A Book of Ghosts: 39
Author: Various authors
Date: 1867-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: Thirteen tales of spooks and spirits and sprites… oh —and spiders, too. By various authors. ~ ~ ~ ~ Compiled by ECM..
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70”.

A BOOK OF GHOSTS
– 39 –

THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT

MobileRead Edition
2023

Thirteen tales of spooks and spirits and sprites… oh — and spiders, too.
By various authors.
Compiled by ECM.

Contents were originally published 1868 ~ 1948. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

CONTENTS:

- Wraith-Haunted
– 1868
by Isabella Banks
(1821–1897)

- An Itinerant House
– 1878
by Emma Frances Dawson
(1839–1926)

- In the Séance Room
– 1893
by Lettice Galbraith
pseudonym of
Lettice Susan Gibson
(1859–1932)

- The Inmost Light
– 1894
by Arthur Machen
(1863–1947)

- The Prayer
– 1895
by Violet Hunt
(1862–1942)

- The Woodley Lane Ghost
– 1899
by Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren
(1825–1898)

- The House Which Was Rent Free
– 1902
by G. M. Robins
pseudonym of
Gertrude Baillie Reynolds
(1861–1939)

- Ancient Lights
– 1912
by Algernon Blackwood
(1869–1951)

- The Death Mask
– 1917
by Theo. Douglas
pseudonym of
Henrietta Dorothy Everett
(1851–1923)

- The Devil’s Graveyard
– 1926
by G. G. Pendarves
pseudonym of
Gladys Gordon Trenery
(1885–1938)

- The Watcher o’ the Dead
– 1929
by John Guinan
(1874–1945)

- Christmas Re-union
– 1946
by Sir Andrew Caldecott
(1884–1951)

- Grey Brothers
–1948
by Sir Andrew Caldecott
(1884–1951)

WRAITH-HAUNTED

Isabella Banks

1868

“Yes, Helen?”

The speaker, a tall, elegant woman, in whose every lineament beauty yet lingered, as if loth to accept from Time his seventy years’ notice to quit, looked up interrogatively at her niece, a blooming matron, busy writing invitations for a juvenile party. “I did not speak, aunt.”

“Did you not? Nor you, Mr. Birley?”

Mr. Birley, engrossed in his evening paper, looked up somewhat vaguely.

“Eh, what?”

“Did you call me?”

“What, I? Certainly not.”

“Strange!” murmured Mrs. Carson, involuntarily glancing at the ormolu timepiece ere her eyes bent down once more on her interrupted sewing. The fingers pointed to ten minutes before nine.

Click, click, went her needle steadily through the seam; Mrs. Birley’s pen made a faint sound as it traced the pink paper; and Mr. Birley studied the “share-list” and “markets” with more than ordinary assiduity. A spaniel coiled up on the hearth dozed in a dog’s paradise, in the glow of a ruddy fire, which lit up every corner of the crimson room, and was reflected cheerfully by glass, gilding, and polished furniture.

Presently Mrs. Carson’s head was raised again.

“Well?” said she, glancing alternately from niece to nephew.

“What?” questioned both in a breath.

“One of you spoke this time – I heard my name distinctly.”

“Indeed, Aunt Marianne, I have not uttered a syllable; I have not lifted my eyes from my desk since you addressed me last.”

“Nor I from my newspaper. Mrs. Carson,” continued the gentleman, “Dash is snoring most melodiously; possibly you mistook his utterance for mine. Not very complimentary if you did, I must say.”

“Indeed I did not,” returned she, with more emphasis than the occasion seemed to warrant. “I certainly heard myself called by my Christian name.”

“Nonsense, aunt; I am sure no one spoke. You must be dreaming.”

Again Mrs. Carson’s eyes sought the timepiece on the mantel-shelf: the index had advanced five minutes.

“Maybe so; old people do dream sometimes,” replied she quietly, resuming work with a sigh as if to dismiss the subject.

With a light laugh Mrs. Birley dipped her pen into the ink, and Mr. Birley sought his lost paragraph.

Had either husband or wife cared to listen, there might have been heard a beating heart keeping time with the sharp click of the needle and the steady tick of the timepiece. But there was only one listener, and she, seemingly occupied with her needlework, sat with lips apart and head bent in mute expectancy.

The hall-clock gave warning. With a first stroke of nine her work dropped; she grasped the arms of her chair and rose. Her face was blanched and rigid, her brown eyes were wild and wandering. For some moments she stood thus, then with a groan sank nerveless in her seat.

Her companions, alarmed, were by her side in an instant. “My dear aunt, what is the matter?”

“Are you ill, Mrs. Carson?” and Mr. Birley as he spoke made a movement towards the bell.

The old lady, recovering, arrested his hand, “Are you sure neither of you spoke to me?”

“Quite sure,” was the simultaneous reply.

“Do you think any of the children called me?”

“Why, Aunt Marianne, what are you thinking of? – the children have been in bed two hours.”

“Did neither of you hear anything?”

“I heard nothing.”

“Nor I, save the scratching of my own pen and the rustle of James’s paper.”

Mrs. Carson looked from one to the other as if incredulity struggled with a foregone conclusion; then in answer to their inquiries, said seriously, “I distinctly heard my own name, Marianne, called thrice, with an interval of five minutes between each call, although I saw nothing!”

“Saw nothing! Why, what did you expect to see?” asked Helen, much perplexed.

“Bosh!” muttered Mr. Birley between his teeth as he resumed his seat and study.

“What I expected to see is not easy to say; but I heard a voice I have not heard for thirty-five years. It is a solemn warning.”

“Of what, aunt?”

“Of death!” was the low and measured response.

Mr. Birley laughed outright; his wife fidgeted nervously.

“James,” said the old lady, “I know you think me a superstitious old fool, and are laughing in your sleeve at my supernatural forebodings; but if you have patience to listen to an old woman’s story first, I will then tell you what I believe is foreshadowed now – you can laugh afterwards, if so inclined.”

Mr. Birley yawned and compared his watch with the clock; but there was a grave dignity in the speaker’s manner which awed him into something like attention. His wife’s curiosity was already aroused; she drew her chair to the fire, and with a gesture and grimace meant to call her spouse to order, said—

“Well, aunt, we are listening.”

•   •   •

Well, Helen, I suppose you know, if James does not, that when your grandfather Denton was in business he was for many years his own traveller; and as there were no railroads, few stagecoaches, and those only on main roads, he used to travel with a horse and gig. On one of his journeys he met at a roadside inn a Mr Lavery, from Bristol, likewise travelling on his own account, although in a different line.

The two had met before on the road, but on that occasion he found Mr. Lavery not only invalided but crippled by rheumatism. The women of those days were of a different type from the present generation, and your grandmother was not only an excellent nurse but possessed a valuable specific for rheumatism; so being a man of impulse, without even a letter to announce his return – for a letter would have been longer on the road than himself – my father brought Mr. Lavery, wrapped up in blankets, to his own house, and placed him under my mother’s care. For months the patient remained an invalid guest, tended by my mother, his wife being sent for after a while.

Out of these services rendered and accepted grew a very warm friendship, one token of which was Mrs. Lavery’s declared inability to dispense with the society of one or other of the Misses Denton. I, however, was the favourite, my visits generally extending over many months.

I was about two-and-twenty when my last visit to Bristol was made, and – I may say so now without vanity – I was known as the beautiful Miss Denton; perhaps one reason why Mrs. Lavery was so proud to have me with her. Fond of dress and company herself, she was glad to have an attractive companion, and introduced me into much gayer society than my own mother had thought well for her daughters.

I had been in Bristol nearly nine months, when the first of those peculiar occurrences which have marked my life stamped its indelible impress on my soul and memory.

Mr. Lavery was away. Mrs. Lavery and myself had been to a card-party, which, as was customary in those days, broke up about ten o’clock. There had been music as well as cards, and I having then a very fine voice—

–   –   –

“Then! You had a fine voice when I knew you first, twelve years ago,” interrupted Mr. Birley.

–   –   –

Well, James, perhaps so; but I had a good voice then, and naturally was pressed to exercise it, One of the guests, Mr. Carson, whom I saw that night for the first time, apparently had neither ears nor eyes for anyone else; he seemed literally entranced by my singing, and whispered as much to me as he handed me to my sedan-chair when we left.

Neither admiration nor adulation was new to me, yet at the one compliment of this young Scotchman I flushed with a strange pleasure such as no flattery had ever called up before. The words lingered in my ears all the while I was carried home; even his peculiar intonation had an unwonted fascination for me; and indeed, when I retired to rest, I found myself still dwelling upon those incidents of the evening in which the handsome Mr. Carson had the most prominent place. I am afraid I answered Mrs. Lavery’s remarks somewhat at random, and went to bed with this stranger’s parting words floating through my mind as I fell asleep.

I mention this, my dears, merely to show that there was no possible link of connection between my thoughts and that which followed.

The bed assigned to me was an old-fashioned four-post, with heavy moreen curtains and full valances, the curtains suspended from brass rings which ran upon iron rods. Mrs. Lavery, in her husband’s absence, always slept with me.

I had been asleep some time, when I suddenly awakened with a start, hearing myself called. I sat up in the bed affrighted. The curtains at the foot wore slowly undrawn, the rings jingling as they slipped over the iron rods, and there, in the aperture, distinctly visible in the frosty moonlight, stood the form of my mother in her night robes. She was thin, and ghastly white; but a smile of ineffable sweetness parted her wan lips, from which issued slowly the words “Marianne, Marianne, Marianne!” Raising her hand as if in benediction, she melted away, as it were, into the moonbeams.

Terror for the moment held me fast. When I recovered my self-possession I roused my bedfellow. She had seen nothing, heard nothing, and was therefore sceptical. In vain she strove, like you, to persuade me I had been dreaming; the still open curtains refuted that, for she recollected closing them with her own hand as she got into bed. She then suggested that the maid had played me a trick; but we found the door locked, with the key inside, as we had left it.

“Oh, Mrs. Lavery,” I moaned in an agony of apprehension, “something is wrong at home – my mother is either ill or in trouble, perhaps dying, and wants me. Oh, that I had never left her!”

“Now do, my dear child, go to sleep; you have had the nightmare, that is all. It is not much more than a week since you heard from home; all was well then,” said Mrs. Lavery, trying to soothe my distress.

“Oh, that was ten days ago,” I argued. “It is a fortnight since the letter was written. What may not have happened since then I must go home at once.”

There was no response from my friend; sleep had overpowered her sympathy. Neither my terror nor distress had fully roused her.

For me there was no more sleep that night. I sat up shivering in bed until the piercing cold compelled me to lie down. I watched the still open curtains and the retreating moonbeams as they marked on the wall the passage of the silent hours; but although my mother’s pale face and languid voice haunted my memory, the actual presence came no more.

Night shadows linger long in December, and I was afraid to rise until daylight, but the first streak of dawn found me astir collecting my scattered possessions; and by the time Mrs. Lavery had got up I had almost completed my packing, for I had determined to go home, and knew that the “Royal Mail” coach would start that very day for Manchester, and, if I missed it, I must wait three days for another.

Mrs. Lavery’s astonishment is not describable; the episode of the night had left no impression on her sleep-bound faculties. She tried raillery, banter, persuasion, to induce me to abandon a “foolish whim, the offspring of a dream.”

She changed her tone when the sluggish postman called out to the deaf servant a letter for Miss Denton, and a shilling to pay in a voice which penetrated to the breakfast-table, and my trembling fingers almost refused to unclasp my purse or break the seal, which, however, was not black.

Well I remember the tenor of that letter. It told that during my father’s absence from home some rollicking fellow with that in his head which was not wit had knocked loudly at our door in the middle of the night when all were asleep, and then run off. My mother, always a light sleeper, had started up under the impression that your grandfather had returned unexpectedly, and in her hurry to reach the door before he, in his irritable impatience, should knock a second time, caught her foot in the coverlet and fell heavily against a carved oak coffer. There she was found in the morning with her collarbone broken. The fracture was reduced, but she never fairly rallied, and I was summoned home, her symptoms being alarming.

We were yet discussing these sad tidings when Mr. Carson was announced. He called, he said, not only to inquire after our health, but to offer his services in conveying either message or package to my friends in Manchester, whither he was then bound. (You need not smile, Helen; it was a common practice at that time to burden travellers with friendly letters and parcels, until their delivery at the journey’s end became quite a tax.)

“You have come quite opportunely, Mr. Carson,” Mrs. Lavery answered briskly; “you will relieve me from a sore dilemma. Miss Denton’s mother having met with a severe injury, our young friend is summoned home hastily. She has never travelled alone in her life, and I was debating how I could trust her so far without a guardian. Will you undertake the charge? I know I can rely upon your care.”

I saw a flush of pleasure light up his clear eye and handsome face as he answered earnestly, “If Miss Denton will graciously accept my humble services, I shall only be too proud of the trust.”

In my eagerness to depart I had lost sight of the dangers and discomforts of the long journey to an unprotected girl, but the picture drawn by Mrs. Lavery to deter me from quitting Bristol, as she then thought, needlessly, had made the prospect something formidable. There was no disguising my satisfaction when a protector offered himself so unexpectedly; and if I thanked him quietly, I know it was sufficiently.

Mr. Carson’s place had been booked the day before – outside. He hastened to the coach-office to secure an inside seat for me, and to transfer his own. A fruitless errand; every inside place was already secured. There only remained the hope that some male passenger would surrender his inside seat in favour of a lady.

A vain hope. The “insides” were all long-distance passengers, and to a man resented any infringement on the right of “number one,” expressing their personal opinions more freely than courteously.

“Mr. Carson,” I whispered, “do not let there be any altercation on my account” (he was waxing warm). “I should dread being penned up with those coarse men for two days; I would much rather sit outside with you.”

An incautious speech, but the grateful look which answered it sent my blood tingling with very shame to my finger-ends. He answered soberly, “I do prefer the outside in all seasons; but, then, I am hardy. You are not fitted to brave the inclemency of a midwinter frost. Only the urgency of life and death should tempt you to make the experiment.”

“It is the urgency of life and death,” I answered. “But I am not afraid of a little cold; my pelisse is warm, and my fur tippet protects my chest.”

I bade my weeping friend “good-bye.” Without another word Mr. Carson assisted me to mount the movable ladder to a seat at the back which held two, and fronted the guard’s solitary post. Just then a messenger, despatched by Mrs. Lavery, came up laden with a rug and shawl.

With much care Mr. Carson placed the rug beneath my feet, and adjusted the shawl around my knees. I felt at once that I was in good hands, though in my ignorance I considered the precaution unnecessary.

The leaders’ heads were released, the coachman cracked his long whip, the guard blew his horn, a final “adieu” was said, and I had started on the most momentous journey of my life.

Rightly judging that my emotions were not less deep because they did no more than well-up into my eyes, my new protector entered into a conversation with the guard to divert his attention, and left me to my meditations. Sombre enough they were. I could not quit my kind friend without regret; but what weighed heaviest on my heart was the presentiment that my mother was dead, and that I had seen her passing spirit. More sorrowful and gloomy became my thoughts as one by one the milestones were left behind on the turnpike-road, and notwithstanding my wrappings I began to feel a little chilly.

I need not weary you with the details of that long and miserable journey, only rendered endurable by the unremitting attention of my protector, for such in truth he was. Not only the scenery, but the weather and temperature varied with the districts through which we rode. From hard black frost we passed to a region where snow lay thick on the distant hills, like a shroud on a dead giant, and in light patches here and there by the roadside or on the trees, which tossed their skeleton arms in the breeze and played at snowball with us as the coach swept past. From falling snow we made an advance under a canopy of weeping clouds – first a drizzle, then rain, soaking, persistent, pitiless rain, rain without intermission, rain which would have penetrated a plank.

No wonder, then, that notwithstanding the plaid which Mr. Carson had stripped from himself to fold round me during the chill of the first evening (using as a substitute, when too late, a horse-rug obtained from an ostler at a fabulous price) – no wonder, I say, that several hours before we reached our destination I was drenched to the skin, and utterly worn out both in body and mind.

When the steaming horses drew the miry coach up before the Bridgewater Arms, I had lain for some time in a state of insensibility on Mr. Carson’s shoulder, utterly unconscious of his supporting arm, or of the anathemas vented by the sympathising guard on the stolid “insides,” whose victim he clearly considered me to be.

Uncle Bancroft was fortunately in waiting, for I had to be lifted from the coach-top, and my generous friend was himself too cramped and benumbed to render further assistance. Brandy was poured down my throat, and as soon as a hackney-coach could be found I was conveyed, not to my father’s house, but to my uncle’s, Mr. Carson never leaving me until I was safe under the roof of my friends and showed some signs of returning animation.

My shoes, stockings, and upper garments, sodden and saturated, had to be cut from my swollen limbs; but of this I knew nothing, for a fever had supervened and blotted out everything.

Evasive answers were given to my first inquiries for my mother, as I was too weak to bear the truth; but when I approached convalescence, I was told everything. She was dead when I commenced my journey – had died on the 23rd of December, close upon midnight. Her last inquiry had been for me. Glancing feebly around from one weeping relative to another, she had said: “All here? All! all except Marianne. Marianne, Marianne, Marianne!”

Helen, there could be no question that my mother’s parting spirit had visited my bedside. The impression made was thenceforth ineffaceable.

–   –   –

“The coincidence was certainly remarkable,” said Mr. Birley; “still, I incline to think the whole a dream.”

“There was something very awful about it, even if it was a dream; you must own that, James,” put in his wife.

–   –   –

It was no dream; but my next revelation took place in broad daylight – that could be no dream, said Mrs. Carson sadly. I have called my journey momentous, and justly. It influenced my life. My friend in his care for me had sacrificed himself. Hardy as he was, inflammation laid its hot hand upon his chest, held him down, and only let him rise with a spot marked like a target for the shaft of death. Gratitude and pity rose to heart and lips when I first saw his altered face. That journey had indeed fused two souls into one. Whatever impressions our first meeting had made, my sufferings and his self-sacrifice had confirmed. What I had found him during our long and miserable ride I found him ever, and loved him as such large-hearted, self-denying men should be loved. There was no talk of marriage between us for at least eighteen months; but there was no doubt whither we were drifting. Every moment he could spare from business was spent with me; and I think it was principally on my account that he induced his uncle in Glasgow, a muslin manufacturer, to engage a traveller and give him a permanent agency in Manchester, opening a ware-room for the sale of their goods.

Shortly after that I became his wife, with the full approbation of friends, and with every prospect of happiness. He had furnished for me, simply but well, a house in Hanover-street, then a thorough Scotch colony, and my father’s house being in Cannon-street, I was not more than a quarter of a mile from home. As was then the custom, we were married on Sunday, it being likewise my birthday, the 21st of December, and at once took possession of our new abode.

The twenty-third was signalled by one of the fiercest conflagrations Manchester had known for years. A cotton-mill at Ancoats had taken fire whilst the hands were being dismissed. Some were in the upper-stories at the time; the narrow staircase was crowded, and many lives were in danger. Attracted by the glare, Mr. Carson was quickly on the spot, forgetful of all but the duty before him, and to his heroic efforts three girls at least owed their lives. They came to thank him a week later. Alas where was he? His hair was singed, and so was his coat, from which the tails were dangling loose; he had been wetted through alike with perspiration and water from the engine, but he waited until all danger to others was over, and when he reached home his clothes were apparently dry. He kissed me, apologised for keeping me waiting tea, and sat down to describe the incidents of the fire. Of his own exploits he said little; but on the plea of fatigue excused his sitting down to tea in the plight he then was. After the meal, he dozed off, which I attributed to his recent exertions and the heat of our own fire. It was only on going to rouse him that I discovered his clothes had been wetted, and I was too inexperienced to calculate the consequences.

The following day I had promised to spend with my father and sisters. William was to join me on closing the warehouse. Being a bride, I was, of course, an object of special attention, made more of by my relations than at any other period of my life. I found there a perfect levee of aunts and cousins, discussing the bride’s cake and future prospects with equal freedom. In the midst of our lively chat time fled fast. There came a sharp rat-tat-tat at the street-door.

“Why, that is William’s knock; what brings him from the warehouse so early?” exclaimed I, running to anticipate the servant in opening the door. Without another word than “Marianne,” strangely spoken, he passed me by, never stopping to kiss me, as was his wont.

I confess he had spoiled me. I pouted, petulant tears welled to my eyes, and I lingered with the fastening of the door before I turned round.

“Marianne!”

He was calling me from behind. I dropped the latch and followed him, as I thought, into the room I had just quitted.

“Where is William?” I asked, looking round but not seeing him.

“He has not come in here.”

“Marianne!”

The voice seemed to come from the room on the opposite side the hall. I ran thither, anticipating the loving embrace he was too reserved to give before strangers.

He was not there.

“William, dear, where are you? don’t hide from me!”

There was no answer. I ran into the back parlours – upstairs – downstairs, calling his name. He was nowhere to be seen.

By this time the house was in commotion. Sisters and cousins alike had heard the knock, but no one had seen my husband or heard his voice.

As they looked from me to one another for an explanation of that which is inexplicable, I having protested that Mr. Carson had passed and spoken to me in the hall, a sudden light flashed over and appalled me. I remembered seeing the hall-panelling through his figure!

With a startling shriek, I rushed bareheaded from the house, tore across Cannon-street, along Sugar Lane, and up Shude Hill, like a mad woman, nor paused till my grasp was on the handle of my own door.

That was ajar. A bad omen. I found my beloved husband extended on our bed, a doctor by his side vainly trying to bleed him – the blood would not flow.

Inflammation – the result, no doubt, of his overnight’s wetting and fatigue – had seized him suddenly.

On his way home he had called on his doctor, who never left him again in life.

Before night fell on the earth, the night of Death had fallen on my idolised husband, and my soul was in eclipse.

Maid, wife, widow in a week, a widow all unconscious of her widowhood. A dumb, dreamy, statuesque automaton. I lived and moved, but that was all.

I was taken home. When the funeral was over, the house in Hanover-street was given up. I was incapable of managing it.

In this state I remained until my boy was born. Then the ice at my heart thawed, and tears came to my relief. The babe lived, and I lived for him.

How I idolised that boy! I watched him night and day with more than a mother’s care. He grew up a fine strong youth, the image of his dead father, whose name he bore. His father’s uncle would have taken the entire charge of him; but I would not part from Willie, so we were summoned to Glasgow together, and there lived until the death of old Mr. Carson, when Willie was sixteen. The old gentleman left considerable property behind him, much of which was bequeathed to my son.

Having no ties in Scotland, I came back to the old home, from which two of my sisters had gone away to homes of their own.

Between myself and his grandfather, Willie stood a fair chance of being spoiled. He grew a tall, athletic man, not overfond of business or study, but much given to all manly sports and pastimes; in which he was encouraged by his grandfather. As for me, I saw no harm in his pursuits, and never dreamed of danger.

Willie had a friend close by with whom he often put on the gloves, or practised fencing and single-stick.

One day, towards the close of the year – my sorrows have always come in the midst of other’s rejoicing – I sat reading by the fire; my father was playing his favourite game of backgammon with my sister Sarah; you, then a child of three years, nursing a kitten at your mother’s feet; she had brought you to spend Christmas with us.

My father, I must tell you, had then given up business, and our garret was filled with old lumber from the warehouse, several open baskets or “wiskets” containing waste “cops,” spindles, and other refuse amongst the rest.

Our quiet was broken, and the rattling dice drowned by a loud clash and clatter upstairs.

“Someone has left that garret-window open again, and the cats are making fine havoc with those cops, I know; hark how they rattle!”

“Go upstairs, Sally, and shut the window,” said my father, pausing in his game.

Sarah went. All was still.

“The window is fast enough, and I saw no cats,” said she, as she sat down again to the board.

Again the clash and clatter, as of metal, clear and distinct.

“Helen, do you go up. Take my stick, and rout the intruder out; I’d swear the cats are there.”

Your mother went, and came back with the same report – nothing there; all silent.

Again the self-same clash and clatter, louder than before. I, haunted by old memories, felt my heart sink.

“Here, Marianne, lass, lend me thy arm; thou and I’ll go up and see what all this din’s about; but don’t thou look so scared.”

We mounted the first flight, he leaning on my arm. All at once the clatter ceased.

“Mother, mother, mother!” came floating like a breath down the stairway, and while we paused to listen – for my father heard it also – the figure of Willie brushed past us, with one hand pressed upon his heart.

I trembled and grew faint. I had seen the balustrades through the form.

My father chuckled outright. “Ah, the young dog, so it was Willie playing tricks upon us, after all.”

I said nothing until I reached the parlour. As I rightly conjectured, no Willie was there.

“Father,” said I, clasping my hands in anguish, “that was not Willie, it was his wraith. I have been wraith-haunted all my life.”

My father looked dazed; my sisters, perhaps with a good motive, rallied me on my Scottish superstition, much as you have done; but ere their laughter had well subsided, there was an imperative knock at the street-door.

We were summoned to our neighbour, Mr. Neale’s; an accident had befallen my son.

He lay on a couch pale and bleeding, wounded in the chest, the room in disorder, foils upon the floor. He had barely strength left to press my hand, and say “Mother, do not weep; Tom could not help it – the button came off his foil. Mother, forgive—” and I was childless.

I was spared all the agony of the inquest, for there was another long blank in my memory; and during my mental oblivion your grandfather died, borne down by the double sorrow.

You see, I have good reasons for saying I am wraith-haunted, and for knowing that the voice I heard tonight is a call from the spirit-world to me.

•   •   •

Mr. Birley and his wife both looked perplexed and serious.

“I do remember something about a ghost in grandfather’s garret when I was a very little girl. But how is it I was never told of the warnings you think you have had?”

“They were hushed up lest my grief should be re-awakened. And now let us go to bed – it is late. The issues of life and death are in higher hands than ours.”

The morning broke – clear, sparkling, exhilarating. Mrs. Carson made her appearance in her ordinary health, a little paler it might be, but that was all.

Mrs. Birley had hesitated whether to issue her invitations, but finally resolved not to disappoint the children, and so they were sent.

The nursery-doors were thrown open, and all hands, big and little, summoned to the task of decoration with evergreens and holly.

In the midst of it all a carrier brought a large box, inscribed, “Aunt Carson’s Gift.” The old lady had made her purchases the day before. There was a general rush to wrench open the lid, and make a raid on the contents. Books, dolls, workboxes, a desk, toys noisy and noiseless, were there, each labelled with the fortunate recipient’s name. Flushed and elated, the youngsters rushed hither and thither displaying their prizes. Frocks and pinafores filled to repletion dropped their contents, until the little ones might be tracked by straggling Shems and Noahs, cups and saucers, whistles and drumsticks.

The box had been removed, the litter cleared away, the stray waifs collected, when Mrs. Carson descended the stairs after her customary nap. A wee round toy, the colour of the stair-carpet, had been overlooked; she stepped upon it, and fell from top to bottom, striking her head against the balustrades.

There was a rush through the house to where she lay stunned on the oilcloth. Reverently and sadly she was carried into the nearest room, – the one occupied overnight. A messenger was sent on horseback for a surgeon and for Mr. Birley.

Shocked beyond measure, the latter gentleman hastened home in time to hear the fiat pronounced.

“An injured spine – concussion of the brain – no hope whatever.”

A physician summoned hastily confirmed the surgeon’s decision. The weeping children were huddled from the room.

“How long may she linger?” was Mr. Birley’s question.

“She may go off any moment, the shock to her system is so great; she may last two or three hours.”

“Do you think she is conscious?”

“I am afraid not.”

Mrs. Birley, sobbing, whispered to her husband, “James, do you think aunt did hear anything supernatural last night.”

Two days before he would have said, “All bosh!” now he answered, “God only knows! It is most mysterious.”

“If she did she will not die until nine o’clock.”

“At nine!” murmured the dying woman; “at nine.”

She was evidently conscious, and something more she said, but the words were inaudible. Husband and wife watched the clock as intensely as Mrs. Carson had watched it the night before.

Ten minutes to nine! The retreating pulse quickened under the doctor’s touch. The lips moved.

“William!” was faintly audible to the bent ear.

Five minutes to nine! The “change” was perceptible.

“Yes, William!”

There was another pause – a burr – the clock’s note of warning. There was a rattle in the throat of the dying woman.

“Coming, William!” was gasped out audibly.

NINE!

A last leap of the pulse – a last flicker of the eyelids – the “call” was obeyed.

Mrs. Carson, wraith-haunted, spirit-summoned, was of the dead!

“The Belgravia Annual”, Dec. 1868

Through the Night (1882)

AN ITINERANT HOUSE

Emma Frances Dawson

1878

“Eternal longing with eternal pain,

Want without hope, and memory saddening all.

All congregated failure and despair

Shall wander there through some old maze of wrong.”

“His wife?” cried Felipa.

“Yes,” I answered, unwillingly; for until the steamer brought Mrs. Anson I believed in this Mexican woman’s right to that name. I felt sorry for the bright eyes and kind heart that had cheered Anson’s lodgers through weary months of early days in San Francisco.

She burst into tears. None of us knew how to comfort her. Dering spoke first: “Beauty always wins friends.”

Between her sobs she repeated one of the pithy sayings of her language: “‘It is as easy to find a lover as to keep a friend, but as hard to find a friend as to keep a lover.’”

“Yes,” said Volz, “a new friendship is like a new string to your guitar – you are not sure what its tone may prove, nor how soon it may break.”

“But at least its falsity is learned at once,” she sobbed.

“Is it possible,” I asked, “that you had no suspicion?”

“None. He told me—” She ended in a fresh gust of tears.

“The old story,” muttered Dering. “Marryatt’s skipper was right in thinking everything that once happened would come again somewhere.”

Anson came. He had left the newcomer at the Niantic, on pretense of putting his house in order. Felipa turned on him before we could go.

“Is this true?” she cried.

Without reply he went to the window and stood looking out. She sprang toward him, with rage distorting her face.

“Coward!” she screamed, in fierce scorn.

Then she fell senseless. Two doctors were called. One said she was dead. The other, at first doubtful, vainly tried hot sealing-wax and other tests. After thirty-six hours her funeral was planned. Yet Dering, once medical student, had seen an electric current used in such a case in Vienna, and wanted to try it. That night, he, Volz, and I offered to watch. When all was still, Dering, who had smuggled in the simple things needed, began his weird work.

“Is it not too late?” I asked.

“Every corpse,” said he, “can be thus excited soon after death, for a brief time only, and but once. If the body is not lifeless, the electric current has power at any time.”

Volz, too nervous to stay near, stood in the door open to the dark hall. It was a dreadful sight. The dead woman’s breast rose and fell; smiles and frowns flitted across her face.

“The body begins to react finely,” cried Dering, making Volz open the windows, while I wrapped hot blankets round Felipa, and he instilled clear coffee and brandy.

“It seems like sacrilege! Let her alone!” I exclaimed. “Better dead than alive!”

“My God! say not that!” cried Volz; “the nerve which hears is last to die. She may know all we say.”

“Musical bosh!” I muttered.

“Perhaps not,” said Dering; “in magnetic sleep that nerve can be roused.”

The night seemed endless. The room gained an uncanny look, the macaws on the gaudy, old-fashioned wallpaper seemed fluttering and changing places. Volz crouched in a heap near the door. Dering stood by Felipa, watching closely. I paced the shadowy room, looked at the gleam of the moon on the bay, listened to the soughing wind in the gum-trees mocking the sea, and tried to recall more cheerful scenes, but always bent under the weight of that fearful test going on beside me. Where was her soul? Beyond the stars, in the room with us, or “like trodden snowdrift melting in the dark?” Volz came behind, startling me by grasping my elbow.

“Shall I not play?” he whispered. “Familiar music is remembrance changed to sound – it brings the past as perfume does. Gypsy music in her ear would be like holding wild flowers to her nostrils.”

“Ask Dering,” I said; “he will know best.”

I heard him urging Dering.

“She has gypsy blood,” he said; “their music will rouse her.”

Dering unwillingly agreed. “But nothing abrupt – begin low,” said he.

Vaguely uneasy, I turned to object; but Volz had gone for his violin. Far off arose a soft, wavering, sleepy strain, like a wind blowing over a field of poppies. He passed, in slow, dramatic style, through the hall, playing on the way. As he came in, oddly sustained notes trembled like sighs and sobs; these were by degrees subdued, though with spasmodic outbursts, amid a grand movement as of phantom shapes through cloud-land. One heart-rending phrase recurring as of one of the shadowy host striving to break loose, but beaten back by impalpable throngs, numberless grace-notes trailing their sparks like fireworks. No music of our intervals and our rhythms, but perplexing in its charm like a draught that maddens. Time, space, our very identities, were consumed in this white heat of sound. I held my breath. I caught his arm.

“It is too bold and distracting,” I cried. “It is enough to kill us! Do you expect to torment her back? How can it affect us so?”

“Because,” he answered, laying down his violin and wiping his brow, “in the gypsy minor scale the fourth and seventh are augmented. The sixth is diminished. The frequent augmentation of the fourth makes that sense of unrest.”

“Bah! Technical terms make it no plainer,” I said, returning to the window.

He played a whispered, merry discordance, resolving into click of castanets, laugh, and dance of a gypsy camp. Out of the whirl of flying steps and tremolo of tambourines rose a tender voice, asking, denying, sighing, imploring, passing into an over-ruling, long-drawn call that vibrated in widening rings to reach the farthest horizon – nay, beyond land or sea, “east of the sun, west of the moon.” With a rush returned the wild jollity of men’s bass laughter, women’s shrill reply, the stir of the gypsy camp. This dropped behind vague, rolling measures of clouds and chaos, where to and fro floated grotesque goblins of grace-notes like the fancies of a madman; struggling, rising, falling, vain-reaching strains; fierce cries like commands. The music seemed another vital essence thrilling us with its own emotion.

“No more, no more!” I cried, half gasping, and grasping Volz’s arm. “What is it, Dering?”

He had staggered from the bed and was trying to see his watch. “It is just forty-four hours!” he said, pointing to Felipa.

Her eyes were open! We were alarmed as if doing wrong, and silently watched her. Fifteen minutes later her lips formed one word:

“Idiots!”

Half an hour later she flung the violin from bed to floor, but would not speak. People began to stir about the house. The prosaic sounds jarred on our strained nerves. We felt brought from another sphere. Volz and I were going, but Felipa’s upraised hand kept us. She sat up, looking a ghastly vision. Turning first toward me, she quoted my words:

“‘Better dead than alive!’ True. You knew I would be glad to die. What right had you to bring me back? God’s curses on you! I was dead. Then came agony. I heard your voices. I thought we were all in hell. Then I found how by your evil cunning I was to be forced to live. It was like an awful nightmare. I shall not forget you, nor you me. These very walls shall remember – here, where I have been so tortured, no one shall have peace! Fools! Leave me! Never come in this room again!”

We went, all talking at once. Dering angry at her mood; Volz, sorry he had not reached a soothing pianissimo passage; I, owning we had no right to make the test. We saw her but once more, when with a threatening nod toward us she left the house.

From that time a gloom settled over the place. Mrs. Anson proved a hard-faced, cold-hearted, Cape Cod woman, a scold and drudge, who hated us as much as we disliked her. Homesick and unhappy, she soon went East and died. Within a year, Anson was found dead where he had gone hunting in the Saucelito woods, supposed a suicide; Dering was hung by the Vigilantes, and the rest were scattered on the four winds. Volz and I were last to go. The night before we sailed, he for Australia, I for New York, he said:

“I am sorry for those who come after us in this house.”

“Not knowing of any tragedy here,” I said, “they will not feel its influence.”

“They must feel it,” he insisted; “It is written in the Proverbs, ‘Evil shall not depart from his house.’”

Some years later, I was among passengers embarking at New York for California, when there was a cry of “Man overboard!” In the confusion of his rescue, among heartless and pitiful talk, I overheard one man declare that the drowned might be revived.

“Oh, yes!” cried a well-known voice behind me. “But they might not thank you.”

I turned – to find Volz! He was coming out with Wynne, the actor. Enjoying our comradeship on the voyage, on reaching San Francisco we took rooms together, on Bush Street in an old house with a large garden. Volz became leader of the orchestra, and Wynne, leading man at the same theater. Lest my folks, a Maine deacon’s family, should think I was on the road to ruin, I told in letters home only of the city missionary in the house.

Volz was hard worked. Wynne was not much liked. My business went wrong. It rained for many weeks; to this we laid the discomfort that grew to weigh on us. Volz wreaked his sense of it on his violin, adding to the torment of Wynne and myself, for to lonesome anxious souls “the demon in music” shows horns and cloven foot in the trying sounds of practice. One Sunday Volz played the “Witches Dance,” the “Dream,” and “The long, long weary day.”

“I can bear it no longer!” said Wynne. “I feel like the haunted Matthias in ‘The Bells.’ If I could feel so when acting such parts, it would make my fortune. But I feel it only here.”

“I think,” said Volz, “It is the gloria fonda bush near the window; the scent is too strong.” He dashed off Strauss’ fretful, conflicting “Hurry and Delay.”

“There, there! It is too much,” said I. “You express my feelings.”

He looked doubtful. “Put it in words,” said he.

“How can I?” I said. “When our firm sent me abroad, I went sight-seeing among old palaces, whose Gobelin tapestries framed in their walls were faded to gray phantoms of pictures, but out of some the thrilling eyes followed me till I could not stay in their range. My feeling here is the uneasy one of being watched.”

“Ha!” said Volz. “You remind me of Heine, when he wrote from Livorno. He knew no Italian, but the old palaces whispered secrets unheard by day. The moon was interpreter, knew the lapidary style, translated to dialect of his heart.”

“‘Strange effects after the moon,’” mused Wynne. “That gives new meaning to Kent’s threat: ‘I’ll make a sop o’ the moonshine of you!’”

Volz went on: “Heine wrote: ‘The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weatherbeaten Gothic piece of a pillar beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.’”

“Perhaps, like Poe’s hero,” said I, “‘I have imbibed shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.’”

“But I, too,” said Wynne, “feel the unrest of Tannhauser:

“‘Alas! what seek I here, or anywhere,

Whose way of life is like the crumbled stair

That winds and winds about a ruined tower,

And leads no whither.’”

“I am oppressed,” Volz owned, “as if someone in my presence was suffering deeply.”

“I feel,” said Wynne, “as if the scene was not set right for the performance now going on. There is a hitch and drag somewhere – scene-shifters on a strike. Happy are you poets and musicians, who can express what is vague.”

Volz laughed. “As in Liszt’s oratorio of ‘Christus,’” said he, “where a sharp, ear-piercing sostenuto on the piccolo-flute shows the shining of the star of Bethlehem.” He turned to me. “Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ always recalls to me a house you and I know to be under a ban.”

“Haunted?” asked Wynne. “Of all speculative theories, St. Martin’s sends the most cold thrills up one’s back. He said none of the dead come back, but some stay.”

“What we Germans call gebannt – tied to one spot,” said Volz. “But this is no ghost, only a proof of what a German psychologist holds, that the magnetic man is a spirit.”

“Go on, ‘and tell quaint lies’ – I like them,” said Wynne.

I told in brief outline, with no names, the tale Volz and I knew, while we strolled to Telegraph Hill, passing five streets blocked by the roving houses common to San Francisco.

Wynne said: “They seem to have minds of their own, with their entrances and exits in a moving drama.”

“Sort of ‘Poor Jo’s,’” said I.

“Castles in chess,” said Volz.

“Io-like,” said Wynne, “with a goad in their hearts that forever drives them on.”

A few foreign sailors lounged on the hill top, looking at the view. The wind blew such a gale we did not stay. The steps we had known, cut in the side, were gone. Where the old house used to be, goats were browsing.

“Perchance we do inhabit it but now,” mockingly cried Wynne; “methinks it must be so.”

“Then,” said Volz, thoughtfully, “it might be what Germans call ‘far-working’ – acted in distance – that affects us.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Do you know anything of her now?”

“I know she went to Mexico,” said he; “that is all.”

“What is ‘far-working?’” asked Wynne. “If I could act in the distance, and here too – ‘what larks!’”

“Yes – ‘if’,” said I. “Think how all our lives turn on that pivot. Suppose Hawthorne’s offer to join Wilkes’ exploring expedition had been taken!”

“Only to wills that know no ‘if’ is ‘far-working’ possible,” said Volz. “Substance or space can no more hinder this force than the one of mineral magnetism. Passavent joins it with pictures falling, or watches stopping at the time of a death. In sleep-walking, some kinds of illness, or nearness of death, the nervous ether is not so closely allied to its material conductors, the nerves, and may be loosened to act from afar, the surest where blood or feeling makes attraction or repulsion.”

Wynne in the two voices of the play repeated:

“Victor. – Where is the gentleman?

CHISPE. – As the old song says:

‘His body is in Segovia,

His soul is in Madrid.’”

We could learn about the house we were in only that five families had moved in and out during the last year. Wynne resolved to shake off the gloom that wrapped us. In struggles to defy it, he, on the strength of a thousand-dollar benefit, made one payment on the house and began repairs.

On an off-night he was vainly trying to study a new part. Volz advised the relief to his nerves of reciting the dream scene from “The Bells,” reminding him he had compared it with his restlessness there. Wynne denied it.

“Yes,” said Volz, “where the mesmerizer forces Matthias to confess.”

But Wynne refused, as if vexed, till Volz offered to show in music his own mood, and I agreed to read some rhymes about mine. Volz was long tuning his violin.

“I feel,” he said, “as if the passers-by would hear a secret. Music is such a subtle expression of emotion – like flower-odor rolls far and affects the stranger. Hearken! In Heine’s ‘Reisebilder,’ as the cross was thrown ringing on the banquet table of the gods, they grew dumb and pale, and even paler till they melted in mist. So shall you at the long-drawn wail of my violin grow breathless, and fade from each other’s sight.”

The music closed round us, and we waited in its deep solitude. One brief, sad phrase fell from airy heights to lowest depths into a sea of sound, whose harmonious eddies as they widened breathed of passion and pain, now swooning, now reviving, with odd pauses and sighs that rose to cries of despair, but the tormenting first strain recurring fainter and fainter, as if drowning, drowning, drowned – yet floating back for repeated last plaint, as if not to be quelled, and closing, as it began, the whole.

As I read the name of my verses, Volz murmured: “Les Nuits Blanches, No. 4. Stephen Heller.”

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

Against the garden’s mossy paling

I lean, and wish the night away,

Whose faint, unequal shadows trailing

Seem but a dream of those of day.

Sleep burdens blossom, bud, and leaf.

My soul alone aspires, dilates.

Yearns to forget its care and grief—

No bath of sleep its pain abates.

How dread these dreams of wide-eyed nights!.

What is, and is not, both I rue.

My wild thoughts fly like wand’ring kites.

No peace falls with this balmy dew.

Through slumb’rous stillness, scarcely stirred

By sudden trembles, as when shifts

O’er placid pool some skimming bird.

Its Lethean bowl a poppy lifts.

If one deep draught my doubts could solve,.

The world might bubble down its brim.

Like Cleopatra’s pearl dissolve.

With all my dreams within its rim.

What should I know but calm repose?

How feel, recalling this lost sphere?

Alas! the fabled poppy shows

Upon its bleeding heart – a tear!

Wynne unwillingly began to recite: “‘I fear nothing, but dreams are dreams—’”

He stammered, could not go on, and fell to the floor. We got him to bed. He never spoke sanely after. His wild fancies appalled us watching him all night.

“Avaunt Sathanas! That’s not my cue,” he muttered. “A full house tonight. How could Talma forget how the crowd looked, and fancy it a pack of skeletons? Tell Volz to keep the violins playing through this scene, it works me up as well as thrills the audience. Oh, what tiresome nights I have lately, always dreaming of scenes where rival women move, as in ‘Court and Stage,’ where, all masked, the king makes love to Frances Stewart before the queen’s face! How do I try to cure it? ‘And being thus frighted, swear a prayer or two and sleep again.’ Madame, you’re late; you’ve too little rouge; you’ll look ghastly. We’re not called yet; let’s rehearse our scene. Now, then, I enter left, pass to the window. You cry ‘is this true?’ and faint. All crowd about. Quick curtain.”

Volz and I looked at each other.

“Can our magnetism make his senses so sharp that he knows what is in our minds?” he asked me.

“Nonsense!” I said. “Memory, laudanum, and whiskey.”

“There,” Wynne went on, “the orchestra is stopping. They Ve rung up the curtain. Don’t hold me. The stage waits, yet how can I go outside my door to step on dead bodies? Street and sidewalk are knee-deep with them. They rise and curse me for disturbing them. I lift my cane to strike. It turns to a snake, whose slimy body writhes in my hand. Trying to hold it from biting me, my nails cut my palm till blood streams to drown the snake.”

He awed us not alone from having no control of his thoughts, but because there came now and then a strange influx of emotion as if other souls passed in and out of his body.

“Is this hell?” he groaned. “What blank darkness! Where am I? What is that infernal music haunting me through all space? If I could only escape it I need not go back to earth – to that room where I feel choked, where the very wallpaper frets me with its flaunting birds flying to and fro, mocking my fettered state. ‘Here, here in the very den of the wolf!’ Hallo, Benvolio, call-boy’s hunting you. Romeo’s gone on.

‘See where he steals—

Locked in some gloomy covert under key

Of cautionary silence, with his arms

Threaded, like these cross-boughs, in sorrow’s knot.’

What is this dread that weighs like a nightmare? ‘I do not fear; like Macbeth, I only inhabit trembling,’ ‘For one of them – she is in hell already, and burns, poor soul! For the other’ – Ah! must I die here, alone in the woods, felled by a coward, Indian-like, from behind a tree? None of the boys will know. ‘I just now come from a whole world of mad women that had almost – what, is she dead?’ Poor Felipa!”

“Did you tell him her name?” I asked Volz.

“No,” said he. “Can one man’s madness be another’s real life?”

