A Book of Ghosts: 43
Author: Various authors
Date: 1831-01-01T05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: Thirteen tales designed to evoke shivers. By various authors. ~ ~ ~ ~ Compiled by ECM.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

A BOOK OF GHOSTS
– 43 –

THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT

MobileRead Edition
2025

Thirteen tales designed to evoke shivers.

By various authors.
Compiled by ECM.

Contents were originally published 1831 ~ 1946. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

CONTENTS:

- The Black Ferry
– 1831
by John Galt
(1779 – 1839)

- The Night-Doings at “Deadman’s”
– 1874
by Ambrose Bierce
(1842 – 1914)

- The American Ghost
– 1883
by Lucretia Peabody Hale
(1820 – 1900)

- They
– 1904
by Rudyard Kipling
(1885 – 1936)

- The Furnished Room
– 1904
by “O Henry”
(William Sydney Porter)
(1862 – 1910)

- Only a Dream
– 1905
by H. Rider Haggard
(1856 – 1925)

- The House That Was Lost
– 1908
by Tom Gallon
(1866 – 1914)

- The Travelling-Companion
– 1910
by H. F. W. Tatham
(1861 – 1909)

- The Stone Coffin
– 1913
by “B”
(? – ?)

- The Duenna
– 1926
by Marie Belloc Lowndes
(1868 – 1947)

- The Crown Derby Plate
– 1931
by “Marjorie Bowen”
(Gabrielle M. V. Long)
(1885 – 1952)

- Retribution
– 1938
by Frederick Ignatius Cowles
(1900 – 1948)

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

A BOOK OF GHOSTS:
– 43 –

THE BLACK FERRY

John Galt

1831

I was then returning from my first session at college. The weather had for some time before been uncommonly wet, every brook and stream was swollen far beyond its banks, the meadows were flooded, and the river itself was increased to a raging Hellespont, insomuch that the ferry was only practicable for an hour before and after high tide.

The day was showery and stormy, by which I was detained at the inn until late in the afternoon, so that it was dark before I reached the ferry-house, and the tide did not serve for safe crossing until midnight. I was therefore obliged to sit by the fire and wait the time, a circumstance which gave me some uneasiness, for the ferryman was old and infirm, and Dick, his son, who usually attended the boat during the night, happened to be then absent, the day having been such that it was not expected any travelers would seek to pass over that night.

The presence of Dick was not, however, absolutely necessary, for the boat swung from side to side by a rope anchored in the middle of the stream, and, on account of the strong current, another rope had been stretched across by which passengers could draw themselves over without assistance, an easy task to those who had the sleight of it, but it was not so to me, who still wore my arm in a sling.

While sitting at the fireside conversing with the ferryman and his wife, a smart, good-looking country lad, with a recruit’s cockade in his hat, came in, accompanied by a young woman who was far advanced in pregnancy. They were told the state of the ferry, and that unless the recruit undertook to conduct the boat himself; they must wait the return of Dick.

They had been only that day married, and were on their way to join a detachment of the regiment in which Ralph Nocton, as the recruit was called, had that evening enlisted, the parish officers having obliged him to marry the girl. Whatever might have been their former love and intimacy, they were not many minutes in the house when he became sullen and morose towards her; nor was she more amiable towards him. He said little, but he often looked at her with an indignant eye, as she reproached him for having so rashly enlisted to abandon her and his unborn baby, assuring him that she would never part from him while life and power lasted.

Though it could not be denied that she possessed both beauty and an attractive person, there was yet a silly vixen humor about her ill calculated to conciliate. I did not therefore wonder to hear that Nocton had married her with reluctance; I only regretted that the parish officers were so inaccessible to commiseration, and so void of conscience as to be guilty of rendering the poor fellow miserable for life to avert the hazard of the child becoming a burden on the parish.

The ferryman and his wife endeavored to reconcile them to their lot; and the recruit, who appeared to be naturally reckless and generous, seemed willing to be appeased; but his weak companion was capricious and pettish. On one occasion, when a sudden shower beat hard against the window, she cried out, with little regard to decorum, that she would go no farther that night.

“You may do as you please, Mary Blake,” said Nocton, “but go I must, for the detachment marches tomorrow morning. It was only to give you time to prepare to come with me that the Captain consented to let me remain so late in the town.

She, however, only remonstrated bitterly at his cruelty in forcing her to travel in her condition, and in such weather. Nocton refused to listen to her, but told her somewhat doggedly, more so than was consistent with the habitual cheerful cast of his physiognomy, “that although he had already been ruined by her, he trusted she had not yet the power to make him a deserter.”

He then went out, and remained some time alone.. When he returned, his appearance was surprisingly changed; his face was of an ashy paleness; his eyes bright, febrile, and eager, and his lip quivered as he said:

“Come, Mary, I can wait no longer; the boat is ready, the river is not so wild, and the rain is over.”

In vain she protested; he was firm; and she had no option but either to go or to be left behind. The old ferryman accompanied them to the boat, saw them embark, and gave the recruit some instructions how to manage the ropes, as it was still rather early in the tide. On returning into the house, he remarked facetiously to his wife:

“I can never see why young men should be always blamed, and all pity reserved for the damsels.”

At that moment a rattling shower of rain and hail burst like a platoon of small shot on the window, and a flash of vivid lightning was followed by one of the most tremendous peals of thunder I have ever heard.

“Hark!” cried the old woman startling, “was not that a shriek?” We listened, but the cry was not repeated; we rushed to the door, but no other sound was heard than the raging of the river, and the roar of the sea-waves breaking on the bar.

Dick soon after came home, and the boat having swung back to her station, I embarked with him, and reached the Opposite inn, where I soon went to bed. Scarcely had I laid my head on the pillow when a sudden inexplicable terror fell upon me; I shook with an unknown horror; I was, as it were, conscious that some invisible being was hovering beside me, and could hardly muster fortitude enough to refrain from rousing the house. At last I fell asleep; it was perturbed and unsound; strange dreams and vague fears scared me awake, and in them were dreadful images of a soldier murdering a female, and open graves, and gibbet-irons swinging in the wind. My remembrance has no parallel to such another night.

