much to give any credit to old legends.”

“Very well, my friend, I’ve no more objection to make. May Heaven watch upon your rest. Bridget, take the light and conduct M. Blendau into the Grey Chamber.”

Blendau said good night to his old friend, then he followed Bridget to the famous Grey Chamber, situated at the second stage of the extremity of one of the wings of the castle.

Bridget put her two candles on a dressing-table on either side of a mirror of oval form surrounded by an interlaced antique border. The old woman seemed ill at ease in this vast chamber; she made a slight curtsey to Blendau and hurried away.

The young traveller stood for a moment considering the apartment which had once been familiar enough to him and had always, in the days of his youth, filled him with terror. It was still in the same state as it had been when he had seen it last. The enormous iron stove bore the date of 1616; a little beyond this, in the corner, was a narrow door the upper part of which was composed of squares of ancient glass, heavily leaded. This led to a long, sombre passage which wound round the tower to the subterranean dungeons.

The furniture consisted of six ormolu chairs, two tables in heavy brasswork supported by finely carved stag’s feet, and a great bed with a baldaquin which was hung with curtains of heavy grey silk embroidered in tarnished gold. Nothing in the room had been changed for perhaps more than a hundred years, for the chancellorship of this royal domain had been confided from time immemorial to the family Rebmann.

The châtelaine Gertrude was of an even greater antiquity. How often had not Blendau heard her horrible story! According to this old legend, which he had heard whispered fearfully by his nurse in his boyhood, Gertrude had from an early age vowed to God her youth and beauty, and had been about to enclose herself forever in a convent when the splendours of her youthful loveliness had aroused the base desires of a certain Graf Hugues, who one night broke into her room, this very Grey Chamber, and despoiled her by force of her honour.

Gertrude swore on the crucifix that she had called for help, but in this lonely part of the castle, so far from the other apartments, who could hear the cries of agony and innocence? The wickedness of Hugues did not entail any consequences that could reveal it, but the unhappy Gertrude avowed the crime to her confessor, who refused her permission to enter the convent and closed to her the door of the sanctuary of the virgins of the Lord. And as she had intended to tempt God by concealing her fault and taking the veil, he told her that in expiation she must suffer the torments of purgatory during three hundred years.

The wretched girl, a prey to despair, poisoned herself and expired in the Grey Chamber at the age of nineteen years. Her rigorous penitence was still lasting and would not be terminated for another forty years, that is to say in 1850, and until the expiration of the fatal term, Gertrude would continue to appear every night in the Grey Chamber.

Blendau had frequently heard this tale and he had even met several people who were ready to swear that they had seen Gertrude in the Grey Chamber. All these tales agreed that the phantom had a dagger in one hand, probably to pierce the heart of the perfidious lover, and a crucifix in the other, destined without doubt to reconcile the criminal with Heaven in offering him the image of the Saviour who died to expiate the sins of mankind.

The ghostly apparition only showed itself in the Grey Chamber, and for this reason this apartment had long remained uninhabited. But when M. Rebmann inherited the castle and the post of chancellor, he had turned the haunted room into a guest-chamber as a proof of his complete disbelief in phantom or legend.

Blendau looked steadily round the room. Although he had boasted of not believing any longer in ghosts, he was not too much at ease. He locked the door by which he had entered and the glass door which gave on to the long, obscure passage. He put out one of the candles, placed the other near the bed, undressed, and slipped beneath the sheets and under the warm coverlet, recommending his soul to God, then extinguished the other candle, sunk his head upon the pillow, and at once fell into a profound sleep.

But about two hours afterwards he woke and heard a clock in the neighbouring tower strike midnight. He opened his eyes and saw that there was a faint light in the chamber. He raised himself on his elbow — extreme terror caused him to become immediately wide awake. The curtains at the end of the bed were half-pulled and his glance fell on the mirror on the dressing-table directly in front of him. In this he could see the reflection of the spectre of Gertrude wrapped in a shroud, a crucifix in the left hand and a dagger in the right.

Blendau’s blood froze in his veins: this that he saw before him was not a dream, a vision, but a frightful reality, it was not a skeleton or a shade, it was Gertrude herself, the face discoloured with the livid tint of death. A garland of ivy and rosemary was interlaced among her dry, colourless locks, and as she moved Blendau heard the rustle of the leaves of this dead chaplet and the sound of the hem of the shroud dragging on the floor. He saw in the mirror by the light of the two candles, both of which were now brightly burning, the fixed brilliancy of the eyes of Gertrude, the pallor of her lips.

He tried to leap from his bed and to run to the door by which he had entered, but the fright had paralysed him — he found that he could not move.

Gertrude kissed the crucifix. She seemed to be praying under her breath; Blendau distinguished the movement of her lips which still carried the marks of the burning poison. He saw the eyes of the unfortunate wretch turned towards heaven; she raised her dagger and advanced towards the bed with a terrible glance.

Blendau was about to lose consciousness as she opened the curtains of the bed. Horror was painted in her fixed and inanimate eyes as she perceived a man crouching on the pillows, and she pressed her little dagger on the bosom of him whom she took for her false lover. As she did so a cold drop of poison fell from her garland on to Blendau’s pallid face. At this he gave a piercing cry, flung himself from the bed, and rushed to the window to cry for help.

But Gertrude prevented him. When he reached the window she was there with one hand on the catch so that he could not open it. With the other she caught him round the waist and he gave a piercing cry, for he felt through his nightshirt the glacial impression of the cold sweat of death coming from her clasp.

He observed that she had now neither crucifix nor dagger, and that she seemed no longer to wish for the life of the unhappy Blendau, but, what was more horrible, that she appeared to offer and to expect the embraces of love.

As the icy spectre folded him in her arms Blendau dragged himself away with long shudders of terror and hurled himself towards the little glass door.

As he opened this (it was not locked, though he had turned the key himself the night before) he found himself face to face with a skeleton that blocked the long passage — that of Graf Hugues, without doubt. His ghastly face, on which still clung a remnant of skin and muscle, was distorted in a frightful grimace. He entered the chamber, letting the door fall behind him with a sound that echoed like thunder throughout the tower.

Blendau, between the two phantoms, that of Gertrude and that of the skeleton, sank to the ground unconscious into darkness.

When he recovered, the cold wintry dawn was showing through the unshuttered windows. Blendau, stiff and chilled, his shirt still bathed with sweat, rose from the floor and with trembling hands searched for his clothes. Though unutterably weary and shaken by nausea, nothing would have persuaded him to endeavour to obtain any repose in that apartment.

At first he endeavoured to persuade himself he had been the victim of some frightful dream, but such an idea was no longer plausible when he perceived, on the dressing-table in front of the mirror, the second candle that he had placed near his bed and put out after he had got between the sheets. He remarked that these candles were half burnt down, although they had only just been lit for a second the night before. He also discovered that the two doors which he had locked the night before were again fastened as he had left them.