“Blood was spilt – the avenger’s wing hovered above my house,” raved Wynne. “What are these lights, hundreds of them – serpent’s eyes? Is it the audience – coiled, many-headed monster, following me round the world? Why do they hiss? I’ve played this part a hundred times. ‘Taught by Rage, and Hunger, and Despair?’ Do they, full-fed, well-clothed, light-hearted, know how to judge me? ‘A plague on both your houses!’ What is that flame? Fire that consumes my vitals – spon-ta-neous combustion! It is then possible. Water! water!”

The doctor said there had been some great strain on Wynne’s mind. He sank fast, though we did all we could. Toward morning I turned to Volz with the words:

“He is dead.”

The city missionary was passing the open door. He grimly muttered:

“Better dead than alive!”

“My God! say not that!” cried Volz. “The nerve which hears is last to die. He may know—”

He faltered. We stood aghast. The room grew suddenly familiar. I tore off a strip of the gray tint on the walls. Under it we found the old paper with its bright macaws.

“Ah, ha!” Volz said; “will you now deny my theory of ‘far-working?’”

Dazed, I could barely murmur: “Then people can be affected by it!”

“Certainly,” said he, “as rubbed glasses gain electric power.”

Within a week we sailed – he for Brazil, I for New York.

Several years after, at Sacramento, Arne, an artist I had known abroad, found me on the overland train, and on reaching San Francisco urged me to go where he lodged.

“I am low-spirited here,” he said; “I don’t know why.”

I stopped short on the crowded wharf. “Where do you live?” I asked.

“Far up Market Street,” said he.

“What sort of a house?” I insisted.

“Oh – nothing modern – over a store,” he answered.

Reassured, I went with him. He lived in a jumble of easels, portfolios, paint, canvas, bits of statuary, casts, carvings, foils, red curtains, Chinese goatskins, woodcuts, photographs, sketches, and unfinished pictures. On the wall hung a scene from “The Wandering Jew,” as we saw it at the Adelphi, in London, where in the Arctic regions he sees visions foreshadowing the future of his race. Under it was quoted:

– “All in my mind is confused, nor can I dissever

The mould of the visible world from the shape of my thought in me—

The Inward and Outward are fused, and through them murmur forever

The sorrow whose sound is the wind and the roar of the limitless sea.”

“Do you remember,” Arne asked, “when we saw that play? Both younger and more hopeful. How has the world used you? As for me, I have done nothing since I came here but that sketch, finished months ago. I have not lost ambition, but I feel fettered.”

“Absinthe? – opium? – tobacco?” I hinted.

“Neither,” he answered. “I try to work, but visions, widely different from what I will, crowd on me, as on the Jew in the play. Not the unconscious brain action all thinkers know, but a dictation from without. No rush of creative impulses, but a dragging sense of something else I ought to paint.”

“Briefly,” I said, “you are a ‘Haunted Man.’”

“Haunted by a willful design,” said he. “I feel as if something had happened somewhere which I must show,”

“What is it like?” I asked.

“I wish I could tell you,” he replied. “But only odd bits change places, like looking in a kaleidoscope; yet all cluster around one center.”

One day, looking over his portfolios, I found an old Temple Bar magazine, which he said he kept for this passage – which he read to me – from T. A. Trollope’s “Artist’s Tragedy:”

“The old walls and ceilings and floors must be saturated with the exhalations of human emotions! These lintels, doorways, and stairs have become, by long use and homeliness, dear to human hearts, and have become so intimately blended a portion of the mental furniture of human lives, that they have contributed their part to the formation of human characters. Such facts and considerations have gone to the fashioning of the mental habitudes of all of us. If all could have been recorded! If emotion had the property of photographing itself on the surfaces of the walls which had witnessed it! Even if only passion, when translated into acts, could have done so! Ah, what palimpsests! What deciphering of tangled records! What skillful separation of successive layers of ‘passionography!’”

“I know a room,” said Arne, “thronged with acts that elbow me from my work and fill me with unrest.”

I looked at him in mute surprise.

“I suppose,” he went on, “such things do not interest you.”

“No – yes,” I stammered. “I have marked in traveling how lonely houses change their expression as you come near, pass, and leave them. Some frown, others smile. The Bible buildings had life of their own and human diseases; the priests cursed or blessed them as men.”

“Houses seem to remember,” said he. “Some rooms oppress us with a sense of lives that have been lived in them.”

“That,” I said, “is like Draper’s theory of shadows on walls always staying. He shows how after a breath passes over a coin or key, its spectral outline remains for months after the substance is removed. But can the mist of circumstance sweeping over us make our vacant places hold any trace of us?”

“Why not? Who can deny it? Why do you look at me so?” he asked.

I could not tell him the sad tale. I hesitated; then said: “I was thinking of Volz, a friend I had, who not only believed in what Bulwer calls ‘a power akin to mesmerism and superior to it, once called Magic, and that it might reach over the dead, so far as their experience on earth,’ but also in animal magnetism from any distance.”

Arne grew queerly excited. “If Time and Space exist but in our thoughts, why should it not be true?” said he. “Macdonald’s lover cries, ‘That which has been is, and the Past can never cease. She is mine, and I shall find her – what matters it when, or where, or how?’” He sighed, “In Acapulco, a year ago, I saw a woman who has been before me ever since – the center of the circling, changing, crude fancies that trouble me.”

“Did you know her?” I asked.

“No, nor anything about her, not even her name. It is like a spell. I must paint her before anything else, but I cannot yet decide how. I feel sure she has played a tragic part in some life-drama.”

“Swinburne’s queen of panthers,” I hinted.

“Yes. But I was not in love. Love I must forgo. I am not a man with an income.”

“I know you are not a nincompoop!” I said, always trying to change such themes by a jest. I could not tell him I knew a place which had the influence he talked of. I could not re-visit that house.

Soon after he told me he had begun his picture, but would not show it. He complained that one figure kept its back toward him. He worked on it till he fell ill. Even then he hid it. “Only a layer of passionography,” he said.

I grew restless. I thought his mood affected mine. It was a torment as well as a puzzle to me that his whole talk should be of the influence of houses, rooms, even personal property that had known other owners. Once I asked him if he had anything like the brown coat Sheridan swore drew ill-luck to him.

“Sometimes I think,” he answered, “it is this special brown paint artists prize which affects me. It is made from the best asphaltum, and that can be got only from Egyptian mummy-cloths. Very likely dust of the mummies is ground in it. I ought to feel their ill-will.”

One day I went to Saucelito. In the still woods I forgot my unrest till coming to the stream where, as I suddenly remembered, Anson was found dead, a dread took me which I tried to lose by putting into rhyme. Turning my pockets at night, I crumpled the page I had written on, and threw it on the floor.

In uneasy sleep I dreamed I was again in Paris, not where I liked to recall being, but at “Bullier’s,” and in wartime. The bald, bespectacled leader of the orchestra, leaning back, shamming sleep, while a dancing, stamping, screaming crowd wave tri-colored flags, and call for the “Chant du Depart.” Three thousand voices in a rushing roar that makes the twenty thousand lights waver, in spasmodic but steady chorus:

“Les departs – parts – parts!

Les departs – parts – parts!

Les departs – parts – parts!”

Roused, I supposed by passing rioters, I did not try to sleep again, but rose to write a letter for the early mail. As I struck a light I saw, smoothed out on the table, the wrinkled page I had cast aside. The ink was yet wet on two lines added to each verse. A chill crept over me as I read:

FOREST MURMURS

Across the woodland bridge I pass,

And sway its three long, narrow planks,

To mark how gliding waters glass

Bright blossoms doubled ranks on ranks;

And how through tangle of the ferns

Floats incense from veiled flower-urns.

What would the babbling brook reveal?

What may these trembling depths conceal?

Dread secret of the dense woods, held

With restless shudders horror-spelled!

How shift the shadows of the wood.

As if it tossed in troubled sleep!

Strange whispers, vaguely understood,

Above, below, around me creep;

While in the sombre-shadowed stream

Great scarlet splashes far down gleam.

The odd-reflected, stately shapes

Of cardinals in crimson capes;

Not those – but spectral pools of blood

That stain these sands through strongest flood!

Like blare of trumpets through black nights—

Or sunset clouds before a storm—

Are these red phantom water-sprites

That mock me with fantastic form;

With flitting of the last year’s bird

Fled ripples that its low flight stirred—

How should these rushing waters learn

Aught but the bend of this year’s fern?

The lonesome wood, with bated breath,

Hints of a hidden blow – and death!

I could not stay alone. I ran to Arne’s room. As I knocked, the falling of some light thing within made me think he was stirring. I went in. He sat in the moonlight, back to me before his easel. The picture on it might be the one he kept secret. I would not look. I went to his side and touched him. He had been dead for hours! I turned the unseen canvas to the wall.

Next day I packed and planned to go East. I paid the landlady not to send Arne’s body to the morgue, and watched it that night, when a sudden memory swept over me like a tidal wave. There was a likeness in the room to one where I had before watched the dead. Yes – there were the windows, there the doors – just here stood the bed, in the same spot I sat. What wildness was in the air of San Francisco!

To put such crazy thoughts to flight, I would look at Arne’s last work. Yet I wavered, and more than once turned away after laying my hand on it. At last I snatched it, placed it on the easel and lighted the nearest gas-burner before looking at it. Then – great heavens! How had this vision come to Arne? It was the scene where Felipa cursed us. Every detail of the room reproduced, even the gay birds on the wallpaper, and her flowerpots. The figures and faces of Dering and Volz were true as hers, and in the figure with averted face which Arne had said kept its back to him, I knew – myself! What strange insight had he gained by looking at Felipa? It was like the man who trembled before the unknown portrait of the Marquise de Brinvilliers.

How long I gazed at the picture I do not know. I heard, without heeding, the doorbell ring and steps along the hall. Voices. Someone looking at rooms. The landlady, saying this room was to let, but unwilling to show it, forced to own its last tenant lay there dead. This seemed no shock to the stranger.

“Well,” said her shrill tones, “poor as he was he’s better dead than alive!”

The door opened as a well-known voice cried: “My God! say not that! The nerve which hears is last to die—”

Volz stood before me! Awe-struck, we looked at each other in silence. Then he waved his hand to and fro before his eyes.

“Is this a dream?” he said. “There,” pointing to the bed; “you” – to me; “the same words – the very room! Is it our fate?”

I pointed to the picture and to Arne. “The last work of this man, who thought it a fancy sketch?”

While Volz stood dumb and motionless before it, the landlady spoke:

“Then you know the place. Can you tell what ails it? There have been suicides in this room. No one prospers in the house. My cousin, who is a house-mover, warned me against taking it. He says before the store was put under it here it stood on Bush Street, and before that on Telegraph Hill.”

Volz clutched my arm. “It is ‘The Flying Dutchman’ of a house!” he cried, and drew me fast down stairs and out into a dense fog which made the world seem a tale that was told, blotting out all but our two slanting forms, bent as by what poor Wynne would have called “a blast from hell,” hurrying blindly, away. I heard the voice of Volz as if from afar: “The magnetic man is a spirit!”

“The Argonaut”, 20 Apr. 1878

An Itinerant House
and Other Stories (1897)

IN THE SÉANCE ROOM

Lettice Galbraith

1893

Dr. Valentine Burke sat alone by the fire. He had finished his rounds, and no patient had disturbed his postprandial reflections. The house was very quiet, for the servants had gone to bed, and only the occasional rattle of a passing cab and the light patter of the rain on the windowpanes broke the silence of the night. The cheerful glow of the fire and the soft light from the yellow-shaded lamp contrasted pleasantly” with the dreary fog which filled the street outside. There were spirit-decanters on the table, flanked by a siphon and a box of choice cigars. Valentine Burke liked his creature comforts. The world and the flesh held full measure of attraction for him, but he did not care about working for his menus plaisirs.

The ordinary routine of his profession bored him. That he might eventually succeed as a ladies’ doctor was tolerably certain. For a young man with little influence and less money, he was doing remarkably well; but Burke was ambitious, and he had a line of his own. He dabbled in psychics, and had written an article on the future of hypnotism, which had attracted considerable attention. He was a strong magnetiser (sic) [mesmerizer?], and offered no objection to semi-private exhibitions of his powers. In many drawing-rooms he was already regarded as the apostle of the coming revolution which is to substitute disintegration of matter and cerebral precipitation for the present system of the parcels mail and telegraphic communication. In that section of society which interests itself in occultism Burke saw his way to making a big success. Meanwhile, as man cannot live on adulation alone, the doctor had a living to get, and he had no intention whatever of getting it by the labour of his hands. He was an astute young man, who knew how to invest his capital to the best advantage. His good looks were his capital, and he was about to invest them in a wealthy marriage. The fates had certainly been propitious when they brought Miss Elma Lang into the charmed circle of the Society for the Revival of Eastern Mysticism. Miss Lang was an orphan. She had full control of her fortune of thirty thousand pounds. She was young, sufficiently pretty, and extremely susceptible. Burke saw his chance, and went for it, to such good purpose that before a month had passed his engagement to the heiress was announced, and the wedding-day within measurable distance. There were several other candidates for Miss Lang’s hand, but it soon became evident that the doctor was first favourite. The gentlemen who devoted themselves to occultism for the most part despised physical attractions; their garments were fearfully and wonderfully made. They were careless as to the arrangement of their hair. Beside them, Valentine Burke, handsome, well set up, and admirably turned out, showed to the very greatest advantage. Elma Lang adored him. She was never tired of admiring him. She was lavish of pretty tokens of her regard. Her photographs, in costly frames, were scattered about his room, and on his hand glittered the single-stone diamond ring which had been her betrothal gift.

He smiled pleasantly as he watched the firelight glinting from the many-colored facets. “I have been lucky,” he said aloud; “I pulled that through very neatly. Just in time, too, for my credit would not stand another year. I ought to be all right now if—” He broke off abruptly, and the smile died away. “If it were not for that other unfortunate affair! What a fool—what a damned fool I was not to let the girl alone, and what a fool she was to trust me! Why could she not have taken better care of herself? Why could not the old man have looked after her? He made row enough over shutting the stable-door when the horse was gone. It was cleverly managed though. I think even ce cher papa exonerates me from any participation in her disappearance; and fate seems to be playing into my hand too. That body turning up just now is a stroke of luck. I wonder who the poor devil really is?”

He felt for his pocket-book, and took out a newspaper cutting. It was headed in large type, “Mysterious Disappearance of a Young Lady—The body found yesterday by the police in Muddlesham Harbour is believed to be that of Miss Katharine Greaves, whose mysterious disappearance in January last created so great a sensation. It will be remembered that Miss Greaves, who was a daughter of a well-known physician at Templeford, Worcestershire, had gone to Muddlesham on a visit to her married sister, from whose house she suddenly disappeared. Despite the most strenuous efforts on the part of her distracted family, backed by the assistance of able detectives, her fate has up to the present remained enshrouded in mystery. On the recovery of the body yesterday the Muddlesham police at once communicated with the relations of Miss Greaves, by whom the clothing was identified. It is now supposed that the unhappy girl threw herself into the harbour during a fit of temporary insanity, resulting, it is believed, from an unfortunate love affair.”

Valentine Burke read the paragraph through carefully, and replaced it in the pocket-book with a cynical smile.

“How exquisitely credulous are the police, and the relatives, and the noble British public. Poor Kitty is practically dead—to the world. What a pity—” He hesitated, and stared into the blazing coals. “It would save so much trouble,” he went on after a pause, “and I hate trouble.”

His fingers were playing absently with a letter from which he had taken the slip of printed paper—an untidy letter, blotted and smeared, and hastily written on poor, thin paper He looked at it once or twice and tossed it into the fire. The note-sheet shrivelled and curled over, dropping on to the hearth, where it lay smouldering. A hot cinder had fallen out of the grate, and the doctor, stretching out his foot, kicked the letter closer to the live coal. Little red sparks crept like glowworms along the scorched edges flickered and died out. The paper would not ignite; it was damp—damp with a woman’s tears. “I was a fool,” he murmured, with conviction. “It was not good enough, and it might have ruined me.” He turned to the spirit-stand and replenished his glass, measuring the brandy carefully. “I don’t know that I am out of the wood yet,” he went on, as he filled up the tumbler with soda-water. “The money is running short, and women are so damned inconsiderate. If Kitty were to take it into her head to turn up here, it would be the—” The sentence remained unfinished, cut short by a sound from below. Someone had rung the night-bell.

Burke set down the glass and bent forward, listening intently. The ring, timid, almost deprecating, was utterly unlike the usual imperative summons for medical aid. Following immediately on his outspoken thoughts, it created an uncomfortable impression of coming danger. He felt certain that it was not a patient; and if it were not a patient, who was it? There was a balcony to the window. He stepped quietly out and leaned over the railing. By the irregular flicker of the street-lamp he could make out the dark figure of a woman on the steps beneath, and through the patter of the falling rain he fancied he caught the sound of a suppressed sob. With a quick glance, to assure himself that no one was in sight, the doctor ran downstairs and opened the door. A swirl of rain blew into the lighted hall. The woman was leaning against one of the pillars apparently unconscious. Burke touched her shoulder. “What are you doing here?” he asked sharply. At the sound of his voice she uttered a little cry and made a sudden step forward, stumbling over the threshold, and falling heavily against him.

“Val, Val,” she cried, despairingly, “I thought I should never find you. Take me home, take me home. I am so tired—and, oh, so frightened!”

The last word died away in a wailing sob, then her hands relaxed their dinging hold and dropped nervelessly at her side.

In an emergency Dr. Burke acted promptly. He shut the outer door, and gathering up the fainting girl in his arms, carried her into the consulting-room, and laid her on the sofa. There was no touch of tenderness in his handling of the unconscious form. He had never cared much about her, when at her best—dainty in figure and fair of face; he had made love to her, pour passer le temps, in the dullness of a small country town. She had met him more than half way, and almost before his caprice was gratified he was weary of her. Her very devotion nauseated him. He looked at her now with a shudder of repulsion. The gaslight flared coldly on the white face, drawn by pain and misery. All its pretty youthfulness had vanished. The short hair, uncurled by the damp night air straggled over the thin forehead. There were lines about the closed eyes and the drooping corners of the mouth. The skin was strained tightly over the cheekbones and looked yellow, like discoloured wax. His eyes noted every defect of face and figure, as he stood wondering what he should do with her. He knew, no one better, how quickly the breath of scandal can injure a professional man. Once let the real story of his relations with Katharine Greaves get wind and his career would be practically ruined. He began to realise the gravity of the situation. Two futures lay before him. The one, bright with the sunshine of love and prosperity; the other darkened by poverty and disgrace. He pictured himself the husband of Elma Lang, with all the advantages accruing to the possessor of a charming wife and a large fortune, and he cursed fate which had sent this wreck of womanhood to stand between him and happiness. By this time she had partially recovered, and her eyes opened with the painful upward roll common to nervous patients when regaining consciousness. With her dishevelled hair and rain-soaked garments, she had all the appearance of a dead body. The sight, horrible as it was, fascinated Burke. He turned up the gas, twisting the chandelier so as to throw a full light on the girl’s face.

“She looks as though she were drowned,” he thought. “When she is really dead she will look like that” The idea took possession of his mind. “If she were dead, if only she were really dead!”

Who can trust the discretion of a wronged and forsaken woman, but—the dead tell no tales. If only she were dead! The words repeated themselves again and again, beating into his brain like the heavy strokes of a hammer. Why should she not die? Her life was over, a spoiled, ruined thing. There was nothing before her but shame and misery. She would be better dead. Why (he laughed suddenly a hard, mirthless laugh), she was dead already. Her body had been found by the police, identified by her own relations. She was supposed to be drowned, why not make the supposition a reality? A curious light flashed into the doctor’s handsome face. A woman seeing him at that moment would have hesitated before trusting her life in his hands. He looked at his unwelcome visitor with an evil smile.

She had come round now and was crouched in the corner of the sofa sobbing and shivering.

“Don’t be angry with me, Val, please don’t be angry. I waited till I had only just enough money for my ticket, and I dare not stay there any longer. It is so lonely, and you never come to see me now. It is ten weeks since you were down, and you won’t answer my letters. I was so frightened all alone. I began to think you were getting tired of me. Of course I know it is all nonsense. You love me as much as you ever did. It is only that you are so busy and hate writing letters.” She paused, waiting for some reassuring words, but he did not answer, only watched her with cold, steady eyes.

“Did you see the papers,” she went on, with chattering teeth. “They think I am dead. Ever since I read it I have had such dreadful thoughts. I keep seeing myself drowned; I believe I am going to die, Val—and I don’t want to die. I am so—so frightened. I thought you would take me in your arms and comfort me like you used to do, and I should feel safe. Oh, why don’t you speak to me? Why do you look at me like that? Val, dear, don’t do it, don’t do it, I cannot bear it.”

Her great terrified eyes were fixed on his, fascinated by his steady, unflinching gaze. She was trembling violently. Her words came with difficulty, in short gasps.

“You have never said you were glad to see me. It is true, then, that you don’t love me any more. You are tired of me, and you will not marry me now. What shall I do? what shall I do? No one cares for me, no one wants me, and there is nothing left for me but to die.”

Still no answer. There was a long silence while their eyes met in that fixed stare—his cold, steady, dominating, hers flinching and striving vainly to withstand the power of the stronger will. In a few moments the unequal struggle had ended. The girl sat stiff and erect, her hand grasping the arm of the sofa. The light of consciousness had died out of the blue eyes, leaving them fixed and glassy. Burke crossed the floor and stood in front of her.

“Where is your luggage?” he asked, authoritatively.

She answered in a dull, mechanical way, “At the station.”

“Have you kept anything marked with your own name—any of my letters?”

“No, nothing—there.”

“You have kept some of my letters. Where are they?”

“Here.” Her hand sought vaguely for her pocket.

“Give them to me—all of them.”

Mechanically she obeyed him, holding out three envelopes, after separating them carefully from her purse and handkerchief.

“Give me the other things.” He opened the purse. Besides a few shillings, it contained only a visiting-card, on which an address had been written in pencil. The doctor tore the card across and tossed it into the fireplace. Then his eyes fastened on those of the girl before him. Very slowly he bent forward and whispered a few words in her ear, repeating them again and again. The abject terror visible in her face would have touched any heart but that of the man in whose path she stood. No living soul, save the “sensitive” on whom he was experimenting, heard those words, but they were registered by a higher power than that of the criminal court, damning evidence to be produced one day against the man who had prostituted his spiritual gift to mean and selfish ends.

In the grey light of the chilly November morning a park-keeper, near the Regent’s Canal, was startled by a sudden, piercing shriek. Hurrying in the direction of the sound, he saw, through the leafless branches, a figure struggling in the black water. The park-keeper was a plucky fellow, whose courage had gained more than one recognition from the Humane Society, and he began to run towards the spot where that dark form had been, but before he had covered ten yards of ground rapid footsteps gained on his and a man shot past him. “Someone in the canal,” he shouted as he ran. “I think it is a woman. You had better get help.”

“He was a good plucked one,” the park-keeper averred, when a few days later he retailed the story to a select circle of friends at the bar of the Regent’s Arms, where the inquest had been held. “Not that I’d have been behindhand, but my wind ain’t what it was, and he might have been shot out of a catapult He was off with his coat and into the water before you could say Jack Robinson. Twice I thought he had her safe enough, and twice she pulled him under; the third time, blest if I thought they were coming up any more at all. Then the doctor chap, he comes to the surface dead-beat, but the girl in his arms.

“‘I’m afraid she’s gone,’ he says, when I took her from him, ‘but we won’t lose time,’ and he set to and carried out all the instructions for recovering the apparently drowned while I went for some brandy. It wasn’t a bit of use. The young woman were as dead as a doornail. ‘If she’d only have kept quiet, I might have saved her,’ he says, quite sorrowful like, ‘but she struggled so,’ and sure enough his hands were regularly torn and bruised where she’d gripped him.”

Dr. Burke and the park-keeper were the chief witnesses at the inquest. There were no means of identifying the dead woman. The jury returned a verdict of felo de se [suicide], and the coroner complimented the doctor on his courageous attempt to rescue the poor outcast.

The newspapers, too, gave him a nice little paragraph, headed, “Determined Suicide in Regent’s Park. Gallant conduct of a well-known physician;” and Elma Lang’s dark eyes filled with fond and happy tears as she read her lover’s praises.

“You are so brave, Val, so good,” she cried, “and I am so proud of you; but you ran a horrible risk.”

“Yes,” he answered, gravely, “I thought once it was all up with me. That poor girl nearly succeeded in drowning the pair of us. Still, there wasn’t much in it, you know; any other fellow would have done the same.”

“No, they would not. It is no use trying to pretend you are not a hero, Val, because you are. How awful it must have been when she clung to you so desperately. It might have cost you your life.”

“It cost me my ring,” he replied, ruefully. “It is lying at the bottom of the canal at this moment, unless some adventurous fish has swallowed it—your first gift.”

“What does it matter,” she answered, impulsively, “I can give you another tomorrow. What does anything matter since you are safe?”

Burke took her in his arms, and kissed the pretty upturned face. She was his now, bought with the price of another woman’s life. Bah! he wanted to forget the clutch of those stiffening fingers and the glazed awful stare of the dead eyes through the water.

“Let us drop the subject,” he said, gently. “It is not a pleasant one, and, as you say, nothing matters since I am safe”—he added under his breath, “quite safe now.”

•   •   •

The carriage stood at the door. In the drawing-room Mrs. Burke was waiting for her husband. She had often waited for the doctor during the four years which had elapsed since their marriage. Those four years had seen to a great extent the fulfilment of Burke’s ambition. He had money. He was popular, sought after, an acknowledged leader of the new school of Philosophy, an authority on psychic phenomena, and the idol of the “smart” women who played with the fashionable theories and talked glibly on subjects the very ABC of which was far beyond their feeble comprehension. Socially, Dr. Burke was an immense success. If, as a husband, he fell short of Elma’s expectations, she never admitted the fact. She made an admirable wife, interesting herself in his studies, and assisting him materially in his literary work. Outwardly, they were a devoted couple. The world knew nothing of the indefinable barrier which held husband and wife apart; of a certain vague distrust which had crept into the woman’s heart, bred of an instinctive feeling that her husband was not what he seemed to be. Something, she knew not what, lay between them. Her quick perceptions told her that he was always acting a part. She held in her hand a little sheaf of papers, notes that she had prepared for him on the series of séances, which for a month past had been the talk of the town. A medium of extraordinary power had flashed like a meteor into the firmament of London society. Phenomena of the most startling kind had baffled alike the explanations of both scientist and occultist. Spiritualism was triumphant. A test committee had been formed, of which Dr. Burke was unanimously elected president, but so far the attempts to expose the alleged frauds had not been attended with any success.

It was to Mdme. Delphine’s house that the Burkes were going tonight. The séance commenced at ten, and the hands of the clock already pointed to a quarter to that hour, when the doctor hurried into the room.

“Ready?” he said. “Come along then. Where are the notes?”

He glanced hastily through them as he went downstairs.

“Falconer and I have been here all the afternoon,” he explained as they drove off. “I had only just time to get something to eat at the club before I dressed. We have taken the most elaborate precautions. If something cannot be proved tonight—” He paused.

“Well?” she said, anxiously.

“We shall be the laughing-stock of London,” he concluded, emphatically.

“What do you reality think of it?”

“Humbug, of course; but the difficulty is to prove it.”

“Mrs. Thirlwall declares that the fifth appearance last night was undoubtedly her husband. I saw her today; she was quite overcome.”

“Mrs. Thirlwall is an hysterical fool.”

“But your theory admitted the possibility of materialising the intense mental—”

Burke leaned back in the carriage, laughing softly.

“My dear child, I had to say something.”

“Valentine,” she cried, sorrowfully, “is there no truth in anything you say or write? Do you believe in nothing?”

“Certainly. I believe in matter and myself; also that the many fools exist for the benefit of a minority with brains. When I see any reason to alter my belief, I shall not hesitate to do so. If, for instance, I am convinced that I see with my material eyes a person whom I know to be dead, I will become a convert to spiritualism. But I shall never see it.”

The drawing-room was filled when they arrived at Mdme. Delphine’s. Seats had been kept for the doctor and his wife. There was a short whispered consultation between Burke and his colleagues, the usual warning from the medium that the audience must conform to the rules of the séance, and the business of the evening began in the customary style. Musical instruments sounded in different parts of the room, light fingers touched the faces of the sitters. Questions written on slips of paper and placed in a sealed cabinet received answers from the spirit world, which the inquirers admitted to be correct. The medium’s assistant handed one of these blank slips to Burke, requesting him to fill it up.

It struck the doctor that if he were to ask some question the answer to which he did not himself know, but could afterwards verify, he would guard against the possibility of playing into the hands of an adroit thought-reader. He accordingly wrote on the paper, “What was I doing this time four years ago? Give the initials of my companions, if any.”

He had not the vaguest idea as to where exactly he had been on the date in question, but a reference to the rough diary he always kept would verify or disprove the answer.

The folded slip was sealed and placed in the cabinet. In due time the medium declared the replies were ready. The cabinet was opened, and the slips, numbered in the order in which they had been given in, were returned to their owners. Burke noticed that there were no fresh folds in his paper, and the seal was of course unbroken. He opened it, and as his eye fell on the writing he gave a slight start, and glanced sharply at the medium. Beneath his query was written in ink that was scarcely yet dry, “On Wednesday, November, 17, 1885, you were at No. 63, Abbey Road. I only was with you. You hypnotised me.—K. G.” The handwriting was that of Katharine Greaves.

The doctor was staggered. In the multiplied interests and distractions of his daily life he had completely forgotten the date of that tragic visit. He tried to recall the exact day of the month and week. He remembered now that it was on a Wednesday, and this was Monday. Calculating the odd days for the leap year, 1888, that would bring it to Monday—Monday, the 17th. Four years ago tonight Kitty had been alive. She was dead now, and yet here before him was a paper written in her hand. He sat staring at the characters, lost in thought. The familiar writing brought back with irresistible force the memory of that painful interview. It suggested another and very serious danger. Burke did not believe for a moment that the answer to his question had been dictated by the disembodied spirit of his victim. He was racking his brains to discover how his secret might possibly have leaked out, who this woman could be who knew, and traded on her knowledge, of that dark passage in his life which he had believed to be hidden from all the world. Was it merely a bow drawn at a venture, which had chanced to strike the one weak place in his armour, or was it deliberately planned with a view to extorting money?

So deeply was he wrapped in his reflections, that the manifestations went on around him unheeded. The dark curtain which screened off a portion of the room divided, and a white-robed child stepped out. It was instantly recognised by one of the sitters—a nervous, highly-strung woman, whose passionate entreaties that her dead darling would return to earth fairly harrowed the feelings of the listeners. Other manifestations followed. The audience were becoming greatly excited. Burke sat indifferent to it all, his eyes fixed on the writing before him, till his wife touched him gently.

“What is the matter, Val?” she whispered, trying to read the paper over his shoulder. “Is your answer correct?”

He turned on her sharply, crushing the message in his hand. “No,” he said audibly. “It is a gross imposture. There was no such person.”

“Hush.” She laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Do not speak so loudly. That is a point in our favour, anyway. Mr. Falconer has proposed a fresh test. He has asked if a material object, something that had been lost at any time, you know, can be restored by the spirits. Madame returned a favourable answer. Mr. Falconer could not think of anything at the moment, but I had a brilliant inspiration. I told him to ask for your diamond ring—the ring you lost when you tried to save that poor girl’s life.”

Burke rose to his feet, then recollecting himself, sat down again and tried to pull himself together. There was nothing in it. If this Madame Delphine was really acquainted with the facts of his relations with Katharine Greaves she could not know its ghastly termination. He tried to reassure himself, but vainly. His nerve was deserting him, and his eyes roved vacantly round the semi-darkened room, as if in search of something. A sudden silence had fallen on the audience. A cold chill, like a draft of icy air, swept through the séance chamber. Mrs. Burke shivered from head to foot, and drew closer to her husband. Suddenly the stillness was broken by a shriek of horror. It issued from the lips of the medium, who, like a second Witch of Endor, saw more than she expected, and crouched terror-stricken in the chair to which she was secured by cords adjusted by the test committee. The presence which had appeared before the black curtain was no white-clad denizen of “summerland,” but a woman in dark, clinging garments—garments, to all appearance, dripping with water—a woman with wide-opened, glassy eyes, fixed in an unalterable stony stare. It was a ghastly sight. All the concentrated agony of a violent death was stamped on that awful face.

Of the twenty people who looked upon it, not one had power to move or speak.

Slowly the terrible thing glided forward, hardly touching the ground, one hand outstretched, and on the open palm a small, glittering object—a diamond ring!

It moved very slowly, and the second or so during which it traversed the space between the curtain and the seats of the audience seemed hours to the man who knew for whom it came.

Valentine Burke sat rigid. He was oblivious of the presence of spectators, hardly conscious of his own existence. Everything was swallowed up in a suspense too agonising for words, the fearful expectancy of what was about to happen. Nearer and nearer “it” came. Now it was close to him. He could feel the deathly dampness of its breath; those awful eyes were looking into his. The distorted lips parted—formed a single word. Was it the voice of a guilty conscience, or did that word really ring through and through the room— “Murderer!”

For a full minute the agony lasted, then something fell with a sharp click on the carpetless floor. The sound recalled the petrified audience to a consciousness of mundane things. They became aware that “it” was gone.

They moved furtively, glanced at each other—at last someone spoke. It was Mrs. Burke. She had vainly tried to attract her husband’s attention, and now turned to Falconer, who sat next to her.

“Help me to get him away,” she said.

The doctor alone had not stirred; his eyes were fixed as though he were still confronted by that unearthly presence.

Someone had turned up the gas. Two of the committee were releasing the medium, who was half dead with fright. Falconer unfastened the door, and seat a servant whom he met in the hall for a hansom.

When he returned to the séance room the doctor was still in the same position. It was some moments before he could be roused, but when once they succeeded in their efforts Burke’s senses seemed to return. He rose directly, and prepared to accompany his wife. As they quitted their seats, Falconer’s eyes fell on the diamond ring which lay unnoticed on the ground. He was going to pick it up, but someone caught his hand and stopped him.

“Leave it alone,” said Mrs. Burke, in a horrified whisper. “For God’s sake, don’t touch it!”

Husband and wife drove home in silence. Silently the doctor dismissed the cab and opened the hall-door. The gas was burning brightly in the study. The servant had left on the side-table a tray with sandwiches, wine, and spirits. Burke poured out some brandy and tossed it off neat. His face was still rather white, otherwise he had quite recovered his usual composure.

Mrs. Burke loosened her cloak and dropped wearily into a chair by the fire. A hopeless despondency was visible in every line of her attitude. Once or twice the doctor looked at her, and opened his lips to speak. Then he thought better of it, and kept silence. Half an hour passed in this way. At last Burke lighted a candle and left the room. When he returned he carried in his hand a small bottle. He had completely regained his self-possession as he came over to his wife and scrutinised her troubled face.

“Have some wine,” he said, “and then you had better go to bed. You look thoroughly done up.”

“What is that?” She pointed to the bottle in his hand.

“A sleeping-draught. Merely a little morphia and bromide. I should advise you to take one, too. Frankly, tonight’s performance was enough to try the strongest nerves. Mine require steadying by a good night’s rest, and I do not intend risking an attack of insomnia.”

She rose suddenly from her chair and clasped her hands on his arm.

“Val,” she cried, piteously, “don’t try to deceive me. Dear, I can bear anything if you will only trust me and tell me the truth. What is this thing which stands between us? What was the meaning of that awful sight?”

For a moment he hesitated; then he pulled himself together and answered lightly—

“My dear girl, you are unnerved, and I do not wonder at it. Let us forget it.”

“I cannot, I cannot,” she interrupted wildly. “I must know what it meant. I have always felt there was something. Valentine, I beseech you, by everything you hold sacred, tell me the truth now before it is too late. I could forgive you almost—almost anything, if you will tell me bravely; but do not leave me to find it out for myself.”

“There is nothing to tell.”

“You will not trust me?”

“I tell you there is nothing.”

“That is your final answer?”

“Yes.”

Without a word she left the room and went upstairs. Burke soon followed her. His nerves had been sufficiently shaken to make solitude undesirable. He smoked a cigar in his dressing-room, and took the sleeping-draught before going to bed. The effects of the opiate lasted for several hours. It was broad daylight when the doctor awoke. He felt weak and used up, and his head was splitting. He lay for a short time in that drowsy condition which is the border-land between sleeping and waking. Then he became conscious that his wife was not in the room. He looked at his watch, and saw that it was half-past nine. He waited a few minutes, expecting her to return, but she did not come. Presently he got up and drew back the window-curtains. As the full light streamed in, he was struck by a certain change in the appearance of the room. At first he was uncertain in what the change consisted, but gradually he realised that it lay in the absence of the usual feminine impedimenta. The dressing-table was shorn of its silver toilet accessories. One or two drawers were open and emptied of their contents. The writing-table was cleared, and his wife’s dressing-case had disappeared from its usual place. Burke’s first impulse was to ring for a servant and make inquiries, but as he stretched out his hand to the bell his eyes fell on a letter, conspicuously placed on the centre of a small table. It was addressed in Elma’s handwriting. From that moment Burke knew that something had happened, and he was prepared for the worst. The letter was not long. It was written firmly, though pale-blue stains here and there indicated where the wet ink had been splashed by falling tears.

When you read this, she wrote, I shall have left you forever. The only reparation in your power is to refrain from any attempt to follow me; indeed, you will hardly desire to do so, when I tell you that I know all. I said last night I could not endure the torture of uncertainty. My fears were so terrible that I felt I must know the truth or die. I implored you to trust me. You put me off with a lie. Was I to blame if I used against you a power which you yourself had taught me? In the last four hours I have heard from your own lips the whole story of Katharine Greaves. Every detail of that horrible tragedy you confessed unconsciously in your sleep, and I who loved you—Heaven knows how dearly!—have to endure the agony of knowing my husband to be a murderer, and that my wretched fortune supplied the motive for the crime. Thank God that I have no child to bear the curse of your sin, to inherit its father’s nature! I hardly know what I am writing. The very ground seems to be cut away from under my feet. On every side I can see nothing but densest darkness, and the only thing that is left to us is death.

—Your wretched wife, Elma.

From the moment he opened the letter, Burke’s decision was made. He possessed the exact admixture of physical courage and moral cowardice which induces a man worsted in the battle of life to end the conflict by removing himself from the arena. He had taken the best of the world’s gifts, and there was nothing left worth having. His belief in a future life was too vague to cause him any uneasiness, and physically, fear was a word he did not understand. He quietly lighted his wife’s letter with a match, and threw it into the tireless grate. He smoked a cigarette while he watched it burn, and carefully hid the charred ashes among the cinders. Then he fetched from his dressing-room a small polished box, unlocked it, and took out the revolver. It was loaded in all six chambers.

Burke leisurely finished his cigarette, and tossed the end away. He never hesitated a moment. He had no regret for the life he was leaving. As Elma had said, there was only one thing left for him to do, and—he did it.

New Ghost Stories (1893)

THE INMOST LIGHT

Arthur Machen

1894

•  1  •

One evening in autumn, when the deformities of London were veiled in faint blue mist, and its vistas and far-reaching streets seemed splendid, Mr. Charles Salisbury was slowly pacing down Rupert Street, drawing nearer to his favourite restaurant by slow degrees. His eyes were downcast in study of the pavement, and thus it was that as he passed in at the narrow door a man who had come up from the lower end of the street jostled against him.

“I beg your pardon – wasn’t looking where I was going. Why, it’s Dyson!”

“Yes, quite so. How are you, Salisbury?”

“Quite well. But where have you been, Dyson? I don’t think I can have seen you for the last five years?”

“No; I dare say not. You remember I was getting rather hard up when you came to my place at Charlotte Street?”

“Perfectly. I think I remember your telling me that you owed five weeks’ rent, and that you had parted with your watch for a comparatively small sum.”

“My dear Salisbury, your memory is admirable. Yes, I was hard up. But the curious thing is that soon after you saw me I became harder up. My financial state was described by a friend as ‘stone broke.’ I don’t approve of slang, mind you, but such was my condition. But suppose we go in; there might be other people who would like to dine – it’s a human weakness, Salisbury.”

“Certainly; come along. I was wondering as I walked down whether the corner table were taken. It has a velvet back you know.”

“I know the spot; it’s vacant. Yes, as I was saying, I became even harder up.”

“What did you do then?” asked Salisbury, disposing of his hat, and settling down in the corner of the seat, with a glance of fond anticipation at the menu.

“What did I do? Why, I sat down and reflected. I had a good classical education, and a positive distaste for business of any kind: that was the capital with which I faced the world. Do you know, I have heard people describe olives as nasty! What lamentable Philistinism! I have often thought, Salisbury, that I could write genuine poetry under the influence of olives and red wine. Let us have Chianti; it may not be very good, but the flasks are simply charming.”

“It is pretty good here. We may as well have a big flask.”

“Very good. I reflected, then, on my want of prospects, and I determined to embark in literature.”

“Really; that was strange. You seem in pretty comfortable circumstances, though.”

“Though! What a satire upon a noble profession. I am afraid, Salisbury, you haven’t a proper idea of the dignity of an artist. You see me sitting at my desk – or at least you can see me if you care to call – with pen and ink, and simple nothingness before me, and if you come again in a few hours you will (in all probability) find a creation!”

“Yes, quite so. I had an idea that literature was not remunerative.”

“You are mistaken; its rewards are great. I may mention, by the way, that shortly after you saw me I succeeded to a small income. An uncle died, and proved unexpectedly generous.”

“Ah, I see. That must have been convenient.”

“It was pleasant – undeniably pleasant. I have always considered it in the light of an endowment of my researches. I told you I was a man of letters; it would, perhaps, be more correct to describe myself as a man of science.”

“Dear me, Dyson, you have really changed very much in the last few years. I had a notion, don’t you know, that you were a sort of idler about town, the kind of man one might meet on the north side of Piccadilly every day from May to July.”

“Exactly. I was even then forming myself, though all unconsciously. You know my poor father could not afford to send me to the University. I used to grumble in my ignorance at not having completed my education. That was the folly of youth, Salisbury; my University was Piccadilly. There I began to study the great science which still occupies me.”

“What science do you mean?”

“The science of the great city; the physiology of London; literally and metaphysically the greatest subject that the mind of man can conceive. What an admirable salmi this is; undoubtedly the final end of the pheasant. Yet I feel sometimes positively overwhelmed with the thought of the vastness and complexity of London. Paris a man may get to understand thoroughly with a reasonable amount of study; but London is always a mystery. In Paris you may say: ‘Here live the actresses, here the Bohemians, and the Ratés’ [failures]; but it is different in London. You may point out a street, correctly enough, as the abode of washerwomen; but, in that second floor, a man may be studying Chaldee roots, and in the garret over the way a forgotten artist is dying by inches.”

“I see you are Dyson, unchanged and unchangeable,” said Salisbury, slowly sipping his Chianti. “I think you are misled by a too fervid imagination; the mystery of London exists only in your fancy. It seems to me a dull place enough. We seldom hear of a really artistic crime in London, whereas I believe Paris abounds in that sort of thing.”

“Give me some more wine. Thanks. You are mistaken, my dear fellow, you are really mistaken. London has nothing to be ashamed of in the way of crime. Where we fail is for want of Homers, not Agamemnons. Carent quia vate sacro [Because they lacked a sacred prophet’ i.e., a poet.], you know.”

“I recall the quotation. But I don’t think I quite follow you.”

“Well, in plain language, we have no good writers in London who make a speciality of that kind of thing. Our common reporter is a dull dog; every story that he has to tell is spoilt in the telling. His idea of horror and of what excites horror is so lamentably deficient. Nothing will content the fellow but blood, vulgar red blood, and when he can get it he lays it on thick, and considers that he has produced a telling article. It’s a poor notion. And, by some curious fatality, it is the most commonplace and brutal murders which always attract the most attention and get written up the most. For instance, I dare say that you never heard of the Harlesden case?”

“No; no, I don’t remember anything about it.”

“Of course not. And yet the story is a curious one. I will tell it you over our coffee. Harlesden, you know, or I expect you don’t know, is quite on the out-quarters of London; something curiously different from your fine old crusted suburb like Norwood or Hampstead, different as each of these is from the other. Hampstead, I mean, is where you look for the head of your great China house with his three acres of land and pine-houses, though of late there is the artistic substratum; while Norwood is the home of the prosperous middle-class family who took the house ‘because it was near the Palace,’ and sickened of the Palace six months afterwards; but Harlesden is a place of no character. It’s too new to have any character as yet. There are the rows of red houses and the rows of white houses and the bright green Venetians, and the blistering doorways, and the little backyards they call gardens, and a few feeble shops, and then, just as you think you’re going to grasp the physiognomy of the settlement, it all melts away.”

“How the dickens is that? the houses don’t tumble down before one’s eyes, I suppose!”

–   –   –

Well, no, not exactly that. But Harlesden as an entity disappears. Your street turns into a quiet lane, and your staring houses into elm trees, and the back-gardens into green meadows. You pass instantly from town to country; there is no transition as in a small country town, no soft gradations of wider lawns and orchards, with houses gradually becoming less dense, but a dead stop. I believe the people who live there mostly go into the City. I have seen once or twice a laden ’bus bound thitherwards. But however that may be, I can’t conceive a greater loneliness in a desert at midnight than there is there at mid-day. It is like a city of the dead; the streets are glaring and desolate, and as you pass it suddenly strikes you that this too is part of London.