In the morning the cloud on my spirit was gone, and I rose at my accustomed hour, and cheerily resumed my journey. It was a bright morning, all things were glittering and fresh in the rising sun, the recruit and his damsel were entirely forgotten, and I thought no more of them.

But when the night came round again next year, I was seized with an unaccountable dejection; it weighed me down; I tried to shake it off but was unable, the mind was diseased, and could no more by resolution shake off its discomfort, than the body by activity can expel a fear. I retired to my bed greatly distressed, but nevertheless I fell asleep. At midnight, however, I was summoned awake by a hideous and undefinable terror; it was the same vague consciousness of some invisible visitor being near that I had once before experienced, as I have described, and I again recollected Nocton and Mary Blake in the same instant; I saw — for I cannot now believe that it was less than apparitional — the unhappy pair reproaching one another.

As I looked, questioning the integrity of my sight, the wretched bride turned round and looked at me. How shall I express my horror, when, for the ruddy beauty which she once possessed, I beheld the charnel visage of a skull; I started up and cried aloud with such alarming vehemence, that the whole inmates of the house, with lights in their hands, were instantly in the room — shame would not let me tell what I had seen, and, endeavoring to laugh, I accused the nightmare of the disturbance.

This happened while I was at a watering-place on the west coast. I was living in a boarding- house with several strangers; among them was a tall pale German gentleman, of a grave impressive physiognomy. He was the most intelligent and shrewdest observer I have ever met with, and he had to a singular degree the gift of a discerning spirit. In the morning when we rose from the breakfast-table, he took me by the arm, and led me out upon the lawn in front of the house, and when we were at some distance from the rest of the company, said:

“Excuse me, sir, for I must ask an impertinent question. Was it indeed the dream or the nightmare that alarmed you last night?”

“I have no objection to answer you freely; but tell me first, why you ask such a question?”

“It is but reasonable. I had a friend who was a painter; none ever possessed an imagination which discerned better how nature in her mysteries should appear. One of his pictures was the scene of Brutus when his evil genius summoned him to Philippi, and, strange to tell, you bear some resemblance to the painted Brutus. When, with the others, I broke into your room last night, you looked so like the Brutus in his picture, that I could have sworn you were amazed with the vision of a ghost.”

I related to him what I have done to you.

“It is wonderful,” said he; “what inconceivable sympathy hath linked you to the fate of these unhappy persons. There is something more in this renewed visitation than the phantasma of a dream.”

The remark smote me with an uncomfortable sensation of dread, and for a short time my flesh crawled as it were upon my bones. But the impression soon wore off, and was again entirely forgotten.

When the anniversary again returned, I was seized with the same heaviness and objectless horror of mind; it hung upon me with bodings and auguries until I went to bed, and then after my first sleep I was a third time roused by another fit of the same inscrutable panic. On this occasion, however, the vision was different. I beheld only Nocton, pale and wounded, stretched on a bed, and on the coverlet lay a pair of new epaulettes, as if just unfolded from a paper. For seven years I was thus annually afflicted. The vision in each was different, but I saw no more of Mary Blake. On the fourth occasion, I beheld Nocton sitting in the uniform of an aide-de-camp at a table, with the customary tokens of conviviality before him; it was only part of a scene, such as one beholds in a mirror.

On the fifth occasion, he appeared to be ascending, sword in hand, the rampart of a battery; the sun was setting behind him, and the shadows and forms of a strange land, with the domes and pagodas of an oriental country, lay in wide extent around: it was a picture, but far more vivid than painting can exhibit.

On the sixth time, he appeared again stretched upon a couch; his complexion was sullen, not from wounds, but disease, and there appeared at his bedside the figure of a general officer, with a star on his breast, with whose conversation he appeared pleased, though languid.

But on the seventh and last occasion on which the horrors of the visions were repeated, I saw him on horseback in a field of battle; and while I looked at him, he was struck on the face by a saber, and the blood flowed down upon his regimentals.

Years passed after this, during which I had none of these dismal exhibitions. My mind and memory resumed their healthful tone. I recollected, without these intervening years of oblivion, Nocton and Mary Blake, occasionally, as one thinks of things past, and I told my friend of the curious periodical returns of the visitations to be as remarkable metaphysical phenomena. By an odd coincidence, it so happened that my German friend was always present when I related my dreams. He in the intervals sometimes spoke to me of them, but my answers were vague, for my reminiscences were imperfect.

It was not so with him. All I told he distinctly recorded and preserved in a book wherein he wrote down the minutest thing that I had witnessed in my visions. I do not mention his name, because he is a modest and retiring man, in bad health, and who has long sequestered himself from company. His rank, however, is so distinguished, that his name could not be stated without the hazard of exposing him to impertinent curiosity. But to proceed.

Exactly fourteen years — twice seven it was — I remember well, because for the first seven I had been haunted as I have described, and for the other seven I have been placed in my living. At the end of that period of fourteen years, my German friend paid me a visit here. He came in the forenoon, and we spent an agreeable day together, for he was a man of much recondite knowledge. Never have I seen one so wonderfully possessed of all sort of occult learning.

He was an astrologer of the true kind, for in him it was not a pretense but a science; he scorned horoscopes and fortune-tellers with the just derision of a philosopher, but he had a beautiful conception of the reciprocal dependencies of nature. He affected not to penetrate to causes, but he spoke of effects with a luminous and religious eloquence. He described to me how the tides followed the phases of the moon; but he denied the Newtonian notion that they were caused by the procession of the lunar changes. He explained to me that when the sun entered Aries, and the other signs of the zodiac, how his progression could be traced on this earth by the development of plants and flowers, and the passions, diseases, and affections of animals and man; but that the stars were more than the celestial signs of these terrestrial phenomena he ridiculed as the conceptions of the insane theory.