Blendau had not the courage to relate his adventure to anyone. He did not wish to be laughed at for a susceptible fool and made the subject of the pleasantries of the family of Rebmann. On the other hand, if he was able to persuade his host of the reality of his vision, who would dare to continue to inhabit the castle where Gertrude and the hideous skeleton of her lover had a rendezvous every evening?

Then, again, if he was silent, he would be asked to spend another night in the Grey Chamber and that he felt he had not the strength to do.

He therefore dressed himself in haste, crept through the castle while everyone was still asleep, went to the stable, mounted his horse, and without taking leave of anyone rode away through the snowy forest towards the city.

The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949)

THE TALLOW CANDLE
writing as
JOSEPH SHEARING

The learned and the unlearned, the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the noble and the beggar are alike interested by the affair of Miss Parsons, and for months this was almost the only topic of conversation, not merely in the Metropolis, but throughout the whole Kingdom.

Miss Parsons, a pamphlet, London

Mr. Kempe travelled in haste from Norfolk to Greenwich where he took solitary lodgings. He was a fine young man dressed with careful elegance, well equipped and handsomely supplied with money. But his demeanour was distressed and he at once shut himself in his alien chamber to consider his position. His wife had died, with her infant child, a few weeks ago after eleven months of marriage, and her younger sister Frances had undertaken the charge of his house. At the first opportunity she had declared her love for him; he was not unmoved, for he saw in her the qualities that had attracted him to his wife — the sisters were much alike — but the law forbade their marriage. Alarmed at the passion of the young woman and the tumult in his own heart, Mr. Kempe had written a farewell message to Frances, shut up his house, and fled to London. His business, that of a stockbroker, could very well be transacted from the capital. He debated if he should wait on a third sister, honourably married and resident in Pall Mall, begging her to have a care of Frances. He confounded the law, for Frances would have suited him very well; she had a substantial dowry and he was moved by her vehemently protested devotion, A practical and a warm-blooded man, he found himself in an irritating dilemma. And when the sun had set, and the Thames was running grey past the noble façade of the Royal Hospital, and the massed shipping before the wharf was black against a pale sky, it was not resolved. Throwing on his hat and cloak, he at last left the lodging, and rode to the “Black Bull,” in Holborn, to which hostelry he had told his agent to address his letters. When he arrived there his dark mood was not lightened. A dispatch had followed fast on his heels. Miss Frances, hearing of his flight, had followed him, and by now would be in London, having travelled, “by the aid of a pair of oars,” a hundred miles in one day. The faithful agent added that the wayward creature was not intending to seek the protection or countenance of her married sister in Pall Mall, but that her sole goal was the company of Mr. Kempe, and this openly avowed to the whole countryside.

Where was she likely to go? She, a rustic bred lady, who knew nothing of London?

The agent supplied this information. The infatuated girl, who was as inexperienced as desperate, was proceeding to the only hostelry she knew of in the capital, the “Turk’s Head,” St. Paul’s Churchyard, that she had heard mentioned in the business conversation of her neighbours. This decided Mr. Kempe. Though the inn was respectable enough, it was not one for a female travelling alone; indeed, there was no place in London fit to receive Miss Frances beyond the houses of her sister or her friends.

Proceeding at once to the city, Mr. Kempe lodged himself at the “Turk’s Head” and there awaited with mingled exasperation and excitement the arrival of his errant sister-in-law.

Frances appeared, flushed from her adventure, but neither afraid nor ashamed.

She perceived him at once, and threw herself into his arms. There could be but one end to such a meeting. He took her back with him to his Greenwich lodging and presented her to his unsuspecting landlady as his wife — Mrs. Kempe.

Frances vowed the world well lost for love, promised obedience, loyalty and discretion, and her complete acceptance of the effaced part she would have to take as the hidden mistress of her brother-in-law.

The arrangement did not really please Mr. Kempe; he was by instinct, breeding and profession respectable and he had no wish to cut himself off from his usual life and his ordinary pleasures and acquaintances.

But Frances overbore him. She was able to persuade him that she would make any sacrifice worth while. And indeed her beauty, youth and outspoken passion were impossible to resist. The young man felt that this was the sister he should have married in the first place, and that in Frances he had found a rare treasure.

His conscience, however, was somewhat burdened, for he realized, as perhaps the girl did not, how awful a step she was taking, one that cut her off, not only from all hopes of marriage, but from any acceptance in society.

Henceforth Frances would be dead to the polite world, and known only as Frances L——g even on documents, so much scandal would attach to her name.

Impelled by these considerations, Mr. Kempe, on the following morning, summoned his agent, and made a will in favour of Frances, leaving her all his property, as if she had been his wife. “Truly,” he declared, “I would make you this, were it in my power.” Not to be outdone in generosity, Frances said she desired to have all her fortune willed to her lover, and desired the agent to have the two documents drawn up in a legal manner and brought back for signing.

Mr. Kempe now began to protest that Greenwich had been but a temporary refuge and if they were to settle in London, or near, it had better be in the capital. “Where you will,” she replied, “as long as we be together.”

At this time a religious fit was upon her and she begged her lover, for whose sake she had jeopardized her soul, to go with her to church.

“Well,” said he, “so I will, but remember that I did not seduce you from the way of honour, my dear girl, but that you followed me, maybe to the sore loss of both of us.”

“Ay,” she replied, “so it is, and I would in no way disturb you, but if, one day, you are going to the city on business, I shall come with you, and we can stop at a church on the way, and may be also find good lodgement in London.”

The village notary drew up the two wills and they were properly signed and witnessed. Mr. Kempe felt a twinge of annoyance against fate when he saw the extent of Miss Frances’ possessions, that were greater than he had supposed. She would have made a most suitable wife. Since she had joined him in Greenwich he had found continual satisfaction in her company and for her sake he was willing to leave his pleasant life in Norfolk and live hidden in London, like a fugitive, almost a criminal. Accordingly, he rode to the capital with Frances pillion and began to look for lodgings near the Mansion House. But Frances complained of the rooms she saw, though sweetly, and said that she had not yet had her church service. So Mr. Kempe took her to early prayers at St. Sepulcher’s near the Old Bailey. The lady protested that this was a dismal place, for she had heard that from this church tolled the bell for those condemned to death on the day of their hanging.

“Tush!” said Mr. Kempe. “’Tis well enough,” and they crept into the aisle of the sombre building. The clerk hurried forward, seeing such a genteel couple, and strangers, the gentleman in richly laced clothes, the lady in a morning dress of Indian muslin under furs, and very handsome, with a high nose and a brilliant complexion.