Well, a year or two ago there was a doctor living there; he had set up his brass plate and his red lamp at the very end of one of those shining streets, and from the back of the house, the fields stretched away to the north. I don’t know what his reason was in settling down in such an out-of-the-way place, perhaps Dr. Black, as we will call him, was a far-seeing man and looked ahead. His relations, so it appeared afterwards, had lost sight of him for many years and didn’t even know he was a doctor, much less where he lived. However, there he was settled in Harlesden, with some fragments of a practice, and an uncommonly pretty wife. People used to see them walking out together in the summer evenings soon after they came to Harlesden, and, so far as could be observed, they seemed a very affectionate couple. These walks went on through the autumn, and then ceased; but, of course, as the days grew dark and the weather cold, the lanes near Harlesden might be expected to lose many of their attractions. All through the winter nobody saw anything of Mrs. Black; the doctor used to reply to his patients’ inquiries that she was a “little out of sorts, would be better, no doubt, in the spring.” But the spring came, and the summer, and no Mrs. Black appeared, and at last people began to rumour and talk amongst themselves, and all sorts of queer things were said at “high teas,” which you may possibly have heard are the only form of entertainment known in such suburbs. Dr. Black began to surprise some very odd looks cast in his direction, and the practice, such as it was, fell off before his eyes. In short, when the neighbours whispered about the matter, they whispered that Mrs. Black was dead, and that the doctor had made away with her.

But this wasn’t the case; Mrs. Black was seen alive in June. It was a Sunday afternoon, one of those few exquisite days that an English climate offers, and half London had strayed out into the fields, north, south, east, and west to smell the scent of the white May, and to see if the wild roses were yet in blossom in the hedges. I had gone out myself early in the morning, and had had a long ramble, and somehow or other as I was steering homeward I found myself in this very Harlesden we have been talking about. To be exact, I had a glass of beer in the “General Gordon,” the most flourishing “public” house in the neighbourhood, and as I was wandering rather aimlessly about, I saw an uncommonly tempting gap in a hedgerow, and resolved to explore the meadow beyond. Soft grass is very grateful to the feet after the infernal grit strewn on suburban sidewalks, and after walking about for some time I thought I should like to sit down on a bank and have a smoke. While I was getting out my pouch, I looked up in the direction of the houses, and as I looked I felt my breath caught back, and my teeth began to chatter, and the stick I had in one hand snapped in two with the grip I gave it. It was as if I had had an electric current down my spine, and yet for some moment of time which seemed long, but which must have been very short, I caught myself wondering what on earth was the matter. Then I knew what had made my very heart shudder and my bones grind together in an agony.

As I glanced up I had looked straight towards the last house in the row before me, and in an upper window of that house I had seen for some short fraction of a second a face. It was the face of a woman, and yet it was not human. You and I, Salisbury, have heard in our time, as we sat in our seats in church in sober English fashion, of a lust that cannot be satiated and of a fire that is unquenchable, but few of us have any notion what these words mean. I hope you never may, for as I saw that face at the window, with the blue sky above me and the warm air playing in gusts about me, I knew I had looked into another world – looked through the window of a commonplace, brand-new house, and seen hell open before me. When the first shock was over, I thought once or twice that I should have fainted; my face streamed with a cold sweat, and my breath came and went in sobs, as if I had been half drowned. I managed to get up at last, and walk round to the street, and there I saw the name “Dr. Black” on the post by the front gate. As fate or my luck would have it, the door opened and a man came down the steps as I passed by. I had no doubt it was the doctor himself. He was of a type rather common in London; long and thin, with a pasty face and a dull black moustache. He gave me a look as we passed each other on the pavement, and though it was merely the casual glance which one foot-passenger bestows on another, I felt convinced in my mind that here was an ugly customer to deal with.

As you may imagine, I went my way a good deal puzzled and horrified too by what I had seen; for I had paid another visit to the “General Gordon,” and had got together a good deal of the common gossip of the place about the Blacks. I didn’t mention the fact that I had seen a woman’s face in the window; but I heard that Mrs. Black had been much admired for her beautiful golden hair, and round what had struck me with such a nameless terror, there was a mist of flowing yellow hair, as it were an aureole of glory round the visage of a satyr. The whole thing bothered me in an indescribable manner; and when I got home I tried my best to think of the impression I had received as an illusion, but it was no use. I knew very well I had seen what I have tried to describe to you, and I was morally certain that I had seen Mrs. Black. And then there was the gossip of the place, the suspicion of foul play, which I knew to be false, and my own conviction that there was some deadly mischief or other going on in that bright red house at the corner of Devon Road: how to construct a theory of a reasonable kind out of these two elements. In short, I found myself in a world of mystery; I puzzled my head over it and filled up my leisure moments by gathering together odd threads of speculation, but I never moved a step towards any real solution, and as the summer days went on the matter seemed to grow misty and indistinct, shadowing some vague terror, like a nightmare of last month. I suppose it would before long have faded into the background of my brain – I should not have forgotten it, for such a thing could never be forgotten – but one morning as I was looking over the paper my eye was caught by a heading over some two dozen lines of small type.

The words I had seen were simply, “The Harlesden Case,” and I knew what I was going to read. Mrs. Black was dead. Black had called in another medical man to certify as to cause of death, and something or other had aroused the strange doctor’s suspicions and there had been an inquest and post-mortem. And the result? That, I will confess, did astonish me considerably; it was the triumph of the unexpected. The two doctors who made the autopsy were obliged to confess that they could not discover the faintest trace of any kind of foul play; their most exquisite tests and reagents failed to detect the presence of poison in the most infinitesimal quantity. Death, they found, had been caused by a somewhat obscure and scientifically interesting form of brain disease. The tissue of the brain and the molecules of the grey matter had undergone a most extraordinary series of changes; and the younger of the two doctors, who has some reputation, I believe, as a specialist in brain trouble, made some remarks in giving his evidence which struck me deeply at the time, though I did not then grasp their full significance. He said: “At the commencement of the examination I was astonished to find appearances of a character entirely new to me, notwithstanding my somewhat large experience. I need not specify these appearances at present, it will be sufficient for me to state that as I proceeded in my task I could scarcely believe that the brain before me was that of a human being at all.” There was some surprise at this statement, as you may imagine, and the coroner asked the doctor if he meant to say that the brain resembled that of an animal. “No,” he replied, “I should not put it in that way. Some of the appearances I noticed seemed to point in that direction, but others, and these were the more surprising, indicated a nervous organization of a wholly different character from that either of man or the lower animals.” It was a curious thing to say, but of course the jury brought in a verdict of death from natural causes, and, so far as the public was concerned, the case came to an end. But after I had read what the doctor said I made up my mind that I should like to know a good deal more, and I set to work on what seemed likely to prove an interesting investigation. I had really a good deal of trouble, but I was successful in a measure. Though why – my dear fellow, I had no notion at the time. Are you aware that we have been here nearly four hours? The waiters are staring at us. Let’s have the bill and be gone.

–   –   –

The two men went out in silence, and stood a moment in the cool air, watching the hurrying traffic of Coventry Street pass before them to the accompaniment of the ringing bells of hansoms and the cries of the newsboys; the deep far murmur of London surging up ever and again from beneath these louder noises.

“It is a strange case, isn’t it?” said Dyson at length. “What do you think of it?”

“My dear fellow, I haven’t heard the end, so I will reserve my opinion. When will you give me the sequel?”

“Come to my rooms some evening; say next Thursday. Here’s the address. Good-night; I want to get down to the Strand.” Dyson hailed a passing hansom, and Salisbury turned northward to walk home to his lodgings.

•  2  •

Mr. Salisbury, as may have been gathered from the few remarks which he had found it possible to introduce in the course of the evening, was a young gentleman of a peculiarly solid form of intellect, coy and retiring before the mysterious and the uncommon, with a constitutional dislike of paradox. During the restaurant dinner he had been forced to listen in almost absolute silence to a strange tissue of improbabilities strung together with the ingenuity of a born meddler in plots and mysteries, and it was with a feeling of weariness that he crossed Shaftesbury Avenue, and dived into the recesses of Soho, for his lodgings were in a modest neighbourhood to the north of Oxford Street. As he walked he speculated on the probable fate of Dyson, relying on literature, unbefriended by a thoughtful relative, and could not help concluding that so much subtlety united to a too vivid imagination would in all likelihood have been rewarded with a pair of sandwich-boards or a super’s banner. Absorbed in this train of thought, and admiring the perverse dexterity which could transmute the face of a sickly woman and a case of brain disease into the crude elements of romance, Salisbury strayed on through the dimly-lighted streets, not noticing the gusty wind which drove sharply round corners and whirled the stray rubbish of the pavement into the air in eddies, while black clouds gathered over the sickly yellow moon. Even a stray drop or two of rain blown into his face did not rouse him from his meditations, and it was only when with a sudden rush the storm tore down upon the street that he began to consider the expediency of finding some shelter. The rain, driven by the wind, pelted down with the violence of a thunderstorm, dashing up from the stones and hissing through the air, and soon a perfect torrent of water coursed along the kennels and accumulated in pools over the choked-up drains. The few stray passengers who had been loafing rather than walking about the street had scuttered away, like frightened rabbits, to some invisible places of refuge, and though Salisbury whistled loud and long for a hansom, no hansom appeared.

He looked about him, as if to discover how far he might be from the haven of Oxford Street, but strolling carelessly along, he had turned out of his way, and found himself in an unknown region, and one to all appearance devoid even of a public-house where shelter could be bought for the modest sum of twopence. The street lamps were few and at long intervals, and burned behind grimy glasses with the sickly light of oil, and by this wavering glimmer Salisbury could make out the shadowy and vast old houses of which the street was composed. As he passed along, hurrying, and shrinking from the full sweep of the rain, he noticed the innumerable bell-handles, with names that seemed about to vanish of old age graven on brass plates beneath them, and here and there a richly carved penthouse overhung the door, blackening with the grime of fifty years. The storm seemed to grow more and more furious; he was wet through, and a new hat had become a ruin, and still Oxford Street seemed as far off as ever. It was with deep relief that the dripping man caught sight of a dark archway which seemed to promise shelter from the rain if not from the wind. Salisbury took up his position in the driest corner and looked about him; he was standing in a kind of passage contrived under part of a house, and behind him stretched a narrow footway leading between blank walls to regions unknown.

He had stood there for some time, vainly endeavouring to rid himself of some of his superfluous moisture, and listening for the passing wheel of a hansom, when his attention was aroused by a loud noise coming from the direction of the passage behind, and growing louder as it drew nearer. In a couple of minutes he could make out the shrill, raucous voice of a woman, threatening and renouncing and making the very stones echo with her accents, while now and then a man grumbled and expostulated. Though to all appearance devoid of romance, Salisbury had some relish for street rows, and was, indeed, somewhat of an amateur in the more amusing phases of drunkenness; he therefore composed himself to listen and observe with something of the air of a subscriber to grand opera. To his annoyance, however, the tempest seemed suddenly to be composed, and he could hear nothing but the impatient steps of the woman and the slow lurch of the man as they came towards him. Keeping back in the shadow of the wall, he could see the two drawing nearer; the man was evidently drunk, and had much ado to avoid frequent collision with the wall as he tacked across from one side to the other, like some bark beating up against a wind. The woman was looking straight in front of her, with tears streaming from her eyes, but suddenly as they went by the flame blazed up again, and she burst forth into a torrent of abuse, facing round upon her companion.

“You low rascal, you mean, contemptible cur,” she went on, after an incoherent storm of curses, “you think I’m to work and slave for you always, I suppose, while you’re after that Green Street girl and drinking every penny you’ve got? But you’re mistaken, Sam – indeed, I’ll bear it no longer. Damn you, you dirty thief, I’ve done with you and your master too, so you can go your own errands, and I only hope they’ll get you into trouble.”

The woman tore at the bosom of her dress, and taking something out that looked like paper, crumpled it up and flung it away. It fell at Salisbury’s feet. She ran out and disappeared in the darkness, while the man lurched slowly into the street, grumbling indistinctly to himself in a perplexed tone of voice. Salisbury looked out after him, and saw him maundering along the pavement, halting now and then and swaying indecisively, and then starting off at some fresh tangent. The sky had cleared, and white fleecy clouds were fleeting across the moon, high in the heaven. The light came and went by turns, as the clouds passed by, and, turning round as the clear, white rays shone into the passage, Salisbury saw the little ball of crumpled paper which the woman had cast down. Oddly curious to know what it might contain, he picked it up and put it in his pocket, and set out afresh on his journey.

•  3  •

Salisbury was a man of habit. When he got home, drenched to the skin, his clothes hanging lank about him, and a ghastly dew besmearing his hat, his only thought was of his health, of which he took studious care. So, after changing his clothes and encasing himself in a warm dressing-gown, he proceeded to prepare a sudorific in the shape of hot gin and water, warming the latter over one of those spirit-lamps which mitigate the austerities of the modern hermit’s life. By the time this preparation had been exhibited, and Salisbury’s disturbed feelings had been soothed by a pipe of tobacco, he was able to get into bed in a happy state of vacancy, without a thought of his adventure in the dark archway, or of the weird fancies with which Dyson had seasoned his dinner. It was the same at breakfast the next morning, for Salisbury made a point of not thinking of anything until that meal was over; but when the cup and saucer were cleared away, and the morning pipe was lit, he remembered the little ball of paper, and began fumbling in the pockets of his wet coat. He did not remember into which pocket he had put it, and as he dived now into one and now into another, he experienced a strange feeling of apprehension lest it should not be there at all, though he could not for the life of him have explained the importance he attached to what was in all probability mere rubbish. But he sighed with relief when his fingers touched the crumpled surface in an inside pocket, and he drew it out gently and laid it on the little desk by his easy-chair with as much care as if it had been some rare jewel.

Salisbury sat smoking and staring at his find for a few minutes, an odd temptation to throw the thing in the fire and have done with it struggling with as odd a speculation as to its possible contents, and as to the reason why the infuriated woman should have flung a bit of paper from her with such vehemence. As might be expected, it was the latter feeling that conquered in the end, and yet it was with something like repugnance that he at last took the paper and unrolled it, and laid it out before him. It was a piece of common dirty paper, to all appearance torn out of a cheap exercise-book, and in the middle were a few lines written in a queer cramped hand. Salisbury bent his head and stared eagerly at it for a moment, drawing a long breath, and then fell back in his chair gazing blankly before him, till at last with a sudden revulsion he burst into a peal of laughter, so long and loud and uproarious that the landlady’s baby in the floor below awoke from sleep and echoed his mirth with hideous yells. But he laughed again and again, and took the paper up to read a second time what seemed such meaningless nonsense.

“Q. has had to go and see his friends in Paris,” it began. “Traverse Handel S. ‘Once around the grass, and twice around the lass, and thrice around the maple tree.’”

Salisbury took up the paper and crumpled it as the angry woman had done, and aimed it at the fire. He did not throw it there, however, but tossed it carelessly into the well of the desk, and laughed again. The sheer folly of the thing offended him, and he was ashamed of his own eager speculation, as one who pores over the high-sounding announcements in the agony column of the daily paper, and finds nothing but advertisement and triviality. He walked to the window, and stared out at the languid morning life of his quarter; the maids in slatternly print dresses washing door-steps, the fishmonger and the butcher on their rounds, and the tradesmen standing at the doors of their small shops, drooping for lack of trade and excitement. In the distance a blue haze gave some grandeur to the prospect, but the view as a whole was depressing, and would only have interested a student of the life of London, who finds something rare and choice in its every aspect.

Salisbury turned away in disgust, and settled himself in the easy-chair, upholstered in a bright shade of green, and decked with yellow gimp, which was the pride and attraction of the apartments. Here he composed himself to his morning’s occupation – the perusal of a novel that dealt with sport and love in a manner that suggested the collaboration of a stud-groom and a ladies’ college. In an ordinary way, however, Salisbury would have been carried on by the interest of the story up to lunchtime, but this morning he fidgeted in and out of his chair, took the book up and laid it down again, and swore at last to himself and at himself in mere irritation. In point of fact the jingle of the paper found in the archway had “got into his head,” and do what he would he could not help muttering over and over, “Once around the grass, and twice around the lass, and thrice around the maple tree.” It became a positive pain, like the foolish burden of a music-hall song, everlastingly quoted, and sung at all hours of the day and night, and treasured by the street boys as an unfailing resource for six months together. He went out into the streets, and tried to forget his enemy in the jostling of the crowds and the roar and clatter of the traffic, but presently he would find himself stealing quietly aside, and pacing some deserted byway, vainly puzzling his brains, and trying to fix some meaning to phrases that were meaningless.

It was a positive relief when Thursday came, and he remembered that he had made an appointment to go and see Dyson; the flimsy reveries of the self-styled man of letters appeared entertaining when compared with this ceaseless iteration, this maze of thought from which there seemed no possibility of escape. Dyson’s abode was in one of the quietest of the quiet streets that lead down from the Strand to the river, and when Salisbury passed from the narrow stairway into his friend’s room, he saw that the uncle had been beneficent indeed. The floor glowed and flamed with all the colours of the East; it was, as Dyson pompously remarked, “a sunset in a dream,” and the lamplight, the twilight of London streets, was shut out with strangely worked curtains, glittering here and there with threads of gold. In the shelves of an oak armoire stood jars and plates of old French china, and the black and white of etchings not to be found in the Haymarket or in Bond Street, stood out against the splendour of a Japanese paper. Salisbury sat down on the settle by the hearth, and sniffed the mingled fumes of incense and tobacco, wondering and dumb before all this splendour after the green rep and the oleographs, the gilt-framed mirror, and the lustres of his own apartment.

“I am glad you have come,” said Dyson. “Comfortable little room, isn’t it? But you don’t look very well, Salisbury. Nothing disagreed with you, has it?”

“No; but I have been a good deal bothered for the last few days. The fact is I had an odd kind of – of – adventure, I suppose I may call it, that night I saw you, and it has worried me a good deal. And the provoking part of it is that it’s the merest nonsense – but, however, I will tell you all about it, by and by. You were going to let me have the rest of that odd story you began at the restaurant.”

“Yes. But I am afraid, Salisbury, you are incorrigible. You are a slave to what you call matter of fact. You know perfectly well that in your heart you think the oddness in that case is of my making, and that it is all really as plain as the police reports. However, as I have begun, I will go on. But first we will have something to drink, and you may as well light your pipe.”

Dyson went up to the oak cupboard, and drew from its depths a rotund bottle and two little glasses, quaintly gilded.

“It’s Benedictine,” he said. “You’ll have some, won’t you?”

Salisbury assented, and the two men sat sipping and smoking reflectively for some minutes before Dyson began.

“Let me see,” he said at last, “we were at the inquest, weren’t we? No, we had done with that. Ah, I remember. I was telling you that on the whole I had been successful in my inquiries, investigation, or whatever you like to call it, into the matter. Wasn’t that where I left off?”

“Yes, that was it. To be precise, I think ‘though’ was the last word you said on the matter.”

“Exactly. I have been thinking it all over since the other night, and I have come to the conclusion that that “though” is a very big “though” indeed. Not to put too fine a point on it, I have had to confess that what I found out, or thought I found out, amounts in reality to nothing. I am as far away from the heart of the case as ever. However, I may as well tell you what I do know.”

–   –   –

You may remember my saying that I was impressed a good deal by some remarks of one of the doctors who gave evidence at the inquest. Well, I determined that my first step must be to try if I could get something more definite and intelligible out of that doctor. Somehow or other I managed to get an introduction to the man, and he gave me an appointment to come and see him. He turned out to be a pleasant, genial fellow; rather young and not in the least like the typical medical man, and he began the conference by offering me whisky and cigars. I didn’t think it worth while to beat about the bush, so I began by saying that part of his evidence at the Harlesden Inquest struck me as very peculiar, and I gave him the printed report, with the sentences in question underlined. He just glanced at the slip, and gave me a queer look. “It struck you as peculiar, did it?” said he. “Well, you must remember that the Harlesden case was very peculiar. In fact, I think I may safely say that in some features it was unique – quite unique.” “Quite so,” I replied, “and that’s exactly why it interests me, and why I want to know more about it. And I thought that if anybody could give me any information it would be you. What is your opinion of the matter?”

It was a pretty downright sort of question, and my doctor looked rather taken aback.

“Well,” he said, “as I fancy your motive in inquiring into the question must be mere curiosity, I think I may tell you my opinion with tolerable freedom. So, Mr., Mr. Dyson? if you want to know my theory, it is this: I believe that Dr. Black killed his wife.”

“But the verdict,” I answered, “the verdict was given from your own evidence.”

“Quite so; the verdict was given in accordance with the evidence of my colleague and myself, and, under the circumstances, I think the jury acted very sensibly. In fact, I don’t see what else they could have done. But I stick to my opinion, mind you, and I say this also. I don’t wonder at Black’s doing what I firmly believe he did. I think he was justified.”

“Justified! How could that be?” I asked. I was astonished, as you may imagine, at the answer I had got. The doctor wheeled round his chair and looked steadily at me for a moment before he answered.

“I suppose you are not a man of science yourself? No; then it would be of no use my going into detail. I have always been firmly opposed myself to any partnership between physiology and psychology. I believe that both are bound to suffer. No one recognises more decidedly than I do the impassable gulf, the fathomless abyss that separates the world of consciousness from the sphere of matter. We know that every change of consciousness is accompanied by a rearrangement of the molecules in the grey matter; and that is all. What the link between them is, or why they occur together, we do not know, and most authorities believe that we never can know. Yet, I will tell you that as I did my work, the knife in my hand, I felt convinced, in spite of all theories, that what lay before me was not the brain of a dead woman – not the brain of a human being at all. Of course I saw the face; but it was quite placid, devoid of all expression. It must have been a beautiful face, no doubt, but I can honestly say that I would not have looked in that face when there was life behind it for a thousand guineas, no, nor for twice that sum.”

“My dear sir,” I said, “you surprise me extremely. You say that it was not the brain of a human being. What was it, then?”

“The brain of a devil.” He spoke quite coolly, and never moved a muscle. “The brain of a devil,” he repeated, “and I have no doubt that Black found some way of putting an end to it. I don’t blame him if he did. Whatever Mrs. Black was, she was not fit to stay in this world. Will you have anything more? No? Good-night, good-night.”

It was a queer sort of opinion to get from a man of science, wasn’t it? When he was saying that he would not have looked on that face when alive for a thousand guineas, or two thousand guineas, I was thinking of the face I had seen, but I said nothing. I went again to Harlesden, and passed from one shop to another, making small purchases, and trying to find out whether there was anything about the Blacks which was not already common property, but there was very little to hear. One of the tradesmen to whom I spoke said he had known the dead woman well; she used to buy of him such quantities of grocery as were required for their small household, for they never kept a servant, but had a charwoman in occasionally, and she had not seen Mrs. Black for months before she died. According to this man Mrs. Black was “a nice lady,” always kind and considerate, and so fond of her husband and he of her, as everyone thought. And yet, to put the doctor’s opinion on one side, I knew what I had seen.

And then after thinking it all over, and putting one thing with another, it seemed to me that the only person likely to give me much assistance would be Black himself, and I made up my mind to find him. Of course he wasn’t to be found in Harlesden; he had left, I was told, directly after the funeral. Everything in the house had been sold, and one fine day Black got into the train with a small portmanteau, and went, nobody knew where. It was a chance if he were ever heard of again, and it was by a mere chance that I came across him at last. I was walking one day along Gray’s Inn Road, not bound for anywhere in particular, but looking about me, as usual, and holding on to my hat, for it was a gusty day in early March, and the wind was making the treetops in the Inn rock and quiver. I had come up from the Holborn end, and I had almost got to Theobald’s Road when I noticed a man walking in front of me, leaning on a stick, and to all appearance very feeble. There was something about his look that made me curious, I don’t know why, and I began to walk briskly with the idea of overtaking him, when of a sudden his hat blew off and came bounding along the pavement to my feet. Of course I rescued the hat, and gave it a glance as I went towards its owner. It was a biography in itself; a Piccadilly maker’s name in the inside, but I don’t think a beggar would have picked it out of the gutter.

Then I looked up and saw Dr. Black of Harlesden waiting for me. A queer thing, wasn’t it? But, Salisbury, what a change! When I saw Dr. Black come down the steps of his house at Harlesden he was an upright man, walking firmly with well-built limbs; a man, I should say, in the prime of his life. And now before me there crouched this wretched creature, bent and feeble, with shrunken cheeks, and hair that was whitening fast, and limbs that trembled and shook together, and misery in his eyes. He thanked me for bringing him his hat, saying, “I don’t think I should ever have got it, I can’t run much now. A gusty day, sir, isn’t it?” and with this he was turning away, but by little and little I contrived to draw him into the current of conversation, and we walked together eastward.

I think the man would have been glad to get rid of me; but I didn’t intend to let him go, and he stopped at last in front of a miserable house in a miserable street. It was, I verily believe, one of the most wretched quarters I have ever seen: houses that must have been sordid and hideous enough when new, that had gathered foulness with every year, and now seemed to lean and totter to their fall. “I live up there,” said Black, pointing to the tiles, “not in the front – in the back. I am very quiet there. I won’t ask you to come in now, but perhaps some other day—” I caught him up at that, and told him I should be only too glad to come and see him. He gave me an odd sort of glance, as if he were wondering what on earth I or anybody else could care about him, and I left him fumbling with his latch-key.

I think you will say I did pretty well when I tell you that within a few weeks I had made myself an intimate friend of Black’s. I shall never forget the first time I went to his room; I hope I shall never see such abject, squalid misery again. The foul paper, from which all pattern or trace of a pattern had long vanished, subdued and penetrated with the grime of the evil street, was hanging in mouldering pennons from the wall. Only at the end of the room was it possible to stand upright, and the sight of the wretched bed and the odour of corruption that pervaded the place made me turn faint and sick. Here I found him munching a piece of bread; he seemed surprised to find that I had kept my promise, but he gave me his chair and sat on the bed while we talked. I used to go to see him often, and we had long conversations together, but he never mentioned Harlesden or his wife. I fancy that he supposed me ignorant of the matter, or thought that if I had heard of it, I should never connect the respectable Dr. Black of Harlesden with a poor garreteer in the backwoods of London.

He was a strange man, and as we sat together smoking, I often wondered whether he were mad or sane, for I think the wildest dreams of Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians would appear plain and sober fact compared with the theories I have heard him earnestly advance in that grimy den of his. I once ventured to hint something of the sort to him. I suggested that something he had said was in flat contradiction to all science and all experience. “No,” he answered, “not all experience, for mine counts for something. I am no dealer in unproved theories; what I say I have proved for myself, and at a terrible cost. There is a region of knowledge which you will never know, which wise men seeing from afar off shun like the plague, as well they may, but into that region I have gone. If you knew, if you could even dream of what may be done, of what one or two men have done in this quiet world of ours, your very soul would shudder and faint within you. What you have heard from me has been but the merest husk and outer covering of true science – that science which means death, and that which is more awful than death, to those who gain it. No, when men say that there are strange things in the world, they little know the awe and the terror that dwell always with them and about them.”

There was a sort of fascination about the man that drew me to him, and I was quite sorry to have to leave London for a month or two; I missed his odd talk. A few days after I came back to town I thought I would look him up, but when I gave the two rings at the bell that used to summon him, there was no answer. I rang and rang again, and was just turning to go away, when the door opened and a dirty woman asked me what I wanted. From her look I fancy she took me for a plain-clothes officer after one of her lodgers, but when I inquired if Mr. Black were in, she gave me a stare of another kind. “There’s no Mr. Black lives here,” she said. “He’s gone. He’s dead this six weeks. I always thought he was a bit queer in his head, or else had been and got into some trouble or other. He used to go out every morning from ten till one, and one Monday morning we heard him come in, and go into his room and shut the door, and a few minutes after, just as we was a-sitting down to our dinner, there was such a scream that I thought I should have gone right off. And then we heard a stamping, and down he came, raging and cursing most dreadful, swearing he had been robbed of something that was worth millions. And then he just dropped down in the passage, and we thought he was dead. We got him up to his room, and put him on his bed, and I just sat there and waited, while my ’usband he went for the doctor. And there was the winder wide open, and a little tin box he had lying on the floor open and empty, but of course nobody could possible have got in at the winder, and as for him having anything that was worth anything, it’s nonsense, for he was often weeks and weeks behind with his rent, and my ’usband he threatened often and often to turn him into the street, for, as he said, we’ve got a living to myke like other people – and, of course, that’s true; but, somehow, I didn’t like to do it, though he was an odd kind of a man, and I fancy had been better off. And then the doctor came and looked at him, and said as he couldn’t do nothing, and that night he died as I was a-sitting by his bed; and I can tell you that, with one thing and another, we lost money by him, for the few bits of clothes as he had were worth next to nothing when they came to be sold.”

I gave the woman half a sovereign for her trouble, and went home thinking of Dr. Black and the epitaph she had made him, and wondering at his strange fancy that he had been robbed. I take it that he had very little to fear on that score, poor fellow; but I suppose that he was really mad, and died in a sudden access of his mania. His landlady said that once or twice when she had had occasion to go into his room (to dun the poor wretch for his rent, most likely), he would keep her at the door for about a minute, and that when she came in she would find him putting away his tin box in the corner by the window; I suppose he had become possessed with the idea of some great treasure, and fancied himself a wealthy man in the midst of all his misery. Explicit, my tale is ended, and you see that though I knew Black, I know nothing of his wife or of the history of her death. – That’s the Harlesden case, Salisbury, and I think it interests me all the more deeply because there does not seem the shadow of a possibility that I or anyone else will ever know more about it. What do you think of it?

–   –   –

“Well, Dyson, I must say that I think you have contrived to surround the whole thing with a mystery of your own making. I go for the doctor’s solution: Black murdered his wife, being himself in all probability an undeveloped lunatic.”

“What? Do you believe, then, that this woman was something too awful, too terrible to be allowed to remain on the earth? You will remember that the doctor said it was the brain of a devil?”

“Yes, yes, but he was speaking, of course, metaphorically. It’s really quite a simple matter if you only look at it like that.”

“Ah, well, you may be right; but yet I am sure you are not. Well, well, it’s no good discussing it any more. A little more Benedictine? That’s right; try some of this tobacco. Didn’t you say that you had been bothered by something – something which happened that night we dined together?”

“Yes, I have been worried, Dyson, worried a great deal. I – But it’s such a trivial matter – indeed, such an absurdity – that I feel ashamed to trouble you with it.”

“Never mind, let’s have it, absurd or not.”

With many hesitations, and with much inward resentment of the folly of the thing, Salisbury told his tale, and repeated reluctantly the absurd intelligence and the absurder doggerel of the scrap of paper, expecting to hear Dyson burst out into a roar of laughter.

“Isn’t it too bad that I should let myself be bothered by such stuff as that?” he asked, when he had stuttered out the jingle of once, and twice, and thrice.

Dyson had listened to it all gravely, even to the end, and meditated for a few minutes in silence.

“Yes,” he said at length, “it was a curious chance, your taking shelter in that archway just as those two went by. But I don’t know that I should call what was written on the paper nonsense; it is bizarre certainly, but I expect it has a meaning for somebody. Just repeat it again, will you, and I will write it down. Perhaps we might find a cipher of some sort, though I hardly think we shall.”

Again had the reluctant lips of Salisbury slowly to stammer out the rubbish that he abhorred, while Dyson jotted it down on a slip of paper.

“Look over it, will you?” he said, when it was done; “it may be important that I should have every word in its place. Is that all right?”

“Yes; that is an accurate copy. But I don’t think you will get much out of it. Depend upon it, it is mere nonsense, a wanton scribble. I must be going now, Dyson. No, no more; that stuff of yours is pretty strong. Good-night.”

“I suppose you would like to hear from me, if I did find out anything?”

“No, not I; I don’t want to hear about the thing again. You may regard the discovery, if it is one, as your own.”

“Very well. Good-night.”

•  4  •

A good many hours after Salisbury had returned to the company of the green rep chairs, Dyson still sat at his desk, itself a Japanese romance, smoking many pipes, and meditating over his friend’s story. The bizarre quality of the inscription which had annoyed Salisbury was to him an attraction, and now and again he took it up and scanned thoughtfully what he had written, especially the quaint jingle at the end. It was a token, a symbol, he decided, and not a cipher, and the woman who had flung it away was in all probability entirely ignorant of its meaning; she was but the agent of the “Sam” she had abused and discarded, and he too was again the agent of someone unknown; possibly of the individual styled Q, who had been forced to visit his French friends. But what to make of “Traverse Handel S.” Here was the root and source of the enigma, and not all the tobacco of Virginia seemed likely to suggest any clue here. It seemed almost hopeless, but Dyson regarded himself as the Wellington of mysteries, and went to bed feeling assured that sooner or later he would hit upon the right track.

For the next few days he was deeply engaged in his literary labours, labours which were a profound mystery even to the most intimate of his friends, who searched the railway bookstalls in vain for the result of so many hours spent at the Japanese bureau in company with strong tobacco and black tea. On this occasion Dyson confined himself to his room for four days, and it was with genuine relief that he laid down his pen and went out into the streets in quest of relaxation and fresh air. The gas-lamps were being lighted, and the fifth edition of the evening papers was being howled through the streets, and Dyson, feeling that he wanted quiet, turned away from the clamorous Strand, and began to trend away to the north-west. Soon he found himself in streets that echoed to his footsteps, and crossing a broad new thoroughfare, and verging still to the west, Dyson discovered that he had penetrated to the depths of Soho. Here again was life; rare vintages of France and Italy, at prices which seemed contemptibly small, allured the passer-by; here were cheeses, vast and rich, here olive oil, and here a grove of Rabelaisian sausages; while in a neighbouring shop the whole Press of Paris appeared to be on sale. In the middle of the roadway a strange miscellany of nations sauntered to and fro, for there cab and hansom rarely ventured; and from window over window the inhabitants looked forth in pleased contemplation of the scene. Dyson made his way slowly along, mingling with the crowd on the cobblestones, listening to the queer babel of French and German, and Italian and English, glancing now and again at the shop-windows with their levelled batteries of bottles, and had almost gained the end of the street, when his attention was arrested by a small shop at the corner, a vivid contrast to its neighbours.

It was the typical shop of the poor quarter; a shop entirely English. Here were vended tobacco and sweets, cheap pipes of clay and cherry-wood; penny exercise-books and penholders jostled for precedence with comic songs, and story papers with appalling cuts showed that romance claimed its place beside the actualities of the evening paper, the bills of which fluttered at the doorway. Dyson glanced up at the name above the door, and stood by the kennel trembling, for a sharp pang, the pang of one who has made a discovery, had for a moment left him incapable of motion. The name over the shop was “Travers.” Dyson looked up again, this time at the corner of the wall above the lamp-post, and read in white letters on a blue ground the words “Handel Street, W.C.,” and the legend was repeated in fainter letters just below. He gave a little sigh of satisfaction, and without more ado walked boldly into the shop, and stared full in the face the fat man who was sitting behind the counter. The fellow rose to his feet, and returned the stare a little curiously, and then began in stereotyped phrase—

“What can I do for you, sir?”

Dyson enjoyed the situation and a dawning perplexity on the man’s face. He propped his stick carefully against the counter and leaning over it, said slowly and impressively—

“Once around the grass, and twice around the lass, and thrice around the maple-tree.”

Dyson had calculated on his words producing an effect, and he was not disappointed. The vendor of miscellanies gasped, openmouthed like a fish, and steadied himself against the counter. When he spoke, after a short interval, it was in a hoarse mutter, tremulous and unsteady.

“Would you mind saying that again, sir? I didn’t quite catch it.”

“My good man, I shall most certainly do nothing of the kind. You heard what I said perfectly well. You have got a clock in your shop, I see; an admirable timekeeper, I have no doubt. Well, I give you a minute by your own clock.”

The man looked about him in a perplexed indecision, and Dyson felt that it was time to be bold.

“Look here, Travers, the time is nearly up. You have heard of Q, I think. Remember, I hold your life in my hands. Now!”

Dyson was shocked at the result of his own audacity. The man shrank and shrivelled in terror, the sweat poured down a face of ashy white, and he held up his hands before him.

“Mr. Davies, Mr. Davies, don’t say that – don’t for Heaven’s sake. I didn’t know you at first, I didn’t indeed. Good God! Mr. Davies, you wouldn’t ruin me? I’ll get it in a moment.”

“You had better not lose any more time.”

The man slunk piteously out of his own shop, and went into a back parlour. Dyson heard his trembling fingers fumbling with a bunch of keys, and the creak of an opening box. He came back presently with a small package neatly tied up in brown paper in his hands, and still, full of terror, handed it to Dyson.

“I’m glad to be rid of it,” he said. “I’ll take no more jobs of this sort.”

Dyson took the parcel and his stick, and walked out of the shop with a nod, turning round as he passed the door. Travers had sunk into his seat, his face still white with terror, with one hand over his eyes, and Dyson speculated a good deal as he walked rapidly away as to what queer chords those could be on which he had played so roughly. He hailed the first hansom he could see and drove home, and when he had lit his hanging lamp, and laid his parcel on the table, he paused for a moment, wondering on what strange thing the lamplight would soon shine. He locked his door, and cut the strings, and unfolded the paper layer after layer, and came at last to a small wooden box, simply but solidly made. There was no lock, and Dyson had simply to raise the lid, and as he did so he drew a long breath and started back.

The lamp seemed to glimmer feebly like a single candle, but the whole room blazed with light – and not with light alone, but with a thousand colours, with all the glories of some painted window; and upon the walls of his room and on the familiar furniture, the glow flamed back and seemed to flow again to its source, the little wooden box. For there upon a bed of soft wool lay the most splendid jewel, a jewel such as Dyson had never dreamed of, and within it shone the blue of far skies, and the green of the sea by the shore, and the red of the ruby, and deep violet rays, and in the middle of all it seemed aflame as if a fountain of fire rose up, and fell, and rose again with sparks like stars for drops. Dyson gave a long deep sigh, and dropped into his chair, and put his hands over his eyes to think. The jewel was like an opal, but from a long experience of the shop-windows he knew there was no such thing as an opal one-quarter or one-eighth of its size. He looked at the stone again, with a feeling that was almost awe, and placed it gently on the table under the lamp, and watched the wonderful flame that shone and sparkled in its centre, and then turned to the box, curious to know whether it might contain other marvels. He lifted the bed of wool on which the opal had reclined, and saw beneath, no more jewels, but a little old pocket-book, worn and shabby with use. Dyson opened it at the first leaf, and dropped the book again appalled. He had read the name of the owner, neatly written in blue ink:

Steven Black, M.D.,
Oranmore,
Devon Road,
Harlesden.

It was several minutes before Dyson could bring himself to open the book a second time; he remembered the wretched exile in his garret; and his strange talk, and the memory too of the face he had seen at the window, and of what the specialist had said, surged up in his mind, and as he held his finger on the cover, he shivered, dreading what might be written within. When at last he held it in his hand, and turned the pages, he found that the first two leaves were blank, but the third was covered with clear, minute writing, and Dyson began to read with the light of the opal flaming in his eyes.

•  5  •

Ever since I was a young man – the record began – I devoted all my leisure and a good deal of time that ought to have been given to other studies to the investigation of curious and obscure branches of knowledge. What are commonly called the pleasures of life had never any attractions for me, and I lived alone in London, avoiding my fellow-students, and in my turn avoided by them as a man self-absorbed and unsympathetic. So long as I could gratify my desire of knowledge of a peculiar kind, knowledge of which the very existence is a profound secret to most men, I was intensely happy, and I have often spent whole nights sitting in the darkness of my room, and thinking of the strange world on the brink of which I trod. My professional studies, however, and the necessity of obtaining a degree, for some time forced my more obscure employment into the background, and soon after I had qualified I met Agnes, who became my wife. We took a new house in this remote suburb, and I began the regular routine of a sober practice, and for some months lived happily enough, sharing in the life about me, and only thinking at odd intervals of that occult science which had once fascinated my whole being. I had learnt enough of the paths I had begun to tread to know that they were beyond all expression difficult and dangerous, that to persevere meant in all probability the wreck of a life, and that they led to regions so terrible, that the mind of man shrinks appalled at the very thought.

Moreover, the quiet and the peace I had enjoyed since my marriage had wiled me away to a great extent from places where I knew no peace could dwell. But suddenly – I think indeed it was the work of a single night, as I lay awake on my bed gazing into the darkness – suddenly, I say, the old desire, the former longing, returned, and returned with a force that had been intensified ten times by its absence; and when the day dawned and I looked out of the window, and saw with haggard eyes the sunrise in the east, I knew that my doom had been pronounced; that as I had gone far, so now I must go farther with unfaltering steps. I turned to the bed where my wife was sleeping peacefully, and lay down again, weeping bitter tears, for the sun had set on our happy life and had risen with a dawn of terror to us both. I will not set down here in minute detail what followed; outwardly I went about the day’s labour as before, saying nothing to my wife. But she soon saw that I had changed; I spent my spare time in a room which I had fitted up as a laboratory, and often I crept upstairs in the grey dawn of the morning, when the light of many lamps still glowed over London; and each night I had stolen a step nearer to that great abyss which I was to bridge over, the gulf between the world of consciousness and the world of matter.

My experiments were many and complicated in their nature, and it was some months before I realised whither they all pointed, and when this was borne in upon me in a moment’s time, I felt my face whiten and my heart still within me. But the power to draw back, the power to stand before the doors that now opened wide before me and not to enter in, had long ago been absent; the way was closed, and I could only pass onward. My position was as utterly hopeless as that of the prisoner in an utter dungeon, whose only light is that of the dungeon above him; the doors were shut and escape was impossible. Experiment after experiment gave the same result, and I knew, and shrank even as the thought passed through my mind, that in the work I had to do there must be elements which no laboratory could furnish, which no scales could ever measure. In that work, from which even I doubted to escape with life, life itself must enter; from some human being there must be drawn that essence which men call the soul, and in its place (for in the scheme of the world there is no vacant chamber) – in its place would enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind cannot conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death itself. And when I knew this, I knew also on whom this fate would fall; I looked into my wife’s eyes. Even at that hour, if I had gone out and taken a rope and hanged myself, I might have escaped, and she also, but in no other way.

At last I told her all. She shuddered, and wept, and called on her dead mother for help, and asked me if I had no mercy, and I could only sigh. I concealed nothing from her; I told her what she would become, and what would enter in where her life had been; I told her of all the shame and of all the horror. You who will read this when I am dead – if indeed I allow this record to survive, – you who have opened the box and have seen what lies there, if you could understand what lies hidden in that opal! For one night my wife consented to what I asked of her, consented with the tears running down her beautiful face, and hot shame flushing red over her neck and breast, consented to undergo this for me. I threw open the window, and we looked together at the sky and the dark earth for the last time; it was a fine star-light night, and there was a pleasant breeze blowing, and I kissed her on her lips, and her tears ran down upon my face.

That night she came down to my laboratory, and there, with shutters bolted and barred down, with curtains drawn thick and close, so that the very stars might be shut out from the sight of that room, while the crucible hissed and boiled over the lamp, I did what had to be done, and led out what was no longer a woman. But on the table the opal flamed and sparkled with such light as no eyes of man have ever gazed on, and the rays of the flame that was within it flashed and glittered, and shone even to my heart. My wife had only asked one thing of me; that when there came at last what I had told her, I would kill her. I have kept that promise.

There was nothing more.

Dyson let the little pocket-book fall, and turned and looked again at the opal with its flaming inmost light, and then with unutterable irresistible horror surging up in his heart, grasped the jewel, and flung it on the ground, and trampled it beneath his heel. His face was white with terror as he turned away, and for a moment stood sick and trembling, and then with a start he leapt across the room and steadied himself against the door.

There was an angry hiss, as of steam escaping under great pressure, and as he gazed, motionless, a volume of heavy yellow smoke was slowly issuing from the very centre of the jewel, and wreathing itself in snakelike coils above it. And then a thin white flame burst forth from the smoke, and shot up into the air and vanished; and on the ground there lay a thing like a cinder, black and crumbling to the touch.

The Great God Pan (1894)

THE PRAYER

Violet Hunt

1895

“It is but giving over of a game,

That must be lost.”

—Philaster.

•  1  •

“Come, Mrs. Arne – come, my dear, you must not give way like this! You can’t stand it – you really can’t! Let Miss Kate take you away – now do!” urged the nurse, with her most motherly of intonations.

“Yes, Alice, Mrs. Joyce is right. Come away – do come away – you are only making yourself ill. It is all over; you can do nothing! Oh, oh, do come away!” implored Mrs. Arne’s sister, shivering with excitement and nervousness.

A few moments ago Dr. Graham had relinquished his hold on the pulse of Edward Arne with the hopeless movement of the eyebrows that meant – the end.

The nurse had made the little gesture of resignation that was possibly a matter of form with her. The young sister-in-law had hidden her face in her hands. The wife had screamed a scream that had turned them all hot and cold – and flung herself on the bed over her dead husband. There she lay; her cries were terrible, her sobs shook her whole body.

The three gazed at her pityingly, not knowing what to do next. The nurse, folding her hands, looked towards the doctor for directions, and the doctor drummed with his fingers on the bedpost. The young girl timidly stroked the shoulder that heaved and writhed under her touch.

“Go away! Go away!” her sister reiterated continually, in a voice hoarse with fatigue and passion.

“Leave her alone, Miss Kate,” whispered the nurse at last; “she will work it off best herself, perhaps.”

She turned down the lamp, as if to draw a veil over the scene. Mrs. Arne raised herself on her elbow, showing a face stained with tears and purple with emotion.

“What! Not gone?” she said harshly. “Go away, Kate, go away! It is my house. I don’t want you, I want no one – I want to speak to my husband. Will you go away – all of you. Give me an hour, half-an-hour – five minutes!”

She stretched out her arms imploringly to the doctor.

“Well …” said he, almost to himself.

He signed to the two women to withdraw, and followed them out into the passage. “Go and get something to eat,” he said peremptorily, “while you can. We shall have trouble with her presently. I’ll wait in the dressing-room.”

He glanced at the twisting figure on the bed, shrugged his shoulders, and passed into the adjoining room, without, however, closing the door of communication. Sitting down in an armchair drawn up to the fire, he stretched himself and closed his eyes. The professional aspects of the case of Edward Arne rose up before him in all its interesting forms of complication….

•   •   •

It was just this professional attitude that Mrs. Arne unconsciously resented both in the doctor and in the nurse. Through all their kindness she had realized and resented their scientific interest in her husband, for to them he had been no more than a curious and complicated case; and now that the blow had fallen, she regarded them Both in the light of executioners. Her one desire, expressed with all the shameless sincerity of blind and thoughtless misery, was to be free of their hateful presence and alone – alone with her dead!