His learning in the curious art of alchemy was equally sublime. He laughed at the fancy of an immortal elixir, and his notion of the mythology of the philosopher’s stone was the very essence and spirituality of ethics. The elixir of immortality he described to me as an allegory, which, from its component parts, emblems of talents and virtues, only showed that perseverance, industry, goodwill, and gift from God, were the requisite ingredients necessary to attain renown.

His knowledge of the philosopher’s stone was still more beautiful. He referred to the writings of the Rosicrucians, whose secrets were couched in artificial symbols, to prove that the sages of that sect were not the fools that the lesser wise of later days would represent them. The self-denial, the patience, the humility, and trusting in God, the treasuring of time by lamp and calculation which the venerable alchemists recommended, he used to say, were only the elements which constitute the conduct of the youth that would attain to riches and honor; and these different stages which are illuminated in the alchemical volumes as descriptive of stages in the process of making the stone, were but hieroglyphical devices to explain the effects of well applied human virtue and industry.

To me it was amazing to what clear simplicity he reduced all things, and on what a variety of subjects his bright and splendid fancy threw a fair and affecting light. All those demi-sciences — physiognomy — palmistry — scaileology, etc., even magic and witchcraft, obtained from his interpretations a philosophical credibility.

In disquisitions on these subjects we spent the anniversary. He had by then enlarged the periphery of my comprehension; he had added to my knowledge, and inspired me with a profounder respect for himself.

He was an accomplished musician, in the remotest, if I may use the expression, depths of the art. His performance on the piano-forte was simple, heavy, and seemingly the labor of an unpracticed hand, but his expression was beyond all epithet exquisite and solemn; his airs were grave, devotional, and pathetic, consisting of the simplest harmonic combinations; but they were wonderful; every note was a portion of an invocation; every melody the voice of a passion or a feeling supplied with elocution.

We had spent the day in the fields, where he illustrated his astrological opinions by appeals to plants, and leaves, and flowers, and other attributes of the season, with such delightful perspicuity that no time can efface from the registers of my memory the substance of his discourses. In the evening he delighted me with his miraculous music, and, as the night advanced, I was almost persuaded that he was one of these extraordinary men who are said sometimes to acquire communion with spirits and dominion over demons.

Just as we were about to sit down to our frugal supper, literally or philosophically so, as if it had been served for Zeno himself; Dick, the son of the old ferryman, who by this time was some years dead, came to the door, and requested to speak with me in private. Of course I obeyed, when he informed me that he had brought across the ferry that night a gentleman officer, from a far country, who was in bad health, and whom he could not accommodate properly in the ferry-house.

“The inn,” said Dick, “is too far off, for he is lame, and has an open wound in the thigh. I have therefore ventured to bring him here, sure that you will be glad to give him a bed for the night. His servant tells me that he was esteemed the bravest officer in all the service in the Mysore of India.”

It was impossible to resist this appeal. I went to the door where the gentleman was waiting, and with true-heartedness expressed how great my satisfaction would be if my house could afford him any comfort.

I took him with me to the room where my German friend was sitting. I was much pleased with the gentleness and unaffected simplicity of his manners.

He was a handsome middle-aged man — his person was robust and well formed — his features had been originally handsome, but they were disfigured by a scar, which had materially changed their symmetry. His conversation was not distinguished by any remarkable intelligence, but after the high intellectual excitement which I had enjoyed all day with my philosophical companion, it was agreeable and gentlemanly.

Several times during supper, something came across my mind as if I had seen him before, but I could neither recollect when nor where; and I observed that more than once he looked at me as if under the influence of some research in his memory. At last, I observed that his eyes were dimmed with tears, which assured me that he then recollected me. But I considered it a duty of hospitality not to inquire aught concerning him more than he was pleased to tell himself.

In the meantime, my German friend, I perceived, was watching us both, but suddenly he ceased to be interested, and appeared absorbed in thought, while good manners required me to make some efforts to entertain my guest. This led on to some inquiry concerning the scene of his services, and he told us that he had been many years in India.

“On this day eight years ago,” said he, “I was in the battle of Borupknow, where I received the wound which has so disfigured me in the face.”

At that moment I accidentally threw my eyes upon my German friend — the look which he gave me in answer, caused me to shudder from head to foot, and I began to ruminate of Nocton the recruit, and Mary Blake, while my friend continued the conversation in a light desultory manner, as it would have seemed to any stranger, but to me it was awful and oracular. He spoke to the stranger on all manner of topics, but ever and anon he brought him back, as if without design, to speak of the accidents of fortune which had befallen him on the anniversary of that day, giving it as a reason for his curious remarks, that most men observed anniversaries, time and experience having taught them to notice, that there were curious coincidences with respect to times, and places, and individuals — things, which of themselves form part of the great demonstration of the wisdom and skill displayed in the construction, not only of the mechanical, but the mortal world, showing that each was a portion of one and the same thing.

“I have been,” said he to the stranger, “an observer and recorder of such things. I have my book of registration here in this house; I will fetch it from my bed-chamber, and we shall see in what other things, as far as your fortunes have been concerned, how it corresponds with the accidents of your life on this anniversary.”

I observed that the stranger paled a little at this proposal, and said, with an affection of carelessness while he was evidently disturbed, that he would see it in the morning. But the philosopher was too intent upon his purpose to forbear. I know not what came upon me, but I urged him to bring the book. This visibly disconcerted the stranger still more, and his emotion became, as it were, a motive which induced me, in a peremptory manner, to require the production of the book, for I felt that strange horror, so often experienced, returning upon me; and was constrained, by an irresistible impulse, to seek an explanation of the circumstances by which I had for so many years suffered such an eclipse of mind.