The clerk showed them into a pew and they offered up their prayers, Fanny, at least, in no formal manner, but with a heartfelt petition for pardon for her wayward passion that had led her into sin, for so she could not but term her connection with her brother-in-law.

On leaving the church, Mr. Kempe asked the clerk if he could recommend lodgings for himself and his wife as he was newly come from the country on business.

The clerk, by name Parsons, offered his own house that was near by. Snow Hill, near Smithfield. The couple went at once to inspect these rooms and Mr. Kempe accepted them, but when they had returned to the street the lady demurred.

The neighbourhood was low, she declared, and the apartments mean, with a forbidding air of poverty; there was a common shop on the ground floor of the two-storied, flat-fronted house, and ragged children were playing in the narrow street.

Mr. Kempe replied that this was the very retreat for them, since it would be the last place in which they would be looked for and they had to beware of the sister in Pall Mall, who must have heard the hue and cry raised in Norfolk on the flight of Frances. Presently, he added, he would find a better residence, but for the present, when she had just thrown in her lot with him so recklessly, it were wise for Frances to endure the inconveniences of the poor apartments.

She agreed at once and hung on his arm as they left the street. Then they were met by a gypsy who, by means of birds in a cage, importuned them to have their fortunes told. Frances agreed, to the vexation of Mr. Kempe, and the bird flew out with a card on which was written: “You shall make such a stir as will not be forgotten, not in three hundred years.”

On this they laughed immoderately, for neither was known beyond a few neighbours and acquaintances, and the woman thought of nothing but domestic love, and the man had neither gifts nor wishes to raise him above the common rank. So they fee’d the gypsy, because they were happy and because of the birds, and went on, forgetting her for a vulgar cheat, poor fool of fortune. Returning to Greenwich, they took up their luggage and came again to the clerk’s house near Snow Hill. And Frances, looking up, saw that the name of the street was “Cock Lane.”

When they entered the house there was a young girl crying in the passage, with her thin arms over her face, and they paused, out of compassion. She whispered that she had been reproved for a fault, there being much work laid on her for a drudge.

“Here, buy yourself some ribbons,” said Mr. Kempe, and gave her a piece of silver; she, peering up, and seeing him merry and kind, began to shudder. She appeared very miserable and her eyes were pale and dull.

“You shall wait on me,” said Frances, “and I shall see you better provided for….”

But it was at Mr. Kempe the girl was staring.

“Tush,” he said, smiling. “You’d be pretty enough with the ribbons.”

They had the best rooms in the house, a parlour and a bedroom on the first floor.

The girl was Elizabeth Parsons, daughter of the clerk; she, though so young and small, helped her mother keep house for her father.

Seeing her so patched and starveling, Frances gave her a gown and a cap, and Mr. Kempe advised the father not to harass the child.

So her conditions were better, yet she remained sullen, only continually watching the lovers, and fawning on Mr. Kempe when she found him alone, like a stray dog pleading for a friend. This he disliked, but being good-natured, and good-humoured also, patted her hair and praised her for a comely Betsy, which she never was.

Mr. Kempe returning to Norfolk on affairs, Frances remained hidden in Cock Lane, and, being lonely, took the girl to sleep in her room on a little pallet bed.

In the morning Frances rang for Mrs. Parsons and told her that there had been violent noises in the night, like one striking heavy blows. The landlady said it must have been the carpenter next door, working late.

Mr. Kempe, continuing in Norfolk, Frances on another night of melancholy asked Betsy to share her room, and again, in the morning, spoke of the noises. “And it was not the carpenter, as this is Sunday.”

The next night Mrs. Parsons sat up with her daughter and Frances, and there were the blows again.

Betsy was drowsy and lay still; her mother was for fetching the Rev. Mr. Linden, but he would not come.

So the occasion passed. Mr. Kempe returned and Frances entreated him not to leave her again and also to take her from this house. But this was not convenient, he said, as he had not only paid in advance for the rooms but had lent Parsons money.

The first night of his return, the knocks were so loud that he sprang out of bed, and came with his sword to the passage, but there was no one there but the child, with a tallow candle in a pewter stick, and her eyes upturned in her head. “I could love you as well as she does,” she said. He thought she was in a dream, and bade her be off for a little mischief, but he did not like the leer on her thin lips and the hunch of her skinny shoulders. In her long shift and cap she looked like an old woman.

The next day Frances insisted on leaving the house that was beginning to be a matter of comment to the neighbours. The miserable Betsy clung to Mr. Kempe to stay him, and when he put her aside she muttered, “Well, I shall bring you back.”

Frances, catching sight of her, swooned, and Mr. Kempe said he would take her from that house that was not only inconvenient but accursed. She was so ill that a Dr. Cooper was sent for, and he took her in a coach to a lodging he knew of in Bartlett Street, Clerkenwell. A nurse was provided, and the services of an apothecary, but her spirits sunk; she appeared to he under a malediction, for no name could be put to her disease; though the medical men spoke of smallpox there were no symptoms of that malady. Mr. Kempe, distracted, asked her if she would see her sister, then resident in Pall Mall. But Frances was unconscious. A clergyman was then sent for, but she expired, four days after her removal from Cock Lane, on 2 February, 1760, and was decently interred at the Church of St. John’s, Clerkenwell. Mr. Kempe, disliking this turn of events, and dreading scandal, went abroad to the Low Countries, where his business kept him in Antwerp and Rotterdam, and did not return to London for two years.

He hoped that by then the life and death of Frances would have been forgotten, for he had heard nothing from her sole relative, the sister who resided in Pall Mall. He had made no new amorous connection, and had become somewhat overcast in his disposition, by reason of dwelling on Frances, how impulsively she had come to him, and how suddenly she had been snatched from him.

Going into the city to visit the Exchange, he passed through a dim alley, and felt someone pull at his sleeve. It was a mild day of thin rain, but at this moment the young man was blown on by a full blast of keen cold wind, out of humour with the weather.

As he turned he saw Elizabeth Parsons, of the lodging-house in Cock Lane, gazing at him with supplicating eyes, and he shook off her thin hand on his arm.

“Do you remember me?” she asked.

“Ay, well enough, and in no pleasant manner, and I must beg your leave to pass.”

She was grown, and sickly in appearance; her tight bodice was laced across a flat bosom, and her skirt touched the ground; a cap was tied under her chin. She would not move, but slipped forward to stand in his way. And the cold wind blew strongly. She seemed a woman to him, but he addressed her as a child and endeavoured to put her aside. But she continued to beseech him, with praying hands, as one who had waited long for him, and entreated his countenance.

Mr. Kempe tried to pass on; his limbs felt heavy and he saw a startling sight. A serpent seemed to form out of the agitated air and slipped along the ground behind Betsy. He pushed her to the wall to stare after it, but it was gone.