She was weary of the doctor’s subdued manly tones – of the nurse’s commonplace motherliness, too habitually adapted to the needs of all to be appreciated by the individual – of the childish consolation of the young sister, who had never loved, never been married, did not know what sorrow was! Their expressions of sympathy struck her like blows, the touch of their hands on her body, as they tried to raise her, stung her in every nerve.

With a sigh of relief she buried her head in the pillow, pressed her body more closely against that of her husband, and lay motionless.

Her sobs ceased.

•   •   •

The lamp went out with a gurgle. The fire leaped up, and died. She raised her head and stared about her helplessly, then sinking down again she put her lips to the ear of the dead man.

“Edward – dear Edward!” she whispered, “why have you left me? Darling, why have you left me? I can’t stay behind – you know I can’t. I am too young to be left. It is only a year since you married me. I never thought it was only for a year. ‘Till death us do part!’ Yes, I know that’s in it, but nobody ever thinks of that! I never thought of living without you! I meant to die with you….

“No – no – I can’t die – I must not – till my baby is born. You will never see it. Don’t you want to see it? Don’t you? Oh, Edward, speak! Say something, darling, one word – one little word! Edward! Edward! are you there? Answer me for God’s sake, answer me!

“Darling, I am so tired of waiting. Oh, think, dearest. There is so little time. They only gave me half-an-hour. In half-an-hour they will come and take you away from me – take you where I can’t come to you – with all my love I can’t come to you! I know the place – I saw it once. A great lonely place full of graves, and little stunted trees dripping with dirty London rain … and gas-lamps flaring all round … but quite, quite dark where the grave is … a long grey stone just like the rest. How could you stay there? – all alone – all alone – without me?

“Do you remember, Edward, what we once said – that whichever of us died first should come back to watch over the other, in the spirit? I promised you, and you promised me. What children we were! Death is not what we thought. It comforted us to say that then.

“Now, it’s nothing – nothing – worse than nothing! I don’t want your spirit – I can’t see it – or feel it – I want you, you, your eyes that looked at me, your mouth that kissed me—”

She raised his arms and clasped them round her neck, and lay there very still, murmuring, “Oh, hold me, hold me! Love me if you can. Am I hateful? This is me! These are your arms….”

The doctor in the next room moved in his chair. The noise awoke her from her dream of contentment, and she unwound the dead arm from her neck, and, holding it up by the wrist, considered it ruefully.

“Yes, I can put it round me, but I have to hold it there. It is quite cold – it doesn’t care. Ah, my dear, you don’t care! You are dead. I kiss you, but you don’t kiss me. Edward! Edward! Oh, for heaven’s sake kiss me once. Just once!

“No, no, that won’t do – that’s not enough! that’s nothing! worse than nothing! I want you back, you, all you…. What shall I do? … I often pray, … Oh, if there be a God in heaven, and if He ever answered a prayer, let Him answer mine – my only prayer. I’ll never ask another – and give you back to me! As you were – as I loved you – as I adored you! He must listen. He must! My God, my God, he’s mine – he’s my husband, he’s my lover – give him back to me!”

•   •   •

—“Left alone for half-an-hour or more with the corpse! It’s not right!”

The muttered expression of the nurse’s revolted sense of professional decency came from the head of the staircase, where she had been waiting for the last few minutes. The doctor joined her.

“Hush, Mrs. Joyce! I’ll go to her now.”

The door creaked on its hinges as he gently pushed it open and went in.

“What’s that? What’s that?” screamed Mrs. Arne. “Doctor! Doctor! Don’t touch me! Either I am dead or he is alive!”

“Do you want to kill yourself, Mrs. Arne?” said Dr. Graham, with calculated sternness, coming forward; “come away!”

“Not dead! Not dead!” she murmured.

“He is dead, I assure you. Dead and cold an hour ago! Feel!” He took hold of her, as she lay face downwards, and in so doing he touched the dead man’s cheek – it was not cold! Instinctively his finger sought a pulse.

“Stop! Wait!” he cried in his intense excitement. “My dear Mrs. Arne, control yourself!”

But Mrs. Arne had fainted, and fallen heavily off the bed on the other side. Her sister, hastily summoned, attended to her, while the man they had all given over for dead was, with faint gasps and sighs and reluctant moans, pulled, as it were, hustled and dragged back over the threshold of life.

•  2  •

“Why do you always wear black, Alice?” asked Esther Graham, “You are not in mourning that I know of.”

She was Dr. Graham’s only daughter and Mrs. Arne’s only friend. She sat with Mrs. Arne in the dreary drawing-room of the house in Chelsea. She had come to tea. She was the only person who ever did come to tea there.

She was brusque, kind, and blunt, and had a talent for making inappropriate remarks. Six years ago Mrs. Arne had been a widow for an hour! Her husband had succumbed to an apparently mortal illness, and for the space of an hour had lain dead. When suddenly and inexplicably he had revived from his trance, the shock, combined with six weeks’ nursing, had nearly killed his wife. All this Esther had heard from her father. She herself had only come to know Mrs. Arne after her child was born, and all the tragic circumstances of her husband’s illness put aside, and it was hoped forgotten. And when her idle question received no answer from the pale absent woman who sat opposite, with listless lack-lustre eyes fixed on the green and blue flames dancing in the fire, she hoped it had passed unnoticed. She waited for five minutes for Mrs. Arne to resume the conversation, then her natural impatience got the better of her.

“Do say something, Alice!” she implored.

“Esther, I beg your pardon!” said Mrs. Arne. “I was thinking.”

“What were you thinking of?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, of course you don’t. People who sit and stare into the fire never do think, really. They are only brooding and making themselves ill, and that is what you are doing. You mope, you take no interest in anything, you never go out – I am sure you have not been out of doors today?”

“No – yes – I believe not. It is so cold.”

“You are sure to feel the cold if you sit in the house all day, and sure to get ill! Just look at yourself!”

Mrs. Arne rose and looked at herself in the Italian mirror over the chimney-piece. It reflected faithfully enough her even pallor, her dark hair and eyes, the sweeping length of her eyelashes, the sharp curves of her nostrils, and the delicate arch of her eyebrows, that formed a thin sharp black line, so clear as to seem almost unnatural.

“Yes, I do look ill,” she said with conviction.

“No wonder. You choose to bury yourself alive.”

“Sometimes I do feel as if I lived in a grave. I look up at the ceiling and fancy it is my coffin-lid.”

“Don’t please talk like that!” expostulated Miss Graham, pointing to Mrs. Arne’s little girl. “If only for Dolly’s sake, I think you should not give way to such morbid fancies. It isn’t good for her to see you like this always.”

“Oh, Esther,” the other exclaimed, stung into something like vivacity, “don’t reproach me! I hope I am a good mother to my child!”

“Yes, dear, you are a model mother – and model wife too. Father says the way you look after your husband is something wonderful, but don’t you think for your own sake you might try to be a little gayer? You encourage these moods, don’t you? What is it? Is it the house?”

She glanced around her – at the high ceiling, at the heavy damask portieres, the tall cabinets of china, the dim oak panelling – it reminded her of a neglected museum. Her eye travelled into the farthest corners, where the faint filmy dusk was already gathering, lit only by the bewildering cross-lights of the glass panels of cabinet doors – to the tall narrow windows – then back again to the woman in her mourning dress, cowering by the fire. She said sharply—

“You should go out more.”

“I do not like to – leave my husband.”

“Oh, I know that he is delicate and all that, but still, does he never permit you to leave him? Does he never go out by himself?”

“Not often!”

“And you have no pets! It is very odd of you. I simply can’t imagine a house without animals!”

“We did have a dog once,” answered Mrs. Arne plaintively, “but it howled so we had to give it away. It would not go near Edward…. But please don’t imagine that I am dull! I have my child.” She laid her hand on the flaxen head at her knee.

Miss Graham rose, frowning.

“Ah, you are too bad!” she exclaimed. “You are like a widow exactly, with one child, stroking its orphan head and saying, ‘Poor fatherless darling.’”

Voices were heard outside. Miss Graham stopped talking quite suddenly, and sought her veil and gloves on the mantelpiece.

“You need not go, Esther,” said Mrs. Arne. “It is only my husband.”

“Oh, but it is getting late,” said the other, crumpling up her gloves in her muff, and shuffling her feet nervously.

“Come!” said her hostess, with a bitter smile, “put your gloves on properly – if you must go – but it is quite early still.”

“Please don’t go, Miss Graham,” put in the child.

“I must. Go and meet your papa, like a good girl.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You mustn’t talk like that, Dolly,” said the doctor’s daughter absently, still looking towards the door. Mrs. Arne rose and fastened the clasps of the big fur-cloak for her friend. The wife’s white, sad, oppressed face came very close to the girl’s cheerful one, as she murmured in a low voice—

“You don’t like my husband, Esther? I can’t help noticing it. Why don’t you?”

“Nonsense!” retorted the other, with the emphasis of one who is repelling an overtrue accusation. “I do, only—”

“Only what?”

“Well, dear, it is foolish of me, of course, but I am – a little afraid of him.”

“Afraid of Edward!” said his wife slowly. “Why should you be?”

“Well, dear – you see – I – I suppose women can’t help being a little afraid of their friends’ husbands – they can spoil their friendships with their wives in a moment, if they choose to disapprove of them. I really must go! Goodbye, child; give me a kiss! Don’t ring, Alice. Please don’t! I can open the door for myself—”

“Why should you?” said Mrs. Arne. “Edward is in the hall; I heard him speaking to Foster.”

“No; he has gone into his study. Goodbye, you apathetic creature!” She gave Mrs. Arne a brief kiss and dashed out of the room. The voices outside had ceased, and she had reasonable hopes of reaching the door without being intercepted by Mrs. Arne’s husband. But he met her on the stairs. Mrs. Arne, listening intently from her seat by the fire, heard her exchange a few shy sentences with him, the sound of which died away as they went downstairs together. A few moments after, Edward Arne came into the room and dropped into the chair just vacated by his wife’s visitor.

He crossed his legs and said nothing. Neither did she.

His nearness had the effect of making the woman look at once several years older. Where she was pale he was well-coloured; the network of little filmy wrinkles that, on a close inspection, covered her face, had no parallel on his smooth skin. He was handsome; soft, well-groomed flakes of auburn hair lay over his forehead, and his steely blue eyes shone equably, a contrast to the sombre fire of hers, and the masses of dark crinkly hair that shaded her brow. The deep lines of permanent discontent furrowed that brow as she sat with her chin propped on her hands, and her elbows resting on her knees. Neither spoke. When the hands of the clock over Mrs. Arne’s head pointed to seven, the white-aproned figure of the nurse appeared in the doorway, and the little girl rose and kissed her mother very tenderly.

Mrs. Arne’s forehead contracted. Looking uneasily at her husband, she said to the child tentatively, yet boldly, as one grasps a nettle, “Say goodnight to your father!”

The child obeyed, saying, “Goodnight” indifferently in her father’s direction.

“Kiss him!”

“No, please – please not.”

Her mother looked down on her curiously, sadly….

“You are a naughty, spoilt child!” she said, but without conviction. “Excuse her, Edward.”

He did not seem to have heard.

“Well, if you don’t care—” said his wife bitterly.

“Come, child!” She caught the little girl by the hand and left the room.

At the door she half turned and looked fixedly at her husband. It was a strange ambiguous gaze; in it passion and dislike were strangely combined. Then she shivered and closed the door softly after her.

The man in the armchair sat with no perceptible change of attitude, his unspeculative eyes fixed on the fire, his hands clasped idly in front of him. The pose was obviously habitual. The servant brought lights and closed the shutters, drew the curtains, and made up the fire noisily, without, however, eliciting any reproof from his master.

Edward Arne was an ideal master, as far as Foster was concerned. He kept cases of cigars, but never smoked them, although the supply had often to be renewed. He did not care what he ate or drank, although he kept as good a cellar as most gentlemen – Foster knew that. He never interfered, he counted for nothing, he gave no trouble. Foster had no intention of ever leaving such an easy place. True, his master was not cordial; he very seldom addressed him or seemed to know whether he was there, but then neither did he grumble if the fire in the study was allowed to go out, or interfere with Foster’s liberty in any way. He had a better place of it than Annette, Mrs. Arne’s maid, who would be called up in the middle of the night to bathe her mistress’s forehead with eau-de-cologne, or made to brush her long hair for hours together to soothe her. Naturally enough Foster and Annette compared notes as to their respective situations, and drew unflattering parallels between this capricious wife and model husband.

•  3  •

Miss Graham was not a demonstrative woman. On her return home she somewhat startled her father, as he sat by his study table, deeply interested in his diagnosis book, by the sudden violence of her embrace.

“Why this excitement?” he asked, smiling and turning round. He was a young-looking man for his age; his thin wiry figure and clear colour belied the evidence on his hair, tinged with grey, and the tired wrinkles that gave value to the acuteness and brilliancy of the eyes they surrounded.

“I don’t know!” she replied, “only you are so nice and alive somehow. I always feel like this when I come back from seeing the Arnes.”

“Then don’t go to see the Arnes.”

“I’m so fond of her, father, and she will never come here to me, as you know. Or else nothing would induce me to enter her tomb of a house, and talk to that walking funeral of a husband of hers. I managed to get away today without having to shake hands with him. I always try to avoid it. But, father, I do wish you would go and see Alice,”

“Is she ill?”

“Well, not exactly ill, I suppose, but her eyes make me quite uncomfortable, and she says such odd things! I don’t know if it is you or the clergyman she wants, but she is all wrong somehow! She never goes out except to church; she never pays a call, or has anyone to call on her! Nobody ever asks the Arnes to dinner, and I’m sure I don’t blame them – the sight of that man at one’s table would spoil any party – and they never entertain. She is always alone. Day after day I go in and find her sitting over the fire, with that same brooding expression. I shouldn’t be surprised in the least if she were to go mad someday. Father, what is it? What is the tragedy of the house? There is one I am convinced. And yet, though I have been the intimate friend of that woman for years, I know no more about her than the man in the street.”

“She keeps her skeleton safe in the cupboard,” said Dr. Graham. “I respect her for that. And please don’t talk nonsense about tragedies. Alice Arne is only morbid – the malady of the age. And she is a very religious woman.”

“I wonder if she complains of her odious husband to Mr. Bligh. She is always going to his services.”

“Odious?”

“Yes, odious!” Miss Graham shuddered. “I cannot stand him! I cannot bear the touch of his cold froggy hands, and the sight of his fishy eyes! That inane smile of his simply makes me shrivel up. Father, honestly, do you like him yourself?”

“My dear, I hardly know him! It is his wife I have known ever since she was a child, and I a boy at college. Her father was my tutor. I never knew her husband till six years ago, when she called me in to attend him in a very serious illness. I suppose she never speaks of it? No? A very odd affair. For the life of me I cannot tell how he managed to recover. You needn’t tell people, for it affects my reputation, but I didn’t save him! Indeed I have never been able to account for it. The man was given over for dead!”

“He might as well be dead for all the good he is,” said Esther scornfully. “I have never heard him say more than a couple of sentences in my life.”

“Yet he was an exceedingly brilliant young man; one of the best men of his year at Oxford – a good deal run after – poor Alice was wild to marry him!”

“In love with that spiritless creature? He is like a house with someone dead in it, and all the blinds down!”

“Come, Esther, don’t be morbid – not to say silly! You are very hard on the poor man! What’s wrong with him? He is the ordinary, commonplace, coldblooded specimen of humanity, a little stupid, a little selfish, – people who have gone through a serious illness like that are apt to be – but on the whole, a good husband, a good father, a good citizen—”

“Yes, and his wife is afraid of him, and his child hates him!” exclaimed Esther.

“Nonsense!” said Dr. Graham sharply. “The child is spoilt. Only children are apt to be – and the mother wants a change or a tonic of some kind. I’ll go and talk to her when I have time. Go along and dress. Have you forgotten that George Graham is coming to dinner?”

After she had gone the doctor made a note on the corner of his blotting-pad, “Mem.: to go and see Mrs. Arne,” and dismissed the subject of the memorandum entirely from his mind.

•   •   •

George Graham was the doctor’s nephew, a tall, weedy, cumbrous young man, full of fads and fallacies, with a gentle manner that somehow inspired confidence. He was several years younger than Esther, who loved to listen to his semi-scientific, semi-romantic stories of things met with in the course of his profession. “Oh, I come across very queer things!” he would say mysteriously, “There’s a queer little widow – – !”

“Tell me about your little widow?” asked Esther that day after dinner, when, her father having gone back to his study, she and her cousin sat together as usual.

He laughed.

“You like to hear of my professional experiences? Well, she certainly interested me,” he said thoughtfully. “She is an odd psychological study in her way. I wish I could come across her again.”

“Where did you come across her, and what is her name?”

“I don’t know her name, I don’t want to; she is not a personage to me, only a case. I hardly know her face even. I have never seen it except in the twilight. But I gathered that she lived somewhere in Chelsea, for she came out on to the Embankment with only a kind of lacy thing over her head; she can’t live far off, I fancy.”

Esther became instantly attentive. “Go on,” she said.

“It was three weeks ago,” said George Graham. “I was coming along the Embankment about ten o’clock. I walked through that little grove, you know, just between Cheyne Walk and the river, and I heard in there someone sobbing very bitterly. I looked and saw a woman sitting on a seat, with her head in her hands, crying. I was most awfully sorry, of course, and I thought I could perhaps do something for her, get her a glass of water, or salts, or something. I took her for a woman of the people – it was quite dark, you know. So I asked her very politely if I could do anything for her, and then I noticed her hands – they were quite white and covered with diamonds.”

“You were sorry you spoke, I suppose,” said Esther.

“She raised her head and said – I believe she laughed – ‘Are you going to tell me to move on?’”

“She thought you were a policeman?”

“Probably – if she thought at all – but she was in a semi-dazed condition. I told her to wait till I came back, and dashed round the corner to the chemist’s and bought a bottle of salts. She thanked me, and made a little effort to rise and go away. She seemed very weak. I told her I was a medical man, I started in and talked to her.”

“And she to you?”

“Yes, quite straight. Don’t you know that women always treat a doctor as if he were one step removed from their father confessor – not human – not in the same category as themselves? It is not complimentary to one as a man, but one hears a good deal one would not otherwise hear. She ended by telling me all about herself – in a veiled way, of course. It soothed her – relieved her – she seemed not to have had an outlet for years!”

“To a mere stranger!”

“To a doctor. And she did not know what she was saying half the time. She was hysterical, of course. Heavens! what nonsense she talked! She spoke of herself as a person somehow haunted, cursed by some malign fate, a victim of some fearful spiritual catastrophe, don’t you know? I let her run on. She was convinced of the reality of a sort of ‘doom’ that she had fancied had befallen her. It was quite pathetic. Then it got rather chilly – she shivered – I suggested her going in. She shrank back; she said, ‘If you only knew what a relief it is, how much less miserable I am out here! I can breathe; I can live – it is my only glimpse of the world that is alive – I live in a grave – oh, let me stay!’ She seemed positively afraid to go home.”

“Perhaps someone bullied her at home.”

“I suppose so, but then – she had no husband. He died, she told me, years ago. She had adored him, she said—”

“Is she pretty?”

“Pretty! Well, I hardly noticed. Let me see! Oh, yes, I suppose she was pretty – no, now I think of it, she would be too worn and faded to be what you call pretty.”

Esther smiled. “Well, we sat there together for quite an hour, then the clock of Chelsea church struck eleven, and she got up and said ‘Goodbye,’ holding out her hand quite naturally, as if our meeting and conversation had been nothing out of the common. There was a sound like a dead leaf trailing across the walk and she was gone.”

“Didn’t you ask if you should see her again?”

“That would have been a mean advantage to take.”

“You might have offered to see her home.”

“I saw she did not mean me to.”

“She was a lady, you say,” pondered Esther. “How was she dressed?”

“Oh, all right, like a lady – in black – mourning, I suppose. She has dark crinkly hair, and her eyebrows are very thin and arched – I noticed that in the dusk.”

“Does this photograph remind you of her?” asked Esther suddenly, taking him to the mantelpiece.

“Rather!”

“Alice! Oh, it couldn’t be – she is not a widow, her husband is alive – has your friend any children?”

“Yes, one, she mentioned it.”

“How old?”

“Six years old, I think she said. She talks of the ‘responsibility of bringing up an orphan.’”

“George, what time is it?” Esther asked suddenly.

“About nine o’clock.”

“Would you mind coming out with me?”

“I should like it. Where shall we go?”

“To St. Adhelm’s! It is close by here. There is a special late service tonight, and Mrs. Arne is sure to be there.”

“Oh, Esther – curiosity!”

“No, not mere curiosity. Don’t you see if it is my Mrs. Arne who talked to you like this, it is very serious? I have thought her ill for a long time; but as ill as that!”

At St. Adhelm’s Church, Esther Graham pointed out a woman who was kneeling beside a pillar in an attitude of intense devotion and abandonment. She rose from her knees, and turned her rapt face up towards the pulpit whence the Reverend Ralph Bligh was holding his impassioned discourse. George Graham touched his cousin on the shoulder, and motioned to her to leave her place on the outermost rank of worshippers.

“That is the woman!” said he.

•  4  •

“Mem.: to go and see Mrs. Arne.” The doctor came across this note in his blotting-pad one day six weeks later. His daughter was out of town. He had heard nothing of the Arnes since her departure. He had promised to go and see her. He was a little conscience-stricken. Yet another week elapsed before he found time to call upon the daughter of his old tutor.

At the corner of Tite Street he met Mrs. Arne’s husband, and stopped. A doctor’s professional kindliness of manner is, or ought to be, independent of his personal likings and dislikings, and there was a pleasant cordiality about his greeting which should have provoked a corresponding fervour on the part of Edward Arne.

“How are you, Arne?” Graham said. “I was on my way to call on your wife.”

“Ah – yes!” said Edward Arne, with the ascending inflection of polite acquiescence. A ray of blue from his eyes,rested transitorily on the doctor’s face, and in that short moment the latter noted its intolerable vacuity, and for the first time in his life felt a sharp pang of sympathy for the wife of such a husband.

“I suppose you are off to your club? – er – goodbye!” he wound up abruptly. With the best will in the world he somehow found it almost impossible to carry on a conversation with Edward Arne, who raised his hand to his hat-brim in token of salutation, smiled sweetly, and walked on.

“He really is extraordinarily good-looking,” reflected the doctor, as he watched him down the street and safely over the crossing with a certain degree of solicitude for which he could not exactly account. “And yet one feels one’s vitality ebbing out at the finger-ends as one talks to him. I shall begin to believe in Esther’s absurd fancies about him soon. Ah, there’s the little girl!” he exclaimed, as he turned into Cheyne Walk and caught sight of her with her nurse, making violent demonstrations to attract his attention. “She is alive, at any rate. How is your mother, Dolly?” he asked.

“Quite well, thank you,” was the child’s reply. She added, “She’s crying. She sent me away because I looked at her. So I did. Her cheeks are quite red.”

“Run away – run away and play!” said the doctor nervously. He ascended the steps of the house, and rang the bell very gently and neatly.

“Not at—” began Foster, with the intonation of polite falsehood, but stopped on seeing the doctor, who, with his daughter, was a privileged person. “Mrs. Arne will see you, Sir.”

“Mrs. Arne is not alone?” he said interrogatively.

“Yes, Sir, quite alone. I have just taken tea in.”

Dr. Graham’s doubts were prompted by the low murmur as of a voice, or voices, which came to him through the open door of the room at the head of the stairs. He paused and listened while Foster stood by, merely remarking, “Mrs. Arne do talk to herself sometimes, Sir.”

It was Mrs. Arne’s voice – the doctor recognized it now. It was not the voice of a sane or healthy woman. He at once mentally removed his visit from the category of a morning call, and prepared for a semi-professional inquiry.

“Don’t announce me,” he said to Foster, and quietly entered the back drawing-room, which was separated by a heavy tapestry portiere from the room where Mrs. Arne sat, with an open book on the table before her, from which she had been apparently reading aloud. Her hands were now clasped tightly over her face, and when, presently, she removed them and began feverishly to turn page after page of her book, the crimson of her cheeks was seamed with white where her fingers had impressed themselves.

The doctor wondered if she saw him, for though her eyes were fixed in his direction, there was no apprehension in them. She went on reading, and it was the text, mingled with passionate interjection and fragmentary utterances, of the Burial Service that met his ears.

“‘For as in Adam all die!’ All die! It says all! For he must reign…. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death. What shall they do if the dead rise not at all! … I die daily…! Daily! No, no, better get it over … dead and buried … out of sight, out of mind … under a stone. Dead men don’t come back…. Go on! Get it over. I want to hear the earth rattle on the coffin, and then I shall know it is done. ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit!’ Oh, what did I do? What have I done? Why did I wish it so fervently? Why did I pray for it so earnestly? God gave me my wish—”

“Alice! Alice!” groaned the doctor.

She looked up. “‘When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption – ’ ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth – ’ Yes, that is it. ‘After death, though worms destroy this body – ’”

She flung the book aside and sobbed.

“That is what I was afraid of. My God! My God! Down there – in the dark – for ever and ever and ever! I could not bear to think of it! My Edward! And so I interfered … and prayed … and prayed till … Oh! I am punished. Flesh and blood could not inherit! I kept him there – I would not let him go…. I kept him…. I prayed…. I denied him Christian burial…. Oh, how could I know….”

“Good heavens, Alice!” said Graham, coming sensibly forward, “what does this mean? I have heard of schoolgirls going through the marriage service by themselves, but the burial service—”

He laid down his hat and went on severely, “What have you to do with such things? Your child is flourishing – your husband alive and here—”

“And who kept him here?” interrupted Alice Arne fiercely, accepting the fact of his appearance without comment.

“You did,” he answered quickly, “with your care and tenderness. I believe the warmth of your body, as you lay beside him for that half-hour, maintained the vital heat during that extraordinary suspension of the heart’s action, which made us all give him up for dead. You were his best doctor, and brought him back to us.”

“Yes, it was I – it was I – you need not tell me it was I!”

“Come, be thankful!” he said cheerfully. “Put that book away, and give me some tea, I’m very cold.”

“Oh, Dr. Graham, how thoughtless of me!” said Mrs. Arne, rallying at the slight imputation on her politeness he had purposely made. She tottered to the bell and rang it before he could anticipate her.

“Another cup,” she said quite calmly to Foster, who answered it. Then she sat down quivering all over with the suddenness of the constraint put upon her.

“Yes, sit down and tell me all about it,” said Dr. Graham good-humouredly, at the same time observing her with the closeness he gave to difficult cases.

“There is nothing to tell,” she said simply, shaking her head, and futilely altering the position of the teacups on the tray. “It all happened years ago. Nothing can be done now. Will you have sugar?”

He drank his tea and made conversation. He talked to her of some Dante lectures she was attending; of some details connected with her child’s Kindergarten classes. These subjects did not interest her. There was a subject she wished to discuss, he could see that a question trembled on her tongue, and tried to lead up to it.

She introduced it herself, quite quietly, over a second cup. “Sugar, Dr. Graham? I forget. Dr. Graham, tell me, do you believe that prayers – wicked unreasonable prayers – are granted?”

He helped himself to another slice of bread and butter before answering.

“Well,” he said slowly, “it seems hard to believe that every fool who has a voice to pray with, and a brain where to conceive idiotic requests with, should be permitted to interfere with the economy of the universe. As a rule, if people were long-sighted enough to see the result of their petitions, I fancy very few of us would venture to interfere.”

Mrs. Arne groaned.

She was a good Churchwoman, Graham knew, and he did not wish to sap her faith in any way, so he said no more, but inwardly wondered if a too rigid interpretation of some of the religious dogmas of the Vicar of St. Adhelm’s, her spiritual adviser, was not the clue to her distress. Then she put another question—

“Eh! What?” he said. “Do I believe in ghosts? I will believe you if you will tell me you have seen one.”

“You know, Doctor,” she went on, “I was always afraid of ghosts – of spirits – things unseen. I couldn’t ever read about them. I could not bear the idea of someone in the room with me that I could not see. There was a text that always frightened me that hung up in my room: ‘Thou, God, seest me!’ It frightened me when I was a child, whether I had been doing wrong or not. But now,” shuddering, “I think there are worse things than ghosts.”

“Well, now, what sort of things?” he asked good-humouredly. “Astral bodies?”

She leaned forward and laid her hot hand on his.

“Oh, Doctor, tell me, if a spirit – without the body we know it by – is terrible, what of a body” – her voice sank to a whisper, “a body – senseless – lonely – stranded on this earth – without a spirit?”

She was watching his face anxiously. He was divided between a morbid inclination to laugh and the feeling of intense discomfort provoked by this wretched scene. He longed to give the conversation a more cheerful turn, yet did not wish to offend her by changing it too abruptly.

“I have heard of people not being able to keep body and soul together,” he replied at last, “but I am not aware that practically such a division of forces has ever been achieved. And if we could only accept the theory of the de-spiritualized body, what a number of antipathetic people now wandering about in the world it would account for!”

The piteous gaze of her eyes seemed to seek to ward off the blow of his misplaced jocularity. He left his seat and sat down on the couch beside her.

“Poor child! poor girl! you are ill, you are overexcited. What is it? Tell me,” he asked her as tenderly as the father she had lost in early life might have done. Her head sank on his shoulder.

“Are you unhappy?” he asked her gently.

“Yes!”

“You are too much alone. Get your mother or your sister to come and stay with you.”

“They won’t come,” she wailed. “They say the house is like a grave. Edward has made himself a study in the basement. It’s an impossible room – but he has moved all his things in, and I can’t – I won’t go to him there….”

“You’re wrong. For it’s only a fad,” said Graham, “he’ll tire of it. And you must see more people somehow. It’s a pity my daughter is away. Had you any visitors today?”

“Not a soul has crossed the threshold for eighteen days.”

“We must change all that,” said the doctor vaguely. “Meantime you must cheer up. Why, you have no need to think of ghosts and graves – no need to be melancholy – you have your husband and your child—”

“I have my child – yes.”

The doctor took hold of Mrs. Arne by the shoulder, and held her a little away from him. He thought he had found the cause of her trouble – a more commonplace one than he had supposed.

“I have known you, Alice, since you were a child,” he said gravely. “Answer me! You love your husband, don’t you?”

“Yes.” It was as if she were answering futile prefatory questions in the witness-box. Yet he saw by the intense excitement in her eyes that he had come to the point she feared, and yet desired to bring forward.

“And he loves you?”

She was silent.

“Well, then, if you love each other, what more can you want? Why do you say you have only your child in that absurd way?”

She was still silent, and he gave her a little shake.

“Tell me, have you and he had any difference lately? Is there any – coldness – any – temporary estrangement between you?”

He was hardly prepared for the burst of foolish laughter that proceeded from the demure Mrs. Arne as she rose and confronted him, all the blood in her body seeming for the moment to rush to her usually pale cheeks.

“Coldness! Temporary estrangement! If that were all! Oh, is everyone blind but me? There is all the world between us! – all the difference between this world and the next!”

She sat down again beside the doctor and whispered in his ear, and her words were like a breath of hot wind from some Gehenna of the soul.

“Oh, Doctor, I have borne it for six years, and I must speak. No other woman could bear what I have borne, and yet be alive! And I loved him so; you don’t know how I loved him! That was it – that was my crime—”

“Crime?” repeated the doctor.

“Yes, crime! It was impious, don’t you see? But I have been punished. Oh, Doctor, you don’t know what my life is! Listen! Listen! I must tell you.

To live with a – At first before I guessed when I used to put my arms round him, and he merely submitted – and then it dawned on me what I was kissing! It is enough to turn a living woman into stone – for I am living, though sometimes I forget it. Yes, I am a live woman, though I live in a grave. Think what it is! – to wonder every night if you will be alive in the morning, to lie down every night in an open grave – to smell death in every corner – every room – to breathe death – to touch it….”

The portiere in front of the door shook, a hoopstick parted it, a round white-clad bundle supported on a pair of mottled red legs peeped in, pushing a hoop in front of her. The child made no noise. Mrs. Arne seemed to have heard her, however. She slewed round violently as she sat on the sofa beside Dr. Graham, leaving her hot hands clasped in his.

“You ask Dolly,” she exclaimed. “She knows it, too – she feels it.”

“No, no, Alice, this won’t do!” the doctor adjured her very low. Then he raised his voice and ordered the child from the room. He had managed to lift Mrs. Arne’s feet and laid her full length on the sofa by the time the maid reappeared. She had fainted.

He pulled down her eyelids and satisfied himself as to certain facts he had up till now dimly apprehended. When Mrs. Arne’s maid returned, he gave her mistress over to her care and proceeded to Edward Arne’s new study in the basement.

“Morphia!” he muttered to himself, as he stumbled and faltered through gaslit passages, where furtive servants eyed him and scuttled to their burrows.

“What is he burying himself down here for?” he thought. “Is it to get out of her way? They are a nervous pair of them!”

•   •   •

Arne was sunk in a large armchair drawn up before the fire. There was no other light, except a faint reflection from the gas-lamp in the road, striking down past the iron bars of the window that was sunk below the level of the street. The room was comfortless and empty, there was little furniture in it except a large bookcase at Arne’s right hand and a table with a Tantalus on it standing some way off. There was a faded portrait in pastel of Alice Arne over the mantelpiece, and beside it, a poor pendant, a pen and ink sketch of the master of the house. They were quite discrepant, in size and medium, but they appeared to look at each other with the stolid attentiveness of newly married people.

“Seedy, Arne?” Graham said.

“Rather, today. Poke the fire for me, will you?”

“I’ve known you quite seven years,” said the doctor cheerfully, “so I presume I can do that…. There, now!… And I’ll presume further – What have we got here?”

He took a small bottle smartly out of Edward Arne’s fingers and raised his eyebrows. Edward Arne had rendered it up agreeably; he did not seem upset or annoyed.

“Morphia. It isn’t a habit. I only got hold of the stuff yesterday – found it about the house. Alice was very jumpy all day, and communicated her nerves to me, I suppose. I’ve none as a rule, but do you know, Graham, I seem to be getting them – feel things a good deal more than I did, and want to talk about them.”

“What, are you growing a soul?” said the doctor carelessly, lighting a cigarette.

“Heaven forbid!” Arne answered equably. “I’ve done very well without it all these years. But I’m fond of old Alice, you know, in my own way. When I was a young man, I was quite different. I took things hardly and got excited about them. Yes, excited. I was wild about Alice, wild! Yes, by Jove! though she has forgotten all about it.”

“Not that, but still it’s natural she should long for some little demonstration of affection now and then … and she’d be awfully distressed if she saw you fooling with that bottle of morphia! You know, Arne, after that narrow squeak you had of it five years ago, Alice and I have a good right to consider that your life belongs to us!”

Edward Arne settled in his chair and replied, rather fretfully—

“All very well, but you didn’t manage to do the job thoroughly. You didn’t turn me out lively enough to please Alice. She’s annoyed because when I take her in my arms, I don’t hold her tight enough. I’m too quiet, too languid!… Hang it all, Graham, I believe she’d like me to stand for Parliament!… Why can’t she let me just go along my own way? Surely a man who’s come through an illness like mine can be let off parlour tricks? All this worry – it culminated the other day when I said I wanted to colonize a room down here, and did, with a spurt that took it out of me horribly, – all this worry, I say, seeing her upset and so on, keeps me low, and so I feel as if I wanted to take drugs to soothe me.”

“Soothe!” said Graham. “This stuff is more than soothing if you take enough of it. I’ll send you something more like what you want, and I’ll take this away, by your leave.”

“I really can’t argue!” replied Arne…. “If you see Alice, tell her you find me fairly comfortable and don’t put her off this room. I really like it best. She can come and see me here, I keep a good fire, tell her…. I feel as if I wanted to sleep . ..” he added brusquely.

“You have been indulging already,” said Graham softly. Arne had begun to doze off. His cushion had sagged down, the doctor stooped to rearrange it, carelessly laying the little phial for the moment in a crease of the rug covering the man’s knees.

•   •   •

Mrs. Arne in her mourning dress was crossing the hall as he came to the top of the basement steps and pushed open the swing door. She was giving some orders to Foster, the butler, who disappeared as the doctor advanced.

“You’re about again,” he said, “good girl!”

“Too silly of me,” she said, “to be hysterical! After all these years! One should be able to keep one’s own counsel. But it is over now, I promise I will never speak of it again.”

“We frightened poor Dolly dreadfully. I had to order her out like a regiment of soldiers.”

“Yes, I know. I’m going to her now.”

On his suggestion that she should look in on her husband first she looked askance.

“Down there!”

“Yes, that’s his fancy. Let him be. He is a good deal depressed about himself and you. He notices a great deal more than you think. He isn’t quite as apathetic as you describe him to be…. Come here!” He led her into the unlit dining-room a little way. “You expect too much, my dear. You do really! You make too many demands on the vitality you saved.”

“What did one save him for?” she asked fiercely. She continued more quietly, “I know. I am going to be different.”

“Not you,” said Graham fondly. He was very partial to Alice Arne in spite of her silliness. “You’ll worry about Edward till the end of the chapter. I know you. And” – he turned her round by the shoulder so that she fronted the light in the hall – “you elusive thing, let me have a good look at you…. Hum! Your eyes, they’re a bit starey….”

He let her go again with a sigh of impotence. Something must be done … soon … he must think…. He got hold of his coat and began to get into it….

Mrs. Arne smiled, buttoned a button for him and then opened the front door, like a good hostess, a very little way. With a quick flirt of his hat he was gone, and she heard the clap of his brougham door and the order “Home.”

•   •   •

“Been saying goodbye to that thief Graham?” said her husband gently, when she entered his room, her pale eyes staring a little, her thin hand busy at the front of her dress….

“Thief? Why? One moment! Where’s your switch?”

She found it and turned on a blaze of light from which her husband seemed to shrink.

“Well, he carried off my drops. Afraid of my poisoning myself, I suppose?”

“Or acquiring the morphia habit,” said his wife in a dull level voice, “as I have.”

She paused. He made no comment. Then, picking up the little phial Dr. Graham had left in the crease of the rug, she spoke—

“You are the thief, Edward, as it happens, this is mine.”

“Is it? I found it knocking about: I didn’t know it was yours. Well, will you give me some?”

“I will, if you like.”

“Well, dear, decide. You know I am in your hands and Graham’s. He was rubbing that into me today.”

“Poor lamb!” she said derisively; “I’d not allow my doctor, or my wife either, to dictate to me whether I should put an end to myself, or not.”

“Ah, but you’ve got a spirit, you see!” Arne yawned. “However, let me have a go at the stuff and then you put it on top of a wardrobe or a shelf, where I shall know it is, but never reach out to get it, I promise you.”

“No, you wouldn’t reach out a hand to keep yourself alive, let alone kill yourself,” said she. “That is you all over, Edward.”

“And don’t you see that is why I did die,” he said, with earnestness unexpected by her. “And then, unfortunately, you and Graham bustled up and wouldn’t let Nature take its course…. I rather wish you hadn’t been so officious.”

“And let you stay dead,” said she carelessly. “But at the time I cared for you so much that I should have had to kill myself, or commit suttee like a Bengali widow. Ah, well!”

She reached out for a glass half-full of water that stood on the low ledge of a bookcase close by the arm of his chair…. “Will this glass do? What’s in it? Only water? How much morphia shall I give you? An overdose?”

“I don’t care if you do, and that’s a fact.”

“It was a joke, Edward,” she said piteously.

“No joke to me. This fag end of life I’ve clawed hold of, doesn’t interest me. And I’m bound to be interested in what I’m doing or I’m no good. I’m no earthly good now. I don’t enjoy life, I’ve nothing to enjoy it with – in here” – he struck his breast. “It’s like a dull party one goes to by accident. All I want to do is to get into a cab and go home.”

His wife stood over him with the half-full glass in one hand and the little bottle in the other. Her eyes dilated … her chest heaved….

“Edward!” she breathed. “Was it all so useless?”

“Was what useless? Yes, as I was telling you, I go as one in a dream – a bad, bad dream, like the dreams I used to have when I overworked at college. I was brilliant, Alice, brilliant, do you hear? At some cost, I expect! Now I hate people – my fellow creatures. I’ve left them. They come and go, jostling me, and pushing me, on the pavements as I go along, avoiding them. Do you know where they should be, really, in relation to me?”

He rose a little in his seat – she stepped nervously aside, made as if to put down the bottle and the glass she was holding, then thought better of it and continued to extend them mechanically.

“They should be over my head. I’ve already left them and their petty nonsense of living. They mean nothing to me, no more than if they were ghosts walking. Or perhaps it’s I who am a ghost to them?… You don’t understand it. It’s because I suppose you have no imagination. You just know what you want and do your best to get it. You blurt out your blessed petition to your Deity and the idea that you’re irrelevant never enters your head, soft, persistent, High Church thing that you are!…”

Alice Arne smiled, and balanced the objects she was holding. He motioned her to pour out the liquid from one to the other, but she took no heed; she was listening with all her ears. It was the nearest approach to the language of compliment, to anything in the way of loverlike personalities that she had heard fall from his lips since his illness. He went on, becoming, as it were, lukewarm to his subject—

“But the worst of it is that once break the cord that links you to humanity – it can’t be mended. Man doesn’t live by bread alone … or lives to disappoint you. What am I to you, without my own poor personality?… Don’t stare so, Alice! I haven’t talked so much or so intimately for ages, have I? Let me try and have it out…. Are you in any sort of hurry?”

“No, Edward.”

“Pour that stuff out and have done…. Well, Alice, it’s a queer feeling, I tell you. One goes about with one’s looks on the ground, like a man who eyes the bed he is going to lie down in, and longs for. Alice, the crust of the earth seems a barrier between me and my own place. I want to scratch the boardings with my nails and shriek something like this: ‘Let me get down to you all, there where I belong!’ It’s a horrible sensation, like a vampire reversed!…”

“Is that why you insisted on having this room in the basement?” she asked breathlessly.

“Yes, I can’t bear being upstairs, somehow. Here, with these barred windows and stone-cold floors … I can see the people’s feet walking above there in the street … one has some sort of illusion….”

“Oh!” She shivered and her eyes travelled like those of a caged creature round the bare room and fluttered when they rested on the sombre windows imperiously barred. She dropped her gaze to the stone flags that showed beyond the oasis of Turkey carpet on which Arne’s chair stood…. Then to the door, the door that she had closed on entering. It had heavy bolts, but they were not drawn against her, though by the look of her eyes it seemed she half imagined they were….

She made a step forward and moved her hands slightly. She looked down on them and what they held … then changed the relative positions of the two objects and held the bottle over the glass….

“Yes, come along!” her husband said. “Are you going to be all day giving it me?”

With a jerk, she poured the liquid out into a glass and handed it to him. She looked away – towards the door….

“Ah, your way of escape!” said he, following her eyes. Then he drank, painstakingly.

The empty bottle fell out of her hands. She wrung them, murmuring—

“Oh, if I had only known!”

“Known what? That I should go near to cursing you for bringing me back?”

He fixed his cold eyes on her, as the liquid passed slowly over his tongue….

“—Or that you would end by taking back the gift you gave?”

“Chapman’s Magazine”, Dec. 1895

Tales of the Uneasy (1911)

THE WOODLEY LANE GHOST

Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren

1899

It was the afternoon of the longest day of the year, the 21st of June, and jogging along over the splendid sweep of Massachusetts avenue, whose picturesque homes are grouped around the statues of historic men, past Thomas Circle, past Scott Circle, reaching Dupont Circle, then by way of Connecticut Avenue and over the city boundary line, Dr. Rawle’s buggy finally turned into that lovely stretch of circling drive called Woodley Lane. The doctor was a young man, a newly-married man, just starting into a meager practice, and quite disposed, while waiting for more patients, to take life as easily as very limited means would permit. His comely, girlish wife was seated at his side, an embroidered linen lap-robe deftly tucked around her. Such is the inconsequence of youth that these two were as happy, perhaps more so, than another two who whirled past them in a grand equipage. In fact, the foolish doctor was even as content as if he were plodding around town with his hired boy, visiting patients and coining dollars.

“Ah, my Cynthia,” said he, “what an Eden Washington would be were it not so detestably healthy. Why, my sweet moon-flower (a pet name of his, in allusion to hers of Cynthia), with more money, you, too, would bloom forth in a stylish victoria.”

“Pray, dear Rufus,” she laughed, cheerily, “don’t wish it, for in such case you would not be my driver.”

“Wise words fallen from fragrant lips,” was the approving answer. Strange how all men, lover and husband alike, are magnetized by the electric stroke of flattery! At this moment, turning a sharp corner of the winding road, they perceived an oldish man coming toward them with slow and feeble step. Although his scanty locks were white, he gave the impression of one rather bending under the weight of a settled sadness than as if oppressed by years. Notwithstanding his stooping gait, it was evident that he was tall of stature, and his bearing was that of a man concentered upon himself, forced back into a brooding introspection by the strong pressure of a stormy past. As thus be tottered on, with eyes fixed upon the ground, all unobservant, a flashing wheel of glittering steel, noiseless and swift, hurtled past them. There was, as one might hold their breath, a forceful clash, a sudden outcry, a horror-stricken scream from Cynthia, and the doctor with a quick spring stood beside two fallen men. The reckless bicyclist had struck the ground with such jarring whirl as partially to stun him, but the old man who had been thus ruthlessly run over, lay limp, moaning and helpless.

“I trust that you are not much hurt, sir,” said the doctor, stooping over him, as with careful precision he made an examination. “Oh, yes, here it is; a compound fracture of the hip, and, it is to be feared, internal injuries.”

Meantime, Cynthia ran to the little brook near by, and filling her straw hat with water, poured it over the head of the youthful wheelman, who, reviving, did not pause to thank her, but, picking himself up, as best be could, remounted his wheel and was off; doubtless fearing arrest, should he remain and assist.