The stranger seeing how intent both of us were, desisted from his wish to procrastinate the curious disclosure which my friend said he could make; but it was evident he was not at ease. Indeed he was so much the reverse, that when the German went for his book, he again proposed to retire, and only consented to abide at my jocular entreaty, until he should learn what his future fortunes were to be, by the truth of what would be told him of the past.

My friend soon returned with the book. It was a remarkable volume, covered with vellum, shut with three brazen clasps, secured by a lock of curious construction. Altogether it was a strange, antique, and necromantic-looking volume. The corner was studded with knobs of brass, with a small mirror in the center, round which were inscribed in Teutonic characters, words to the effect, “I WILL SHOW THEE THYSELF”. Before unlocking the clasp, my friend gave the book to the stranger, explained some of the emblematic devices which adorned the cover, and particularly the words of the motto that surrounded the little mirror.

Whether it was from design, or that the symbols required it, the explanations of my friend were mystical and abstruse; and I could see that they produced an effect on the stranger, so strong that it was evident he could with difficulty maintain his self-possession. The color entirely faded from his countenance; he became wan and cadaverous, and his hand shook violently as he returned the volume to the philosopher, who, on receiving it back, said:

“There are things in this volume which may not be revealed to every eye, yet to those who may not discover to what they relate, they will seem trivial notations.”

He then applied the key to the lock, and unclosed the volume. My stranger guest began to breathe hard and audibly. The German turned over the vellum leaves searchingly and carefully. At last he found his record and description of my last vision, which he read aloud. It was not only minute in the main circumstances in which I had seen Nocton, but it contained an account of many things, the still life, as it is called, of the picture, which I had forgotten, and among other particulars a picturesque account of the old General whom I saw standing at the bedside.

“By all that’s holy,” cried the stranger, “it is old Cripplington himself — the queue of his hair was, as you say, always crooked, owing to a habit he had of pulling it when vexed — where could you find the description of all this?”

I was petrified; I sat motionless as a statue, but a fearful vibration thrilled through my whole frame.

My friend looked back in his book, and found the description of my sixth vision. It contained the particulars of the crisis of battle in which, as the stranger described, he had received the wound in his face. It affected him less than the other, but still the effect upon him was impressive.

The record of the fifth vision produced a more visible alarm. The description was vivid to an extreme degree — the appearance of Nocton, sword in hand, on the rampart — the animation of the assault, and the gorgeous landscape of domes and pagodas, was limned with words as vividly as a painter could have made the scene. The stranger seemed to forget his anxiety, and was delighted with the reminiscences which the description recalled.

But when the record of the fourth vision was read, wherein Nocton was described as sitting in the regimentals of an aide-de-camp, at a convivial table, he exclaimed, as if unconscious of his words:

“It was on that night I had first the honor of dining with the German general.”

The inexorable philosopher proceeded, and read what I had told him of Nocton, stretched pale and wounded on a bed, with new epaulettes spread on the coverlet, as if just unfolded from a paper. The stranger started from his seat, and cried with a hollow and tearful voice:

“This is the book of life.”

The German turned over to the second vision, which he read slowly and mournfully, especially the description of my own feelings, when I beheld the charnal visage of Mary Blake. The stranger, who had risen from his seat, and was panting with horror, cried out with a shrill howl, as it were:

“On that night as I was sitting in my tent, methought her spirit came and reproached me.” I could not speak, but my German friend rose from his seat, and holding the volume in his left hand, touched it with his right, and looking sternly at the stranger, said:

“In this volume, and in your own conscience, are the evidences which prove that you are Ralph Nocton and that on this night, twice seven years ago, you murdered Mary Blake.”

The miserable stranger lost all self-command, and cried in consternation.

“It is true, the waters raged; the rain and the hail came; she bitterly upbraided me; I flung her from the boat; the lightning flashed, and the thunder — Oh! it was not so dreadful as her drowning execrations.”

Before any answer could be given to this confession, he staggered from the spot, and almost in the same instant fell dead upon the floor.

The Club Book (1831) as “The Book of Life”

THE NIGHT-DOINGS
AT “DEADMAN’S”

A STORY THAT IS UNTRUE

Ambrose Bierce

1874

It was a singularly sharp night, and clear as the heart of a diamond. Clear nights have a trick of being keen. In darkness you may be cold and not know it; when you see, you suffer. This night was bright enough to bite like a serpent. The moon was moving mysteriously along behind the giant pines crowning the South Mountain, striking a cold sparkle from the crusted snow, and bringing out against the black west the ghostly outlines of the Coast Range, beyond which lay the invisible Pacific. The snow had piled itself, in the open spaces along the bottom of the gulch, into long ridges that seemed to heave, and into hills that appeared to toss and scatter spray. The spray was sunlight, twice reflected: dashed once from the moon, once from the snow.

In this snow many of the shanties of the abandoned mining camp were obliterated, (a sailor might have said they had gone down) and at irregular intervals it had overtopped the tall trestles which had once supported a river called a flume; for, of course, “flume” is flumen. Among the advantages of which the mountains cannot deprive the gold-hunter is the privilege of speaking Latin. He says of his dead neighbor, “He has gone up the flume.” This is not a bad way to say, “His life has returned to the Fountain of Life.”

While putting on its armor against the assaults of the wind, this snow had neglected no coign of vantage. Snow pursued by the wind is not wholly unlike a retreating army. In the open field it ranges itself in ranks and battalions; where it can get a foothold it makes a stand; where it can take cover it does so. You may see whole platoons of snow cowering behind a bit of broken wall. The devious old road, hewn out of the mountain side, was full of it. Squadron upon squadron had struggled to escape by this line, when suddenly pursuit had ceased. A more desolate and dreary spot than Deadman’s Gulch in a winter midnight it is impossible to imagine. Yet Mr. Hiram Beeson elected to live there, the sole inhabitant.