“You had better come to terms,” she said, and she pulled out of her pocket a ribbon that he had once worn in his hair, and told him she had stolen it and cherished it for two years. “You know how to please,” she added, “for I have listened at panel and heard you flatter and caress your Fanny.”

“I shall wait on your father to demand he shuts you up,” said Mr. Kempe, and broke from her at last. Then the fine rain descended again and the wind ceased.

After this she haunted him, not speaking, but lying in wait in doorways and arches, by whatever road he went to his affairs, until he braced himself to go to that disagreeable house that was kept by Mr. Parsons, the clerk of St. Sepulchre’s. Some heat followed, for the father declared that his daughter seldom went abroad, and never alone. She was in low health and shared a room with another child they had taken to keep her company. This lie (as he took it to be) was set out with such insolence that Mr. Kempe reminded the man that he owed him money and that if he did not pay he would be sued. On which the young man left Cock Lane, not without a shudder. Recalling the sinister appearance of the child, and the silent manner in which she came upon him, and the frequency of his meetings with her, he began to feel a dread lest the clerk had spoken the truth and that what he had seen might be a phantom or double of the malignant creature. And recalling the death of Frances, he feared for himself. So, thinking to silence this abominable family, he summoned the man Parsons for the debt he owed. On that day there was a buzz on the Exchange about the haunted house with which the citizens of London were beginning to be much concerned. Mr. Parsons had complained that to the great terror of his family there had been such a knocking and scratching throughout the night as had caused him to have the wainscot taken down, without effect.

These stories continued from day to day, and Mr, Kempe could not avoid them. The noise was most violent under the bed where the two children lay, and the Parsonses related how the elder child, when sleeping in the same room with Mrs. Kempe (as Frances had been named), had before been disturbed in a like manner.

The clerk now apprehended that the house was haunted and said that his daughter had seen the apparition of a woman in a blazing light.

There was then a burst of gossip in the neighbourhood, much heightened when a publican, bringing in beer to the Parsonses at eleven o’clock on a February night, saw this spectre at the head of the stairs, in a light so brilliant that he could read, by the beam it cast, the time on a clock before the charity school, seen beyond the window of the clerk’s house. The ghost beckoned to him, but he fled in terror and was taken very, very ill. About an hour later Mr. Parsons himself came on the figure, lurking in the corner of another room, and declared positively it was Mrs. Kempe. As the noises were constantly under the bed of Elizabeth, whether she slept alone or not, and though she frequently moved her chamber, she was interrogated about the apparition, and she also swore that it was that of Mrs. Kempe.

About this time a well-placed gentleman of Norfolk received a letter, very ill put together, and with no name, setting out how Mr. Kempe had employed an agent to bring Miss L——g from her home and friends and take her to his lodgings at Greenwich, where the faithful girl drew up a will in his favour, that soon afterwards she was removed from Greenwich to Cock Lane, then to Clerkenwell, where she died suddenly. Her sister, hearing of this illness, went to see her, but she was denied even a sight of her body, the coffin being screwed down. Soon after Mr. Kempe proved the will in Doctors’ Commons, to the prejudice of her relatives, who had lived in great harmony and love together until this fatal accident. This gentleman passed this letter round until it became public, and a strong rumour arose that the spirit of Mrs. Kempe had taken possession of Betsy Parsons because she had been poisoned by her lover.

All this Mr. Kempe heard with terror. He had no friends in the affair, all being against him for taking away his wife’s sister and keeping her hidden in London. He brought forward the doctor, clergyman and apothecary who had attended Frances, and all testified to the great care of her he had had, and the great charge he had been at, while as to the taking of her fortune, he explained that she had left many debts and her affairs in much disorder, so that, when all was settled, he was hardly a shilling the richer.

All this was of no avail, the disturbances in the Parsons’ house continued; the girl fell in frequent fits and several ladies and gentlemen sat up with her, to no purpose, until on 13 January, a respectable clergyman was sent for, who established communication with the supposed spirit, the knocks to be used as a code; “Yes” was to be one knock, “No” was to be two knocks. By this means, asking questions, it was soon established that the spirit was that of Frances L——g, and that she had died of arsenic given her in purl by Mr. Kempe.

Even on this he could do nothing but rally his friends about him, for no one had weapons against an inhabitant of the invisible world. The newspapers now took up the business, and pamphlets were written on each side of the case, that of the unhappy Mr. Kempe and that of the Parsonses, which might be said to be that of the ghostly visitor. Many new touches appeared, among them the declaration of Frances that the noises she had heard predicted her own death, while others swore they were warnings sent by her dead sister, the real Mrs. Kempe. New characters appeared in the drama, first among them a Scotch girl, Mary Fraser, named “Carrots,” who helped with the work in the Parsons’ house. To her Frances appeared, bound in her shroud, without hands. This girl stated that she had been much attached to Mrs. Kempe (meaning Frances), but she had, in reality, joined the clerk’s household after that lady’s removal to Clerkenwell.

The whole of London was now in commotion over the Cock Lane ghost, and a press of people filled that narrow street at all hours of the day and night. Mr. Kempe, casting about for deliverance, asked that the girl might be removed to another house, where all the strictest precautions against fraud could be taken. The divines in charge of the case agreed and Elizabeth, shivering violently, and in a pitiful condition of exhaustion, was taken up in blankets by some sober matrons and put to bed in a house at the corner of Hosier Lane.

At once the bed began to heave, and the knocks resounded. There were twenty persons present, including two negroes, and a number of questions were asked and replied to by knocks. By these means it was confirmed that the spirit was Frances L——g and that she declared that she had been brought to her untimely end by red arsenic given her in a cup of purl by Mr. Kempe. She stated that she wished to see him hanged, that he soon would come to this dreadful end, that it eased her to communicate with the living, that she had taken possession of the child, Elizabeth Parsons, and could follow her about anywhere. She also had a message for Carrots, and on being given test questions answered them accurately, as that there were two negroes in the room and three clergymen. She gave the colour of a watch that was held up as black, which was correct, it being in a black shagreen case. A friend of Mr. Kempe’s had insinuated himself into this company, and disputed the truth of the manifestations. He desired he might take the child to his own house, where she should have a maid and whoever else her father pleased to attend her, but Mr. Parsons refused this offer. The spirit was then asked when it would depart, and replied about four o’clock in the morning, at which hour it disappeared from the house in Hosier’s Lane, and entered the bedroom of the landlord of the “Wheatsheaf” near by, knocking on the ceiling above his head as he lay asleep, to his great dismay.