“An imp of Satan,” groaned the wounded. “By the Highest One, the Spirit of Bad has prevailed.”

The doctor look significantly at his wife, as much as to say, “Poor man, his mind wanders.”

“Can you tell me where to take you, sir?” inquired the doctor, in a compassionate voice. “We will lift you as gently as possible into my buggy, and not leave you. Have courage.”

“Courage,” gasped the old man, “comes of force of will. It is a subtle essence, it penetrates and overcomes, I WILL, to endure – I will point the way.”

Cynthia helped her husband, and together they succeeded in placing the unfortunate, leaning against and supported by her, in the buggy, the doctor leading the horse very slowly. The transfer, the motion, were torture to the hurt man, whose pallid brow was bathed with great beaded drops, such was his agony.

“By Siva!” muttered he, grinding his teeth, “my cycle is closing.”

Cynthia shivered, but she firmly upheld the sufferer amid all his delirious ravings. Yet, incoherent as were his utterances, he retained sufficient consciousness to point out the way exactly. By his direction they had turned off from Woodley Lane into the Tenleytown road, when presently he called out: “Turn in there,” and they entered unkempt grounds through a shackly gate. With what a masterful command over himself, tortured and almost swooning as he was, had he guided their progress. The doctor, who had had a season of training in the hospital wards, understood the force of will this man had exerted, saying, as if to himself: “Most men would lie in the stupor of a dead swoon who had borne this nervous shock and endured his awful pain. This is no common man.”

They were now slowly ascending a hill by a narrow, serpentine and undulating road. The season, as we have said, was leafy June, and these grounds, neglected as they were, gloried in the, majestic growth of a magnificent oak forest. So entirely was the house hidden by their dark and towering branches that one came upon it as a surprise, so unexpectedly, and yet it was a substantial, well-built brick house, of ample proportions. There was no attempt at architectural lines, except, perhaps, in a square tower that was projected from the center of the house, forming a hail of entrance below, and a small room, as if of observation, above. Otherwise, the structure was a plain red-brick dwelling of two spacious rooms, one on each side of a wide hall below, and on the second floor were precisely corresponding rooms, with the addition of the tower apartment. Directly in front of the building was a knoll of horseshoe shape crowned by an immense red Virginia oak. It stood a very sentinel tree, shooting a skyward shaft some seventy feet, its finely-veined oblong leaves of a vivid green, framed in and screened the house in umbrageous beauty. As they passed under its protecting boughs, the hurt man, who seemed to have grown very faint during the hard jolting of the winding ascent, instantly revived, as if through some mysterious accession of strength, and uplifting an ardent gaze of yearning tenderness, he extended wide his arms, upraising them as if to embrace the sighing leaves that bent over him. “I come, I come!” he almost shouted with a fierce eagerness; then, as if his very soul had gone forth in the supreme effort, he sank back in a dead swoon of pain.

There was not a soul to greet them. No, not even yelping cur, or mewing cat, or singing bird. This strange man, then, lived alone, yes, literally all alone. The doctor entered the unlocked door, and ascending to the tower room brought forth a small mattress, upon which he laid the now insensible form. As the doctor’s fair young wife zealously helped him, he said to her caressingly, “My Cynthia, how good and brave you are.” The momentary glance he had given the tower room amazed him. It was evident, as he had said, that his patient was no common man. Here was the den of a natural philosopher, a chemist, an astronomer, in fact, of a wide student of nature. This was his laboratory, his workshop. Here, undoubtedly, he performed various experiments with scientific precision, and through his well-planted telescope that pierced a small opening adjusted to its use, the heavens were nightly read. And what, at that time, was of vital consequence, was the existence of a carefully labeled pharmacy, evidently supplementing extensive investigations in chemistry.

“It is wonderful, simply wonderful!” said the doctor. “Here are all appliances needed for treatment. Have you rubbed Aladdin’s lamp and sent a genii hither, my moon-flower?” queried he.

“’Tis the Pitris,” murmured the patient. They both started. He must have heard and measured the doctor’s words in his seeming syncope. Meantime Dr. Rawle made strenuous and successful efforts to revive his patient, preparatory to the more serious operation that he knew must be attempted. It was not long before the old man spoke again.

“Do not torture me,” he said; “all surgery is useless. I shall soon be dissolved. My work in this transition is at an end. All that now remains is to disintegrate the earth-bound ties. Leave me – go quickly, and bring hither one learned in the law. But hearken. No jugglery, no priestcraft. Do as you are bid. Now hasten.”

The doctor looked inquiringly at his wife. “Do you dare to stay, Cynthia, until I come back?” asked he.

“I dare,” said the brave little woman, “but hasten, Rufus, for the night closes in.” Her words were calmly spoken, but her heart beat violently.

“Daughter of Eve,” said the sick man, looking kindly upon her, “you do well – stay!”

•   •   •

Some two hours later – it seemed an endless age to Cynthia, as she watched in profound silence, amid the gathering gloom – her husband returned, bringing with him his friend, Mr. Albright, a well-known Washington lawyer. Already the face of the dying man had taken on that ashen hue that precedes approaching dissolution, and the mildew of death had gathered on his humid brow. But now, as if collecting himself for a last effort, his faculties were clear.

“You are two men, and strong,” said he, “lift me to my Edris. Be quick!” and he pointed his gaunt finger upward.

They carried him gently on the mattress and laid it upon the narrow couch in the tower room. The motion, slight as it was, was exhaustive of a fast ebbing life He pointed to a shelf whispering as he did so, “The nameless amphora,” adding, as it was touched, “Open!” The doctor silently obeyed, and the delicious perfume of some aromatic volatile essence filled the air. All felt the subtle and penetrating effect of this exhilarating aroma.

“Write! write!” cried the dying man with a momentary force.

The lawyer wrote as dictated—

“I, the Java Aleim, being of sound disposing mind, do hereby devise, give, and bequeath all that I possess, both of real estate and personal, to—” he paused and looked impatiently at the doctor – “Quick – your name!”

“My name?” muttered the dazed doctor, “my name?”

The lawyer smiled and wrote “to Rufus Rawle, of the city of Washington, D. C.”

“We must have three signatures to this will,” said the lawyer.

The Java Aleim listened intently for a moment, or rather shrank within himself by some inward act of volition, then gasped—

“Two men approach! I hear the footsteps of the Silent Brothers! Hasten to meet them!”

Five minutes later and the doctor, who had left the room in a bewildered way, returned with two men, whom he had met at the gate. They glanced at the Java Aleim, who became so agitated that he drew his breath convulsively; but speedily controlling himself, he took the pen and signed his name. Then the lawyer and the two men appended their signatures, when, without comment, the two latter disappeared. Were these sentient, living forms, or were they merely the astral souls of Silent Brothers’, evoked by one of their number to serve his purpose? Or was it a dream, a mere figment of the imagination? Verily, there were the names, fairly written in good black ink of the “Idra Rabba” and “Adam Ferio.”

The Brahman, for such he was, wearily joined his thin hands above his head, then marking his forehead with the sign sacred to Vishnu, his lips moved as if in prayer. The moribund, fixed and rigid as one in a trance, now spoke rapidly and continuously in a hoarse, cavernous whisper that seemed to issue from his body as from a half-closed vault.

“My soul escapes, oh, Triad! The expiatory hour is at hand. My life has failed in abnegation and the taint of selfishness must be expunged. Gross emanations have passed like a murky cloud over the spirit, shutting out Nirvana. I must traverse eons of cyclic arcs ere I can once again reach the ascending cosmic scale. Oh, woe is me! I must be absorbed in the universal whole!”

He paused and seemed to listen, then seizing the triple cord that girded his loins, the invocations were renewed.

“O, Brahma! O, Vishnu! O, Siva! Triad of Triads! Help my return to nature – when this aching clod, this husk of the outer shell shall be evolved and absorbed into the heart and essence of you far-spreading oak, when my clogged veins shall run along its deep-reaching roots in rivulets of fire, when with heavy lateral pressure, my pent-up thoughts shall scintillate and strike deep the flinty rocks, taking wide and wider range, pressing down into the bowels of Mother Earth; then, with fierce upspringing power, remount in juicy sap, flushing with incarnadine splendor its autumn leaves, or dropping its purifying tears that fill the sacred viscum’s pearly coronals; then, partially released, forming true essence of Virgil’s golden bough, I shall arise a fluidic spectre of transcendent brightness, permeate the opalescent moonlit rays – a glorious astral shape! Ugh! The way is blinding dark – oh, this confusing present – but the end is luminous – I know it – I feel it!” Partially arousing himself, he fixed his burning eyes upon the three. “Mystic Triad – children groping in the outer darkness, heed – this, my last injunction – failing which, beware! Bury with me the seven knotted bamboo rod, the Gurugave – rest my bones, that they may mingle with the roots of the cabalistic oak that shoots its sacred shaft aloft within the triple circle of the horse shoe knoll. Thus shall my essence be infused in it, and the virtue from out the oak be effused to me, and thus I shall be transformed into a dual life. But beware!” and his face grew livid and distorted, “violate not this sacred tree, touch it not, handle it not! Let the holy lustration that shall proceed as we two become one in cosmic scale continue undisturbed.” His bony finger, still fixed and rigid like a note of warning, amid convulsive shudderings terrible to behold, with one long outcry of A. U. M., he gave up the ghost.

Silence and darkness intervened, only broken now and then by the nervous, spasmodic sobs of Cynthia.

“Poor wife,” said the doctor; “the strain was awful.”

The Java Aleim was buried as he had requested. Did the process of a metempsychosis then and there commence!

•   •   •

Dr. Rawle found himself suddenly a rich man. No need now of troubling himself about the health of Washington. With a pleasant home, that commanded a splendid view, with a goodly store of bonds, securities, and rare coins and curios; and for his wife, gold chains of fine filigree work, filmy taffeties embroidered in silver; tortoise shell combs set with plates of gold, and girdles enriched with pearls, sapphires and diamonds; rings and necklaces of ruby, blue topaz, yellow tourmalins, blood stones, cat’s eyes, and amethyst; etuis of aquamarine and cinnamon stone, and of various devices to charm a woman’s eye. The doctor loved books, and was an enthusiast in his profession. There were various works in chemistry and medical books, but others not a few, filled with hieroglyphics and strangely illuminated, besides rolls of palimpsests covered with secret Arabic symbols bearing evidence of successive ages, and one, most precious of all, steeped in a musky, dankish odor, inscribed in Candian sanskrit and bound in thick, lacquered ivory boards, encrusted with gems, framing the enigmatic abraxas. Happily for the doctor, he was a matter-of-fact man, or he surely would have sworn by the Vedas, yielded to the fascination of his surroundings, and become a Buddhist. As it was he only sighed and said: “What a pity that I am not an Oriental scholar!” But already he was to a degree imbued with the influences pressing upon him, smoking a superb chibouk [pipe] with amber mouthpiece the while, lazily immersed in vague speculations and daydreams.

Now and then his friend the lawyer came to see him, drawn by curiosity he could not resist to revisit a spot of such weird memories. But Dr. Rawle never left this idlewild of Woodley Lane, nor, strange to say, did Cynthia wish for change. Was the spirit of the old seer and Brahman permeating the atmosphere with an oriental repose at the very outset of their occupancy? Some energy had been displayed in transforming the house into a more cheerful home, and in building a verandah over the front door, whence the superb view could be more fully enjoyed. They had found the two lower rooms unfurnished, and the one nearest the mystic oak-tree was fitted up as a kitchen, while the room across the hall was pleasantly adorned as a drawing-room and dining-room as well. Here Cynthia, presided, spending happy, quiet hours, quite content, as she imagined, and yet not knowing why or wherefore, subdued and gradually toned into a half-drooping melancholy.

“How can gladness and sadness be one, dear Rufus?” asked she puzzled to understand herself.

“’Tis the spirit of the place, pale moon-flower,” he answered, smiling, yet sighing.

It was strange, but various little mishaps, too trifling to notice, attended the building of that part of the verandah nearest the horseshoe knoll. If so much as a chip fell upon that spot it rebounded, inflicting some hurt, and the mechanic, not knowing why, declared it an unlucky thing to work oil that side.

There came to be a tacit understanding between the doctor and his wife to avoid all allusion to that deathbed scene, and after the verandah was finished it began to be unpleasant to sit upon it on a moonlight night, and even the sun’s rays glinted with a sickly glare through the umbrageous screen. At all times there was never a surcease of low, humming, busy sound, a shadowy play of leaves, and when the droning summer faded into autumn, and the coruscant foliage threw out vivid flashes of light, the blood-red veins became swelled and tinged, tracing mystic imagery against the blue of Heaven, and the grand old tree communed with nature, rustling with a sad susurrus.

“Passing strange,” softly said the doctor.

“Uncanny,” whispered Cynthia.

The first positive discomfort was experienced when, one evening in the early winter, the two Irish domestics, a man and woman servant, were seated in the kitchen at dusk, their hands folded at the close of a day’s work, and they resting in that inert way that marks the repose succeeding manual labor. The open-mouthed fireplace was all aglow with the hot coals of oak-wood cinders, when, almost imperceptibly at first, the burning mass became astir. Presently odd and fierce flashes leaped forth from out the incandescent heat, accompanied by the constant popping of exploding fragments, when, as if gaining a rapid aggressive force, a lurid light appeared, out of which sprang forth an impalpable shape that advanced into the room. Scream after scream called Dr. Rawle and his wife to the scene just as the woman fainted, and the man rushing out, hatless and distracted, never stopped until he reached Swampoodle, crossing himself under the shadow of the Jesuit church in Washington, vociferating all the way, “Spooks! spooks!” Nor would the woman stay one hour after she was revived, declaring that “a say of howly wather” was not enough “to clane that fiery divil out.” “It must have been the knotted heart of oak that split and frightened those fools out of their shallow wits,” cried the doctor, much irritated. “Oh, no, Rufus,” said Cynthia, mildly, “It was a dead bough that fell from the oak. Katy told me that she picked it up from off the knoll where it had fallen, and tripped with it in her arms, nearly tumbling into the fire as she threw it on, and then it burned savagely into that dreadful mass of coals.”

“Old women’s tales, forsooth,” muttered the doctor.

But be that as it may, after this incident, with that freemasonry of signals that exists among the Ishmallites, it was understood that the house was haunted, and no one would hire out to live at that place. This event also seemed to mark a distinct epoch, as if that baptism of fire had liberated an astral soul. Henceforth there was a shadowy shade, an indefinable something in that room that took possession. So the door was closed and the doctor took the key thereof.

“Damn it,” said he, “what’s the use of a kitchen, Cynthia, if there’s no cook?”

“Don’t swear, Rufus,” she shudderingly answered. “I love to cook, dear. With our little oil-stove in the drawing-room it’s like playing at housekeeping. Yes, positively, I prefer it, dear. Then, it is so nice for us to be alone; just we two.”

“Moon-flower, how sweetly you expand!” cried the doctor, enfolding her in his arms and kissing her.

If a wife wishes to make her husband a radiant lover, let her try cooking for him; that is, if she knows how! And thus the winter closed in upon these two, who lived in the old house without other occupants. Dr. Rawle soon became so deeply interested in the occult investigations into which he was led through the books left him by the Java Aleim that he did not feel the weariness of their solitary life; but it was not so with his wife.

She, poor lady, had entered that strange house a gay and laughing bride, in good health and fine spirits. It was not long before she moved about silently, growing each day paler and paler, like some tender plant that requires sunshine and wilts in cheerless shade. She was not unhappy, because she led a life apart from the world, with her husband, for she loved him too fondly to pine for other society, still less did she care for the dissipation of gayety. But her nervous system had received a serious shock. The terrifying accident and harrowing deathbed scene, succeeded by the horror of that spectral fire, phantasmal as it undoubtedly was, had left an impression, not to be shaken off, that the place was haunted. She would constantly repeat to herself that it was a mere hallucination, and yet the feeling wore upon her, and she became exceedingly sensitive to all sounds. A vague distrust and fear took possession of her. Upon the eminence where they lived the winter storms oft and again held wildest revelry. To her morbid imagination the rude blasts had human voices that sighed, moaned, groaned, wailed, howled and shrieked, and during the blackness of the long winter nights all these voices of nature were a thousand-fold intensified to her acute perceptions. Oh, how she dreaded the prolonged swirl of the tempest, with its tumultuous onset, the swift-recurring waves of direful sound of these viewless legions of the air, when her timid soul shrank shriveled and aghast within its shell.

During that dismal winter they slept in the chamber directly above the now-closed room, which she felt sure had a nightly occupant. One thing Cynthia became aware of. Only her ears were opened to these preternatural sounds. She had, it is true, an increasing consciousness that they might be evoked at any time; but she never heard, or thought she heard, the plaintive sighs, the stealthy tread, nor the slamming of a door she knew was closed, or even, oh, hideous feeling, that she was being breathed upon, unless she was alone, or her husband’s spirit locked in sleep. The something, whatever it was, that had access to that house, had not the force to impress itself upon the stronger organization of the doctor. At moments she became overwhelmed with a creeping fear, that if she slept, when her willpower was dormant would it not then oppress her, and could not the ghoul live from her life and gloat upon her vitality? All that she had read about the ravening vampire would then recur to her disturbed fancy and affright her.

And thus, month after month, poor Cynthia, half distraught, communed within herself. At first, whenever she would strive to express her impressions, they were brusquely repelled by her husband as silly dreams, and he thus quite unwittingly condemned this woman, whom he loved, to untold torture.

But at last the dreary winter passed away, and the budding of spring cast a more cheerful atmosphere upon the gloomy spot. Then the doctor aroused himself somewhat from the long hibernation over the books from which he had derived sustenance. Opening his eyes to things around him, he began to notice how wan and thin his wife was. All the while his love had never abated, but in the strange existence he had led, absorbing thoughts had occupied him. Had he been dreaming? He was vexed with himself. He feared, indeed, he felt sure, that be must have neglected his darling while leading this visionary life. Like one who returns from a foreign land, where, deeply interested in the new scenes around him, he, for the moment, forgets loved ones at home, yet rekindles his devotion on his return, so it was with this student of the occult. Once awakened, he again recognizes all that had made a part of his former life, and he was uneasy about his wife. “My pale moon-flower!” he would say tenderly, and Cynthia was revived by this delicate attention, finding relief in tears. Oh, if man could only understand how inexpressibly it comforts the heart of a woman to cry! Tears, consoling tears, are the one special, delicious, feminine luxury. They fertilize and revivify the arid wastes of a woman’s heart. The affectionate care the doctor now bestowed upon his wife was quite oppressive, for he was always thinking what healing influences would be most beneficial. He besought her to live more in the open air, but such was her morbid dread of passing the tree that she would actually stay indoors from the dread of going out. Then he began to think seriously of leaving the place, and reproached himself anew for past obliviousness.

“Better far,” thought he, “to go back to the city. I have been a fool indeed to burrow in the old wizard’s den, immersed in the mystical so-called black arts that occupied him, while the very essence of a being dearer than my own life was fading away. A thousand times rather be the poor man, the struggling young practitioner of a year ago.” With a sigh of regret he pictured to himself the joyousness, the lightheartedness of that time, and in the retrospect, the past months, during a nearly a year, seemed to be in dismal shadow, in unwholesome dreariness, as compared with the sunshine and bright cheeriness of the healthful effort then made. It’s strange that young people never can realize what a bracing, wholesome life those lead who begin with merely a competence, and how much pleasure is involved in the eagerness of pursuit, stimulated by hopes of the future. In youth uncertainty lends a zest to the present, and makes a constant incentive for action. All the little daily plans that grow out of such situations form, as it were, a series of plots and counterplots of a drama, where no one can foresee the ending. “I worried then,” sadly mused the doctor, “because we were poor; I know now that we were very happy.”

Thus the summer days succeeded each other, finding Cynthia more and more prostrated, and her husband more and more irresolute. Was it the enervating atmosphere in which they lived? The omened old oak, had the brunt bravely borne, of the wild, wintry winds, fiercely flinging its bared, brawny arms aloft, as one bereft and bestraught; or, sullenly standing aloof, besprent of the vested beauty of its foliage, an image of statuesque despair. But with the renaissant spring came the mystery of its revivification, when coursing through all its gaunt length of frame mounted the renewing vital sap. Then the sere, crackling branches put on a semblance of youth, and in numerous tiny leaflets that burgeoned from out its frowning wrinkles thrilled with the joy of new-born living, until the hot embrace of June completed its glorious expansion, and the dull splendor of its resurgence. Oh, touching symbols of the mysteries of life and death that nature ever and ever exhibits! Oh, dullard eyes that scan so illy the clear mirror ever held forth to view! Yes, a perpetual pageant is unfolded of birth, growth, maturity, decay, decline to dissolution, out of which the endless circling cycles bring forth fruition. But in the midst of this great joy of living, drinking in this wine of life, so freely offered, we grow riotous of language, and forget to face our facts solemnly.

•   •   •

To recall a coincidence of time, it will be remembered that the tragic opening of this story occurred on the twenty-first day of June. As this anniversary drew near, Cynthia became really ill. She was in an unceasing state of agitation, so that the doctor grew seriously alarmed. It was the eve of that day that Cynthia, weak and prostrated, retired early. The isolated place was, as usual, very still, and the doctor, wearied with apprehension, also retired and was soon soundly sleeping.

Not so with Cynthia. Insomnia had become a dreaded condition, and she solaced her waking hours wistfully looking at the handsome face of her sleeping spouse, upon which, even in sleep, a certain sadness rested under the closed lips and expressed itself in the drooping lines around the mouth. Then it occurred to her that if she gazed upon him when his will-power was relaxed, it might infuse some mesmeric state not well for him, so she silently arose, and impelled by a vague desire she could not resist, gently opened her window and leaned forward. The young moon, with clear and beaming crescent, lazily drifted on a bed of lightest amber cloudlets, diffusing that faint, mysterious light so grateful to her questioning soul. Before her stood the mystic oak, now so very near, in its far-spreading branches of vivid green, that were softened and exquisitely tinted by the opalescent rays that shone upon it, so that its splendid noontide beauty was etherealized.

“Oh, translucent image,” sighed Cynthia, “art thou in very truth, as the Druids would have thee, a sacred form to worship – or” —and as she paused in her unconscious invocation, as if responsive to her call, and effused from out the deep-planted roots of the tree, a mild radiance played with swaying motion, to and fro, over the horseshoe knoll. At one moment swinging slowly, hovering with a phosphorescent glow, rising a little, then sinking again as if about to die out, but all the while steadily gaining force to mount higher.

Eagerly bending toward the witching glimmer, stretching forth her hand in supplication, she adjured the aura, “Oh, elemental, arise; disengage thyself from these painful, earth-bound ties!”

She had scarcely spoken when, as if awaiting the summons to arise, and by it permeated with a force it had hitherto vainly sought, it suddenly streamed upward with a clear and steady flame until it touched the lower sweep of the oak tree branches when, forming instantaneously into definite shape, the aural soul of Java Aleim stood before her.

As Cynthia uttered an agonized cry it extended toward her a skeleton arm, with gestures of pleading entreaty; then slowly sinking downward, as if repelled by want of attractive power, and casting upon her a lowering look of fierce hatred, it disappeared just as the doctor was aroused by the shriek of his wife. In another moment he bore, with tenderest care, her fainting form back to bed. He had not seen the vision, but he knew what it all meant.

“This, this is too dreadful!” he cried, in a transport of rage. “The old demon gave me a true devil’s gift, fair to the seeming, illusory in the holding, and fatal in reality. Tomorrow, the anniversary of this cursed existence here, shall witness my return to the busy scenes of the outer world. I shall have done with this infernal nonsense. I shall end it all.”

“Shall end it all!” slowly re-echoed a phantom voice.

Unnerved and horrified, the doctor hastened to close the window, with averted eyes, and applied himself to the restoration of his poor wife.

“Darling, sweetest, dearest, best!” he implored, “revive, awake! Tomorrow there shall come a new life, for tomorrow shall end it all.”

“Shall end it all,” was the weird warning whispered in his ear.

The doctor started, then collected himself defiantly. “This way lies madness,” he muttered. “The time has come to be up and doing. Tomorrow—”

•   •   •

The morrow of that predestined day, forewarned by the entombed, now dawned. There are good hours, and there are evil hours, that appear in the horoscope of life, and from the Chaldeans of remote ages to the soothsayers and Buddhists of the present time the starry hosts have been compelled to give up their secrets. Have they found true interpreters?

What happened on this recurring twenty-first day of June – this day of seven times three and three times seven? The day found Cynthia too ill to rise. The doctor saw the danger of brain fever, and tried to calm himself and quiet her.

“Rest today, dearest wife,” he said to her. “You need rest. But tomorrow, when you are stronger, we will leave this lonely place. Forgive me, darling, that I have let you pine away in these dark shadows so long—”

She made no reply other than to mutter: “Too late! too late!”

The doctor sadly turned to the window, from whence the night before he had borne his swooning wife. Through the exquisite screen of the lofty oak, he caught glimpses here and there of a ravishing landscape. The peerless city of liberty stretched out at his feet in graceful repose, then a vista of the rounded dome of the capitol, or of the sinuous line of the meandering Potomac sparkling in the sunlight, beautified by its island oasis, dotted here and there and encrusted by its gem-like environment of undulating verdure-clad hills.

“Oh, paradisaical earth! why, why should the trail of the serpent rest on thy fair bosom! Why should the malign glance of the evil eye empoison thy fairest scenes!” groaned the wretched man. His mind was filled with the rich imagery of that hidden lore, over which he had been listlessly dreaming during this past year. But he had received a rude awakening, as he at last fully realized the critical condition of his beloved wife. Cynthia’s fever rose as the hot June sun heated the air with its vertical rays, and as the day wore slowly on the doctor saw that she was no better.

•   •   •

Was it a psychic effect that influenced Mr. Albright and attracted him to such a degree that putting aside a mass of papers claiming his careful attention, he yielded to the power that impelled him to revisit his friends? “It is the anniversary,” he thought, “of one of the strangest events I have ever witnessed, and many hidden aspects of life have been laid open to me in the course of the practice of my profession. I have not seen Rawle for months, for both he and his pretty wife are positively buried.” Thus it came to pass that just as the sunset gorgeous cloud masses transfigured into ethereal shapes, the two friends met, and they walked together in the oak forest, not far distant from the house. Cynthia continued very ill, too ill to be moved, and the doctor was in a state of agitation and grief difficult to describe. It was indeed a welcome relief to grasp the friendly hand of Albright thus unexpectedly extended to him, and to unburden his heart. The lawyer listened with that precise and patient attention which was his habit.

The story of the two apparitions, of the dismal winter, filled with its imaginary terrors, and the frantic fright of the previous night, culminating in the present delirium of Cynthia, was all told. When the doctor had finished, his friend said: “Of course, Rawle, the weird part, and it is weird, must be all fustian and fancy. The serious part comes in the effect produced.”

Dr. Rawle was about to reply, “effect produced from a cause” – but he shrank from making the open avowal. The bravest men are apt to be moral cowards in the face of ridicule, so he merely said with an assumed assent he did not feel – “Of course.”

They were silent, but after a moment’s pause the doctor remarked:

“Please excuse me an instant. I wish to see if my wife still sleeps.”

Left alone in this lone forest, as the light of day was rapidly yielding to the gathering twilight, even the incredulous lawyer felt a creeping sensation, a thrill of the nerves, that was, to say the least, uncomfortable; but he resolutely battled against the influence, and retired within his triple armor of incredulity, materialism and logical sequence, thus defying the visionary. For all that, he found the hour that he was thus left alone both tedious and uncomfortable. But at last the doctor came striding forward. Cynthia was awake and raving about a bough of the oak that, she declared, had waved over her, assuming the grinning aspect of a death’s head.

“Albright,” said Rawle, “I must try the effect of heroic treatment. I mean to ascend to that devilish bough and cut it off. I wish I could destroy the whole infernal tree, root and branch. We have lived too long under its deadly upas shade. [poisonous tropical tree] I hope, old fellow, that the sudden revulsion when Cynthia sees it crashing down will help her to overcome these diabolical illusions. Promise me, my dear friend,” he added, with emotion, “that while I am doing this thing you will watch over my darling, so that no harm can befall her in some frenzied mood.”

The obscurity of the early dusk was now giving way to the glimmering pallor of the newly-risen moon as the two friends approached the house.

Suddenly Albright exclaimed, “Look!” A flickering, uncertain, shadowy, lambent light played above the grave that these two men had dug one year ago that very night. Then, as if condensing, casting a sickly sheen around, it hovered here and there, at one moment darting upward fiercely, as a thin pillar of fire, then subsiding, trailing along near the ground, gradually sinking, and finally its flamboyant curving line was lost to sight!

It was a somewhat varied repetition of the phantom flights that had horrified Cynthia, but neither the doctor nor the lawyer had ever before seen a visible shape thus defined from the invisible. They were students and thinkers, not disposed to accept an illusory semblance, and both men declared that it must be an optical illusion. But Dr. Rawle was under a strong and fierce excitement on account of the sickness of his wife. “My God!” groaned he, “what if Cynthia has seen it!”

He hastened past the horseshoe knoll, up to her room. She was still reclining as he had left her, muttering inarticulate sounds – her hands tightly clasped and her eyelids half open. It was evident that she had not stirred. In a few minutes the doctor returned, carrying a saw.

“Go, watch her, Albright,” said he, hoarsely. “The time has come for me to ascend this accursed tree. I will lop off these hellish branches. I will hack and hew—”

He strode fiercely forward, stamping heavily over the horse shoe knoll.

“Ha! ha!” he laughed, strangely moved. “To molest my Cynthia; mine, with its tricksy images, its impish delusions, its uncanny spectacular shows!”

He now commenced to ascend the gnarled trunk of the knotted oak. Climbing and clinging to every inequality. The doctor was a practiced athlete, and this was child’s play for him.

Up! up! and the fated branch is reached! The sharp teeth of the saw had made its first deep, grinding incision, when—

As Albright entered the room Cynthia had risen and stood beside the open window, enveloped in a fleecy flowing robe of some light India stuff; a gray cashmere shawl of richest oriental design was carelessly thrown over her fair shoulders, and her wealth of pale, ashen-colored hair, fell, unheeded, in tangled masses, around her. Albright, wishing to protect, but not to disturb her, approached with noiseless step. She did not see him, or, seeing, heeded not. With the palms of her thin hands closely pressed against the blue-veined temples, the large orbs of her wide-opened eyes gazing fixedly, she stood in speechless affright. Albright could not resist the impulse. He advanced and stood beside her, and he, too, gazed outwardly intently.

The doctor had commenced his work, and with sure and swift motion the pitiless saw ground through the twisted bark. Already the huge branch swayed and rocked to and fro. The air was filled with the sharp clicking resonance of the breaking branches; they moved backward and forward; they crackle; they oscillate; they swing; they sway – when – “Oh God! my God!” shrieked Cynthia, for now the flickering light arose from out the grave, the emanation rapidly gathering force, when sheeted with encircling flames, the fierce phantom arose in might and with an awful swirl enveloped the daring iconoclast in its skeleton ribs of furious fire, bearing downward in one crushing mass the crashing bough and the crushed man.

Cynthia had swooned away, but the horror-stricken Albright heard distinctly, in vibratory sepulchral tones – “Dead! All is at an end!”

And poor Cynthia?

“Dead! All is at an end!”

The Woodley Lane Ghost
and Other Stories (1899)

THE HOUSE
WHICH WAS RENT FREE

G. M. Robins

1902

It seemed an offer that I ought to accept, merely for the sake of the children. It would just make all the difference! If I had no rent, rates, or taxes to pay for the first year, it might be possible to make ends meet; for, by next year, those terrible debts would all be paid, and my own small income clear.

I was determined to pay off everything, at any cost; but the expenses of those operations, that illness, that death, had been - greater than seemed possible to me in my ignorance, and had left us woefully crippled in our loneliness, Ruth, Lettice, and I.

Yet somehow, now that the house in Belgrave Square, and the shooting-box, and the yacht, were all things of the past, I breathed more freely; my widow’s weeds were to me the outward signs of a freedom I had scarcely dared to hope for. Charles Preston was in his grave, and with him I could bury all the bitter thoughts Of what he had made me suffer. Thank God, only I had known it. There is no need to speak of it to anyone now; the anguish and the struggles are over, and the deadly nightmare lest others beside myself should have to know. Peace to the dead!

I was touched that this offer of help should come from Sidney Locke, for in the ten years since my marriage I had never seen him. He had sent me a sumptuous wedding-present, but he had not been present at the wedding. I kept those pearls, when I sold with joy the jewels that Charles had lavished upon me, because they were the only thing I had which came from the only person I knew who remembered me in the old vicarage days. Sidney had been kind then. In fact, I used gleefully to think that he was jealous when Charles whirled me away behind his spanking grey horses, a bride of nineteen, her curly head completely turned by a wooing that took six weeks from first to last.

And now, after the ten years’ silence, came Sidney’s voice, speaking to me, as it were, out of the past.

“I am so grieved, as well as surprised, to learn that Preston has left you badly off. May an old friend make a suggestion? Since you and I were acquainted I have become a landed proprietor, and I have a pretty house in Dorsetshire which I should like to lend you, as I think you may for the present feel inclined to a quiet country life. The house is fairly well furnished, and not too large to be comfortable. If you could make use of it for a year or so, you would do me a great service, for a foolish tale of its being haunted has got about in the neighbourhood, and, ridiculous as it may seem in these days, I cannot let it. If you would go down and refute this nonsense by occupying the house I should hold myself greatly your debtor. I am sure you would be pleased with the neighbourhood, and the air is very fine.”

He did not, could not know, this man who wrote to me, how much his offer meant, how low was my exchequer, how great the problem as to how Ruth, Lettice, myself, and old Darley, my nurse. were to he suitably housed and fed during the next twelve months. This remote spot was the very thing; we should want no new frocks, and food would be cheap and plentiful.

“Darley,” I said, “it will be the saving of us.”

“You’re never going to accept a favour from a cast-off lover!” said the old woman indignantly.

“Darley, what do you mean? Mr. Locke was never my lover.”

“Oh, wasn’t he! Much you know about it,” was the old body’s anything but respectful reply.

“Besides,” I went on with dignity, “the favour is a mutual one; I shall oblige Mr. Locke by living in his house, which is furnished and without a tenant. Nobody is likely to take such a house at this time of the year. I shall accept this offer on condition that the house still remains ‘To Let,’ and that we turn out for any permanent tenant who may appear.”

I did not tell Darley of the foolish local superstition; elderly country-women are often superstitious.

•   •   •

There was no caretaker at Dennismore Hall, so I sent down my ex-coachman and his wife to make ready for our arrival. They had been long in my service, and were people I could depend upon. I felt sure that, whatever happened, Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher would see no ghosts.

Fletcher secured a curious-looking trap, and met us at the little wayside station. It was good to see his pleasure at beholding us again. The journey was so long that the short winter’s day was already fading out of the sky, and it was in pitch darkness that we reached our new abode after a long, chilly drive.

Mrs. Fletcher welcomed us with a broad smile of satisfaction which was a full assurance that nothing had happened to disturb her tranquillity; and the well-spread tea-table looked very cosy and “homy,” with our own silver and linen, in the low-ceiled dining-room.

The house was just to my taste – the rooms were not large, and many of them were of odd shapes. Most of the furniture was of the time of Queen Anne, with additions of queer, foreign-looking things whose age I could only guess at. The walls were thick, the window-seats deep, the passages dark. It was old enough, but, I thought, too comfortable to be ghostly.

I never believed in ghosts. It was a subject I avoided, ever since a curious illusion that once came to me during my married life – but that is another story. I had the feeling always after that as if, should I once believe in ghosts, I should begin to see them. I sometimes felt as if I had a curious inner eye which I could keep shut; and I determined not to open it while I was at Dennismore.

Darley was the only person to whom I told my former curious experience. She called it second-sight, saying it was the fruit of my mother’s Highland blood. Since those days I have heard it called the Fourth Dimension. If it is, there can be no doubt that three dimensions are the most comfortable number for mortals to possess.

Dennismore Hall was mostly built on two floors, though upstairs, under the gables, were several roomy attics, quite good enough to accommodate servants. These rooms we did not, however, occupy, Mrs. Fletcher and I having agreed that, in such a lonely part of the world, it was better that our sole male protector should be within easy reach.

Ruth and I had a charming room, opening into another, occupied by Darley and Lettice; and no sleep could have been sounder than that which we all enjoyed on the night of our arrival.

Next morning our eyes unclosed on a dazzling prospect. The grand rugged sweep of a Dorsetshire valley, pine-crowned and desolate, the rush of the stream in its stony bed, the outline of the hills which lay between us and the sea, composed a whole which made one feel how good a thing was life.

It was piercingly cold, but we had large fires everywhere, Fletcher having discovered among the outhouses a store of logs which would last us the winter through.

Out of doors we rushed when breakfast was over, and explored the garden, the old stables, the empty pigsties, the deserted fowl-yard; and then, beyond our own boundaries, following the plunging stream down to the dark, still millpool in the deep hollow of the combe.

The mill was to let also. Its old wheel hung motionless over the weed-grown sluice, There was a great desolation about that place which made me turn round and hurry the chicks home; I felt that I did not want to linger there.

But Dennismore itself was charming. We went all over and through the house, which indeed was of no great dimensions; and Fletcher and I planned to have some fowls and a pig, to give him employment and cheer up the place a bit. Vic, our big watch-dog, was already there. I had bestowed him upon Fletcher when our household was broken up; and Ruth and Lettice had brought the two Persian pussies, Fatima and Selim, and an excitable terrier, Larkie by name; so that we were quite a household.

The great zest of existence at first was the effort to procure food on which to sustain it. We were supplied every morning from a little farm close by with milk, eggs, and butter; every other necessary we had to go and fetch for ourselves – and, until we settled down into a comprehension of the position, we had some very funny meals, productive of keen delight to the little girls.

I felt sure that I should spend a most happy winter, with my children to teach, my new strange freedom to enjoy, and leisure to develop my taste for wood-carving, so as, if possible, to add to my income thereby. When the children were gone to bed, I sat down and wrote a very grateful letter to Sidney Locke.

•   •   •

It was a week after our being installed that the first curious little thing happened; and, had I had no hint from Sidney, I might not have noticed it.

I had determined, in view of the untidy nature of the work, to do my wood-carving in one of the attic rooms. There was plenty of daylight there – a quality rather lacking in the low rooms downstairs; and I had brought with me an oil stove which would warm my studio thoroughly.

On the day that Mrs. Fletcher was scrubbing and preparing this room, I met her just at the foot of the twisting oak stair that led to it.

“Please ’m, I wouldn’t let Miss Ruthie run in and out them rooms while the floors is wet, if I was you,” said she.

“Miss Ruthie!” I said, staring at her. “They are both gone out for their walk with Darley.”

“I think you’re mistaken, ’m,” said Mrs. Fletcher respectfully; “one of ’em came up the stairs just now while I was scrubbing, and went into the next attic, and, when I called that the windows was open, went down again, hurried-like.”

I paused a minute. I knew that the children and Darley were out; there was nobody in the house but Mrs. Fletcher and me, for Fletcher was gardening, and, besides, his step could hardly be mistaken for that of a child. But on no account must I make Mrs. Fletcher uneasy, so I said:

“Oh, perhaps they have not started yet; I – I will go and speak to Miss Ruthie.”

And I went downstairs, pondering, to find, as I had been certain that I should, that the children were nowhere on the premises.

Next day I did not visit my studio, for we were invited to tea at the vicarage, a walk of nearly two miles.

Mr. and Mrs. Rendle asked with much interest how we liked Dennismore, and in spite of their careful reserve, I could plainly see that they were surprised at our assurances of our happiness there. I was a bit anxious as to whether they would allude to the haunting before the children; but doubtless they imagined that I myself did not know of it, and they were models of discretion. The only thing said about the former tenants was by the vicar, who remarked:

“We were all glad when the Hall changed hands, the late owners were not nice people.”

I should have liked to make further inquiry, but thought it better not to do so. Instead, I invited them to tea at Dennismore. I saw them exchange glances. Mrs. Rendle accepted, but said something about the evenings being dark – the vicar’s throat – and her relief was very obvious when I suggested lunch instead of tea. I had a great feeling of superiority as I walked home to our haunted house that evening! How superstitious some people were!

I dreamed that night – dreamed of the idle mill-wheel, and the desolate pool, and that on the brink sat a shivering child, half-clad, who sobbed and sobbed as if his heart would break.

I started awake. The night-light flickered on the warm curtains and low ceiling, and showed me Ruthie’s fat form, curled up in slumber at my side; but the pitiful sobbing continued – it was still audible – it was real. Lettice must be sobbing in her sleep, and I wondered that Darley did not awake to comfort her.

Without noise I slipped out of bed, and, going to the half-open door between our rooms, I peeped through. Both the sleepers were absolutely quiet and comfortable. I crept near enough to Lettice’s little bed to hear the child’s soft, even breathing and see the rounded cheek and burnished curls. Then I hastened back; and it was as I stood in the freezing night, hesitating, that the idea first occurred to me that the noise I heard might be ghostly. It still went on: there is no sound so torturing to the ears of a mother as that of a child’s hopeless misery. My flesh creeps now as I think of that pitiful, broken wailing. It sounded muffled, as though it came from another room – overhead, I took it to be.

Snatching a warm dressing-gown, I lit a candle, and cautiously opened the door of my room. The long, narrow passage lay in gloom outside. I listened; all sound had entirely ceased. After a few moments’ waiting the silence got upon my nerves, and, drawing back into the bedroom, I closed the door.

No sobbing was now to be heard. Everything was as still, as comforting, as homelike as it could be. Then, drawing back the blind, I peered out into the night. It was pitch dark. With a glance at sleeping Ruth, I softly opened the casement and held out a candle so as to illumine the garden beds just under my window. The night was so still that the candle burned steadily. There were no large shrubs there, and, had any child been outside, the light must have attracted its attention. But there was no movement, stir, or sound. Either the sobbing was a persistent nightmare going on after having awakened me, or it was something outside the range of one’s ordinary experiences. I crept back to bed, feeling very cowardly and small; next morning I patrolled the whole house and grounds without finding anything that could throw light upon the mystery.

To no one did I speak of it; I was more than willing to think it a delusion. It seemed natural that I should be nervous and unstrung just now – feeling the reaction after years of strain; a determination awoke to give no encouragement to that state of mind in which one looks searchingly into dark corners, and starts at an unexpected sound.

Next day was really lovely, and the children danced delightedly off with Fletcher to see how much ice was on the pond – a morning’s uninterrupted wood-carving seemed really possible. I did just, as I passed Mrs. Fletcher on the stairs, ask her if she slept well, and she replied that, as usual, neither she nor her husband had stirred all night.

My studio was charming. It was sunny, and the stove warmed it to perfection. Work no doubt was the thing to cure morbid delusions, and for two hours I was most diligent. I had just begun to feel hungry after two hours’ unbroken energy, when I heard a light footstep pattering up the uncarpeted oak stairs.

Never for a moment did such a thing seem surprising. It was the footfall of a child, doubtless Ruth or Lettice come to say that lunch awaited me. The door was fastened; it was a commonly finished garret door, with a latch which was visible on the inside. As I looked I saw the latch rise, the door slowly open, and a little boy peer round into the room. He looked about ten or eleven years old; his face was white, his dark eyes big and hollow. He was so thin that my heart ached to behold him; and his poor little hand, which grasped the woodwork of the door, was covered with sores, such as disfigure the ill-nourished children of the very poor. There was a purple bruise upon his left cheekbone. Here, doubtless, was the creature who had sobbed in the night – and I, superstitious fool, because of a foolish ghost-story, had believed his pitiful crying a delusion! I sprang up.

“Oh, poor little man!” I cried, “what do you want?”

He drew back behind the door – only his head and part of his body had been visible. As he disappeared I saw to my bewilderment that the latch was not undone, but firmly fastened. It was the work of a moment to unfasten it and look out; nobody was there.

I took a swift survey right and left. The stairhead was opposite, about twelve feet to my right. The straight passage had three other doors – all were fastened. I was not afraid of a child in broad daylight, but it seemed that he must be hidden in one of these rooms among old furniture and lumber, and his eyes had looked so scared, so full of the impulse of flight, that it seemed likely he might escape me by darting out of one room while I was searching another. It seemed imperative to secure him, so I whisked down the stair, shut the door at the foot, locked it on the outside, took away the key, and rushed downstairs to the kitchen.

Darley and Mrs. Fletcher were both there.

“Mrs. Fletcher,” I gasped breathlessly, “somehow or other a child has got into this house – a little boy, who seems to be half wild with fright. He is hidden somewhere in the garrets, and he must be starving! You know you heard him moving about the day before yesterday, and I woke in the night and heard him sobbing. He came and peeped at me just now, but when I spoke he ran away.”

Both the servants faced me blankly.

“I think you must be mistaken, ma’am,” said Darley.

“My dear Darley, I tell you I saw him; but he ran away! I have locked the door at the foot of the stairs, so he is trapped up there; will you two come and help me find him?”

They both came at once. Mrs. Fletcher remained at the stairhead to intercept him. should he run out. But the odd thing was the rooms, all but the studio, were locked, with the keys outside. We went through them all, nevertheless.

There was no trace of a child, or of any living thing.

“It is perfectly dreadful; he must have some hiding-place,” I urged. “Why does he not come out? Why is he so frightened? I spoke so gently to him.”

Darley did not answer; her eyes were fixed on me with a troubled gaze, and I stopped short. I knew in my heart that the door of my studio had never really opened; all this must be mere fancy. The only person who had been told the foolish tale of haunting was the only one to be disturbed. Ah, but what of the footsteps that Mrs. Fletcher had heard upon these same oak stairs?

I began to feel a distinct lessening of my sense of gratitude to Sidney Locke.

It was difficult to know what line to adopt with the servants. Gazing at their grave, attentive faces, I realised how inconvenient, how almost impossible it would be to leave this shelter, offered me in my necessity. But if the Fletchers got unsettled, and declined to stay – what should I do? In some mysterious manner, the impression had been conveyed, by what the vicar’s wife did not say, that no native of the neighbourhood would take service at Dennismore.