Away up the side of the North Mountain his little pine-log shanty projected from its single pane of glass a long, thin beam of light, and looked not altogether unlike a black beetle fastened to the hillside with a bright new pin. Within it sat Mr. Beeson himself, before a roaring fire, staring into its hot heart as if he had never before seen such a thing in all his life. He was not a comely man. He was gray; he was ragged and slovenly in his attire; his face was wan and haggard; his eyes were too bright. As to his age, if one had attempted to guess it, one might have said forty-seven, then corrected himself and said seventy-four. He was really twenty-eight. Emaciated he was; as much, perhaps, as he dared be, with a needy undertaker at Bentley’s Flat and a new and enterprising coroner at Sonora. Poverty and zeal are an upper and a nether millstone. It is dangerous to make a third in that kind of sandwich.

As Mr. Beeson sat there, with his ragged elbows on his ragged knees, his lean jaws buried in his lean hands, and with no apparent intention of going to bed, he looked as if the slightest movement would tumble him to pieces. Yet during the last hour he had winked no fewer than three times.

There was a sharp rapping at the door. A rap at that time of night and in that weather might have surprised an ordinary mortal who had dwelt two years in the gulch without seeing a human face, and could not fail to know that the country was impassable; but Mr. Beeson did not so much as pull his eyes out of the coals. And even when the door was pushed open he only shrugged a little more closely into himself, as one does who is expecting something that he would rather not see. You may observe this movement in women when, in a mortuary chapel, the coffin is borne up the aisle behind them.

But when a long old man in a blanket overcoat, his head tied up in a handkerchief and nearly his entire face in a muffler, wearing green goggles and with a complexion of glittering whiteness where it could be seen, strode silently into the room, laying a hard, gloved hand on Mr. Beeson’s shoulder, the latter so far forgot himself as to look up with an appearance of no small astonishment; whomever he may have been expecting, he had evidently not counted on meeting anyone like this. Nevertheless, the sight of this unexpected guest produced in Mr. Beeson the following sequence: a feeling of astonishment; a sense of gratification; a sentiment of profound good will. Rising from his seat, he took the knotty hand from his shoulder, and shook it up and down with a fervor quite unaccountable; for in the old man’s aspect was nothing to attract, much to repel. However, attraction is too general a property for repulsion to be without it. The most attractive object in the world is the face we instinctively cover with a cloth. When it becomes still more attractive — fascinating — we put seven feet of earth above it.

“Sir,” said Mr. Beeson, releasing the old man’s hand, which fell passively against his thigh with a quiet clack, “it is an extremely disagreeable night. Pray be seated; I am very glad to see you.”

Mr. Beeson spoke with an easy good breeding that one would hardly have expected, considering all things. Indeed, the contrast between his appearance and his manner was sufficiently surprising to be one of the commonest of social phenomena in the mines. The old man advanced a step toward the fire, glowing cavernously in the green goggles. Mr. Beeson resumed:

“You bet your life I am!”

Mr. Beeson’s elegance was not too refined; it had made reasonable concessions to local taste. He paused a moment, letting his eyes drop from the muffled head of his guest, down along the row of moldy buttons confining the blanket overcoat, to the greenish cowhide boots powdered with snow, which had begun to melt and run along the floor in little rills. He took an inventory of his guest, and appeared satisfied. Who would not have been? Then he continued:

“The cheer I can offer you is, unfortunately, in keeping with my surroundings; but I shall esteem myself highly favored if it is your pleasure to partake of it, rather than seek better at Bentley’s Flat.”

With a singular refinement of hospitable humility Mr. Beeson spoke as if a sojourn in his warm cabin on such a night, as compared with walking fourteen miles up to the throat in snow with a cutting crust, would be an intolerable hardship. By way of reply, his guest unbuttoned the blanket overcoat. The host laid fresh fuel on the fire, swept the hearth with the tail of a wolf, and added:

“But I think you’d better skedaddle.”

The old man took a seat by the fire, spreading his broad soles to the heat without removing his hat. In the mines the hat is seldom removed except when the boots are. Without further remark Mr. Beeson also seated himself in a chair which had been a barrel, and which, retaining much of its original character, seemed to have been designed with a view to preserving his dust if it should please him to crumble. For a moment there was silence; then, from somewhere among the pines, came the snarling yelp of a coyote; and simultaneously the door rattled in its frame. There was no other connection between the two incidents than that the coyote has an aversion to storms, and the wind was rising; yet there seemed somehow a kind of supernatural conspiracy between the two, and Mr. Beeson shuddered with a vague sense of terror. He recovered himself in a moment and again addressed his guest.

“There are strange doings here. I will tell you everything, and then if you decide to go I shall hope to accompany you over the worst of the way; as far as where Baldy Peterson shot Ben Hike — I dare say you know the place.”

The old man nodded emphatically, as intimating not merely that he did, but that he did indeed.

“Two years ago,” began Mr. Beeson, “I, with two companions, occupied this house; but when the rush to the Flat occurred we left, along with the rest. In ten hours the Gulch was deserted. That evening, however, I discovered I had left behind me a valuable pistol (that is it) and returned for it, passing the night here alone, as I have passed every night since. I must explain that a few days before we left, our Chinese domestic had the misfortune to die while the ground was frozen so hard that it was impossible to dig a grave in the usual way. So, on the day of our hasty departure, we cut through the floor there, and gave him such burial as we could. But before putting him down I had the extremely bad taste to cut off his pigtail and spike it to that beam above his grave, where you may see it at this moment, or, preferably, when warmth has given you leisure for observation.

“I stated, did I not, that the Chinaman came to his death from natural causes? I had, of course, nothing to do with that, and returned through no irresistible attraction, or morbid fascination, but only because I had forgotten a pistol. This is clear to you, is it not, sir?”