The rational part of the company and the friends of Mr. Kempe’s still talking of fraud, the child was moved again to a house in Crown and Cushion Court, at the upper end of Cow Lane, where the company assembled again, and a lawyer, sent by Mr. Kempe, spoke angrily to the girl on which she became uneasy and wept.

At this, the knocking was louder and faster than before, and there was a sound like the fluttering of large wings. But there were no answers to any questions while this gentleman was in the room, so, after some altercation, he was induced to leave.

The spirit was then questioned, and it answered that it would have ease from seeing Mr. Kempe, whereon one of the company objected why did it not go to him, on which the reply was that he must come to her, in the room where they had lived together in Cock Lane.

The question then was, “If your body was taken up, would you be helped?” And the answer, “Yes.” Further precautions against fraud being taken, Elizabeth was lodged in the house of the matron of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. This news leaking out, a multitude gathered round the place expecting some marvels. But the child slept soundly, only there was a continuous sound, as of a rat scratching on a cane chair. About seven in the morning the child woke in a fit of tears and desired to be taken home, asserting that her familiar would give her no peace until Mr. Kempe was brought to the room where he had lived with her when in the flesh. Yet first she was brought to the schoolhouse in Cock Lane, where further investigations were undertaken, with no result. So she came again to her room in Mr. Parsons’ house, where the manifestations continued.

The position of Mr. Kempe was now painful, even perilous, even among his friends some of whom thought he was trifling with an awful being of the other world in refusing to go to the child’s chamber.

And there, at length, he went, about eighty people being crowded into the room, among them many persons of rank and fashion, of intelligence and even of royal birth, so taken was the town by the spirit, known to the wits as Scratching Fanny, taken by some to be an impostor, and by many more as supernatural and terrible.

Mr. Kempe was pushed forward to the bed that was in a niche by the window, that was deep set and curtained. To his left was the fireplace; above it a mantelpiece with Staffordshire figures and a tarnished mirror. The fire was low, the room heated from the crowd. Beside the hearth stood a joint stool and Mr. Kempe took his place before that. He was very pale, but resolute; he believed that he confronted the powers of evil. Most of the company believed that he was a murderer and hoped for his hanging at Tyburn. All of them knew him as the seducer from honour of a wealthy young woman whose money he had inherited.

Elizabeth Parsons writhed in the bed to see him and bared her teeth, saying, “I knew that you would come.”

Mr. Kempe found himself strangely placed, and was in a sweat, not wholly from the heat of the fire behind him. The occupant of the bed seemed to change before his dazzled gaze; now it was Frances who had once lain there, then it was a golden woman, who seemed to be the symbol of all women, then it was a sly girl, who mocked at him maliciously for rejecting her love, then a thin child whimpering. And the bed began to heave up and down and violent knockings were heard.

These being interpreted by one of the clergymen present according to the code used, the ghost of Frances was understood to repeat that she had been murdered by Mr. Kempe, that he should hang for the crime. On this one of the gentlemen asked if the spirit would meet the present company by her coffin in the vault of St. John’s, Clerkenwell, and there, by raps, or other signs, give proof of its existence. This the ghost publicly promised, while the child declared she felt it like a mouse running up her back: she held her hands out to be examined, the while shivering and crying. There was the sound as if a result of wings and another again like a rat scratching a cane chair.

“Step closer, sir,” said one of the company to Mr. Kempe, “and see if you can detect a fraud.”

Reluctantly the young man was edged towards the bed, so that he looked directly down on Elizabeth Parsons. Then, in the overheated room, the cold wind blew on him and he saw the serpent, shaped as it were of vapour, coiling in the girl’s bosom, and about to dart on him when it vanished, and a little voice said in his ear, “Why could you not like me?”

To cover his dismay, he spoke loudly of a trick, and made his way to the door, where the man Parsons, in the strongest terms, denied any knowledge or belief of fraud.

“Well,” said he, “we shall see what happens in the vault of St. John’s, for I think the mischief to be in the girl.”

At first the test was made without him, and a crowd of notable people went into the church, and some of them into the vault. The spirit was solemnly required to perform its promise, but silence ensued. Yet there were some not convinced, but who would have the accused man come into the vault. He refused, on which resort was had to the child, through whom the spirit declared that Mr. Kempe must indeed go into the vault himself, and then it would rap on the coffin.

Accordingly he went, keeping his countenance, but appearing very uneasy, and again the spirit was called on, but there was silence.

Most people were now convinced that the child had some means of counterfeiting noises and that there was nothing supernatural in the matter, but a contrivance on the part of Parsons to rid himself of his creditor.

Yet this was not the end of the gossip, for some gave out that Mr. Kempe had had the coffin changed or the body removed, so he was obliged to go with the undertaker, clerk, sexton and some others again into the vault, where the undertaker and sexton easily identified the coffin, which was handsome, yet without a nameplate, for what name had this lady known as Mrs. Kempe? The lid was unscrewed, and Mr. Kempe looked on the face of Frances, which was strangely preserved, even to the high arch of the nose, the lace bonnet being intact, and the woollen shroud very clean. It was immediately remarked that this corpse could not be that of one who had died of smallpox, but might well be that of one dead of arsenical poisoning.

“Sirs,” said Mr. Kempe, “I suspect diabolical dealings in all this affair.”

The child meanwhile had been taken from house to house, and even slung in a hammock, but the noises continued. Since the failure of the spirit to appear in the vault, or in any place where Elizabeth Parsons was absent, the affair became the jest of the town, from being its wonder, and Scratching Fanny was much laughed at.

To Mr. Kempe it was no jest. He set his feet resolutely, as one who stands by an abyss, and drew away from darkness. Since his misfortunes had come from women — his dead wife, his sisters-in-law, Frances, who had pressed him, and the other in Pall Mall, who accused him, and Elizabeth Parsons — he eschewed their company and lived solitary in his chambers, that were then in New Square, the house with the vine. There he forged himself, by much prayer and meditation, a spiritual weapon, that was like a sword to resist the powers of evil. For he was a man innocent of anything save a rash action contrary to his nature, and his undoing was his handsome person, not so much any fault, for he had few.

At the end of his retreat, the fear of God and the image of his dead love, as she lay in her nameless coffin, being before him, he went boldly to the house where Elizabeth Parsons was then being watched and found her tied up, her hands and feet fastened down with fillets.

It was Sunday and the better, Mr. Kempe thought, for his purpose.

“If you do not confess to a gross fraud,” he said, “your father and mother will be sent to Newgate — and you have but till tomorrow morning.”

“You know,” she replied, “there is no fraud. And I do what I do by supernatural powers.”

He looked at her straightly as she lay bound and prostrate in the hammock and said, “Your power, if you possessed any, is gone.”