It seemed that the haunting of the house was confined to the top floor. To leave this unused was simple enough. I wished that I had kept my experience to myself; but it had seemed so idiotic to imagine that the child could be unreal!

I began to stammer out excuses; it was nightmare, overwrought nerves, a vivid fancy: I would certainly adopt Darley’s advice – take a glass of wine with my dinner, and lie down.

The rest of the day was not comfortable; shaken nerves will not quiet down in a moment, such a shock leaves the victim shaky and queer. But by next morning a profound sleep had refreshed me, and I could begin to feel ashamed of myself; it is much easier to believe oneself nervous and fanciful, than that the curtain between the seen and unseen has been lifted for a moment.

All these laudable convictions were strengthened when a week passed without anything to disturb our tranquillity. The children were well, the air fine, and Darley began to lose her habit of regarding me as though in apprehension of some dislocation of my mental balance.

But one night – the eighth or ninth after the first sounds, I was again awakened by the sobbing. It was too unbearable; some assurance that the thing was only fancy seemed imperatively needed. Hastening into Darley’s room, I awoke her, and in a whisper bade her get up and come into my room.

Now we should see if I were mad. “Do you hear that?” I whispered.

She grew perceptibly paler; she did not need to speak; evidently she heard it too.

“Darley,” I solemnly said, “dare you come up to the garrets with me, and see that there is nobody there?”

“Yes, ma’am, I dare,” she answered simply. “There is a child up there, no doubt, as you said.”

My laugh was rather mocking.

“Has he been there nine days without food? He was starving when I saw him! No, Darley, I am going to tell you the truth. This house is haunted. Mr. Locke knew that it was said to be, but he did not believe it. However, it is true, as you hear.”

The dreadful sounds died away. Darley turned to me with resolution.

“It is but childish to talk so, ma’am. We know there’s no such things as ghostis. But somebody’s been ill-treating a child and turned his brain, and we ought to have the law of ’em. Come, ma’am, let us lock the children in here, and you come up with me to the garrets. We must find him.”

Resolution was in her eye as she lighted two candles in glass chimneys, and softly we crept from the room and went along the passage. On the other side of it were doors of rooms which we did not use – two bedrooms, one with an adjoining dressing-room, also the bathroom.

These lay at right angles to the rooms we occupied, the passage making a sharp bend. As we turned the corner, emerging into that part which led straight to the oak stair, I stopped short.

At the door of the dressing-room there stood a man. His attitude was of one listening; in his right hand, which hung at his side, he held a cane. His face I clearly saw, and can only say that it was one of the worst, the most degraded, the vilest, I have ever encountered. His age might be between fifty and sixty, and in my heart there rose up against him, as I gazed, a loathing which sickened me.

“Look,” I whispered to Darley, “quick! What do you see – there by the door?”

She looked blank; it was plain in an instant that she saw nothing. And so it was clear that the house was haunted, and that I was one possessed of that much-to-be-dreaded gift, the power to see what others cannot.

“We may go back to our beds, Darley,” I cried defiantly. “There is no child upstairs, any more than there is really a man there, by the door, where I see him.”

Even as the words escaped me, the horror had faded and was gone; and it seems that it was all that Darley could do to drag my collapsed limbs back to bed.

The next day I wrote to Sidney Locke:

“Had you some grudge against me in the past, that you should wish to expose me to the horrors of residence in this place? If so, you have accomplished your purpose; I have suffered.

“The house is indeed haunted – haunted, as I believe, by a murderer and his victim. Fortunately I am the one who is most disturbed, but I dare not think for how long I could stand the strain; and there is, besides, to be considered the possibility that, in spite of all my care, the children may get a shock which would impair their nervous system for all the future. I am at my wits’ end. Do you think the Society for Psychical Research could do anything? It is awful to contemplate a move just now, but I cannot bear this for long.”

Two days after the despatch of this letter, Sidney Locke himself drove up to the door of Dennismore!

We were at tea when he arrived, and, before the little girls, nothing could of course be said respecting the object of his visit. But in every look of his I could read what he would say, his mingled anxiety and incredulity – and some other, warmer feeling, whose very existence I had in old times never suspected, and which it was surely only vanity to imagine now!

“Ten layers of birthdays on a woman’s head!”

But it was certainly pleasant to see him, and the very knowledge of his solicitude brought reassurance with it.

Of course he had come to stay. There was no other place in the neighbourhood in which he could conceivably put up. So Darley prepared a room for him, and when Ruth and Lettice had gone to bed he and I sat over the fire, and I told him exactly what I had seen and heard. He seemed so staggered and upset that I was quite surprised.

“But who told you anything about the Haggards?” he said at last.

“Who are the Haggards?” I instantly rejoined.

“The people who lived in this house before my uncle bought it.”

“I never heard of them,” I replied, “not even their names.”

“Is that really so? Have you made no inquiries in the neighbourhood?”

“None whatever. The only person who has ever spoken to us of the house at all has been the vicar, who said that the late owners were not nice people, and that he was glad when the place changed hands.”

“Well,” he said, after a considerable pause of surprise, “the house belonged to a naval captain named Newman. Haggard was his brother-in-law, a man who had never done any good, but for the sake of his sister, who was married to the brute, Newman allowed them to live here, and gave them the care of his only boy, whose mother was dead. Haggard seems to have thought that, as the captain’s life was precarious, it would be a good thing to rid himself of the boy, and get the house left to him, and the money too. His wife must have been pretty nearly as bad as he, or else completely terrorised. Their story was that the child was half-witted, stubborn, and disgusting in his habits. But, remote though the place is, whispers of their cruelty got abroad. At last the child disappeared, and they gave out that he had run away to sea, which they declared he had often threatened to do. The father’s frantic grief and indignation had exactly the contrary effect to that which Haggard intended. He turned them both out, sold the place, and made a will leaving. his money to the Society for Befriending Waifs and Strays. He is still alive, and so are the Haggards, for aught I know to the contrary.”

“The child was murdered,” I said with conviction; “and his bones lie hid somewhere about this house or grounds, I feel certain.”

“It seems to me probable that you are right,” he said, after more thought. “Of course, it was likely that a child ill-treated might run away, but still more likely that the man should get rid of him, if he thought he could do so with impunity.”

“He hadn’t the spirit to run away,” I said with a shudder. “A more down-trodden. desolate creature you never saw.”

“But ghost-stories,” he presently added with a puzzled air, “are not true.”

“I can’t say,” I replied. “I can only truly tell you what I have seen and heard. and also that Mrs. Fletcher heard steps, and Darley heard sobbing. I am not afraid, though – that is, not now that you are here.”

He caught me up quickly.

“Not now that I am here,” he began – and stopped. “I know,” he said, “that you believe I never meant to expose you to anything of the sort.”

“Of course I know it, and I am ashamed to have written to you as I did; but I was overwrought, and it did seem as though l was never to have any peace. Besides,” I added, somewhat irrelevantly, “I hadn’t seen you then.”

“Ah! And now that you have seen me. you are inclined to believe me honest?”

“Yes.”

“And trustworthy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll try to live up to that opinion.” he replied, jumping up suddenly and walking about the room. “Then may I stay here. say a week, and continue investigations?”

I agreed, and, as it was growing late, we separated.

Next day there was no question of investigating, nor of anything else but skating.

The millpond was five inches thick In glossy black ice, and Ruth and Lettice whirled us off directly after breakfast. They were like mad things with pleasure when they found that Sidney could cut figures; as for me, I could not, however I strove, shake off from my mind the sinister impression which that place always made upon me.

I could not be gay there; the house had never impressed me in the same way. But the pool! If ever a place appealed to me directly as being haunted, it was that water. The hush, the curious stillness, the black depths of wintry firs and larches that kept the sun from it all day long – the sullen aspect of the torpid wheel, hanging as though in horror of what it knew lay under the smooth surface – it all wrought upon my nerves till I longed to fly the spot. And yet I did not like to leave the care of the children to Sidney, and I could not plead my fantastic fears.

We went home to dinner, and then I found, to my unspeakable woe, that it was necessary for me to face the awful place again. Lettice was just beginning to grasp the true science of the outside edge, and Sidney really seemed quite as keen as she was herself about it.

Back we all went, and I glided to and fro, trying hard to think of other things, to forget how I hated the wicked atmosphere that overhung me.

The short afternoon began to close in; the children must not be out in the dusk. I issued the order to return, and, amid much grumbling, they sat down on the bank for Sidney to take off their skates.

I came slowly skating down the pond to join them; and some strange impulse drew my eyes to the opposite bank, where the dense shadow of the thick trees loomed blackest.

There lay something on the surface of the pool, but it looked half submerged, as though it floated. Slowly, slowly I drew nearer, with the fascination of horror; it was the body of a child!

I saw the small chin flung helplessly back, the grey outline of the pinched face, the sodden limpness of the impotent limbs—

Did they not see it too? … I held my breath in utter dread. It may have been thirty seconds, it seemed to me that hours elapsed, that ages of awful possibilities rolled over my head, before I began to realise that the ice was five inches thick, and that a floating corpse must be an illusion of the filmiest kind.

Through the roaring in my ears I heard the high-pitched, laughing voices of the children borne on the frozen twilight air; an oppression gripped me – a feeling of deadly nausea; the smoky redness of the west was a blur of blood and fire to my dazzled eyes.

I did not say anything, so they tell me. I stood as still as if the ice had reached my heart. They became suddenly aware of something odd or unusual in my rigidity. Sidney crossed the pond in a few strokes; his coming was inaudible to me, but he was in time to catch me as I fell in a fainting-fit which lasted for more than two hours.

In the morning I had developed feverish symptoms, and for several days I was ill with what the doctor called a chill, with a good deal of fever and consequent delirium.

During that delirium the apparition of the little boy went and came continually. He stood by my bed, he tapped at my door, he crouched on my hearth as if for warmth. To such a phantom I attach, of course, no importance whatever; it was the direct result of temperature, and vanished completely as soon as the clinical thermometer could be induced to register less than a hundred.

I have never seen it since; and you may consequently be tempted to think, as most people do who hear this story, that the whole of the haunting of Dennismore Hall was merely febrile in its character – the result of my constitution having been in a state of working up for a pretty sharp attack of illness.

As to the justice of such a view, you who have heard the facts must judge for yourselves; but to what I have already related please add the following before arriving at a conclusion:

When the thaw came the millpond was dragged, and the bones of a child were found in the slime just beneath the scene of my vision.

“The Lady’s Realm”, Mar. 1902

The Relations and What They Related
and Other Weird Tales (1902)

ANCIENT LIGHTS

Algernon Blackwood

1912

From Southwater, where he left the train, the road led due west. That he knew; for the rest he trusted to luck, being one of those born walkers who dislike asking the way. He had that instinct, and as a rule it served him well. “A mile or so due west along the sandy road till you come to a stile on the right; then across the fields. You’ll see the red house straight before you.” He glanced at the postcard’s instructions once again, and once again he tried to decipher the scratched-out sentence – without success. It had been so elaborately inked over that no word was legible. Inked-out sentences in a letter were always enticing. He wondered what it was that had to be so very carefully obliterated.

The afternoon was boisterous, with a tearing, shouting wind that blew from the sea, across the Sussex weald. Massive clouds with rounded, piled-up edges, cannoned across gaping spaces of blue sky. Far away the line of Downs swept the horizon, like an arriving wave. Chanctonbury Ring rode their crest – a scudding ship, hull down before the wind. He took his hat off and walked rapidly, breathing great draughts of air with delight and exhilaration. The road was deserted; no horsemen, bicycles, or motors; not even a tradesman’s cart; no single walker. But anyhow he would never have asked the way. Keeping a sharp eye for the stile, he pounded along, while the wind tossed the cloak against his face, and made waves across the blue puddles in the yellow road. The trees showed their under leaves of white. The bracken and the high new grass bent all one way. Great life was in the day, high spirits and dancing everywhere. And for a Croydon surveyor’s clerk just out of an office this was like a holiday at the sea!

It was a day for high adventure, and his heart rose up to meet the mood of Nature. His umbrella with the silver ring ought to have been a sword, and his brown shoes should have been top-boots with spurs upon the heels. Where hid the enchanted Castle and the princess with the hair of sunny gold? His horse….

The stile came suddenly into view and nipped adventure in the bud. Everyday clothes took him prisoner again. He was a surveyor’s clerk, middle-aged, earning three pounds a week, coming from Croydon to see about a client’s proposed alterations in a wood – something to ensure a better view from the dining-room window. Across the fields, perhaps a mile away, he saw the red house gleaming in the sunshine; and resting on the stile a moment to get his breath he noticed a copse of oak and hornbeam on the right. “Aha,” he told himself, “so that must be the wood he wants to cut down to improve the view? I’ll ’ave a look at it.” There were boards up, of course, but there was an inviting little path as well. “I’m not a trespasser,” he said; “it’s part of my business, this is.” He scrambled awkwardly over the gate and entered the copse. A little round would bring him to the field again.

But the moment he passed among the trees the wind ceased shouting and a stillness dropped upon the world. So dense was the growth that the sunshine only came through in isolated patches. The air was close. He mopped his forehead and put his green felt hat on, but a low branch knocked it off again at once, and as he stooped an elastic twig swung back and stung his face. There were flowers along both edges of the little path; glades opened on either side; ferns curved about in damper corners, and the smell of earth and foliage was rich and sweet. It was cooler here. What an enchanting little wood, he thought, turning down a small green glade where the sunshine flickered like silver wings. How it danced and fluttered and moved about! He put a dark blue flower in his button hole. Again his hat, caught by an oak branch as he rose, was knocked from his head, falling across his eyes. And this time he did not put it on again. Swinging his umbrella, he walked on with uncovered head, whistling rather loudly as he went. But the thickness of the trees hardly encouraged whistling, and something of his gaiety and high spirits seemed to leave him. He suddenly found himself treading circumspectly and with caution. The stillness in the wood was so peculiar.

There was a rustle among the ferns and leaves and something shot across the path ten yards ahead, stopped abruptly an instant with head cocked sideways to stare, then dived again beneath the underbrush with the speed of a shadow. He started like a frightened child, laughing the next second that a mere pheasant could have made him jump. In the distance he heard wheels upon the road, and wondered why the sound was pleasant. “Good old butcher’s cart,” he said to himself – then realised that he was going in the wrong direction and had somehow got turned round. For the road should be behind him, not in front.

And he hurriedly took another narrow glade that lost itself in greenness to the right. “That’s my direction, of course,” he said; “the trees has mixed me up a bit, it seems” – then found himself abruptly by the gate he had first climbed over. He had merely made a circle. Surprise became almost discomfiture then. And a man, dressed like a gamekeeper in browny green, leaned against the gate, hitting his legs with a switch. “I’m making for Mr. Lumley’s farm,” explained the walker. “This is his wood, I believe—” then stopped dead, because it was no man at all, but merely an effect of light and shade and foliage. He stepped back to reconstruct the singular illusion, but the wind shook the branches roughly here on the edge of the wood and the foliage refused to reconstruct the figure. The leaves all rustled strangely. And just then the sun went behind a cloud, making the whole wood look otherwise. Yet how the mind could be thus doubly deceived was indeed remarkable, for it almost seemed to him the man had answered, spoken – or was this the shuffling noise the branches made? – and had pointed with his switch to the notice-board upon the nearest tree. The words rang on in his head, but of course he had imagined them: “No, it’s not his wood. It’s ours.” And some village wit, moreover, had changed the lettering on the weather-beaten board, for it read quite plainly, “Trespassers will be persecuted.”

And while the astonished clerk read the words and chuckled, he said to himself, thinking what a tale he’d have to tell his wife and children later – “The blooming wood has tried to chuck me out. But I’ll go in again. Why, it’s only a matter of a square acre at most. I’m bound to reach the fields on the other side if I keep straight on.” He remembered his position in the office. He had a certain dignity to maintain.

The cloud passed from below the sun, and light splashed suddenly in all manner of unlikely places. The man went straight on. He felt a touch of puzzling confusion somewhere; this way the copse had of shifting from sunshine into shadow doubtless troubled sight a little. To his relief, at last, a new glade opened through the trees and disclosed the fields with a glimpse of the red house in the distance at the far end. But a little wicket gate that stood across the path had first to be climbed, and as he scrambled heavily over – for it would not open – he got the astonishing feeling that it slid off sideways beneath his weight, and towards the wood. Like the moving staircases at Harrod’s and Earl’s Court, it began to glide off with him. It was quite horrible. He made a violent effort to get down before it carried him into the trees, but his feet became entangled with the bars and umbrella, so that he fell heavily upon the farther side, arms spread across the grass and nettles, boots clutched between the first and second bars. He lay there a moment like a man crucified upside down, and while he struggled to get disentangled – feet, bars, and umbrella formed a regular net – he saw the little man in browny green go past him with extreme rapidity through the wood. The man was laughing. He passed across the glade some fifty yards away, and he was not alone this time. A companion like himself went with him. The clerk, now upon his feet again, watched them disappear into the gloom of green beyond. “They’re tramps, not gamekeepers,” he said to himself, half mortified, half angry. But his heart was thumping dreadfully, and he dared not utter all his thought.

He examined the wicket gate, convinced it was a trick gate somehow – then went hurriedly on again, disturbed beyond belief to see that the glade no longer opened into fields, but curved away to the right. What in the world had happened to him? His sight was so utterly at fault. Again the sun flamed out abruptly and lit the floor of the wood with pools of silver, and at the same moment a violent gust of wind passed shouting overhead. Drops fell clattering everywhere upon the leaves, making a sharp pattering as of many footsteps. The whole copse shuddered and went moving.

“Rain, by George,” thought the clerk, and feeling for his umbrella, discovered he had lost it. He turned back to the gate and found it lying on the farther side. To his amazement he saw the fields at the far end of the glade, the red house, too, ashine in the sunset. He laughed then, for, of course, in his struggle with the gate, he had somehow got turned round – had fallen back instead of forwards. Climbing over, this time quite easily, he retraced his steps. The silver band, he saw, had been torn from the umbrella. No doubt his foot, a nail, or something had caught in it and ripped it off. The clerk began to run; he felt extraordinarily dismayed.

But, while he ran, the entire wood ran with him, round him, to and fro, trees shifting like living things, leaves folding and unfolding, trunks darting backwards and forwards, and branches disclosing enormous empty spaces, then closing up again before he could look into them. There were footsteps everywhere, and laughing, crying voices, and crowds of figures gathering just behind his back till the glade, he knew, was thick with moving life. The wind in his ears, of course, produced the voices and the laughter, while sun and clouds, plunging the copse alternately in shadow and bright dazzling light, created the figures. But he did not like it, and he went as fast as ever his sturdy legs could take him. He was frightened now. This was no story for his wife and children. He ran like the wind. But his feet made no sound upon the soft mossy turf.

Then, to his horror, he saw that the glade grew narrow, nettles and weeds stood thick across it, it dwindled down into a tiny path, and twenty yards ahead it stopped finally and melted off among the trees. What the trick gate had failed to achieve, this twisting glade accomplished easily – carried him in bodily among the dense and crowding trees.

There was only one thing to do – turn sharply and dash back again, run headlong into the life that followed at his back, followed so closely too that now it almost touched him, pushing him in. And with reckless courage this was what he did. It seemed a fearful thing to do. He turned with a sort of violent spring, head down and shoulders forward, hands stretched before his face. He made the plunge; like a hunted creature he charged full tilt the other way, meeting the wind now in his face.

Good Lord! The glade behind him had closed up as well; there was no longer any path at all. Turning round and round, like an animal at bay, he searched for an opening, a way of escape, searched frantically, breathlessly, terrified now in his bones. But foliage surrounded him, branches blocked the way; the trees stood close and still, unshaken by a breath of wind; and the sun dipped that moment behind a great black cloud. The entire wood turned dark and silent. It watched him.

Perhaps it was this final touch of sudden blackness that made him act so foolishly, as though he had really lost his head. At any rate, without pausing to think, he dashed headlong in among the trees again. There was a sensation of being stiflingly surrounded and entangled, and that he must break out at all costs – out and away into the open of the blessed fields and air. He did this ill-considered thing, and apparently charged straight into an oak that deliberately moved into his path to stop him. He saw it shift across a good full yard, and being a measuring man, accustomed to theodolite and chain, he ought to know. He fell, saw stars, and felt a thousand tiny fingers tugging and pulling at his hands and neck and ankles. The stinging nettles, no doubt, were responsible for this. He thought of it later. At the moment it felt diabolically calculated.

But another remarkable illusion was not so easily explained. For all in a moment, it seemed, the entire wood went sliding past him with a thick deep rustling of leaves and laughter, myriad footsteps, and tiny little active, energetic shapes; two men in browny green gave him a mighty hoist – and he opened his eyes to find himself lying in the meadow beside the stile where first his incredible adventure had begun. The wood stood in its usual place and stared down upon him in the sunlight. There was the red house in the distance as before. Above him grinned the weather-beaten notice-board: “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”

Dishevelled in mind and body, and a good deal shaken in his official soul, the clerk walked slowly across the fields. But on the way he glanced once more at the postcard of instructions, and saw with dull amazement that the inked-out sentence was quite legible after all beneath the scratches made across it: “There is a short cut through the wood – the wood I want cut down – if you care to take it.” Only “care” was so badly written, it looked more like another word; the “c” was uncommonly like “d.”

“That’s the copse that spoils my view of the Downs, you see,” his client explained to him later, pointing across the fields, and referring to the ordnance map beside him. “I want it cut down and a path made so and so.” His finger indicated direction on the map. “The Fairy Wood it’s still called, and it’s far older than this house. Come now, if you’re ready, Mr. Thomas, we might go out and have a look at it….”

“The Eye-Witness”, 11 Jul. 1912

Ten-Minute Stories (1914)

THE DEATH MASK

Theo. Douglas

1917

“Yes, that is a portrait of my wife. It is considered to be a good likeness. But of course she was older-looking towards the last.”

Enderby and I were on our way to the smoking-room after dinner, and the picture hung on the staircase. We had been chums at school a quarter of a century ago, and later on at college; but I had spent the last decade out of England. I returned to find my friend a widower of four years’ standing. And a good job too, I thought to myself when I heard of it, for I had no great liking for the late Gloriana. Probably the sentiment, or want of sentiment, had been mutual: she did not smile on me, but I doubt if she smiled on any of poor Tom Enderby’s bachelor cronies. The picture was certainly like her. She was a fine woman, with aquiline features and a cold eye. The artist had done the features justice—and the eye, which seemed to keep a steely watch on all the comings and goings of the house out of which she had died.

We made only a brief pause before the portrait, and then went on. The smoking-room was an apartment built out at the back of the house by a former owner, and shut off by double doors to serve as a nursery. Mrs. Enderby had no family, and she disliked the smell of tobacco. So the big room was made over to Tom’s pipes and cigars; and if Tom’s friends wanted to smoke, they must smoke there or not at all. I remembered the room and the rule, but I was not prepared to find it still existing. I had expected to light my after dinner cigar over the dessert dishes, now there was no presiding lady to consider.

We were soon installed in a couple of deep-cushioned chairs before a good fire. I thought Enderby breathed more freely when he closed the double doors behind us, shutting off the dull formal house, and the staircase and the picture. But he was not looking well; there hung about him an unmistakable air of depression. Could he be fretting after Gloriana? Perhaps during their married years, he had fallen into the way of depending on a woman to care for him. It is pleasant enough when the woman is the right sort; but I shouldn’t myself have fancied being cared for by the late Mrs. Enderby. And, if the fretting was a fact, it would be easy to find a remedy. Evelyn has a couple of pretty sisters, and we would have him over to stay at our place.

“You must run down and see us,” I said presently, pursuing this idea. “I want to introduce you to my wife. Can you come next week?”

His face lit up with real pleasure.

“I should like it of all things,” he said heartily. “But a qualification came after.” The cloud settled back over him and he sighed. “That is, if I can get away.”

“Why, what is to hinder you?”

“It may not seem much to stay for, but I—I have got in the way of stopping here—to keep things together.” He did not look at me, but leaned over to the fender to knock the ash off his cigar.

“Tell you what, Tom, you are getting hipped living by yourself. Why don’t you sell the house, or let it off just as it is, and try a complete change?”

“I can’t sell it. I’m only the tenant for life. It was my wife’s.”

“Well, I suppose there is nothing to prevent you letting it? Or if you can’t let it, you might shut it up.”

“There is nothing legal to prevent me—!” The emphasis was too fine to attract notice, but I remembered it after.

“Then, my dear fellow, why not? Knock about a bit, and see the world. But, to my thinking, the best thing you could do would be to marry again.”

He shook his head drearily.

“Of course it is a delicate matter to urge upon a widower. But you have paid the utmost ceremonial respect. Four years, you know. The greatest stickler for propriety would deem it ample.”

“It isn’t that. Dick, I—I’ve a great mind to tell you rather a queer story.” He puffed hard at his smoke, and stared into the red coals in the pauses. “But I don’t know what you’d think of it. Or think of me.”

“Try me,” I said. “I’ll give you my opinion after. And you know I’m safe to confide in.”

“I sometimes think I should feel better if I told it. It’s—it’s queer enough to be laughable. But it hasn’t been any laughing matter to me.”

He threw the stump of his cigar into the fire, and turned to me. And then I saw how pale he was, and that a dew of perspiration was breaking out on his white face.

“I was very much of your opinion, Dick: I thought I should be happier if I married again. And I went so far as to get engaged. But the engagement was broken off, and I am going to tell you why.”

–   –   –

My wife was some time ailing before she died, and the doctors were in consultation. But I did not know how serious her complaint was till the last. Then they told me there was no hope, as coma had set in. But it was possible, even probable, that there would be a revival of consciousness before death, and for this I was to hold myself ready.

I daresay you will write me down a coward, but I dreaded the revival: I was ready to pray that she might pass away in her sleep. I knew she held exalted views about the marriage tie, and I felt sure if there were any last words she would exact a pledge. I could not at such a moment refuse to promise, and I did not want to be tied. You will recollect that she was my senior. I was about to be left a widower in middle life, and in the natural course of things I had a good many years before me. You see?

–   –   –

“My dear fellow, I don’t think a promise so extorted ought to bind you. It isn’t fair—!”

–   –   –

Wait and hear me. I was sitting here, miserable enough, as you may suppose, when the doctor came to fetch me to her room. Mrs. Enderby was conscious and had asked for me, but he particularly begged me not to agitate her in any way, lest pain should return. She was lying stretched out in the bed, looking already like a corpse.

“Tom,” she said, “they tell me I am dying, and there is something I want you to promise.”

I groaned in spirit. It was all up with me, I thought. But she went on.

“When I am dead and in my coffin, I want you to cover my face with your own hands. Promise me this.”

It was not in the very least what I expected. Of course I promised.

“I want you to cover my face with a particular handkerchief on which I set a value. When the time comes, open the cabinet to the right of the window, and you will find it in the third drawer from the top. You cannot mistake it, for it is the only thing in the drawer.”

That was every word she said, if you believe me, Dick. She just sighed and shut her eyes as if she was going to sleep, and she never spoke again. Three or four days later they came again to ask me if I wished to take a last look, as the undertaker’s men were about to close the coffin.

I felt a great reluctance, but it was necessary I should go. She looked as if made of wax, and was colder than ice to touch. I opened the cabinet, and there, just as she said, was a large handkerchief of very fine cambric, lying by itself. It was embroidered with a monogram device in all four corners, and was not of a sort I had ever seen her use. I spread it out and laid it over the dead face; and then what happened was rather curious. It seemed to draw down over the features and cling to them, to nose and mouth and forehead and the shut eyes, till it became a perfect mask. My nerves were shaken, I suppose; I was seized with horror, and flung back the covering sheet, hastily quitting the room. And the coffin was closed that night.

Well, she was buried, and I put up a monument which the neighbourhood considered handsome. As you see, I was bound by no pledge to abstain from marriage; and, though I knew what would have been her wish, I saw no reason why I should regard it. And, some months after, a family of the name of Ashcroft came to live at The Leasowes, and they had a pretty daughter.

I took a fancy to Lucy Ashcroft the first time I saw her, and it was soon apparent that she was well inclined to me. She was a gentle, yielding little thing; not the superior style of woman. Not at all like—

–   –   –

(I made no comment, but I could well understand that in his new matrimonial venture Tom would prefer a contrast.)

–   –   –

—But I thought I had a very good chance of happiness with her; and I grew fond of her: very fond of her indeed. Her people were of the hospitable sort, and they encouraged me to go to The Leasowes, dropping in when I felt inclined: it did not seem as if they would be likely to put obstacles in our way. Matters progressed, and I made up my mind one evening to walk over there and declare myself. I had been up to town the day before, and came back with a ring in my pocket: rather a fanciful design of double hearts, but I thought Lucy would think it pretty, and would let me put it on her finger. I went up to change into dinner things, making myself as spruce as possible, and coming to the conclusion before the glass that I was not such a bad figure of a man after all, and that there was not much grey in my hair. Aye, Dick, you may smile: it is a good bit greyer now.

I had taken out a clean handkerchief, and thrown the one carried through the day away crumpled on the floor. I don’t know what made me turn to look at it as it lay there, but, once it caught my eye, I stood staring at it as if spell-bound. The handkerchief was moving—Dick, I swear it—rapidly altering in shape, puffing up here and there as if blown by wind, spreading and moulding itself into the features of a face. And what face should it be but that death-mask of Gloriana, which I had covered in the coffin eleven months before!

To say I was horror-stricken conveys little of the feeling that possessed me. I snatched up the rag of cambric and flung it on the fire, and it was nothing but a rag in my hand, and in another moment no more than blackened tinder on the bar of the grate. There was no face below.

–   –   –

“Of course not,” I said. “It was a mere hallucination. You were cheated by an excited fancy.”

–   –   –

You may be sure I told myself all that, and more; and I went downstairs and tried to pull myself together with a dram. But I was curiously upset, and, for that night at least, I found it impossible to play the wooer. The recollection of the death-mask was too vivid; it would have come between me and Lucy’s lips.

The effect wore off, however. In a day or two I was bold again, and as much disposed to smile at my folly as you are at this moment. I proposed, and Lucy accepted me; and I put on the ring. Ashcroft père was graciously pleased to approve of the settlements I offered, and Ashcroft mère promised to regard me as a son. And during the first forty-eight hours of our engagement, there was not a cloud to mar the blue.

I proposed on a Monday, and on Wednesday I went again to dine and spend the evening with just their family party. Lucy and I found our way afterwards into the back drawing-room, which seemed to be made over to us by tacit understanding. Any way, we had it to ourselves; and as Lucy sat on the settee, busy with her work, I was privileged to sit beside her, close enough to watch the careful stitches she was setting, under which the pattern grew.

She was embroidering a square of fine linen to serve as a tea-cloth, and it was intended for a present to a friend; she was anxious, she told me, to finish it in the next few days, ready for despatch. But I was somewhat impatient of her engrossment in the work; I wanted her to look at me while we talked, and to be permitted to hold her hand. I was making plans for a tour we would take together after Easter; arguing that eight weeks spent in preparation was enough for any reasonable bride. Lucy was easily entreated; she laid aside the linen square on the table at her elbow. I held her fingers captive, but her eyes wandered from my face, as she was still deliciously shy.

All at once she exclaimed. Her work was moving, there was growing to be a face in it: did I not see?

I saw, indeed. It was the Gloriana death-mask, forming there as it had formed in my handkerchief at home: the marked nose and chin, the severe mouth, the mould of forehead, almost complete. I snatched it up and dropped it over the back of the couch. “It did look like a face,” I allowed. “But never mind it, darling; I want you to attend to me.” Something of this sort I said, I hardly know what, for my blood was running cold. Lucy pouted; she wanted to dwell on the marvel, and my impatient action had displeased her. I went on talking wildly, being afraid of pauses, but the psychological moment had gone by. I felt I did not carry her with me as before: she hesitated over my persuasions; the forecast of a Sicilian honeymoon had ceased to charm. By-and-by she suggested that Mrs. Ashcroft would expect us to rejoin the circle in the other room. And perhaps I would pick up her work for her—still with a slight air of offence.

I walked round the settee to recover the luckless piece of linen; but she turned also, looking over the back, so at the same instant we both saw.

There again was the Face, rigid and severe; and now the corners of the cloth were tucked under, completing the form of the head. And that was not all. Some white drapery had been improvised and extended beyond it on the floor, presenting the complete figure laid out straight and stiff, ready for the grave. Lucy’s alarm was excusable. She shrieked aloud, shriek upon shriek, and immediately an indignant family of Ashcrofts rushed in through the half-drawn portières which divided the two rooms, demanding the cause of her distress.

Meanwhile I had fallen upon the puffed-out form, and destroyed it. Lucy’s embroidery composed the head; the figure was ingeniously contrived out of a large Turkish bath-sheet, brought in from one of the bedrooms, no one knew how or when. I held up the things protesting their innocence, while the family were stabbing me through and through with looks of indignation, and Lucy was sobbing in her mother’s arms. She might have been foolish, she allowed; it did seem ridiculous now she saw what it was. But at the moment it was too dreadful: it looked so like—so like! And here a fresh sob choked her into silence.

Peace was restored at last, but plainly the Ashcrofts doubted me. The genial father stiffened, and Mrs. Ashcroft administered indirect reproofs. She hated practical joking, so she informed me; she might be wrong, and no doubt she was old-fashioned, but she had been brought up to consider it in the highest degree ill-bred. And perhaps I had not considered how sensitive Lucy was, and how easily alarmed. She hoped I would take warning for the future, and that nothing of this kind would occur again.

Practical joking—oh, ye gods! As if it was likely that I, alone with the girl of my heart, would waste the precious hour in building up effigies of sham corpses on the floor! And Lucy ought to have known that the accusation was absurd, as I had never for a moment left her side. She did take my part when more composed; but the mystery remained, beyond explanation of hers or mine.

As for the future, I could not think of that without a failing heart. If the Power arrayed against us were in truth what my superstition feared, I might as well give up hope at once, for I knew there would be no relenting. I could see the whole absurdity of the thing as well as you do now; but, if you put yourself in my place, Dick, you will be forced to confess that it was tragic too.

I did not see Lucy the next day, as I was bound to go again to town; but we had planned to meet and ride together on the Friday morning. I was to be at The Leasowes at a certain hour, and you may be sure I was punctual. Her horse had already been brought round, and the groom was leading it up and down. I had hardly dismounted when she came down the steps of the porch; and I noticed at once a new look on her face, a harder set about that red mouth of hers which was so soft and kissable. But she let me put her up on the saddle and settle her foot in the stirrup, and she was the bearer of a gracious message from her mother. I was expected to return to lunch, and Mrs. Ashcroft begged us to be punctual, as a friend who had stayed the night with them, would be leaving immediately after.

“You will be pleased to meet her, I think,” said Lucy, leaning forward to pat her horse. “I find she knows you very well. It is Miss Kingsworthy.”

Now Miss Kingsworthy was a school-friend of Gloriana’s, who used now and then to visit us here. I was not aware that she and the Ashcrofts were acquainted; but, as I have said, they had only recently come into the neighbourhood as tenants of The Leasowes. I had no opportunity to express pleasure or the reverse, for Lucy was riding on, and putting her horse to a brisk pace. It was some time before she drew rein, and again admitted conversation. We were descending a steep hill, and the groom was following at a discreet distance behind, far enough to be out of earshot.

Lucy looked very pretty on horseback; but this is by the way. The mannish hat suited her, and so did the habit fitting closely to her shape.

“Tom,” she said; and again I noticed that new hardness in her face. “Tom, Miss Kingsworthy tells me your wife did not wish you to marry again, and she made you promise her that you would not. Miss Kingsworthy was quite astonished to hear that you and I were engaged. Is this true?”

I was able to tell her it was not: that my wife had never asked, and I had never given her, any such pledge. I allowed she disliked second marriages—in certain cases, and perhaps she had made some remark to that effect to Miss Kingsworthy; it was not unlikely. And then I appealed to her. Surely she would not let a mischief-maker’s tittle-tattle come between her and me?

I thought her profile looked less obdurate, but she would not let her eyes meet mine as she answered:

“Of course not, if that was all. And I doubt if I would have heeded it, only that it seemed to fit in with—something else. Tom, it was very horrible, what we saw on Wednesday evening. And—and—don’t be angry, but I asked Miss Kingsworthy what your wife was like. I did not tell her why I wanted to know.”

“What has that to do with it?” I demanded—stoutly enough; but, alas! I was too well aware.

“She told me Mrs. Enderby was handsome, but she had very marked features, and was severe-looking when she did not smile. A high forehead, a Roman nose, and a decided chin. Tom, the face in the cloth was just like that. Did you not see?”

Of course I protested.

“My darling, what nonsense! I saw it looked a little like a face, but I pulled it to pieces at once because you were frightened. Why, Lucy, I shall have you turning into a spiritualist if you take up these fancies.”

“No,” she said, “I do not want to be anything foolish. I have thought it over, and if it happens only once I have made up my mind to believe it a mistake and to forget. But if it comes again—if it goes on coming!” Here she shuddered and turned white. “Oh Tom, I could not—I could not!”

That was the ultimatum. She liked me as much as ever; she even owned to a warmer feeling; but she was not going to marry a haunted man. Well, I suppose I cannot blame her. I might have given the same advice in another fellow’s case, though in my own I felt it hard.

I am close to the end now, so I shall need to tax your patience very little longer. A single chance remained. Gloriana’s power, whatever its nature and however derived, might have been so spent in the previous efforts that she could effect no more. I clung to this shred of hope, and did my best to play the part of the light-hearted lover, the sort of companion Lucy expected, who would shape himself to her mood; but I was conscious that I played it ill.

The ride was a lengthy business. Lucy’s horse cast a shoe, and it was impossible to change the saddle on to the groom’s hack or my own mare, as neither of them had been trained to the habit. We were bound to return at a foot-pace, and did not reach The Leasowes until two o’clock. Lunch was over: Mrs. Ashcroft had set out for the station driving Miss Kingsworthy; but some cutlets were keeping hot for us, so we were informed, and could be served immediately.

We went at once into the dining-room, as Lucy was hungry; and she took off her hat and laid it on a side-table: she said the close fit of it made her head ache. The cutlets had been misrepresented: they were lukewarm; but Lucy made a good meal off them and the fruit-tart which followed, very much at her leisure. Heaven knows I would not have grudged her so much as a mouthful; but that luncheon was an ordeal I cannot readily forget.

The servant absented himself, having seen us served; and then my troubles began. The tablecloth seemed alive at the corner which was between us; it rose in waves as if puffed up by wind, though the window was fast shut against any wandering airs. I tried to seem unconscious; tried to talk as if no horror of apprehension was filling all my mind, while I was flattening out the bewitched damask with a grasp I hardly dared relax. Lucy rose at last, saying she must change her dress. Occupied with the cloth, it had not occurred to me to look round, or keep watch on what might be going on in another part of the room. The hat on the side-table had been tilted over sideways, and in that position it was made to crown another presentation of the Face. What it was made of this time I cannot say; probably a serviette, as several lay about. The linen material, of whatever sort, was again moulded into the perfect form; but this time the mouth showed humour, and appeared to relax in a grim smile.

Lucy shrieked, and dropped into my arms in a swoon: a real genuine fainting-fit, out of which she was brought round with difficulty, after summoned help of doctors.

I hung about miserably till her safety was assured, and then went as miserably home. Next morning I received a cutting little note from my mother-in-law elect, in which she returned the ring, and informed me the engagement must be considered at an end.

Well, Dick, you know now why I do not marry. And what have you to say?

“The Novel Magazine”, May 1917

THE DEVIL’S GRAVEYARD

G. G. Pendarves

1926

•  1  •

“You don’t understand, John! I used to laugh at it, too, but these last months the thought of that old curse has been more and more in my mind.”

“Well, dear, why worry yet? It will be time enough if this proves to be a boy; after all, we may have a daughter at last.”

“No! I feel convinced it will be another boy, and the words of that old saying go round and round in my head:

“When Radcliffe’s heir has brothers six

And seeks to take to wife

The only child of Blackmore’s line.

The Curse shall wake to life.”

“But, Agnes, you are really inventing worries. Supposing this seventh is a boy! According to the silly jingle you quoted, the worst will only happen about twenty years hence, if our eldest boy should happen to fall in love with Blackmore’s small daughter. And after all, it’s absurd,” he went on. “She might have any number of brothers and sisters in the interval— or she might even die,” he added hopefully.

“You may make light of it, and I know it sounds absurd; but I feel so afraid, so miserably afraid, as though some black shadow was by my side, always whispering and threatening.”

“My dear,” said Radcliffe, now genuinely alarmed, “You musn’t let go like that! It’s only a foolish old story, kept up by one generation after another. All old families boast of hidden treasures, or a curse, or a ghost, or something of that nature— it goes with the estate. You must not get fancies like that into your head, dear.”

He got up and crossed the room to where his wife was sitting in the sunny window embrasure, and stood looking at her in a puzzled way, as though she were a new hybrid which had appeared among his treasured plants, and could not be accounted for. He was devoted to his wife, but hitherto she had been so normal, and well-balanced that this strange fantastic notion of hers worried him considerably. It was so utterly unlike her.

“Better have Dr. Green up tomorrow and have a chat with him.”

His wife suppressed a sigh. It was impossible to make him take her seriously. It was of no use to try to explain the awful weight that pressed upon her heart— the monstrous fear that oppressed her. He put it all down to her health, and brushed aside her premonitions as mere fancies. But at. the same time it comforted her that he should take this attitude. His unimaginative practical outlook on life, and careless way of disbelieving what he did not understand, actually did, for the moment, make her feel that perhaps after all her fears were only imaginary.

She smiled at her husband in the sudden relief of her thought, as he bent down to kiss her and, drawing her wrap about her shoulders, said:

“It would do you good to have a turn round the grounds, Agnes. I’ll take you down to the potting sheds. There are some new hybrids there that will surprize you. Perfect specimens! Even old Bums was almost enthusiastic about them; he never believed I could get that blue dahlia.”

•   •   •

The stillness of a golden October evening enveloped the big room where so many generations of Radcliffes had first seen the light.

Mrs. Radcliffe lay dying in that room now. Her husband, bewildered and helpless, faced with the first great sorrow in a hitherto placid existence, stood over by one of the windows, staring out over the far-stretching acres of the Radcliffe estate.

The six elder sons had come and gone, she would see them no more; and on them, especially David, her first-born and dearest, the mother’s thoughts were centered. She glanced from time to time at the cot, where slept her seventh son.

Who was he? What was he? Why did her whole being shrink from the tiny helpless thing? She had turned from him with loathing, when the nurse showed him to her first— how long ago was that? A day, or an hour? It was all a mist and confusion in her brain.

But after that they had troubled her with him no more. She looked again at the child. What was that dark shadow? Why did it move when everything else was still in that quiet room? A little cloud resting on the cot.

A vapor exhaling from the body of the child. Rapidly it darkened and spread, and soon loomed gigantic to the ceiling. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, it took form and shape! Its vague outlines became sharp and definite, and presently something dimly approaching the semblance of a man towered there— a leering unholy thing!

Its menacing bulk, shapeless and uncouth as one of the lesser animals in the far-off days of the primeval world! Its cold unsmiling eyes in dreadful contrast to the mouth distended in silent horrid laughter! Its bloated features a travesty of man even at his most vile! The evil hour had dawned. This was the horror which had haunted her so long, this was the doom that would haunt her first-born! She tried to call out— to move, and the pale eyes of that accursed thing gleamed evilly upon her efforts.

One last awful struggle with the icy numbness that pressed upon her limbs, and then the mother gave one great cry, pointing a shaking finger at the cot.

“The Curse! Kill— kill the child!”

John Radcliffe turned instantly; he saw nothing but the awful look on his wife’s face as she fell back, and before he could reach her side she was gone— her heart had stopped in that supreme effort; and all unseen as Radcliffe stooped over the bed, that fell shadow moved about the silent room, and presently withdrew itself once more to the human habitation which sheltered it.

•  2  •

Far up among the heather which spread its rich carpet to the very verge of his own fields and parklands, David Radcliffe sat, and by his side the girl who had just promised to marry him. They were both extremely happy. The sun seemed to be shining for their especial benefit, the deep glowing colors of sky and moor to be painted just as a background for their joy.

“There is nothing to wait for, Maisie dear,” said the man. “Now that my father is dead I must live at The Turrets altogether, and curb my desire for travel and expeditions. But you must marry me soon— very soon! I can’t face the great lonely old place for very long without you. There’s only Hirst at home now, and I see as little of him as possible.”

“I shall feel dreadful about leaving my poor old dad by himself, though,” answered the girl. “I know he would never consent to come and live at Radcliffe Turrets with us; he would never have a happy moment away from all those old Blackmore ancestors who gloom down on us from the walls. You’ve no idea how I dislike some of them.”

“I expect you will dislike some of mine even more,” laughed David, as he turned to kiss the sunburnt cheek so near his own. “Well, for sheer ugliness I think the Blaekmores score; your family was really rather handsome. But, of course, that horrible portrait you boast of is worse than all mine put together.”

“Oh, you mean the man who was nick-named ‘Giles the Thruster,’ because he fought so many duels. He had a rather sinister reputation, and his face matches it. It is a very famous portrait, though.”

“I hate it,” said Maisie with a little shiver. “That sneering mouth and those long narrow eyes. Oh, it’s a wicked face!”

David put a protecting arm about her.

“Well, it’s only a picture after all; he’s dead, hundreds of years ago.”

“Yes, and I am very glad too. That old legend of the Radcliffe Curse is about him, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” answered David. “He said he was coming back to haunt us. I’m the one he ought to haunt, too! The eldest of seven sons, and you are a Blackmore, and an only child.”

“Oh, David, what a perfectly horrid idea! Are you really the one that is meant in the Curse?”

He replied laughingly, “Yes, I really am. But, of course, it’s only a fairy tale.”