The visitor nodded gravely. He appeared to be a man of few words, if any. Mr. Beeson continued:

“According to the Chinese faith, a man is like a kite: he cannot go to heaven without a tail. Well, to shorten this tedious story — which, however, I thought it my duty to relate — on that night, while I was here alone and thinking of anything but him, that Chinaman came back for his pigtail.

“He did not get it.”

At this point Mr. Beeson relapsed into blank silence. Perhaps he was fatigued by the unwonted exercise of speaking; perhaps he had conjured up a memory that demanded his undivided attention. The wind was now fairly abroad, and the pines along the mountainside sang with singular distinctness. The narrator continued:

“You say you do not see much in that, and I must confess I do not myself.

“But he keeps coming!”

There was another long silence, during which both stared into the fire without the movement of a limb. Then Mr. Beeson broke out, almost fiercely, fixing his eyes on what he could see of the impassive face of his auditor:

“Give it him? Sir, in this matter I have no intention of troubling anyone for advice. You will pardon me, I am sure” — here he became singularly persuasive — “but I have ventured to nail that pigtail fast, and have assumed the somewhat onerous obligation of guarding it. So it is quite impossible to act on your considerate suggestion.

“Do you play me for a Modoc?”

Nothing could exceed the sudden ferocity with which he thrust this indignant remonstrance into the ear of his guest. It was as if he had struck him on the side of the head with a steel gauntlet. It was a protest, but it was a challenge. To be mistaken for a coward — to be played for a Modoc: these two expressions are one. Sometimes it is a Chinaman. Do you play me for a Chinaman? is a question frequently addressed to the ear of the suddenly dead.

Mr. Beeson’s buffet produced no effect, and after a moment’s pause, during which the wind thundered in the chimney like the sound of clods upon a coffin, he resumed:

“But, as you say, it is wearing me out. I feel that the life of the last two years has been a mistake — a mistake that corrects itself; you see how. The grave! No; there is no one to dig it. The ground is frozen, too. But you are very welcome. You may say at Bentley’s — but that is not important. It was very tough to cut: they braid silk into their pigtails. Kwaagh.”

Mr. Beeson was speaking with his eyes shut, and he wandered. His last word was a snore. A moment later he drew a long breath, opened his eyes with an effort, made a single remark, and fell into a deep sleep. What he said was this:

“They are swiping my dust!”

Then the aged stranger, who had not uttered one word since his arrival, arose from his seat and deliberately laid off his outer clothing, looking as angular in his flannels as the late Signorina Festorazzi, an Irish woman, six feet in height, and weighing fifty-six pounds, who used to exhibit herself in her chemise to the people of San Francisco. He then crept into one of the “bunks,” having first placed a revolver in easy reach, according to the custom of the country. This revolver he took from a shelf, and it was the one which Mr. Beeson had mentioned as that for which he had returned to the Gulch two years before.

In a few moments Mr. Beeson awoke, and seeing that his guest had retired he did likewise. But before doing so he approached the long, plaited wisp of pagan hair and gave it a powerful tug, to assure himself that it was fast and firm. The two beds — mere shelves covered with blankets not overclean — faced each other from opposite sides of the room, the little square trapdoor that had given access to the Chinaman’s grave being midway between. This, by the way, was crossed by a double row of spike-heads. In his resistance to the supernatural, Mr. Beeson had not disdained the use of material precautions.

The fire was now low, the flames burning bluely and petulantly, with occasional flashes, projecting spectral shadows on the walls — shadows that moved mysteriously about, now dividing, now uniting. The shadow of the pendent queue, however, kept moodily apart, near the roof at the further end of the room, looking like a note of admiration. The song of the pines outside had now risen to the dignity of a triumphal hymn. In the pauses the silence was dreadful.

It was during one of these intervals that the trap in the floor began to lift. Slowly and steadily it rose, and slowly and steadily rose the swaddled head of the old man in the bunk to observe it. Then, with a clap that shook the house to its foundation, it was thrown clean back, where it lay with its unsightly spikes pointing threateningly upward. Mr. Beeson awoke, and without rising, pressed his fingers into his eyes. He shuddered; his teeth chattered. His guest was now reclining on one elbow, watching the proceedings with the goggles that glowed like lamps.

Suddenly a howling gust of wind swooped down the chimney, scattering ashes and smoke in all directions, for a moment obscuring everything. When the firelight again illuminated the room there was seen, sitting gingerly on the edge of a stool by the hearthside, a swarthy little man of prepossessing appearance and dressed with faultless taste, nodding to the old man with a friendly and engaging smile. “From San Francisco, evidently,” thought Mr. Beeson, who having somewhat recovered from his fright was groping his way to a solution of the evening’s events.

But now another actor appeared upon the scene. Out of the square black hole in the middle of the floor protruded the head of the departed Chinaman, his glassy eyes turned upward in their angular slits and fastened on the dangling queue above with a look of yearning unspeakable. Mr. Beeson groaned, and again spread his hands upon his face. A mild odor of opium pervaded the place. The phantom, clad only in a short blue tunic quilted and silken but covered with grave-mold, rose slowly, as if pushed by a weak spiral spring. Its knees were at the level of the floor, when with a quick upward impulse like the silent leaping of a flame it grasped the queue with both hands, drew up its body and took the tip in its horrible yellow teeth. To this it clung in a seeming frenzy, grimacing ghastly, surging and plunging from side to side in its efforts to disengage its property from the beam, but uttering no sound. It was like a corpse artificially convulsed by means of a galvanic battery. The contrast between its superhuman activity and its silence was no less than hideous!

Mr. Beeson cowered in his bed. The swarthy little gentleman uncrossed his legs, beat an impatient tattoo with the toe of his boot and consulted a heavy gold watch. The old man sat erect and quietly laid hold of the revolver.

Bang!