She twisted as well as she was able and kept her pale glance on him, but he perceived nothing beyond a dishevelled child. There was no cold wind, no snake, and no noise. He went away, much comforted, and spent the night in prayer, kneeling in the window-place. It was full moon and a cloudless winter night, very still for March. And he thought how cold the moonbeam would fall through the Norman arch in the south aisle of the vaults of St. John’s, Clerkenwell.

In the morning a messenger came to inform him that Elizabeth Parsons had been found with two boards under her stays that she was clapping together under the bedclothes; this was a clumsy cheat, soon detected, and all said that these pieces of wood did not make sounds similar to those produced before.

“The power has gone out of her,” murmured Mr. Kempe, but as, humanly speaking, he had to protect his good name and vindicate his character, he brought an action for conspiracy against the Parsonses, the Rev. Mr. Moore, curate of St. Sepulchre’s, Mary Fraser (Carrots), and one Mr. James, as well as one Brown, a publisher, and one Say, a printer. These last two had published and printed pamphlets accepting the evidence of Scratching Fanny that Mr. Kempe was a murderer.

The prosecutor, however, made his peace with them, on their apology, and compounded with the Rev. Mr. Moore and Mr. James, on the payment of three hundred pounds and his costs, which were nearly as much more. Mrs. Parsons was sent to Bridewell for one year, and Mary Fraser for six months. Thus was the affair judged at the Guildhall, before Lord Mansfield and a special jury, the trial lasting twelve hours, the court being filled by women, who buzzed a good deal at the manly good looks of the prosecutor.

As for the grand culprit, as Parsons was considered, he was ordered to be set in the pillory three times in one month, once at the end of Cock Lane, and after that to be imprisoned for two years.

There were satirical poems consigning the Cock Lane ghost to perpetual ridicule, yet there were other sides to the matter than those that might be found by jesters.

Not only did the mob not torment Mr. Parsons in the pillory, but they made a collection of money for him. The Rev. Mr. Moore, overwhelmed by chagrin and sunk in reputation, for he had sincerely believed in the ghost, died of grief, while Mrs. Parsons and Carrots did not long survive the rigours of Bridewell. Mr. Kempe had thus been deeply revenged by the deaths of three of the conspirators (as Lord Mansfield held them to be) and the ruin of the others.

Now a flaw began to show clearly in his character. He was fond of money. Some of his troubles dated from his drawing of Fanny’s fortune, which set her family against him; he had sued a poor man for a small debt, and now he accepted a cash compensation for honest errors from a miserable curate and a humble tradesman. He felt an inner warning that he should give this money to charity, but he kept it, feeling now confident that he was free of his troubles. His contempt of virtue was lamentable. and avarice a sorry vice for one who was young, comely and good-natured. Dreadful were the consequences of his thus putting a worldly price on love and hate. He lost his supernatural protection that had come to him because of his integrity.

For a while he was not molested. He kept clear of women and said his prayers regularly at night.

While her father was serving his term in the King’s Bench prison Elizabeth Parsons fell into a lingering sickness, with trances and paralysis, and died, ignored, in the house of a charitable neighbour near the Mansion House.

Mr. Kempe heard of this, and of her burial in a pauper’s grave, without emotion, though this was the fourth death since sentence had been passed on the conspirators against his life and liberty.

It was July, and Mr. Kempe had been out in the country to attend a wedding, and rode home to London as the sun was setting, his spirits being equable.

As he passed by Temple Bar his horse shied and he perceived a group of women in the shadows who seemed to be chatting together, and pointing at him, as if admiring his fine blue plum-coloured coat with the gold-laced seams, his chestnut curls in a crimson ribbon, and the posy of summer flowers in his bosom. Mr. Kempe could not make them out clearly, for the darkness came on suddenly; it was later, he supposed, than he had thought, for the streets were empty.

He put up his horse at the stables near by, the ostler remarking that thunder was coming up, then returned to New Square. The vine was in full leaf beneath his window from which he believed he saw someone look out, yet knew that this was a delusion, since no one had access to his chambers.

The wall lamp was lit to cast a faint light down the dark stairway as the doomed man went up. The nosegay fell withered out of his bosom.

The door of his room was open and the two sisters, his wife and Frances, were waiting for him, tied up in their shrouds, mute, with dead faces, pale as water waving over a rock they showed against the panelled walls.

Before them was the child, hovering in the air, with long arms hanging down, with fillets at the wrist, like snakes of smoke or vapour stretching out to embrace him.

“We have come to keep house for you,” said a little voice in his ear.

He felt the cold wind, heard the wings flutter and could not pray.

Mr. Kempe died a few months afterwards at Antwerp, under an assumed name, much degraded in person and distracted in mind. He was alone, yet complained to every stranger who would listen to him that he was pursued by a child, who had two others in her company. And when he came to his end, he would have it that there was a chill breeze blowing though the month was June, and the lime trees in full flower beneath the window of his wretched lodging.

The Uncertain Element (1950) (as by Joseph Shearing)

THE BREAKDOWN

The local line had broken down, as it not infrequently did, and the little group of people who had stepped out of the London express, and hurried across the platform to make the connection were left stranded, the half-dozen villages along the Somerset Marshland that were served by the tiny railway were completely cut off; the stationmaster had no consolation or even advice to offer, and it was a forlorn little group that stood irresolute under the glare of the gas-lamp.

John Murdoch left the others and asked the way to Mutchley Towers — only three miles along the high road, and he had an electric torch. The young man at once decided to walk, and leaving his baggage at the station, he struck out into the dark as the scanty conveyances of the village were being mustered for the benefit of his fellow-travellers.

When you are young, robust, contented, and just off for your holidays after a very prosperous year, it is not such a bad thing to step out briskly on a frosty country road with the crystal facets of stars sparkling overhead and a crisp north wind whipping the blood to your face and emphasizing the warmth and comfort of a good overcoat.

It was Christmas Eve, and Murdoch was visiting an old college friend whom, though he had not seen him for some time, he had been very intimate with in his youth. Both the young men had been lucky; Murdoch was a remarkably successful lawyer, and Blanchard had succeeded to an ancient estate that had belonged to a distant kinsman; it was to view this new kingdom that this Christmas gathering had been got together, and Murdoch was looking forward to a really pleasant time in rather novel surroundings, for the busy city man had little time for any but the most conventional of holidays.

As he strode out along the hard road, leaving the lights of the village behind him, he recalled, as he had often recalled during his journey, the very charming association that he had with Blanchard. It was only a portrait, a delicate pencil drawing, touched with colour, of a girl’s head with black curls and a lace scarf with “Marie Blanchard” written beneath; Murdoch’s youthful fancy had been strangely enthralled by this sketch — so much so that he had always been too self-conscious to ask Blanchard who it was, but the style of the drawing had led him to infer that it must be at least a hundred years old, and that Marie Blanchard had long since been dust. This, however, had not prevented the peculiar haunting loveliness of the pictured countenance from shining fitfully through his secret dreams.