“What was the whole story of the Curse, dear? Why did your ancestor curse anybody at all?”

“Well, if you will promise not to take it seriously, I will tell you. I read it in some old manuscripts I found once in a secret drawer. The story goes that in the Thirteenth Century there was, as now, a family of seven Radcliffe brothers, and the youngest was this Giles the Thruster. He was betrothed to a girl, the only daughter of a Blackmore, whose land adjoined ours then, as it does now.

“The eldest Radcliffe also loved this girl, and the two of them ran away together. Giles pursued them, caught them up on the road, and the two men fought a duel in which Giles, blind with fury, missed his stroke, and was fatally wounded, and died, and was buried there in the clearing by the roadside, where they had fought. In dying, he cursed his brother bitterly, and swore that he would come again to earth and take his revenge.

“He prophesied that history would repeat itself, and that in the future once more seven Radcliffe brothers should be born, and the eldest again desire to wed a Blackmore’s only daughter. Giles vowed that then he would return to snatch the girl from that eldest born, and cheat him of his love as he himself had been cheated.”

“Oh, David! How awful if such things really could happen!”

“Well, they can’t. We don’t live in the Dark Ages now, darling. I am afraid old Giles would have a rough time of it if he returned to England in these post-war days. Everything got killed in the war. Religion and superstition alike. People only believe in what can be seen and paid for now.”

“Nonsense, David!— Of course they—”

She broke off and turned to look at him. He had let his arm drop from her shoulders, and was sitting up stiffly, his eyes fixed on something ahead.

“Why, what’s the matter? What are you looking at, David?”

She caught his arm, her own rosy color fading as she saw his dreadful pallor and the stricken look in his eyes.

“David! David! Answer me. Oh, do speak! There’s nothing there!”

She beat with her little hand on the man’s clenched fist, but he neither moved nor answered her. “Oh, you must be ill. What shall I do? Can’t you speak to me—just a word, dear?”

But he sat in frozen silence, his face a mask of horror.

At last she got up and moved toward the spot on which David’s eyes were fixed so intently. Suddenly the wide sweep of moors seemed desolate, almost menacing. A dark cloud blotted out the sunshine, and a little squall of wind rushed up angrily against her as she moved forward.

“Come back, Maisie. A—a—h—h! come back.”

The voice rose almost to a scream, and she turned to see David plunging over the heather toward her. He seized her roughly by the arm and dragged her away, and then stood holding her, panting as though he had run a race. The reaction of finding him apparently recovered made her irritable, and she said, “I’m not going to run away; you needn’t clutch me like that. What on earth is the matter with you, David?”

The man did not answer, but clasped her to him, his lips moving silently. He did not heed her questions, but began to walk away rapidly, holding her hand in his, and urging her to greater haste. Once or twice he pushed up against her, as though to avoid someone or something at his other side, his hand gripping hers convulsively.

Maisie was first frightened and then annoyed at his behavior. Why couldn’t he explain? It was ridiculous— dragging her across the moors like this.

She wrenched her hand free at last, and said, “I can’t go so quickly. Leave me, David; I would rather go home alone.”

He turned a white face to her, as she stood looking up at him, her brown curls all blown about her pretty face, her gray eyes wide and indignant. Her heart melted when she saw his look, and she said, “Oh, my dear, what is it? Do tell me. I can’t bear to be treated like this. You look as though you had seen a ghost!”

Then as David recoiled, the horror on his face was reflected on her own, and she said, in a terrified whisper, “Oh, David, have you seen something? What was it? Tell me!”

The man’s lips moved, but no sound was audible.

Maisie clasped his arm. “Was it really a ghost?” she whispered, with a horrified glance over her shoulder. “Oh, let us go then, quickly; it may come back; it’s so lonely here.”

For answer David put his hand to his throat with a sudden sharp intake of breath.

“Go away— go away,” he managed to gasp out. She fell hack a few paces, her frightened eyes glued to his face.

“But why won’t you let me touch you? I want to be near you, David.”

“No, no,” he muttered. “Keep away. It’s— it’s— oh, Maisie, it’s the Curse!”

At the last word he shivered like one in an ague, and backed away still farther from the girl, his outstretchedhands repelling something terrible and unseen.

She covered her face and stood trembling and shaking in every limb. David stood looking at her miserably, then he sprang to her side and, taking her in his arms, said, “Kiss me good-bye, Maisie. Quick, ah, quick! Before he—”

But as the girl raised her face to his, David jerked back violently, with such abruptness that Maisie almost lost her balance. “Go home – run – run, darling,” came David’s voice, low and urgent. “It’s no use. We may not be together.”

At that she turned, and ran obediently in the opposite direction, looking over her shoulder at intervals to see him walking away, his head bent, his whole figure shrunk together like that of an old man.

•  3  •

A whole week went by, and still Maisie, beside herself with constant anxiety, saw and heard nothing of David.

The memory of his face with that gray shadow of fear upon it, and the agony of his eyes haunted her night and day. She had never known how dear he was to her until now, when this awful invisible agency had thrust them asunder. Her heart was tom between the longing to see him and the fear of adding to his sufferings if she did so.

Every day she wandered aimlessly about the moors, seeking the high levels where she could command a view of the country round, and perhaps catch a glimpse of his tall figure. When dark came, she kept watch from the window of her room, staring for hours in the direction of Radcliffe Turrets, where the many lighted windows shone; and she pictured David alone and wanting her. All night she would keep the vigil, with the feeling that so she might help him, that her love would protect him when night and its evil shadows closed in around him; and when dawn came she would fall into heavy sleep, troubled by many dreams in which she and David fled over land and sea, pursued by a monster which would not let her go.

Then one day she saw him! It was late afternoon when she came upon him, sitting on a rough boulder, apparently watching the sun sinking into a smoky gray cloud-bank, which like a forest of dreams rose on the western horizon. “David!— Oh, at last, my dear!”

She ran eagerly. toward him, and he rose at the sound of her clear voice, and made as if to meet her. But at the first step he fell back suddenly, clutching the rock behind him with one hand and holding the other arm before his face, as though to ward off some invisible opponent.

“Don’t come near me, Maisie,” his voice came in a choking cry.

The girl stood rooted, and a great nausea swept over her as she watched the unspeakable loathing on the man’s face, the blind terror with which he resisted some unseen foe.

Instinct warned her that in some way her presence was harmful to David, that her nearness increased his danger and suffering— and she retreated until she saw that he no longer struggled with that hateful enemy, but was sitting on the rock with his head bowed on his hands.

There she left him, and stumbling, with tears blinding her eyes, she went slowly home. The bitterness of despair filled her as she realized that she had actually been the cause of torturing David afresh. She must never see him again. She would write and tell him so tonight.

•  4  •

“There is a letter for you, David, I found it on the hall table and brought it as I happened to be coming up.”

Hirst Radcliffe, the youngest of the Radcliffe sons, entered his brother’s study as he spoke, and stood, a tall, arresting figure, his pale cold eyes gleaming as he noted the bowed shoulders and drawn features of the man in the chair by the fire.

“It looks like Maisie’s writing. I have wondered why we have seen so little of her lately—perhaps this will explain.” Hirst crossed the room and stood leaning up against the fireplace. He held the letter carelessly, and as David stretched out an eager hand, with a sudden glow of color in his sunken cheek, Hirst slipped, stumbled, and in some way too quick for David to see, the letter fell into the heart of the flames and was destroyed in a moment.

“Oh, I say! How stupid of me! My dear chap, I am sorry. What a perfectly rotten accident.”

There was a wild light in David’s eyes as he sprang to his feet.

“You’re not sorry! I believe you did it on purpose. Get out of my room. I loathe the sight of you.”

“That’s nothing new, is it? No one would ever accuse us of being a David and Jonathan! But it’s no use letting your feelings run away with you like that.”

“Will you or won’t you get out?”

“Yes, when I am ready to go. I just came up to bring your letter, and tell you I thought of strolling over to see old Blackmore and Maisie.”

David’s fists clenched, and he made a spring forward, but a sudden blackness descended upon him, and from out its murk, that which he knew and dreaded began slowly to take form. He collapsed, suddenly limp and shaking, into the chair behind him, as with a sneering laugh Hirst sauntered out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.

For long David sat, staring hard at the fire, as if out of the flames themselves he could reconstruct the precious letter they had consumed. At last he rose shakily to his feet and rang the bell.

“Send Reed to me, will you?” he asked the footman.

The valet appeared almost at once, an old servant of the Radcliffes, and devoted to David as he had been to his father before him.

“Reed, I have made up my mind to go away. I want you to pack for me at once, and also take a message to Miss Blackmore.”

“Yes, Mr. David.”

“I won’t write the message. You must remember it, Reed— it’s safer so. Tell her I am going to try to escape if I can! I am going to that little place in the Carpathians where I stayed once with a college chum. She knows where it is. Ask her to write and— give her my love, Reed.”

The old man stood hesitating.

“Take me with you, sir,” he burst out at last. “You must not go alone.”

But David shook his head.

“No, no, Reed. You can do more for me by staying here at home. I think you know or guess something of what has fallen on me. I am cursed— a doomed man, Reed.”

The faithful old servant nodded dumbly, and David continued. “Look after her for me. You and she are the only ones who know or understand. And now come, we must be quick; I want to start in a few hours.”

•  5  •

Maisie Blackmore was in the train on the way to London. It was some weeks, the darkest she had ever known, since David had fled from England.

The faithful Reed had given his master’s message and she had written again and again to him, and waited now in the greatest suspense for news. It was a few days only since the wonderful idea had dawned which had impelled her to take her present journey.

It was her father who had been the unconscious means of sending her on it. At breakfast one morning, he had looked up suddenly from his Northern Mail, saying, “Well, well. I am sorry to have missed that. If I had known I would have gone up to town to hear him.”

Maisie was absorbed in her own thoughts, wondering if David would write, if he had escaped from the Curse, and if she would ever see him again— and she answered abstractedly, “Would you?”

Mr. Blackmore continued with increasing enthusiasm, “Of course. Old Fremling was the best chum a man ever had. I shall never forget those years at Oxford together. And apart from that, his lecture must have been well worth hearing.”

The girl’s listless interest was roused at the name of Fremling, and she asked, “What was he lecturing on, father?”

“Devil Worship and Ancient Rites among the Nomadic Tribes of Central Asia.”

“I would like to have heard that, too,” said Maisie, her eye kindling with an almost painful interest.

“Nonsense, child! Not at all the sort of thing for you. The tales Fremling tells make even me— well, if not afraid, something very like it. It’s appalling to think such things exist, even in foreign countries. Of course I consider Fremling exaggerates a great deal. He’s an extraordinary man— a genius!— and knows more about Asia than, any man alive.”

“I remember him very well, coming to stay here once, when I was a child,” answered Maisie reflectively.

“Yes— about ten years ago,” agreed her father. “He was very much interested in the strange illness of the vicar of this parish, who was said to be haunted.” Maisie’s voice shook as she asked, “And what happened? What did Sir Donald Fremling do?”

Blackmore buttered his toast, and helped himself to marmalade before replying, “Well, I never pretended to understand Fremling or his fantastic theories. He did explain his view of this particular case, but I have forgotten.”

“But the vicar! Did Sir Donald save him?”

“There was no question of saving,” said her father testily. “The vicar was mad— and he got better. Fremling helped in one way, soothing influence and all that, no doubt. But as to casting out devils— well it’s not the sort of thing that happens to a decent Englishman. All very well for the colored races, with their hot climate, and priests, and opium.”

And with this final statement the old man had risen from the table and gone out into the garden.

Maisie had swiftly made her decision; and accepting a long-standing invitation from a friend who lived in London, she left home two days later, determined to see Sir Donald Fremling and tell him the whole story of the Curse. Sir Donald Fremling!

The name rose up now in Maisie’s mind, as a harbor light to a storm-tossed mariner. Could he really cast out devils ? Would he be able to save David?

•  6  •

These Two questions still burned in her mind as, on the following afternoon, she reached Sir Donald’s house. He was sitting alone by his study fire, with a Great Dane stretched by his side, and an old worn book in black letter on a small table at his elbow.

He showed no surprize at her visit, and greeted her with a gentle Old World courtesy which gave her courage.

She sank into a chair on the opposite side of the fire. The dog looked at her solemnly, then stalked over and put one heavy paw on her knee.

“You see you are among friends,” Sir Donald said with a smile in his deep-set eyes, as they met the hesitating doubt in her own. “You can speak freely! Tell me why you are here, in London, instead of enjoying your moors and heather at home? You don’t look as though the city agreed with you, either. Why are you so unhappy, dear child?”

“Oh, I am— I am most unhappy,” said the girl, clasping her hands with painful earnestness. “It’s too awful. It’s not the sort of thing that can happen, really. I feel you can’t possibly believe it.”

“There’s very little I can not believe,” answered the old savant gravely. “Tell me everything, and let me judge for myself. Remember I have spent my whole life in warring against those dark forces which are all about us, and which manifest themselves so terribly at times.”

Thus encouraged, Maisie told him all she knew, first of the legend of the Curse— and of its subsequent fulfilment in the haunting of David Radcliffe.

Sir Ronald heard her without comment or interruption, and when she had finished he sat gazing thoughtfully at the Persian rug under his feet, his deep-set eyes almost hidden under his white eyebrows, his thin face showing many a line furrowed by past ordeals and encounters with Evil.

“Tell me all you can about the present Radcliffe family,” Sir Donald asked presently.

“Well, as I said, David has six brotheis, and they are all particularly nice jolly boys, except Hirst— the youngest?”

“Ah! The youngest! And why is he so different?”

“It is difficult to explain what he is like. But I hate him, and so does David. In fact, none of the brothers got on with him, and as soon as they were old enough they left home rather than live with him. It’s been a very unhappy household since their mother died. The father loved Hirst best, and could see no fault in him; he sacrificed all the rest of the family to his caprices and wishes.”

“This is most valuable information,” Sir Donald said, his keen eyes alight with interest. “Go on, tell me all you can remember about this youngest Radcliffe.”

“He was the strangest child. Even as a baby no one ever knew him to cry or shed a tear. He has never had one hour’s pain or illness in his life, and is absolutely callous to everyone else’s suffering. In fact, I am sure he enjoys the sight of pain. He is a horrible man— cold, sneering and hateful.”

“How did the other boys treat him at school?”

“Oh, no school kept him more than a few days. There were dreadful scandals about it. He had a tutor finally— a Mr. Fane. And that was the worst of all.”

“What happened to the tutor?”

“No one knows exactly— that’s the horrible part of it. He got to look wretchedly ill and miserable while he was at The Turrets. David once begged him not to stay, because it made him feel so angry to see how Hirst treated him.”

“And why didn’t Fane go away then?”

“He told David he couldn’t go— he would give no reason, simply said he couldn’t go. Then he disappeared, and they found his body later, lying in the woods among the bracken and dead leaves. The doctor said he had died of shock, and his face was terrible to see, I believe.”

“And was Hirst held to blame for the tragedy?”

“Well, no! Not exactly. And yet everyone who knew Hirst well, and had seen Fane with him, felt uneasy. The poor man had so obviously been in his power, and cringed before him in a most painful way.”

“And is this Hirst Radcliffe living at home now?”

“Yes,” answered Maisie. “He rarely leaves The Turrets; he has a suite to himself, and is supposed to be studying astronomy. He’s got telescopes and all sorts of apparatus fixed up on a flat roof, very strange instruments some of them look, but I have only seen them from a distance.”

After a few more questions Sir Donald said, “It’s well for David Radcliffe that you came to me. He will not find a place of escape in Europe, or on any spot on earth until the Curse is broken and its power destroyed. Will you give me his address? I will go in search of him and bring him home. The Curse must be undone where it was first uttered, and David must help me to find that place.”

Maisie rose, her white face raised imploringly to Sir Donald’s.

“And do you think there is any hope of helping David?”

“Yes, my child,” Sir Donald said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “There is always hope, and you have done much to help him already by coming here. In the meantime stay in London, do not return north. You must not see David again until he is a free man once more. Another meeting between you would mean danger to you both in the highest degree. And as to Hirst— I will explain more fully later, but if you value your immortal soul keep away from him. He is not what he seems.”

•  7  •

David Radcliffe stopped walking and stared around him. He realized suddenly that for the last few minutes that long-drawn-out sound had persistently forced itself upon his consciousness, but, absorbed in his own despairing thoughts, he had paid no heed to its appeal.

The broad highway over the Carpathian Alps stretched out before him, flinging its endless leagues about the shoulders of the mountains that towered in proud desolation to the wintry sky.

David stood for a minute, trying to penetrate the gloom of the dense fir-forests that marched on either hand; then, guided by that repeated cry, he turned off the road and plunged in among the trees. It was some minutes before he could locate the call accurately, but at last on the edge of a clearing he saw that an old man was there on the ground, leaning up against a tree and evidently in pain.

The stranger explained to David that he had walked out from Borviz, a small mountain hamlet about three miles distant, but had unfortunately slipped and wrenched his ankle, and found himself unable to walk or even stand. Radcliffe, a great fair giant well over six feet, looked down on the slight figure of the injured man with considerable interest and sympathy; and for the first time in many weeks he felt the burden of his thoughts lifted, and an unwonted sense of security enveloped him.

“There’s only one thing for it, I think, sir— I must carry, you, if you will trust yourself to me.”

The other man smiled up at this modern Sir Christopher. “I think that would be imposing a little too far on your goodness, I am heavier than I look. But if you could find some conveyance and bring it here to me—”

Radcliffe shook his head. “No! That would not do at all. These woods are far from safe even in the daylight, and it is already dusk! Night would have fallen long before I could get one of those rascally Tsziganes back here with a horse and cart. It is not safe for you to be here alone. Better let me carry you.”

The older man looked up at his companion.

“Perhaps if you took me down to the road, someone might pass and give me a lift.”

“I don’t think there is any chance of that. Won’t you let me try to lift you? We ought to start at once, there is a big fall of snow just about due.”

As he spoke David knelt and hoisted the stranger on to his broad shoulders, and began to make his way slowly through the increasing darkness to the open road.

But there he halted. The snowstorm had arrived! And a stinging icy wind blew a flurry of sleet against his face as he emerged from the shelter of the forest.

“You can’t do it in this. Better set me down again in the shelter of the trees, and make your way to the nearest village,” said the stranger.

David answered with quick indignant warmth, “You don’t know what a night, or even a few hours, means in these heights at this time of the year, sir. You would die of the cold, even apart from the danger of wolves. No! the only thing is to make a night of it together. I will build a fire, and find some sort of a shelter.”

And in spite of protests, David carried his burden back to the woods, and having found a spot comparatively sheltered from the fury of the ever-rising storm, he proceeded to break off the lower branches of the fir trees, and soon made an effectual screen from the wind.

A fire was quickly built, and its cheerful crackle and the fragrant odor of the resinous wood drew a sigh of satisfaction from the man by whom Radcliffe now seated himself.

“You are showing great kindness to an absolute stranger—I owe my life to yon,” said the former, as he looked earnestly at his young benefactor, noting the hunted expression of the blue eyes, the marks of pain and fear on the young face.

David’s color deepened as he made an awkward gesture of denial.

“I can’t tell you how awfully glad I am of the accident that has brought us together,” continued the old man. “I have come to this part of the world for the purpose of finding you.”

“Finding me!” echoed David. “But I don’t quite understand, I am afraid. Perhaps your name—?”

“My name is Fremling,” answered the other.

“What! Not Sir Donald Fremling the famous traveler?”

Fremling smiled at the young man’s enthusiasm.

“Yes, I suppose that describes me.”

David put out his big brown hand and clasped that of the older man.

“I can’t tell you how awfully glad I am to meet you, sir. It was only the other day I came across some friends of yours in Budapest. They were talking about what you had done for them, and all the strange places and people you had known.”

David paused; then, encouraged by the listening attitude of his companion, he continued, rather hurriedly, “Is it true that you are interested in the supernatural, and—well, in what is called Black Magic?”

Fremling’s face became very grave as he answered slowly, “Tell me what it is that haunts you.”

“Haunts me!” gasped David. “But I did not say— I don’t know why you think—?”

He suddenly turned and faced the other man, staring hard into Fremling’s deep-set eyes.

“I am haunted! No man was ever haunted as I am. Do you believe in the power of a Curse?”

“I believe in the power of the hate which prompts a Curse,” answered Fremling quietly. Still David looked long and eagerly into the other’s tranquil face; then, as if he had found what he sought and was satisfied, he turned away.

“It is not necessary for me to say that I am David Radcliffe,” he said at length. “Evidently you know who I am, and why I am here.”

“Yes, I know everything. I have seen Maisie Blackmore—in fact she came to see me, and it was from her that I learned the danger you are in. I am an old friend of her father’s, and remembering that I am interested in all supernatural manifestations she brought your case to me.”

David flushed with pride and pleasure in this new proof of Maisie’s love and ceaseless efforts to help him.

Sir Donald smiled. “You are very young still in spite of your trouble. A girl whose spirit is so finely tempered as that of Maisie Blackmore, when she loves, loves without counting the cost at all—she would become the haunted one herself if by so doing she could free you from your Curse!”

“And what is your opinion, Sir Donald, now that you know all? What is it that haunts me—and why?”

“My opinion is that you have lived all your life with a demon at your side— your brother Hirst! He is not a human being, as we understand the term. His body is a vehicle borrowed by an Elemental. Your ancestor Giles died in a moment of eternal hate! And after death his strong personality was still bound to earth by its own overwhelming passions. Consequently it would ally itself with those Elemental forces of evil which strive unceasingly to gain access to mankind. Thus Giles has acquired force to project his hate down the centuries; and by infernal aid has at last gained possession of a body so that he may live on earth again.”

David tossed a branch on to the fire, adding more and more fuel, until the crackling hiss of the flames almost drowned the moan of the wind, and the encroaching shadows of the forest fell back reluctantly.

Fremling noted the furtive glance the young man threw over his shoulder, and the nervous dilation of his nostrils.

“Tell me,” begged David at last, “this—this thing that haunts me… can you destroy it… can you lift the Curse? Oh, I can not bear more.”

“Poor boy!” said the older man. “All alone here in the wilderness with that ever at your side. I can realize what you must suffer.”

At the compassion and understanding in Fremling’s voice, the other looked up with tears in his eyes.

“I am going mad. I meant to end it all tonight. To walk on and on into the very heart of the storm, until the cold and snow had frozen the life out of me and I could never wait or fear or suffer any more.”

“Only to find your implacable enemy awaiting you on the other side of the door you would thus force open.”

“What do you say? No… Oh, no! I can’t believe that.”

“Won’t believe it, you mean,” corrected Fremling. “I do not wonder that you are eager to meet death— that you long for its merciful oblivion! But believe me when I tell you that there is no such easy way out of it as that. Should your enemy overcome you while you still possess your human body, his hate would cause your death… the death of your body, that is! But that would be the end, for in the effort he put forth to bill you, his power would expend itself, and your true self would henceforth continue freed from his malice.

“But on the other hand—should you cut short your span of human life yourself, Giles would meet you as an equal; you would have descended to his level, have pulled down the barriers between… and his hate would absorb your very being into his, and add incalculably to the diabolical force which gives him existence.”

David leaned forward in terrible agitation, and spoke rapidly, “Are you a devil, too? Has he sent you to taunt me—to drive me to greater despair? You have taken away my only hope. Death was my one refuge.”

His blue eyes glared at Fremling as he spoke, and it was only too evident that his reason was tottering to a fall. With all the compassion of a father for a frightened child, Fremling clasped the hand of the unhappy man and answered gently,

“I will help you. That is what I am here for. If you have courage and will to obey me, you may yet be saved. I can promise nothing, because so much depends on your own efforts and strength of purpose— but I have saved others in more desperate case even than yourself.”

David’s brief moment of madness passed, leaving him deeply contrite and ashamed of his outburst, and as the two men sat talking together hour after hour, David felt a spring of hope and confidence well up within him. His former passive acceptance of his awful fate changed to a strong determination to fight the evil which shadowed his existence. And when dawn came at last and the storm died, the quiet stillness of the mountains was reflected in his own heart as he rose to tread out the red fire and prepared to carry Fremling to some place of shelter and safety.

•  8  •

Over the jagged spine of rock which crested the hill known as the “Devil’s Teeth,” in that neighborhood— the great reddened orb of a harvest moon rose like the eye of some gigantic Polyphemus peering down on that unhallowed spot with wide unblinking stare, eager to witness once again the triumph of deathless hate— to gloat with full-orbed vision on the resurrection of all that was evil and abominable.

Fremling and Radcliffe stood watching the rising of this ill-omened moon, the younger man with beating heart and a feeling of helpless terror which made his hands and feet icy cold, and the breath come short and quick through his nostrils.

His nervous excitement was in strong contrast to the calm of his companion, who looked alternately from his watch to the heavy shadow cast by the hill— a shadow retreating gradually like some furtive guilty thing back into the bulk of the hill which had cast it forth. Fremling drew from his pocket a roll of parchment yellow with age, and consulted it narrowly.

“In half an hour’s time, according to this manuscript,” he said, “the outline of the grave should be distinct, and we shall learn the exact spot where Giles’ blood was shed. It is there that we must meet the demon-soul which possesses your brother’s body— and it is there alone that we can destroy it.”

A long shudder shook David’s body as he looked furtively round at the trees which encircled the open grassy space on which they stood. He watched the inky shadow of the hill, until its sharp outline became hazy and indistinct and the whole scene swam in a pale mist before his aching eyes. For a moment he shut them to recall Maisie’s face— to nerve himself by the thought of her love and belief in him to face what was coming.

“Ah—h—h”— the low exclamation from Fremling made his heart stop beating; then his pulses throbbed furiously as he followed the direction of the other’s pointing finger.

A luminous red stain, its shape unmistakable and sinister, was growing momentarily more distinct there on the grass in front of them… not six feet distant!

Every leaf and blade of grass or weed within that rectangular boundary gleamed red as blood and fiery bright. Sir Donald picked up from the ground a short, broad-bladed sword, worn and stained, its hilt encrusted with rubies whose fire outshone even the crimson glare of the grave itself.

“Dig… dig swiftly,” he commanded, putting the weapon in the young man’s hands. “Do not lose a moment— all depends now on your speed— before midnight that grave must lie open to the moon and stars, or we shall meet Giles unprepared and helpless.”

Urged and goaded by repeated warnings, David pursued his dreadful task. The red grass came up easily enough, being rooted in a light powdered soil of the same deep red stain as the grass itself.

As the last sod of that stained weed was cut up and tossed aside, Fremling drew David quickly back from the graveside, and as he did so a great tremor shook the whole place, and a tongue of fire shot with a hissing roar skyward from the uncovered grave.

When it died Fremling went forward and peered cautiously into the grave, beckoning David to his side. Clutching the older man with icy hands, the other looked, and drew back with a gasp… a dark shaft had opened, reaching to unfathomable depths, in whose yawning chasm a far-off point of green light burned like an evil star of the underworld.

David recoiled with ashen face, while Sir Donald’s firm mouth set in its sternest lines.

“It is Gaffarel! Gaffarel the Mighty! Gaffarel and the Four Ancient Ones who come against us,” he whispered to his trembling companion. “This place is saturated with unspeakable guilt.”

His eyes closed for a minute as he muttered a few low indistinct words. Then taking from his pocket a small phial he turned to David again, and with a certain rare and fragrant oil he rapidly anointed the eyes, nose, and mouth of his companion and himself.

“I warn you,” Fremling said, “to wait in. silence now for what shall come. Do not utter a syllable, or you will plunge us both into that devil’s tomb where Giles and his legions await us.”

Chill eddies of wind swept up against the silent pair as the midnight hour approached … the pound under their feet trembled with the thundering march of some invisible army… the sound of countless hoarse voices and echoing horrid laughter came faintly to their ears.

Fremling drew forth a rod of ancient ivory, carved with symbols of magic as old as the dawn of the world. Its tip gleamed with pale fire, and as Sir Donald traced on the ground the outline of the sacred pentacle, the rank grass burned fiercely in its wake, and within the fiery five-pointed star David and Fremling stood by the graveside waiting.

Strange flickering lights moved among the trees which hemmed them in. Shadows formed and re-formed in sinister array about them. The chill of death gripped David’s heart, and he turned to look at his companion, standing upright and stedfast, his face raised to the midnight sky, his lips moving rapidly.

Suddenly all noise and movement ceased abruptly, and in the intense stillness which fell, David nerved himself for the last supreme effort. To face Giles the Thruster— to defy him— to pit his own will against the awful power of the demon.

It was coming— coming!

In every nerve he felt the dread approach of the Enemy. With cold lips he murmured over to himself the ancient words of power which Fremling had taught him, and with shaking fingers pressed a leaf of vervain to his nostrils.

There upon the open grave stood Giles, a gigantic shadow, his beckoning figure drawing David with irresistible lure.

Like one in a trance, David took a stiff step forward, but ere he could move again, Fremling advanced swiftly and interposed his own body between the monstrous Shadow and its victim.

At this, the baleful lights outside the pentacle drew closer, and dim forms were visible, bestial and uncouth, surging forward with horrid effort to pass the barrier of fire. Fremling stood as though carved in stone; not a step did he give back, as with almost imperceptible movement Giles advanced upon him.

There was not a hand’s breadth between them, when Fremling held up the fire-tipped rod, and in a loud clear voice commanded Giles to return to the place whence he came.

Three times Sir Donald repeated the terrible name which can command even the Ancient Four themselves, and slowly Giles the Thruster retreated— his hate powerless against the divine courage of his antagonist. Inch by inch Sir Donald advanced— inch by inch Giles moved backward to the grave.

Sir Donald’s face was awful in its set intensity, his steady eyes fixed on the flaming eyeballs of the demon who opposed him. Good and Evil matched in a colossal struggle for supremacy.

Back over the brink of the grave Giles was forced, and then with the swiftness of light Fremling raised the magic rod and plunged its blazing tip deep into the Thruster’s heart.

A great tongue of flame shot up from the fathomless depths of the grave, wrapping round Giles like a winding sheet of fire! And in that same moment the phantom lights that pressed about the pentacle vanished utterly— the blazing star itself dimmed, and went out.

David gripped his companion’s arm convulsively as they waited. The black clouds overhead were tom by a blinding glare, followed by crash after crash of thunder, which seemed to shake the solid earth.

Then came the rain, sudden and torrential— washing the evil of the haunted spot from off the earth, and Fremling and Radcliffe lifted their faces thankfully to its cleansing sweetness.

At last it ceased, the darkness lifted, and from a ragged fringe of cloud the moon shone clear and bright. Grass and trees glistened with the silvery sparkle of some enchanted forest.

How strangely altered was that sullen ring of trees! That ragged, haunted, desolate spot! Not haunted now— quiet and lonely, perhaps, but not desolate. A calm sweet peace brooded over the place; the threatening copse had become a friendly shelter from the storm, where the birds cowered and shook their wings, piping encouragement to one another as they dried their wet feathers.

The circle of grass was wholly green. No red stain now, nor gaping depth was there. Green and fragrant the weeds and long waving grasses shone in the moonlight. But that which had walked among men as Hirst, the youngest of the Radcliffe brothers, would haunt them no more. Cold and terrible in death they found the mortal body deserted by its demon!

It faced them as they burst open the locked door of the study— sitting upright in a high carved chair— one hand clenched over its heart— the features twisted by inhuman rage. The pale cold eyes were hardly changed by death, and stared into the horror-stricken faces around— and stared— and stared.

“Hutchinson’s Mystery Story Magazine”, Dec. 1924

“Weird Tales”, Aug. 1926

THE WATCHER O’ THE DEAD

John Guinan

1929

It is now the fall of the night. The last of the neighbours are hitting the road for home. The time they went out through that door together, for the sake of the company on the way, as they said, did they give e’er a thought at all to myself, left alone here in this desolate house? To be sure, they asked me more than once why I refuse to leave the place, and the day is in it, by the same token. But I have no call to answer them, though what I am about to set down here in black and white will settle the question, at least for myself.

A few hours ago, and the corpse of Tim McGowan was taken from under this roof and buried deep in the clay. They laid the spade and the shovel like a rude cross on the fresh sod of his grave, and they went down on their knees and said a few hasty prayers for the good of his soul. One or two, and their faces hidden in their hats, took good care not to rise from the wet ground till they got sight of others already on their two feet. Letting on that their thoughts were on higher things, they kept in mind the old belief that the first one to leave the churchyard warm in life would not be the last to come back cold in death.

The little groups moving out began to talk of the man who was gone. Their talk ran in whispers, for fear they might trouble his long sleep. They all knew, though none had the rights of it, that he was after earning his rest dearly. An old man, whose face was hard, even for his years, took a white clay pipe from the pocket of his body coat.

“God rest your soul, Tim McGowan,” he cried. It was the custom to pray for the dead before taking a “draw” from a wake pipe. “God rest you in the grave,” he added, “for it’s little peace or ease you had and you in the world that we know! ”

The bulk of those who heard his words caught, a little gladly, a mocking undertone which stole through the kindly feeling that
had at first shaken his voice. A young man, with eager eyes and a desire to know and talk of things that should be left hidden, took courge and spoke out bluntly:

“For him to be haunting the graveyard like a ghost, and he a living man! That was a strange vagary, for sure.”

“It was the death of the good woman a year ago,” the old man went on, speaking more openly, in his turn. “It was her loss turned his poor head.”

“There’s no denying there was a queer strain in him already,” the young man said to that. “Sure they say all of that family were a bit touched!”

They did not scruple to speak like this before myself, and I of the one blood with the man who was dead, if any of them could know or suspect that. They were after doing their duty towards his mortal remains: if there was a kink in his nature or a mystery about his life why, they might fairly ask, should it not fill the gossip of an idle hour? But it was myself only, the stranger amongst them, who knew the true reason of Tim McGowan’s nightly vigils in Gort na Marbh, why he, a living man, as was said, chose to become the Watcher o’ the Dead in the lonesome graveyard. It was ere yesterday morning he told me his secret. Tim was lying there in the settle-bed from which his stark body was carried feet foremost this day. I was trying to get ready a little food by the fire on the hearth, for Tim had not been able to rise, let alone to do a hand’s turn for himself. Our wants were simple, and it was not for the first time that I had turned my poor endeavours to homely use.

“There are times,” I made bold to remark, “there are times I feel this house to be haunted;” for every night during the short spell since I came to see my kinsman, I was sure I heard the fall of footsteps on the floor after the pair of us had gone to our beds. The rattling of the door, if it was not a troubled dream, had also startled me in my sleep. I had begun to ask myself was it one of these houses where the door must be left on the latch and the hearth swept clean for Those who come back. Always at a certain hour Tim was in a hurry to rake the fire and get shut of me out of the kitchen. A pang now shot through my breast. With the poor man hardly able to raise hand or foot, it was not kind to draw down such a thing. But he looked glad that I had given him the chance to speak out.

“As you make mention of it,” he said eagerly, “I want to let you know the house is haunted, surely! But it is not by any spirit of good or evil from beyond the grave. That is a strange thing, you will be saying.”

“It is a strange thing,” I agreed. I had no doubt what he was going to disclose. He had already given me the story of a house built, and not without warning, on a “fairy pass”, through which the Sluagh Sidhe in their hosting and revels swept gaily every night. This was the house for sure: The Gentle Folk had never passed the gates of death and know nothing of the grave.

“But,” he went on, “there is one other thing as strange again. It is that same you will now be hearing, if you pay heed to me.” “You mean that this is the house” - I began, intending to say that it was the house of the story, but I checked myself - “ that it is a case of a fallen angel, hanging between heaven and hell, who never had to pay the penalty of death ? ”

“If you let me,” he made answer, “I will tell you the truth. The place is haunted by a mortal man!”

“One still in the world, one who goes about in his clothes, one to be seen by daylight?” I asked, without drawing breath.

“In troth,” he declared, “it is haunted by the man who tells it, and no other, if I am still in the flesh itself!”

I lifted him slightly in the bed, not knowing what to say or think. Was this his way of speaking about some common habit, or was his reason leaving him?

“Whisper!” he said, and his face was flushed. “You came here to gather old stories out of the past, over and above seeing your last living relative in the world, leaving out Michael, my son, who should be here by this. I might do worse than give you the true version of my own trouble.”

This made a double reason why I should hear him out. There is no man but carries in his breast the makings of a story, which, though never told, comes more home to him, than any the mind of another man can find and fashion in words.

“What harm if my story should turn out a poor thing in the telling?” he sighed. “It will ease my mind, if it does only that.

And who knows: but we will talk of that when the times comes.” He turned aside from the food I was coaxing him to take, and started:

“It is now a year since herself was laid to rest. Laid to rest!” He laughed, a little bitterly. “That is what they call it. A week after that again, call it what you like, the graveyard was closed by orders. There are people still to the fore who have their rights under the law; but it is hardly likely that many, if any of them, will try to make good their claim to be buried in Gort na Marbh.” Gurthnamorrav, the Field of the Dead, that is what those around and about call the lonely patch to this day. Though this generation of them are “dull of” the ancient tongue, such names, of native savour, help to keep them one in soul with the proud children of Banbha who are in eternity. Vivid imagery, symbols drawn, in a manner of speaking, from the brown earth, words of strength and beauty that stud like gems of light and grace the common speech hold not merely an abiding charm in themselves. Such heritages of the mind of the Gael evoke through active fancy the fuller life of the race of kings no less surely than those relics of skill and handicraft found by chance in tilth or red bog, the shrine of bell or battle book, the bronze spear head, the torque of gold.

“But, surely,” I objected, “those who are able would like to have their bones laid beside their own when their day of nature is past! Surely they would choose such a ground as the place of their resurrection, as the holy men of old used to say!”

“Time and time again,” he made answer, “people have left it to their deaths not to be buried in Gort na Marbh. Man and wife have been parted, mother and child. What call have I to tell you the reason? You know it rightly. You know it is the lot of the last body brought to its long home to be from that time forth the Watcher o’ the Dead?”

“I have heard tell of that queer - of that belief,” I replied. “That the poor soul cannot go to its rest, if it took years itself, till another comes to fill its place; that it must wander about in the dead of the night amongst the graves where the mortal body is crumbling to dust; and, as one might say in a plain way, keep an eye over the place!”

“And who would care to be buried in ground that was shut up for ever?” he asked. “Even at the best of times people try their best endeavours to be the first through the gate with the corpse of their own friend and when two funerals happen to fall on the one day.”

And then he went on to tell me, and his voice failing at that, of all he was after going through thinking of his woman, his share of the world, making the weary, dreary, rounds of the graveyard during the best part of the changing year. And, bitter agony! he felt that she could not share in the Communion of Saints, that all his good works for her sake would not hasten her release. But the thing that made it the hardest for him to bear was this: It was through his veneration for the old customs, through his great respect even for the dead, that this awful tribulation had come to the pair of them.

“Let you not be laughing at what I’m going to tell you now,” he warned me: “for I won’t deny there have been times when I made merry over the like myself. It was a seldom thing two funerals to be on the one day; nor would it have come to happen at the time it did if the other people had the proper spirit, like myself, or the right regard for the things good Christians hold highly. Listen! They knew the order to close the graveyard, the other people knew it was on the road, for the man who was dead and going to be buried on the same day as herself was himself on the Board of Guardians. That was why they waked him for one night only, and they people of means, and rushed with him in unseemly haste to Gort na Marbh. But we got wind of it, and would have been the first, for all that, only we followed the old road, the long road, and in a decent and becoming way walked in through the open gate while they took a short cut and got in over the stile. We did more than that, and so did they. While the savages, for they were little else, while they were trampling above the relics of the dead, we went round about the ground in the track of the sun till we came in the proper course to the side of the open grave.”

This set me thinking of the ancient ritual by which the corpse is brought round to pay its respects, as a body might say, to those who have gone before. I began to ask myself was it a fragment of Druid worship that had come down even to our own day. But this is what I said to my kinsman:

“You did what was right, and no one would be better pleased than the woman who was gone!”

“That is the way I felt myself at the first going off,” he agreed: “but soon I began to question myself: When I did the right thing, that the neighbours gave me full credit for, was I thinking more of what was expected from the living or what was due to the dead? Was I thinking of myself, and the great name I’d be getting from the self-same neighbours, or of the woman going into the clay, who only wanted their prayers? Many’s the long night this thought kept me on the rack till I was nigh gone astray in the head. In my mind I saw her, and her brown habit down to her feet, and she looking to me for help, and it my sin of human respect, as I felt, that kept her so long from walking on the sunny hills of Glory! Funeral after funeral went the way, for people have to die; but not a one passed the rusty gate of Gort na Marbh as a poor woman of the roads might give the go-by to a stricken house.

“At length and at last, I could stand it no longer, and one night I got up from my bed and made my way to the graveyard. “Twas in the dark hour before the crowing of the cocks, when wandering spirits are warned home to their house of clay.”

“And did you half expect to see the Watcher o’ the Dead?” I asked.

“Did I? And why not?” he asked in turn, by way of reply.

“With your mind disturbed that way,” I went on, “the wonder is you didn’t see her, if only in fancy.”

I meant to be kind. He faced me testily.

“I did see her, as sure as I’m a living man! ” he declared.

I had not the heart to urge my view that it was only a brain- born figure.

“I no sooner crossed the stile,” he said softly, “than I got clear sight of herself. She was moving through the graves she guarded, and a kindly look in her two eyes. The dead image I thought her of the Nuns you see in the sick ward of the poorhouse in Bally- brosna, and she taking a look at the beds in their little rows, and fearing to waken the tired sleepers in her charge. There she was, in truth, as I had seen her a thousand times in my own mind.” “In your own mind!” I said after him. “It was on your eyes, so to speak, and you merely saw what was in your mind already. Was it not more natural to see the figment that never left your sight than not to see it at all?”

It was all very clear to me, and I felt this was sound talk; and isn’t it a caution the way the rage of battle will rise in a body and set the tongue loose! But Tim’s reply put a stop to any dispute or war of words.

“It was in my mind, for sure,” he said. “But tell me, you who have the book learning, why was it in my mind? When a man’s brain begins to work, what gives it the start, or sets it going - or does it start to go of itself?”

I had to give in that I always left such vexed questions to wiser heads, adding, whimsically enough as it seems to me now, that I was not such a great fool as to attempt an answer where they failed. In a way I was put out by the reflection that this old man, who “didn’t know his letters”, was making a mockery of me on the head of my few books and my small store of book learning.

“There is nothing hard about the case I am after putting before you,” he said. “It was on my mind because the thing was taking place in Gort na Marbh night after night, was taking place in the Field of the Dead, though there was no living eye to see it!”

I had no reply to that, whether it was a head-made ghost or not. Where was the use of starting to argue that nothing really takes place if not within the knowledge of man? I told myself weakly that such visions were due to the queer strain in the old man the neighbours spoke about this day. It might be that, in his present state, all this had only come into his head as the two of us talked together. It did not occur to me then, and I have too much respect for the dead to credit it now, that he was “taking a rise” out of me, as the plain saying is.

Tim became a little rambling in his speech and asked me to let him lie flat in the bed. I gathered from the words he mumbled and jumbled that he made a promise to the departed spirit to take her place till his own time came in real earnest: that he had bid her go to her rest, in the Name of God, much, I could not help but think, as one might banish an evil spirit to the “red sea” to make ropes of the sand; that he had kept his word, which brought great peace to his breast: and that he never set eyes on her again from that hour, there or there else.

I had no doubt he had but laid the ghost of his own troubled thoughts. It is not every poor mortal can do that same, even by dint of hard sacrifice. Tim was growing worse. I tried hard to cheer him. It was all to no use. I talked of his son, Michael, who was far away on the fishing grounds. We had already sent word for him to come home, and he might be here any stroke, if it was a long ways off, itself.

“Michael will never be here in time!” the father groaned. “That is my great trouble. I never could ask another to do it. It would be again’ reason.”

“There is nothing you could name I would not gladly do! ” I declared; and, in all fair speaking, I meant it.

“There are things no man should ask of his friend,” he said to that, with a slight shake of the head.

“And who else should he ask but his friend?” I laughed, trying to rouse him. “But, first, I’ll send for the Doctor—”

“The Doctor, how are ye! ” he broke in on me. “That is not what I want. What can the like of himself do for a body who has seen the Watcher o’ the Dead?”

“What harm if you did itself?” I asked. “The sign of a long life it is, as likely as not. It would be another story, entirely, one’s ‘fetch’ to be seen in the late hours of the day. An early death that would signify.”

“The man,” he made answer, “the man who lays eyes on the Watcher o’ the Dead, late or early, if the like could come to pass at all before dark, that man will soon be only a shadow himself. I am saying, he will soon be among the silent company. The time I took the woman’s place, the woman who held my heart for years, I knew rightly, it would not be for long. It is for that reason and no other I am after telling you my secret sorrow. I will never be able to put out this night, if I live through this night of the nights, or any night for the future; and if it was a thing I failed her, sure herself would be disturbed in her rest.”

I took a grip of his hand and looked down steadily into his eyes.

“Put your trust in me!” I said. “I’ll take your place till such time as you are laid in the clay!”

Who is it, though he might throw doubt on the very stars above his head, would not try to humour an old man or a little child?

“God sent you for a friend,” he said, “praised be His holy Name! For all I know, I may not want you to do so much: I may want you to do a little more, but in another way. I want you to take my place till Michael comes, and not an hour more; I want you, as well as that, to tell him all I have told you and to give him my dying wish, if it is a thing he does not come before I go for ever. Whisper! You’ll tell Michael, in case I’m too far through myself, that I am dying happy knowing he will not refuse a last favour to the father who reared him. It is this: That he will become the Watcher o’ the Dead, though a living man, like myself, and let me, after so much fret and torment, go straight to herself, to his mother, in Heaven. Tell him I know he will do this, for the rest of his mortal days, if it comes to that. Tell him I know that, after that again, if he gets no release he will have his bones laid in Gort na Marbh and wait his own turn. I have done my share of watching, God knows!”