Like a body cut from the gallows the Chinaman plumped into the black hole below, carrying his tail in his teeth. The trapdoor turned over, shutting down with a snap. The swarthy little gentleman from San Francisco sprang nimbly from his perch, caught something in the air with his hat, as a boy catches a butterfly, and vanished into the chimney as if drawn up by suction.

From away somewhere in the outer darkness floated in through the open door a faint, far cry — a long, sobbing wail, as of a child death-strangled in the desert, or a lost soul borne away by the Adversary. It may have been the coyote.

•   •   •   •   •

In the early days of the following spring a party of miners on their way to new diggings passed along the Gulch, and straying through the deserted shanties found in one of them the body of Hiram Beeson, stretched upon a bunk, with a bullet hole through the heart. The ball had evidently been fired from the opposite side of the room, for in one of the oaken beams overhead was a shallow blue dint, where it had struck a knot and been deflected downward to the breast of its victim. Strongly attached to the same beam was what appeared to be an end of a rope of braided horsehair, which had been cut by the bullet in its passage to the knot. Nothing else of interest was noted, excepting a suit of moldy and incongruous clothing, several articles of which were afterward identified by respectable witnesses as those in which certain deceased citizens of Deadman’s had been buried years before. But it is not easy to understand how that could be, unless, indeed, the garments had been worn as a disguise by Death himself — which is hardly credible.

London Sketch-Book Mar. 1874

THE AMERICAN GHOST

Lucretia P. Hale

1883

I would like to tell the story as an old friend told it to me in her garrulous way. She tried to write it down herself, indeed, at my request, but I shall have to give it as she read it to me, interspersed with her own interjections that came up at the moment, and that are needed to explain what she told.

I must begin, she said, with two young girls looking at each other, one evening, when we had all being sitting together, talking with those English ladies who had been visiting us, and they left the very next day quite disappointed that all the time they had been in the house they had heard no broad Yankee spoken, and my sister was quite put out about it, wondering that they should have expected it at our house, or thought to hear it in Boston. But they went on to say that, after all, the principal difference between us Americans and the English is that we have no faith in ghosts, or indeed that we have no ghosts to have faith in. Either because, if we have an old house we pull it down, or because our houses are all so new — and how could you expect a ghost on the Back Bay where the houses are only just built? And so, indeed, there is not a house for a ghost to go to, or to stay in, if there happened to be one.

Now in England, these ladies said, there is not a town but is old enough to have its traditions, and keep up its haunted house along with its old streets.

“I have not met one family ghost,” said one of these ladies, “since I have been in America. And what is the worst, if there were one, nobody would believe in it. In England there’s not a respectable family but has its ghost attached to it, — perhaps the ghost is gone, indeed, but it has been there, and the servants know all about it, and the nurse-maids, and they brought us up to believe in it. To be sure it is not every one of the family that can see a ghost, perhaps not one in a generation, but we would all of us be much disappointed if there had not been a ghost seen in the family some time or other.”

Then she went on to tell about one of her uncles. He was dead now, but he was one of that kind who had seen their family ghost — yes, more than once; and she made our blood curdle and our flesh cold, telling us about it, for it was late at night, and somebody had turned the gas down low, and there were only a few flickering embers in the fire round which we were sitting.

“But the noise?” asked a tall boy, breaking the silence that came after the story. He had been listening, with all the hairs, short as they were on his close-cut head, standing up on end. “What was the noise, after all — did you find out? Was it Rats?”

“Just what I told you,” exclaimed the English lady, quite angry; “you expect to have an explanation of everything! and find out why it was so! It is enough to discourage any right-minded ghost! Of course, anyone who has really seen a ghost does not think to question. Rats, indeed! You don’t deserve to have any ghosts!” and she would not say another word on the subject.

And the very next day these English ladies went back home to England, and I might have a great deal to tell about their letters, and what they thought about Americans, and what we thought about them, but that sort of thing comes into so many other stories there is no need for it here.

But the two girls I was telling you of, sitting together on the sofa, who looked at each other that particular way, during this talk about ghosts — they had come from the country only the day before for the winter. We none of us knew them very well, and perhaps that is why they neither of them spoke, though they looked at each other as if they had something to say.

But, though they said nothing downstairs, they talked fast enough when they went up to their own room, and on this very subject. They were in the upper story of one of the houses in Beacon Street, by the side of the Athenaeum, and they were looking across to the houses opposite.

Now, they had picked out this particular room for their winter home, because the place might seem something like home, for they knew that their mother was born in the house opposite. Of course, not in one of those very houses, for though they may begin to look old and weather-beaten now-a-days to the rising generation, we can many of us remember when they were new. And some of us can remember the house that was there before — a lonely old house that stood back, back on a hill, on a line with the State House — almost the top of Beacon Hill of those days, with a slope in front, and a garden behind. And if you should pass through one of these houses standing there now, you might see in the back yard a remnant of this old Beacon Hill, sloping the other way, as it used to slope up from the end of Somerset Court that was, and that now is Ashbnrton Place, which has cut through this hill. And you can still see remaining in this back yard a bit of slope, and on it the same grasses growing, and blue succory, if you look there in the spring, just such as we used to pick through the cracks in the boards on the bit of hill remaining at the end of Somerset Court in those days, long ago, when the mother of these girls lived in the old house. She left it when she was seven years old, for the house was pulled down; but her mother, and all her aunts and ancestors used to live there, and their great-grand-aunt, Dora, for whom one of these girls was named, must have visited there.

I am not going to stop and tell all these stories, because I hate stories within stories, and always did. Pilpay’s Fables were always a disappointment to me when I was a child. I read all the fables, but I had to skip the between part. Of course I don’t include the Arabian Nights, because there’s no reason why one should ever stop reading on and on, in those stories, if only one had the leisure of the Arabs, smoking their nargiles, reclining on their Persian rugs, with their heads on foot-stools, in their gardens. beneath their rose-trees.