And it was with an instant recollection of his visionary fancy that Murdoch had accepted this invitation.

And now, as he trudged through the star-spangled dark, he was thinking, with a delightful thrill, that he might see again that enchanting drawing or even another portrait or some delightful memorial of the vanished lady.

It was very cold; the deep midwinter chill began to penetrate even Murdoch’s fleecy coat. When he snapped on his torch the acrid sweep of electric light showed only the frozen ridges of the road and the bleak hedges, dry, hard, and lifeless as a bone.

Murdoch began to wonder how much further Mutchley Towers was and how he should find it; as his quick walking brought him no nearer any sign of human habitation. As the wild clouds began to roll over the stars he regretted his impulse to walk and flashed the torch about to discover any place or person where he could ask his way. None such appeared, and when the stars were completely obscured and a bitter sleet was cast in his face by the rising wind, the young man lost his cheerful confidence, and thought with some sharpness of yearning of the car, waiting for him at the station where he would never arrive, and the dinner preparing that would very likely be spoiled before he could sit down in comfort before it; he had not reckoned on the country being so desolate, and surely the porter’s two or three miles was five or six.

As he thought thus with some impatience an upward flash of his torch clove the sleet and showed him, strangely close, a square white house, with a sign hanging in front on which was written in bold characters:

The Wishing Inn

Murdoch was almost startled to find that he had almost stumbled into a house without being aware of it, but pleased, too, and he went up to the flat home-painted door and knocked.

It was an old-fashioned inn, but rather dreary than picturesque; fluted pilasters relieved the drab front, blinds were drawn in the upper windows, and the only light was a faint glimmer behind the curtains of what was obviously the bar-parlour; the hedge came either side, right up to the house and the rough road directly to the one step. Murdoch was mentally commenting on the cold and inhospitable look of the place when the door was abruptly opened and a repulsive-looking man appeared dimly outlined against a dark passage.

“Can you tell me the way to Mutchley Towers?” asked Murdoch briskly.

“No,” replied the man sullenly, “it is a long weary road from here, and no stranger could find it in the dark.”

“But I must get there tonight,” said Murdoch vexed. “Have you any conveyance or even someone to guide me?”

“Neither one nor the other,” replied the innkeeper.

“You’ve no telephone? Where is the nearest? There must be somewhere a post office — a farm where I could get a trap, something—”

Murdoch looked at the forbidding inn, and then at the forlorn night.

The north wind was mounting higher with every blast, the sleet was changing to icy flakes of snow, every star was now concealed behind the oncoming storm-clouds. The young man considered that he might walk on till he dropped with fatigue and never find his way; it was quite likely that the information given at the station was wrong, or even that he had taken the wrong direction; in either case, to continue to press aimlessly through the darkness seemed foolish; better to trust till daylight to the uninviting hospitality of “The Wishing Inn.”

“Can you give me some food and a bed?” he asked dubiously.

“Come inside,” was the man’s non-committal reply.

Murdoch stepped across the dingy threshold, glad to be out of the blast, yet reluctant to enter the musty dusk of the passage.

“You have not many travellers here?” he suggested, “nor much custom, perhaps? You seem to be a long way from the village.”

“The place is lonely,” was the reply.

“Will you wait in the parlour while your room is got ready for you?”

Murdoch followed him into the front room, where the light had glimmered between the folds of the drab curtains; this proved to be a lamp set on the centre of a large table covered in dark green cloth that deadened the already feeble illumination; the walls were dark and dirty, a few obscure oiled prints and a case of lead-coloured fish hung amongst this background, a meagre fire burnt on the open hearth; there were a few horsehair chairs and a dull, locked cabinet.

“Good Lord,” thought Murdoch, “who could have dreamt to find such an out-of-the-way place — so near the railway?”

“Are you the landlord?” he asked aloud.

“Yes,” replied the queer-looking individual who had opened the door, “the place is mine.”

Murdoch looked at him intently; he wore a soiled flowered dressing-gown tied tightly round his lean figure, and carpet slippers that caused him to shuffle; his head was bald, his face yellow and pinched, his look both dejected and repellent.

Murdoch glanced round, not without a shudder.

“You have a curious name,” he said. “The Wishing Inn.”

“There are old stories about the place,” replied the landlord with a shifty glance. “It is said that those who pass Christmas Eve here are allowed the fulfilment of one wish.”

“Curious that this should be Christmas Eve!” exclaimed Murdoch. “Well, can you bring me some supper, when perhaps I can think of a wish?”

The man shuffled to the door, paused there, and glanced back.

“There are other travellers here I must consider,” he grumbled gruffly, “a lady — a young lady — she must come down and warm herself here. There is no fire in her bedroom.”

Murdoch’s curiosity was fully roused, a woman that this man called a “young lady,” staying in this wretched place on Christmas Eve!

“She is not alone?” he asked.

“She is alone, but she is waiting for someone,” replied the man. “That is her wish, that he may come quickly—”

Jarred by the leer in the man’s sullen tones, Murdoch turned aside, and, pulling off his dogskin gloves, busied himself warming his hands before the thin blaze.

“Bring what you have to eat at once, please,” he said, knowing that it was hopeless to ask for any definite fare.

The door closed, and Murdoch tried to trim the lamp, and then with a squeaking pair of bellows to urge the pale fire; both his efforts were in vain, a cold dimness persisted in the dreary room, and neither fire nor lamp seemed to give either warmth or light!

Murdoch turned up his coat collar and sat shivering on one of the shiny horse-hair chairs. He wondered if the “young lady” upstairs was coming down to warm herself, as the dismal landlord had suggested, and whatever kind of romance it could be that chose such a place and time for its setting! Where was the tardy “he” coming from, and where did he intend to take the girl on such a night?

Christmas Eve, too, when all travel and conveniences would be suspended. The morrow was one of the most impossible days in the year for any kind of action, when the busiest cease their turmoil, and the most wretched have some shelter and peace.

So complete was the silence in which the inn was wrapped that Murdoch began to think that the landlord’s tale was a mere fiction. Who would linger mute in such an icy, bleak bedroom as this place afforded?

Murdoch began to feel drowsy. He had lost the keen appetite that had urged him on the road, and regarded his ordered meal with repugnance. Huddled in the worn horse-hair chair, his mind went idly over the possible tale of the woman lurking upstairs, and then he dwelt, dreamily, on the tale of the wish — the wish on Christmas Eve — Wishing Inn!

“Now what could my wish be?” thought Murdoch, drowsily. “Supposing I was to think of something quite fantastical and foolish? Supposing I was to wish to see, to win, to love, Marie Blanchard!”