Some kind neighbours gathered during the course of the day, and the priest of the parish was sent for. Father Malachy was a man of the world, without being worldly. It is not for the knowing, and never will be in this world, whether Tim told him about the Watcher o’ the Dead. As a man, his reverence knew all the customs and beliefs of the people, for he was one of them himself. Deep in his nature a body might expect to find a kindly toleration for the harmless “superstitions”, as some would call them, lingering from the pagan days of Firbolg or Tuatha de Danaan. As a priest, he had, no doubt, full knowledge of the rites of the Church for dealing with “appearances” from the other world, which shows it to be no harm to give heed to such things.

Tim kept quiet till the night wore on. Then he got restless and began to mutter to himself. The use of his speech was well-nigh gone. I caught such words as “Gort na Marbh”, and “Herself”, and “the Watcher o’ the Dead”. His grip was tight on my fist when I said in his ear that I would not fail him, dead or alive, till Michael came. The kind neighbours did not let on to hear the pair of us, and I left him in their charge while I set out for the strange duty I had taken on myself so lightly, taken on, indeed, with a certain zest, in the vague hope of enlarging my experience. It was clear from Tim’s behaviour that the hour of the night had come when he felt the “call” to the graveyard, and still there was no sign of Michael. The moon was in the sky. The night was cold. There was no stir. The place held no terrors for me. I set little store by Tim’s story, except as a “study” in delusion. The old man was much in my thoughts, for he was passing rapidly away. I saw him in my mind, as he us£d to say, and he walking here and there through the graves that now held nothing but cold clay, passing by fallen stones, broken and moss-grown. I tried hard to banish such airy pictures, for I did not want to begin seeing sights.

What was that story Tim told me a few days ago as we stood before a headstone in Gort na Marbh? It was a true tale of revenge, revenge both on the living and the dead, and it was a poor sort of revenge at that. Before long I would be seeing again the spot where the dead man he spoke about was laid in the clay. His relations, in blood and law, hoped to benefit largely by his death. But he left all to his son. The boy was an only child whose mother died the hour he came into the world. He came home, a likely youth, to be at the father’s funeral. For the first time in his young life he saw the place that was now to be his own. It was natural for him to ask why the usual black plumes did not wave above the hearse instead of white. The errors of the past, if any, should have been covered by charity. Feuds are forgiven, if not forgotten, in the hour of death. It is what they told him, with wild malice, that black plumes were only for people who were lawfully joined in wedlock.

Here I found the elements of tragedy, but the story only helped to keep the figure of Tim before me. I was stepping over the stile and thinking of the nights he spent walking about in the dreary waste, for, after so much neglect, that is what it had by now sunk to. I felt the nettles rank and dank as I set foot on the ground; and then - it was not wild phantasy! -I got sight of Tim moving in the moonlight among the shadows of the headstones and the trees.

“In the Name of God!” I cried, profanely, I am half afraid, “leave the place at once, and let me keep my promise in peace.”

I was furious with the neighbours for letting him rise and he in a fever. But were they to be blamed? I crossed hastily and found myself alone! This gave me a start, and I began to wonder whether in that strange ground - for, surely, the place was not “right”! - I, in my turn, saw what was on my eyes only! Had Tim been there in the flesh or was it that I, in my turn, had laid but the ghost of a deranged imagination? Could it be that the queer strain of the family, if there is such a thing, runs in my own blood? Or does a sane man put such a question to himself? Without waiting for the crowing of the cocks, I made haste back to the house. My heart was beating loudly.

“We were going to call after you,” the neighbours said to me. “Hardly was your back turned when the end came! ”

Tim was stretched there in his long sleep, his features set free by the kindly touch of death!

Last night at the same hour we dug his grave. I was heartened by the presence of the neighbours and lingered over the work till the dawn broke, walking about from time to time, “by way of no harm”, trying to keep my promise to the dead man. More than once the shadows, moving with the shifting lanthorn, took a start out of me. There were a few of the neighbours would not put out with us. One was a strong young man who was so free of the tongue this day.

“Why do you want to choose such an unreasonable hour?” they grumbled. “It is not lucky to turn up the sod in the dead of the night.”

“As likely as not,” I heard another make answer, “he was waiting to see would Michael come on the long car.”

I did not put him right. If we were waiting for Michael only the work could have been left over till morning. It is the long wait we would have, for the same Michael, God rest the poor boy! God rest him! I say, for before Tim was taken out this day word came that the hardy young fisherman had been lost a week ago in the depths of the salt water. The hungry, angry sea did not give up its dead. And now his death comes home to me! Michael’s bones will never be laid in Gort na Marbh. Michael will never, never, either in life or death, become the Watcher o’ the Dead! And I have pledged my word to the man who is gone, the father, to take his place till such time as Michael should come home! That will be never, never!

What way can I break my word to the dead, whether I credit his story or doubt it? It was part of his own belief, part of himself. What odds does it make even if he was out of his mind, or if I am a madman myself? A promise, a promise to one passed away, is sacred.

Where is the good of talking of common sense? Half the world is stupid with common sense, if there is any such quality. But I see a dismal prospect before me, till the end of my days, as likely as not, let alone, for all I know, till the Day of Judgment itself! Already I feel there is a stir in my blood, the time has come for me to get up and make my lonely vigil: for I have been putting this down in black and white for many hours. It is a true word for Tim; every man has his own story, his own agony. But I set out to tell of his troubles, which, for sure, are at an end, and not of my own, which, for all a body can see, are only in their birth throes.

“The Cornhill Magazine”, Jun. 1929

The Supernatural Omnibus (1931)

CHRISTMAS RE-UNION

Sir Andrew Caldecott

1946

•  1  •

“I cannot explain what exactly it is about him; but I don’t like your Mr Clarence Love, and I’m sorry that you ever asked him to stay.”

Thus Richard Dreyton to his wife Elinor on the morning of Christmas Eve.

“But one must remember the children, Richard. You know what marvellous presents he gives them.”

“Much too marvellous. He spoils them. Yet you’ll have noticed that none of them likes him. Children have a wonderful intuition in regard to the character of grown-ups.”

“What on earth are you hinting about his character? He’s a very nice man.”

Dreyton shuffled off his slippers in front of the study fire and began putting on his boots.

“I wonder, darling, whether you noticed his face just now at breakfast, when he opened that letter with the Australian stamps on?”

“Yes; he did seem a bit upset: but not more so than you when you get my dressmaker’s bill!”

Mrs Dreyton accompanied this sally with a playful pat on her husband’s back as he leant forward to do up his laces.

“Well, Elinor, all that I can say is that there’s something very fishy about his antipodean history. At five-and-twenty, he left England a penniless young man and, heigh presto! he returns a stinking plutocrat at twenty-eight. And how? What he’s told you doesn’t altogether tally with what he’s told me; but, cutting out the differences, his main story is that he duly contacted old Nelson Joy, his maternal uncle, whom he went out to join, and that they went off together, prospecting for gold. They struck it handsomely; and then the poor old uncle gets a heart-stroke or paralysis, or something, in the bush, and bids Clarence leave him there to die and get out himself before the food gives out. Arrived back in Sydney, Clarence produces a will under which he is the sole beneficiary, gets the Court to presume old Joy’s death, and bunks back here with the loot.”

Mrs Dreyton frowned. “I can see nothing wrong or suspicious about the story,” she said, “but only in your telling of it.”

“No! No! In his telling of it. He never gets the details quite the same twice running, and I’m certain that he gave a different topography to their prospecting expedition this year from what he did last. It’s my belief that he did the uncle in, poor old chap!”

“Don’t be so absurd, Richard; and please remember that he’s our guest, and that we must be hospitable: especially at Christmas. Which reminds me: on your way to office, would you mind looking in at Harridge’s and making sure that they haven’t forgotten our order for their Santa Claus tomorrow? He’s to be here at seven; then to go on to the Simpsons at seven-thirty, and to end up at the Joneses at eight. It’s lucky our getting three households to share the expenses: Harridge’s charge each of us only half their catalogued fee. If they could possibly send us the same Father Christmas as last year it would be splendid. The children adored him. Don’t forget to say, too, that he will find all the crackers, hats, musical toys and presents inside the big chest in the hall. Just the same as last year. What should we do nowadays without the big stores? One goes to them for everything.”

“We certainly do,” Dreyton agreed; “and I can’t see the modern child putting up with the amateur Father Christmas we used to suffer from. I shall never forget the annual exhibition Uncle Bertie used to make of himself, or the slippering I got when I stuck a darning-needle into his behind under pretence that I wanted to see if he was real! Well, so long, old girl: no, I won’t forget to call in at Harridge’s.”

•  2  •

By the time the festive Christmas supper had reached the dessert stage, Mrs Dreyton fully shared her husband’s regret that she had ever asked Clarence Love to be of the party. The sinister change that had come over him on receipt of the letter from Australia became accentuated on the later arrival of a telegram which, he said, would necessitate his leaving towards the end of the evening to catch the eight-fifteen northbound express from King’s Pancras. His valet had already gone ahead with the luggage and, as it had turned so foggy, he had announced his intention of following later by Underground, in order to avoid the possibility of being caught in a traffic-jam.

It is strange how sometimes the human mind can harbour simultaneously two entirely contradictory emotions. Mrs Dreyton was consumed with annoyance that any guest of hers should be so inconsiderate as to terminate his stay in the middle of a Christmas party; but was, at the same time, impatient to be rid of such a skeleton at the feast. One of the things that she had found attractive in Clarence Love had been an unfailing fund of small talk, which, if not brilliant, was at any rate bright and breezy. He possessed, also, a pleasant and frequent smile and, till now, had always been assiduous in his attention to her conversation. Since yesterday, however, he had turned silent, inattentive, and dour in expression. His presentation to her of a lovely emerald brooch had been unaccompanied by any greeting beyond an unflattering and perfunctory “Happy Christmas!” He had also proved unforgivably oblivious of the mistletoe, beneath which, with a careful carelessness, she stationed herself when she heard him coming down to breakfast. It was, indeed, quite mortifying; and, when her husband described the guest as a busted balloon, she had neither the mind nor the heart to gainsay him.

Happily for the mirth and merriment of the party Dreyton seemed to derive much exhilaration from the dumb discomfiture of his wife’s friend, and Elinor had never seen or heard her husband in better form. He managed, too, to infect the children with his own ebullience; and even Miss Potterby (the governess) reciprocated his fun. Even before the entry of Father Christmas it had thus become a noisy, and almost rowdy, company.

Father Christmas’s salutation, on arrival, was in rhymed verse and delivered in the manner appropriate to pantomime. His lines ran thus:

To Sons of Peace

Yule brings release

From worry at this tide;

But men of crime

This holy time

Their guilty heads need hide.

So never fear,

Ye children dear,

But innocent sing “Nowell”;

For the Holy Rood

Shall save the good,

And the bad be burned in hell.

This is my carol

And Nowell my parole.

There was clapping of hands at this, for there is nothing children enjoy so much as mummery; especially if it be slightly mysterious. The only person who appeared to dislike the recitation was Love, who was seen to stop both ears with his fingers at the end of the first verse and to look ill. As soon as he had made an end of the prologue, Santa Claus went ahead with his distribution of gifts, and made many a merry quip and pun. He was quick in the uptake, too; for the children put to him many a poser, to which a witty reply was always ready. The minutes indeed slipped by all too quickly for all of them, except Love, who kept glancing uncomfortably at his wristwatch and was plainly in a hurry to go. Hearing him mutter that it was time for him to be off, Father Christmas walked to his side and bade him pull a farewell cracker. Having done so, resentfully it seemed, he was asked to pull out the motto and read it. His hands were now visibly shaking, and his voice seemed to have caught their infection. Very falteringly, he managed to stammer out the two lines of doggerel:

Re-united heart to heart

Love and joy shall never part.

“And now,” said Father Christmas, “I must be making for the next chimney; and, on my way, sir, I will see you into the Underground.”

So saying he took Clarence Love by the left arm and led him with mock ceremony to the door, where he turned and delivered this epilogue:

Ladies and Gentlemen, goodnight!

Let not darkness you affright.

Aught of evil here today

Santa Claus now bears away.

At this point, with sudden dramatic effect, he clicked off the electric light switch by the door; and, by the time Dreyton had groped his way to it in the darkness and turned it on again, the parlour-maid (who was awaiting Love’s departure in the hall) had let both him and Father Christmas out into the street.

“Excellent!” Mrs Dreyton exclaimed, “quite excellent! One can always depend on Harridge’s. It wasn’t the same man as they sent last year; but quite as good, and more original, perhaps.”

“I’m glad he’s taken Mr Love away,” said young Harold.

“Yes,” Dorothy chipped in; “he’s been beastly all day, and yesterday, too: and his presents aren’t nearly as expensive as last year.”

“Shut up, you spoilt children!” the father interrupted. “I must admit, though, that the fellow was a wet blanket this evening. What was that nonsense he read out about reunion?”

Miss Potterby had developed a pedagogic habit of clearing her throat audibly, as a signal demanding her pupils’ attention to some impending announcement. She did it now, and parents as well as children looked expectantly towards her.

“The motto as read by Mr Love,” she declared, “was so palpably inconsequent that I took the liberty of appropriating it when he laid the slip of paper back on the table. Here it is, and this is how it actually reads:

“Be united heart to heart,

Love and joy shall never part.

“That makes sense, if it doesn’t make poetry. Mr Love committed the error of reading ‘be united’ as ‘reunited’ and of not observing the comma between the two lines.”

“Thank you, Miss Potterby; that, of course, explains it. How clever of you to have spotted the mistake and tracked it down!”

Thus encouraged, Miss Potterby proceeded to further corrective edification.

“You remarked just now, Mrs Dreyton, that the gentleman impersonating Father Christmas had displayed originality. His prologue and epilogue, however, were neither of them original, but corrupted versions of passages which you will find in Professor Borleigh’s Synopsis of Nativity, Miracle and Morality Plays, published two years ago. I happen to be familiar with the subject, as the author is a first cousin of mine, once removed.”

“How interesting!” Dreyton here broke in; “and now, Miss Potterby, if you will most kindly preside at the piano, we will dance Sir Roger de Coverley. Come on, children, into the drawing-room.”

•  3  •

On Boxing Day there was no post and no paper. Meeting Mrs Simpson in the Park that afternoon, Mrs Dreyton was surprised to hear that Father Christmas had kept neither of his two other engagements. “It must have been that horrid fog,” she suggested; “but what a shame! He was even better than last year:” by which intelligence Mrs Simpson seemed little comforted.

Next morning – the second after Christmas – there were two letters on the Dreytons’ breakfast-table, and both were from Harridge’s.

The first conveyed that firm’s deep regret that their representative should have been prevented from carrying out his engagements in Pentland Square on Christmas night owing to dislocation of traffic caused by the prevailing fog.

“But he kept ours all right,” Mrs Dreyton commented. “I feel so sorry for the Simpsons and the Joneses.”

The second letter cancelled the first, “which had been written in unfortunate oversight of the cancellation of the order”.

“What on earth does that mean?” Mrs Dreyton ejaculated.

“Ask me another!” returned her husband. “Got their correspondence mixed up, I suppose.”,

In contrast to the paucity of letters, the morning newspapers seemed unusually voluminous and full of pictures. Mrs Dreyton’s choice of what to read in them was not that of a highbrow. The headline that attracted her first attention ran “XMAS ON UNDERGROUND”, and, among other choice items, she learned how, at Pentland Street Station (their own nearest), a man dressed as Santa Claus had been seen to guide and support an invalid, or possibly tipsy, companion down the long escalator. The red coat, mask and beard were afterwards found discarded in a passage leading to the emergency staircase, so that even Santa’s sobriety might be called into question. She was just about to retail this interesting intelligence to her husband when, laying down his own paper, he stared curiously at her and muttered “Good God!”

“What on earth’s the matter, dear?”

“A very horrible thing, Elinor. Clarence Love has been killed! Listen;” here he resumed his paper and began to read aloud: “‘The body of the man who fell from the Pentland Street platform on Christmas night in front of an incoming train has been identified as that of Mr Clarence Love, of 11 Playfair Mansions. There was a large crowd of passengers on the platform at the time, and it is conjectured that he fell backwards off it while turning to expostulate with persons exerting pressure at his back. Nobody, however, in the crush, could have seen the exact circumstances of the said fatality.’”

“Hush, dear! Here come the children. They mustn’t know, of course. We can talk about it afterwards.”

Dreyton, however, could not wait to talk about it afterwards. The whole of the amateur detective within him had been aroused, and, rising early from the breakfast-table, he journeyed by tube to Harridge’s, where he was soon interviewing a departmental sub-manager. No: there was no possibility of one of their representatives having visited Pentland Square on Christmas evening. Our Mr Droper had got hung up in the Shenton Street traffic-block until it was too late to keep his engagements there. He had come straight back to his rooms. In any case, he would not have called at Mr Dreyton’s residence in view of the cancellation of the order the previous day. Not cancelled? But he took down the telephone message himself. Yes: here was the entry in the register. Then it must have been the work of some mischief-maker; it was certainly a gentleman’s, and not a lady’s voice. Nobody except he and Mr Droper knew of the engagement at their end, so the practical joker must have derived his knowledge of it from somebody in Mr Dreyton’s household.

This was obviously sound reasoning and, on his return home, Dreyton questioned Mrs Timmins, the cook, in the matter. She was immediately helpful and forthcoming. One of them insurance gents had called on the morning before Christmas and had been told that none of us wanted no policies or such like. He had then turned conversational and asked what sort of goings-on there would be here for Christmas. Nothing, he was told, except old Father Christmas, as usual, out of Harridge’s shop. Then he asked about visitors in the house, and was told as there were none except Mr Love, who, judging by the tip what he had given Martha when he stayed last in the house, was a wealthy and open-handed gentleman. Little did she think when she spoke those words as Mr Love would forget to give any tips or boxes at Christmas, when they were most natural and proper. But perhaps he would think better on it by the New Year and send a postal order. Dreyton thought it unlikely, but deemed it unnecessary at this juncture to inform Mrs Timmins of the tragedy reported in the newspaper.

At luncheon Mrs Dreyton found her husband unusually taciturn and preoccupied; but, by the time they had come to the cheese, he announced importantly that he had made up his mind to report immediately to the police certain information that had come into his possession. Miss Potterby and the children looked suitably impressed, but knew better than to court a snub by asking questions. Mrs Dreyton took the cue admirably by replying: “Of course, Richard, you must do your duty!”

•  4  •

The inspector listened intently and jotted down occasional notes. At the end of the narration, he complimented the informant by asking whether he had formed any theory regarding the facts he reported. Dreyton most certainly had. That was why he had been so silent and absent-minded at lunch. His solution, put much more briefly than he expounded it to the inspector, was as follows.

Clarence Love had abandoned his uncle and partner in the Australian bush. Having returned to civilisation, got the Courts to presume the uncle’s death, and taken probate of the will under which he was sole inheritor, Love returned to England a wealthy and still youngish man. The uncle, however (this was Dreyton’s theory), did not die after his nephew’s desertion, but was found and tended by bushmen. Having regained his power of locomotion, he trekked back to Sydney, where he discovered himself legally dead and his property appropriated by Love and removed to England. Believing his nephew to have compassed his death, he resolved to take revenge into his own hands. Having despatched a cryptic letter to Love containing dark hints of impending doom, he sailed for the Old Country and ultimately tracked Love down to the Dreytons’ abode. Then, having in the guise of a travelling insurance agent ascertained the family’s programme for Christmas Day, he planned his impersonation of Santa Claus. That his true identity, revealed by voice and accent, did not escape his victim was evidenced by the latter’s nervous misreading of the motto in the cracker. Whether Love’s death in the Underground was due to actual murder or to suicide enforced by despair and remorse, Dreyton hazarded no guess: either was possible under his theory.

The inspector’s reception of Dreyton’s hypothesis was less enthusiastic than his wife’s.

“If you’ll excuse me, Mr Dreyton,” said the former, “you’ve built a mighty lot on dam’ little. Still, it’s ingenious and no mistake. I’ll follow your ideas up and, if you’ll call in a week’s time, I may have something to tell you and one or two things, perhaps, to ask.”

“Why darling, how wonderful!” Mrs Dreyton applauded. “Now that you’ve pieced the bits together so cleverly the thing’s quite obvious, isn’t it? What a horrible thing to have left poor old Mr Joy to die all alone in the jungle! I never really liked Clarence, and am quite glad now that he’s dead. But of course we mustn’t tell the children!”

Inquiries of the Australian Police elicited the intelligence that the presumption of Mr Joy’s death had been long since confirmed by the discovery of his remains in an old prospecting pit. There were ugly rumours and suspicions against his nephew but no evidence on which to support them. On being thus informed by the inspector Dreyton amended his theory to the extent that the impersonator of Father Christmas must have been not Mr Joy himself, as he was dead, but a bosom friend determined to avenge him. This substitution deprived the cracker episode, on which Dreyton had imagined his whole story, of all relevance; and the inspector was quite frank about his disinterest in the revised version.

Mrs Dreyton also rejected it. Her husband’s original theory seemed to her more obviously right and conclusive even than before. The only amendment required, and that on a mere matter of detail, was to substitute Mr Joy’s ghost for Mr Joy: though of course one mustn’t tell the children.

“But,” her husband remonstrated, “you know that I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“No, but your aunt Cecilia does; and she is such a clever woman. By the way, she called in this morning and left you a book to look at.”

“A book?”

“Yes, the collected ghost stories of M. R. James.”

“But the stupid old dear knows that I have them all in the original editions.”

“So she said: but she wants you to read the author’s epilogue to the collection which, she says, is most entertaining. It’s entitled ‘Stories I have tried to write’. She said that she’d side-lined a passage that might interest you. The book’s on that table by you. No, not that: the one with the black cover.”

Dreyton picked it up, found the marked passage and read it aloud.

“There may be possibilities too in the Christmas cracker if the right people pull it and if the motto which they find inside has the right message on it. They will probably leave the party early, pleading indisposition; but very likely a previous engagement of long standing would be the more truthful excuse.”

“There is certainly,” Dreyton commented, “some resemblance between James’s idea and our recent experience. But he could have made a perfectly good yarn out of that theme without introducing ghosts.”

His wife’s mood at that moment was for compromise rather than controversy.

“Well, darling,” she temporised, “perhaps not exactly ghosts.”

Not Exactly Ghosts (1946)

GREY BROTHERS

Sir Andrew Caldecott

1948

•  1  •

Collinson’s Kongea, published in 1883, stated the highlands of that Colony to be “well suited for coffee or spice gardens: excepting the Nywedda valley, which is rendered unfit for human habitation by the miasma exhaled from its marshland.” Present-day passengers, who watch their ship being loaded at Takeokuta wharves with case after case, and crate after crate, all stencilled “Nywedda Produce”, might guess Collinson to have been misinformed. He was right, however, according to the terminology and medical science of his day; the habitability of the valley began only with the completion of a great drainage scheme round about 1908. Until then it was devoid of population, save for one solitary individual, of whom and whose fate the pages that follow will give some account.

Of Hilary Hillbarn’s origin and history before his arrival in Kongea, at the end of 1895, there is no record. The papers dealing with his appointment as Assistant Entomologist to the Takeokuta Museum must have been lost in the fire that later destroyed the curator’s office. He was not a Colonial Office recruit, or there would have been despatches about him in the Secretariat record room. His contemporaries in the museum remember him as reticent, secretive, unsocial and pedantic. The incoming mails brought no letters for him, and he made no friends in Kongea.

The work which he was set to do was that of a field collector, many of the museum specimens standing at that time in need of amplification or replacement. The consequent expeditions into the jungle proved most congenial to Hillbarn. His brief periodical returns to Takeokuta and civilisation were dictated by the necessity of replenishing provisions and handing over his collections. He never stayed long. As a collector he had great success. His specimens included not only some much-needed lepidoptera, but also a number of interesting arachnids hitherto unrepresented. The only cause of concern to the Director of Museums lay in a growing unwillingness on the part of Kongean assistant collectors and camp carriers to accompany Hillbarn on his explorations. This unwillingness culminated in point-blank refusal after the death in mid-jungle of an assistant collector. A formal departmental enquiry had to be instituted.

Complaint against Hillbarn at this enquiry was on two main grounds. First that all his collections were being made in the Nywedda valley, notoriously the home of devils and disease; secondly that all the work of collection was being done by Hillbarn himself, his assistants and subordinates being forced by him to spend their whole time in felling trees, and in building a large timber hut in the middle of the forest. To these charges Hillbarn replied that the Nywedda valley was of all Kongean regions the richest in insect life, hence his choice of it for his expeditions; and that a weatherproof hut was necessary for the treatment and conservation of his specimens.

The Kongeans being a not unreasonable folk, the Director was disinclined to accept these quite plausible replies without some degree of verification. He decided, therefore, wet season though it was, to go and see for himself. It was not a journey that he was to remember with pleasure. His party had to spend two nights in rain-sodden, leech-ridden scrub; was bogged twice; and had to make circuitous detours, hacking their way through dense and spiny undergrowth. This effort and labour was, however, rewarded on the second morning by the disclosure, in a small clearing on rising ground, not of a small hut but of a commodious two-roomed timber shed, walled with bamboo wattles and thatched with palmleaf.

“What else did you expect?” Hillbarn replied to the Director’s expostulations, “it’s no use doing anything by halves: I shall need every inch of this space when I get the big specimens.”

“Big specimens?” asked the Director angrily. “What the devil do you mean? Specimens of what.”

“Arachnids, you old fool,” Hillbarn barked back. “You’re blind if you didn’t see them against the sunrise this morning. Just you wait till I bag one.”

The homeward journey was less physically arduous, for they followed the trail that they had hacked on the way up. It was, however, rendered even more uncomfortable for the Director by a growing conviction that he had to deal, not merely with an insubordinate officer, but with a mental case. He had been called an old fool in the hearing of English-speaking Kongean staff: well, he felt himself big enough to forget that; for Hillbarn was the best collector that he’d had. But this talk of arachnids against the sunrise and sunset (for Hillbarn affected to see them again that evening before they made camp) he could not bring himself to forget. Perhaps the young man, who boasted of being malaria-proof, had contracted it in some unusual form detrimental to mental stability. He would send him for medical examination as soon as they got back to Takeokuta.

It was not Hillbarn, however, but the Director who shortly underwent medical examination. He, with three others of the party, succumbed to a severe attack of malaria within a few days of their return, and before he had completed his notes of enquiry or recorded the findings. He lay in hospital a whole fortnight. On his return to duty, the Director found among the letters awaiting his personal attention a short memorandum from Hillbarn.

DIRECTOR OF MUSEUMS

I return herewith my salary cheque for April, having decided to terminate my service on forfeit of a month’s pay as provided by clause 12 of my agreement.

H. HILLBARN

May 5th, 1897

Nobody in Takeokuta could tell the Director where the signatory had gone. He had indeed become known to very few. Enquiry at shipping offices made it certain that he had not left the Colony: the Director therefore concluded that he must have taken up some job on an up-country plantation. A month or more later, however, he was reported by a headman to have been seen buying provisions in the little shop near Kechoba, which lies at the foot of the Nywedda valley. There were no plantations in the vicinity at that time, so the Director knew at once that he must have returned to that jungle shed. Well; he was no longer a Government servant, and the Department bore no responsibility for his movements. All that need or could be done was to inform the Commissioner of Police of his recent behaviour and of his present whereabouts. This the Director duly did.

•  2  •

The Nywedda valley is incorrectly so called. It is not a depression between two ranges of hills but an oval marshy basin, some three thousand feet above sea level, and roughly fifty square miles in area. There are high hills along seven-eighths of its circumference; the remaining eighth consists of a narrow ridge or saddle-back, at the western foot of which lies the small hamlet of Kechoba. This ridge is of granite, and unbroken by any watercourse. Were the rainfall more than it is, the basin would soon become a mountain lake instead of damp jungle interspersed with bogs and shallow meres.

More than one authority claimed parentage of a scheme to drain it by tunnelling through the ridge. The idea was, indeed, likely to occur to any engineer who inspected the terrain, or studied a contour map of the district. To finance such a project was a more difficult problem. Its cost was finally allocated, in equal shares, between the Colonial Government and a newly formed plantation company, to which the basin was appropriated under a ninety-nine year concession. This concession was instrumented and promulgated by special ordinance in I goo; an incidental effect of which was to alter the status of the region’s solitary inhabitant from squatter to trespasser. He no longer camped on Crown land but on private property.

The necessity for Hillbarn’s eviction might not have arisen, at any rate in the initial stages of the tunnel scheme, had it not been for his reputation among the local Kongeans. To them he had become the familiar, if not an impersonation, of evil spirits of the mountains. He was seen only when he emerged to obtain provisions at the Kechoba shop. These appearances became fewer as he gradually accustomed his digestion to a diet of jungle herbs and berries. His clothing diminished with each visit, and was finally standardised in a loincloth. His hair grew long and shaggy, covering not only his head and chin but also his legs, chest, arms and backs of the hands. It was a rusty grey. He walked barefoot; and the surface of his skin, where it was not covered by hair, was blotched with sores. The steel-blue eyes seemed set in a challenging stare; he answered neither greeting nor question.

When his stock of currency notes and coin had run out, Hillbarn traded upon the Kechoba shopkeeper’s fear of him by taking goods without payment. The second time that he did so the shopman had summoned up courage to ask for it; but Hillbarn pointed menacingly to the hills, crooked his arms, moved them backwards and forwards like a crab, and blew a thin grey froth of saliva through tightly closed lips. This, to the Kongeans, was a sure sign of demoniacal possession. Hillbarn indeed may have intended such an interpretation.

The upshot was that, when the Survey and Public Works Departments received instructions to take levels and measurements for the tunnel scheme, not a single coolie could be induced to set foot in the valley so long as Hillbarn was at large.

The Surveyor-General appealed to the Commissioner of Police; but the latter professed powerlessness in the matter until Hillbarn should have received and acknowledged a formal notice to evacuate. But how serve such a notice on a man hiding in thick jungle? Both officers sought escape from this quandary by explaining their predicament to the Attorney-General.

“Well, well!” was his reply, “it’s a lucky thing that, in drafting the special ordinance, I had in mind that there might be nomad aborigines on whom notices could not be served. So I inserted a provision that notice can be given by proclamation. I’ll draft one right away, and have it sent up for the Governor’s signature. It’ll have to be gazetted, of course, and posted conspicuously at Kechoba. When that’s been done, your man will have ten days’ grace in which to clear out.”

“But suppose he doesn’t?”

“Ah! That’s quite another matter. I never advise on hypothetical cases. We must first wait and see.”

The proclamation was duly issued. Its posting attracted quite a crowd of villagers outside the Kechoba shop. None of them could read it, being in English, but the Royal Arms at its top evoked their curiosity and admiration. It was, they supposed, some potent hieroglyphic that would strike terror into the man-devil. But of such comfortable doctrine they were rudely disillusioned next morning, when Hillbarn appeared at the shop-front, bent as usual on loot. He read the proclamation; slashed it into shreds with his jungle knife and, dashing into the shop, seized on one of the ledgers and tore from it some two dozen pages. These he set on the counter, and began writing on them with the shopman’s pen and ink. He scribbled fiercely for more than an hour, every now and again savagely tearing into small scraps what he had just written. The shopman, in fear for his life, joined the gaping crowd outside.

Having at last produced a manifesto to his satisfaction he strode with it to where the proclamation had been posted, and pinned it up. Then, having made a larger rape of goods than usual from the shop, he made off into the jungle. Again nobody could read what was written; but a Kongean sub-magistrate, passing by on his return from circuit, declared it to be a bad sort of writing, unpinned it, and took it away with him to Takeokuta.

To the Commissioner of Police next morning it appeared a very bad sort of writing. This is how it ran:

WE
HILARY HILLBARN,
of Nywedda
KING By conquest,
LORD PROTECTOR of the Hills,
DEFENDER of the Forests,
EMPEROR of all that lives or lies within this vale,
Give by these presents to Our subjects
GREETING.

WHEREAS by proclamation of a recent date A governor of Kongea has presumed That WE shall quit Our rightful Realm and Throne:

NOW KNOW YE that the said presumption
WE Do utterly contemn and set at nought.
WE shall continue here to reign and rule,
And peradventure he attempt by force Our Person to evict, let him
BEWARE:

For WE upon his emissaries
With unrelenting hand will quick unleash
The Hounds of Death, high-kennelled in the hills.

HILARY R.I.

The Commissioner of Police grunted and frowned. He would have to show this disloyal nonsense to the Chief Secretary; perhaps to the Governor himself. At noon, therefore, we find him in the former’s office, and at a quarter past the hour both officers are walking together towards Government House.

Sir Wilfrid Narrowgate prided himself on being able to see a thing quickly and state it shortly. “Madman, rebel, or both,” he said, “the fellow has got to be got out. We won’t bring the Attorney-General in on it at this stage: it’s easier to act in charity than in law. You’ve satisfied me that there’s a sick man in the jungle; so I shall send a search party to bring him safely out. Here’s my specification for the party; you two must settle its personnel. First, a Civil Servant of magisterial rank; second, a young medical officer; third, a gazetted police officer; fourth, a government surveyor who knows the lie of the land. All four must be good men in the jungle: we can’t send natives with them if they are as scared as you say of Hillbarn. So the party must travel light: sandwiches and flasks in their haversacks; enough for two days. They must be prepared for violence, but not use it unless forced to. They must get the fellow out without injury to him or to themselves. We needn’t prescribe methods now, or probe too curiously into them afterwards. Arrange for a wagonette to meet them at Kechoba on the return journey; and tell the P.M.O. to have accommodation ready at the Tenekka Asylum. That’s all for the present; but let me know as soon as they’ve got their man and handed him over. That’s when we may have to call in the Attorney-General.”

The Chief Secretary and Commissioner of Police discussed personnel for the expedition as they walked down from Government House. “What I like about the Governor,” the Commissioner remarked, “is the way he relieves one of responsibility.”

“Yes,” dryly assented the Chief Secretary, “but not of work.”

•  3  •

The next day but one the search party set out for Kechoba. Its senior member, Hugh Milversom, Assistant District Officer of Karatta, was well known as a hunter of pig and big game: he knew his jungle well. Medical Officer Leonard Hatley, also from Karatta, and Frank Nearwell, Assistant Commissioner of Police, were next in age and official standing. The youngest was Tasman Copworth, a surveyor on agreement from Australia. All four were as physically fit and mentally spry as the purpose of their present expedition demanded.

They had discussed strategy over whiskies and soda the night before. If Hillbarn had any inkling of their search for him he would, Milversom thought, make off into the jungle and elude discovery. Their only hope of speedy contact lay in finding him at his hut. On this point they all agreed; and Nearwell, arguing from police experience, declared that it would be necessary for them to separate a mile downstream of the hut, and later converge on it simultaneously from the four points of the compass. This plan, Copworth objected, postulated the possibility of four men making an efficient cordon, which he felt to be absurd. They must keep together, and manage somehow to surprise their quarry.

At this Dr Hatley, who was making patterns with his forefinger on the marble-top table out of a splash of spilled soda water, began speaking in a low meditative tone. “This fellow Hillbarn,” he said, “has long been an enigma to us doctors. He ought to have died years ago. Malaria completely blotted out the local aborigines; so how has he, a soft-bred European, managed to survive? From all accounts he suffers from emaciation and scurvy; but just think of his dietary! In this hothouse climate, of course, nudity is not injurious, except…”

Hatley here making a premonitory pause, the others impatiently cut in with “Except what?”

“Except that he can’t possibly wander about naked at night at that altitude. As you know, the wind blows hard for eight out of the twelve months; and for an hour or so before dawn it is positively icy. It gets unpleasantly cool soon after sundown. Wait and see for yourselves tomorrow. It’s particularly bad this season. We’ve a score of pneumonia cases in the Karatta hospital. Take my word for it, Hillbarn must keep to his hut of a night, and use blankets too. That’s where we shall find him, if we time our arrival after dusk: a hundred to one on that.” The bet was not taken; for the others, though they had not thought of it before, agreed. So they planned their timetable accordingly. They could take things easily on the way up, clearing a path, wherever necessary, in order to facilitate their journey back with Hillbarn.

Their progress up the valley proved uneventful. It was dry underfoot, the weather fine and, owing to the wind, not oppressively hot. At about half-past five in the afternoon they found themselves on rising ground, from which Copworth’s trained eyes were able to descry a small clearing, not more than a quarter of a mile away, and in its middle a brown patch which could be nothing but a hut or shed. The scrub round about them was now only breast-high, its branches and twigs bearded with tufts of a grey-green lichen. They decided, therefore, to sit down for a smoke and rest; for Hillbarn might not repair to his hut before sunset. They had not, however, sat long before there broke on their ears the clang of a pan or tin being struck six times.

“Six o’clock,” Nearwell laughed, “Fancy the fellow beating the hours in deserted jungle!”

“I might do it myself,” mused Hatley. “His mind may be travelling back to some old church clock striking across a village green. Even lunatics occasionally escape into the past.”

Milversom, who on hearing the clangs had made his way further up the rise, returned at this point to suggest that they might use what remained of daylight to get as near to the clearing as they could without being seen. This they proceeded to do; walking half-bent, and speaking only in undertones. Creeping, thus silently forward they came before very long up against the prostrate trunk of a felled tree, on the edge of the clearing. Peeping from behind it they could see the hut, a few chains distant, and its surround of half-grown coconuts, bread-fruit trees, plantains and chillies. From a slanting bamboo pole there hung by a piece of cord an inverted kerosene tin. A stick, lying on the ground below, evidenced its use as a gong. East and west of the pole two large stones had been set into the ground, each as big as a man could carry unaided.

Milversom was considering whether his party had better wait for complete darkness to veil their approach, or go forthwith to the hut, when they beheld Hillbarn hobbling feebly towards them. He had clearly injured his right leg; for he dragged it laboriously, using a stick. There was no chance, Milversom realised with relief, of his bolting into the jungle. As usual he wore a kind of loin-cloth, but supplemented this evening by a blanket hung down his back from the shoulders like an academic hood. Behind him slunk a very lean black cat, which, on reaching the bamboo pole, he hit at with his stick and drove away. Muttering something which his watchers could not overhear he then began to beat the tin, as though in imitation of the ringing of a bell for church. Indeed when the tolling had ceased it was plain to the four who spied on him that they were witnessing some sort of religious ritual; for he advanced to the large stone on the west side, made signs of beckoning towards the hills, and began to chant words which Milversom afterwards thus reconstructed from memory:

Creep down, creep down, grey spiders of the sky

And leave the cobweb clouds that ye have spun

Across the face of day;

For day now dies.

Creep down, creep down the brazen chain of rays

Flung by the sun aslant the western hills;

It shall not burn you,

For the sun now dies.

Creep down, creep down to weave a pall of mist

From hill to hill; so hide me from the stars,

Until the morrow dawn

And they too die.

Creep down, creep down; there is no moon to thwart

The workings of the night; and I have called

All shapes of Hell

To keep me company.

But none so dear to me, O spiders grey,

As beady belly slung from eight lean legs

Poised for a pounce

Or crouching low to spin.

What if you be invisible to such

As see not what I see, live not my life,

Have other thoughts than mine,

Act otherwise?

This makes you the more mine, me yours;

So do I bide the promised time when I

Grey spider shall become,

My manhood shed.

Creep down, Creep down, entoil the trespasser

In grey cocoon of death; so keep me free,

My dark soliloquy

Inviolate.

At the close of this incantation Hillbarn limped back to the pole; gave the tin a loud bang and, peering this way and that, cried out “I smell white men!”

“Your nose doesn’t deceive you,” Milversom said, climbing over the tree trunk and signalling the others to follow. “There are four of us here. How do you do?”

Hillbarn glared angrily at the extended hand. “I do not know you,” he said, “or what brings you here.”

“We’ve come to take you home with us tomorrow. The Governor’s sent for you. He can’t allow you to die here in the jungle, you know. You already look half-dead.”

“You must be brave men to venture here; but bravery kills more people than it saves. If you are alive, I will come with you tomorrow; but you will not be. They have already marked you.”

“Who have?”

“My grey brothers. Come inside the hut. The sun is down.”

The inside of the hut was bare of furniture; but in a corner on top of a pile of leaves and rushes lay a heap of discoloured blankets. The floor was of trampled earth. In the middle of it a few logs smouldered, yielding little heat or light but emitting an acrid smoke, for which the palm-thatched roof offered no vent. It was consequently sooted over, and the fumes hung in layers below it.

The party had brought candles in their haversacks and now proceeded to light them, as the last of the twilight faded from the doorway. The resultant glimmer revealed only one thing of interest. There was a closed door in the wall or partition on the right-hand side of the entrance; presumably therefore a second room beyond. In front of it Hillbarn stood shivering, for the evening was already cold. Or was it from excitement? His eyes, now burning with defiance, were certainly those of a madman, and perhaps of a dangerous one.

“They are hungry,” he snarled, “and will leap on you swiftly, but softly and silently. There may be worse deaths than yours, but none more noiseless. I bid you goodbye.”

At this he wrenched the shut door open.

Milversom afterwards confessed that his heart was in his mouth. Nearwell whipped out his service revolver, and Copworth had a hand on his jungle knife. Only Dr Hatley kept his eyes away from the opened door. They were focused keenly on Hillbarn.

Nothing emerged from the door, and they could see nothing but blackness beyond it.

“They invite you to see them first,” Hillbarn said; “take your candles and look inside.”

They did so. In various positions crouched a large number of huge spiders; the body of each about the size of a coconut, the legs covered with a grey-green inch-long hairiness. They were not grouped on one level; some were on the floor, others clung to racks against the walls, yet others hung from the rafters. All were motionless.

Again Milversom’s heart was in his mouth, and Copworth’s fear broke out chokingly with “God help us! Just look at the bloody things!” Nearwell pointed his revolver at the nearest of them. The doctor’s gaze, however, was still riveted on Hillbarn, as though that were the quarter from which danger might come. He had in fact noticed, what the others had not, that since their entry into the hut Hillbarn had picked up from somewhere, and now held in his hand, a heavy chopper.

This atmosphere of apprehension and suspense was all of a sudden dispelled by a happening that in the recollection, but not at the time, appeared ludicrous. The lean black cat must have passed unnoticed through the door when Hillbarn opened it. It now sprang across the floor at some mouse or rat, and in doing so knocked over three or four of the spiders. The bodies, that had looked the size of coconuts, were now revealed as coconuts; the legs as twigs with lichen on them. Hillbarn had modelled them into spiders so realistically that they would have deceived in a stronger light than that of the candles. Dr Hatley, on a considered review of the case, had no doubt that the wretched man believed himself to have endowed them with life.

There was no time for thought at the moment, for a horrible scene ensued. Hillbarn lurched savagely forward; his injured leg gave way beneath him, and he crashed headlong to the floor, knocking over more of the spiders and pinning the cat under his left elbow. With the chopper in his right hand he hacked at its protruding forelegs; and then, grabbing its tail with his left, half-decapitated it. Twistily struggling to a kneeling posture he held the shuddering animal above his head, its blood dripping on to his hair and forehead, and hurled it against the wall. With a circular swing of the chopper he next smashed a couple of the spiders that lay nearest to him, and then giddily attempted to regain his feet.

“Get that chopper from him,” shouted Hatley; and Milversom, with a kick at his right wrist, sent it clattering to the ground. In an instant Nearwell and Copworth had closed with him, hauled him erect and propped him against the wall. It needed their full strength to hold him upright, for he seemed suddenly to have gone limp and inarticulate.

“Lay him down on the blankets, please,” the doctor ordered in a professional tone, “I rather fancy he’s finished.”

He was. Whatever store of vitality there may have been in his underfed, underclothed body, it had been squandered in that final paroxysm of rage and violence. As Hatley examined it now upon the bed of leaves and rushes there was neither breath nor heartbeat. Hilary Hillbarn was dead.

There was nothing more that they could do that night; so, having pulled palm fronds from the roof and laid them as mats before the fire, they lay down, ate some sandwiches, drank from their flasks, and talked themselves into such sleep as they managed to get.

•  4  •

The presence at Hillbarn’s passing of a magistrate, doctor and senior officer of police would, without doubt or question under Kongean law, have enabled immediate interment. Milversom, however, reminded his colleagues of the Kongean proverb that “every planting makes a haunting”. To leave the corpse in that valley would be to make an evil reputation worse. They slung it, therefore, in a blanket from a long bamboo and, shouldering it, marvelled at the lightness of their burden. It was little heavier than a child.

Starting at dawn they reached the Kechoba shop by three o’clock. The wagonette was there; and the body was duly taken to the Takeokuta mortuary.

Next day the four members of the search party were summoned to the Secreta.

“The Governor wishes me to thank you for your services,” the Chief Secretary told them, “having heard the main gist of your report from the Commissioner of Police. His Excellency was greatly distressed about the cat. He has come across a passage in an old Museum Journal which he thinks might interest you. You will find it on the writing-table in the waiting-room, in case any of you would like to take a note. His Excellency has marked the passage in pencil on page thirty-seven.”

The Museum Journal was that of the third quarter of 1893, and the marked passage read as follows:

…but the Kongean araneae have been insufficiently collected, and many of the museum specimens are not in a condition to ensure correct identification. One of the avicularia appears to be of a size hitherto unreported from any tropical region; but the specimen is too disintegrated to admit of exact measurement. It may have been this species that gave rise to the legend, current within living memory among the aborigines, of man-hunting spiders. The legend is no longer heard, but there survives in some districts a superstition of mountain spirits that assume a visible but impalpable arachnid form. Medicine men and warlocks are still alluded to in such districts as “those who behold the eight-legged ones”, and a popular but fanciful derivation of the name Nywedda is from nyiva (leg) and edda (eight). For its true derivation the reader is referred to the Rev Josiah Hughson’s monograph on Some Place Names in Western Kongea.

Milverson, who had been holding the book, suddenly dropped it. There had crept out on to his hand, from the hollow back-cloth, a small but seemingly vicious grey spider.

Fires Burn Blue (1948)