As he whispered the name, it seemed to him that a deeper chill took possession of the room that the dreary fire could not warm or the dreary lamp light; he turned round sharply, as if in apprehension.

The door was opened, though he had heard no sound, and a figure stood on the threshold.

The breath of icy air was more penetrating now and Murdoch shivered as he rose.

“Won’t you come to the fire?” he said, “though I am afraid it does not give out any heat.”

The figure advanced from the shadows of the passage and came to the hearth; it was Marie Blanchard as he had seen her in the delicate sketch that had haunted his secret fancy.

Here was every feature on which his boy’s caprice had so fondly dwelt, the straight nose, the level brows, the dark liquid eyes, the fine black ringlets loosely confined with a silver ribbon, the slender neck and shoulders, the lace scarf and the clinging gown of fine floating muslin; despite the attire and the bitterness of the season she looked as fresh and blooming as if she wandered in a shadowed summer garden.

She looked at him with the petulant, wilful yet beseeching expression that so well became her type of loveliness and that in her portrait had so long haunted Murdoch.

“He has not come,” she said, “he has not come — but you will, sir, help me to find him?”

She bent towards him, clasping her hands, and a queer perfume, like the last breath of dying flowers, was wafted to the young man.

“Who am I to find?” he stammered. “Are you not Marie Blanchard?”

“Yes, I am that unfortunate woman. And I am here to meet my lover. If he does not come they will take me back—”

“They call this The Wishing Inn,” said Murdoch. “I wished to see you and you came.”

She turned on him her sad, limpid gaze and Murdoch shuddered.

“I used to worship a little picture of you,” he continued.

Unheeding she turned towards the door.

“Oh, come, will you not help me find my lover?” she entreated. Murdoch, as if against her entreaties, he had not the full use and power of his faculties, followed her to the door, out into the black passage and then into the road, she gliding before him like a glimmer of white. Snow and wind had alike ceased and the night was one of close darkness through which faintly gleamed the dull light of two carriage lamps.

“See, my carriage is waiting!” cried Marie Blanchard. “Will you not enter and help me find my lover?”

Murdoch, as his eyes became accustomed to the encompassing gloom, discerned the dim outlines of a carriage.

“Perhaps you can put me on my way to Mutchley Towers,” he said as he stepped after the slight figure of Marie Blanchard into the cavernous interior of the lumbering old-fashioned barouche, “for I,” he added, vaguely, “am going to see your brother — is he not your brother — young Blanchard?”

The carriage was swinging forward now into the pitchy night; no ray of light penetrated the darkness where Murdoch sat on the chill seat, and where his companion was there was only the faintest blur of light where her white garments showed through the inky blackness.

“Help me to find my lover!” came her voice in continued anguish. “Ah, make haste to find him before it is too late!”

“Who is he, and how can I help you?” answered Murdoch, wildly, “and how can we find him? And where are you driving in this haste?”

For the carriage was bumping and jolting over what appeared to be rough heath strewn with boulders.

Murdoch pressed his face against the glass, and could just visualize whitish objects picked out for a fleeting second by the ghastly chill light of the carriage lamps.

“Where are we?” he cried. “Where are we going?”

And then he was overmastered by an overpowering desire to see his companion, and, like a lightning inspiration from another world, he thought of the electric torch lying in his overcoat pocket.

“Marie Blanchard!” he cried, as he fumbled with it, “Marie Blanchard!” as he snapped on the powerful ray of light.

The moan, “Oh help me find my lover!” faded in his ear and the torch showed an empty carriage; he saw frayed leather, worn velvet, weather-stained glass, but nothing else; he was alone in the ancient barouche.

With a feeling akin to panic he beat at the door, the crazy fastenings gave way and he was precipitated violently into the darkness.

Again before him flitted the figure of Marie Blanchard; by a kind of bluish glow that appeared to encircle her he could see her plainly; she was moving rapidly and the sound of her lamentations fell sadly on his ear as he followed her wildly, stumbling over hillocks and falling against stones.

“See, I have found him,” she cried, and stopped; Murdoch was almost beside her; he could see her standing, smiling archly as in the portrait sketch, fresh and merry and gay. “Through here,” she added and struck on what seemed a door. “Come, will you not see him, my dear delight?”

Murdoch hastened eagerly forward; the torch was still grasped in his hand, and without knowing it he pressed the button. A flood of white light spread in front of him, there was no woman, no door; only a heavy stone with a railing round it and frail snow outlining the inscription:

Marie Blanchard
and
Tobias Grieve. 1823.

Murdoch wildly flashed the torch around the hillocks and graves, the stones were graves; he was in a large churchyard and the snow was falling noiselessly into the dark and silence.

With a shudder of deep and intense horror, Murdoch, keeping his torch lit, fumbled his way towards the church; as he reached the porch he saw a light, heard voices, and from a chaos of movement and darkness he heard a friend speak his name.

“You were pretty well done,” grinned young Blanchard the next morning as Murdoch lingered over a late Christmas breakfast. “Why, you crept into the church like a ghost.”

“I felt like one,” replied Murdoch briefly. “If you hadn’t been there—”

“Well, it is just the one night in the year you would have found anyone, and then it was only because we were late with decorations — but I say, old chap, how did you get so far out of your way, and why were you in such a state?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Murdoch sheepishly. “I’ve been overworking lately — the dark and the cold and no food — I say,” he added abruptly, “is there a place here called The Wishing Inn?”

“Used to be — pulled down about a hundred years ago. Why?”

“Oh, I heard someone in the train mention it,” said Murdoch. “Any story?”

“Yes. An ancestress of mine, Marie Blanchard, ran away on Christmas Eve to that inn to meet her lover — she chose that spot because a wish uttered there on that evening was supposed to come true! You know the usual tale.”

“Well?”

“The poor lady wished that she might never be separated from her lover — but he was found by her brothers on his way to the rendezvous and killed in a scuffle. He was a certain Tobias Grieve, a farmer, much beneath her, the good old days! She did the proper thing and died of a broken heart and then they relented enough to put her in his grave, so her wish came true after all.”

Murdoch did not answer; he was looking intently out of the window.

“She isn’t altogether a legend,” continued Blanchard, “for you can still see the grave with the two names on it — and there is a sketch of her by Cosway; I liked it so I used to have it in my rooms. Do you remember? But as for The Wishing Inn—”

The door opened and a girl stood on the threshold, the exact counterpart of Murdoch’s vision of the night, except that she was dressed in furs and a plumed hat.

“You haven’t met my sister, Marie? The same name as the lady of the adventure and rather like her, too—”

Murdoch thought of his last night’s wish and his heart thrilled as he looked into the fair girl’s eyes — “To meet — to — love — to — win — Marie Blanchard!”