But, I would like to tell about Dora’s mother, who was named Dora, too, after this same old great-grand-aunt, and how she used to tell of the days she played in the “mall” on Beacon Street when she was a schoolgirl — on the slope of Beacon Street — how there was a row of elms half-way down the bank, and a path worn along beneath the trees, making two grassy banks where there is now one slope from the street. And there was one large tree, whose roots came out above the earth, and across into the path, and she used to play there with the other schoolgirls, — and such baby houses as they made among the twisted roots — they could push into deep holes way under the tree, making secret passages, and more than one doll they lost there, though of course they were careful with their most choice dolls; but they used to play as though the place were their own, and that nobody else would come there, and would leave their things, thinking to find them next day. But of course some other party of girls might come along that very afternoon, and carry away what they pleased, and when they came again everything would be gone, much to their surprise. They would take the loss as children take their losses, as they do their gains, as coming down upon them like breakfast, dinner or supper, not at any regular times, but just when the elders should choose.

But there came a more serious loss one day. This Dora, I mean my Dora’s mother, had a queer old pin that came down to her from her great-grand-aunt Dora — a silver pin she called it, but it might have been lead, for it was no longer bright; some curious carvings on it were ‘worn down, and whatever might be considered its value now, when all old things are raked up, and a high price set on them, it did not then rank much above a common pin, except that it had belonged to great-grand-aunt Dora. It had a round, heavy head, and was odd-looking anyhow. She had been using it to pin her favorite doll Janet’s shawl with; and she knew she must have left it in the roots of the tree in a choice corner, called Janet’s closet, which they always kept shut up close, with grass wedged in. But when she went to look for it, it was not there, and the grass all gone, and bits of cracker and orange-peel crammed into the closet, instead. It could not be found, and very foolish all her aunts and uncles called her, for leaving it there, for by this time her own mother was dead, who might have been more careful for aunt Dora’s pin.

Well, a long time passed on, and Dora’s mother was living no longer in Boston, but in that old house in the country from which these two girls bad come this very winter, near Byfield, I believe, with a slope down to some river under its windows. And she went one day to a sleigh-ride, or some other party, when they stopped somewhere for a dance, and she had a great many partners; some of them she had never seen before, but there was one of these — there was one — and when he stood bowing before her, to ask if she would dance with him — that was, after she had been introduced — as he stood there, she could not but see he wore aunt Dora’s pin — that same round-headed pin, with its worn carvings — it pinned his cravat! All confused as she went to dance, she could not keep her eyes off the pin, and as he could not help seeing how she looked at it, “There’s an odd story about this pin!” he said; and he went on to tell how, when he was a boy, he and the schoolboys used to go to play by a tree in the mall by the common — the Beacon Street mall — and how they made fortifications among the twisted roots of the great old tree, and how they had barracks and bastions, and how it was in their “quarter-master‘s secret closet,” one day, he found this queer pin. “But that was Janet’s closet, my doll’s,” interrupted Dora’s mother — only she was not married then — but of course did afterward marry Dora’s father, as he said there seemed no better way of restoring the pin that Dora inherits to this very day. I ought not to have been so long telling this, except to show how it was that my Dora, this young Dora, felt a close connection with this old grand-aunt, and more so now, because she had just been going through a great sorrow that reminded her of great-grand-aunt Dora, and the story that was always told about her.

You see the two girls were looking out upon the very place, as I said, where their mother and grandmother had lived before them, — only so different now, that row of brick houses, not so especially new either, and when their mother was a child the old house stood back from the street, and you went up to it by a succession of steps — first a few steps, then a landing place, then more steps, something like the front of the State House, with grassy banks each side, and the door in the middle of the house, and perhaps a lilac, or some other bush, either side of the door. This was the way it looked then. But now they were sitting up even with the upper windows of the row of brick houses close opposite them.

And Elsie, the older sister, said — she was the more cheerful one of the two: “Of course grand-aunt Dora used to come and visit her relations when they lived in the old house here, but it was not her home.”

“No,” answered Dora, “her home was in the part of Washington Street that used to be called Newbury Street, on this side of Essex Street.”

“But, Dora,” said Elsie, in a low tone, “our mother never saw her there — grand-aunt Dora, I mean.”

For the story of grand-aunt Dora was that, far back in the olden days, living up there in what was Newbury Street — she was all dressed one day to go to Commencement — so always the family story went. For in those days “Commencement” at Harvard was considered a great event, and all the young girls (and grand-aunt Dora was a young girl then) had their hair dressed for the occasion high up on their head, as was the fashion, and the hairdressers were engaged to come the day before always, because they must go so early on Commencement day — no time for dressing beforehand, and because there were so many to have their hair dressed, and but one hairdresser of any great repute. And with all the rest grand-aunt Dora had her hair powdered and dressed, and a red poppy stuck in on one side, just above the cushion that puffed up her hair, and so she sat up all night that she might not tumble it by lying down (and many another young lady was doing the same), in a high easy-chair by the window. The high-cushioned side of the chair (these two girls still owned it in the old country house) could partly support her head — and there she sat all night — and not all that night only, but ever after — night after night.

So the story always went, but it does not tell when or how she died, but there she was still sitting, all that passing generation said, night after night at the window. When the dash and the clash of the carriages and horse-cars in front of the Globe and Park theaters dies away, and quiet comes over the midnight, and morning approaches, doubtless she might be seen in later days still in the front window of one of the upper stories, with her powdered hair, and the flower by the side of her head waiting, still waiting, because the young lover that was to have taken her to Commencement — he never came.

So the story was always told, with never a reason why “he” did not come. Perhaps he went to Cambridge with another girl — or when it was she faded away in the easy-chair as she sat there — we never knew.

And so the tale was told, though there was one version, perhaps the true one, that the “strange lady ” appeared only on Commencement morning; but the girls never knew if their mother, or her mother, had ever seen Aunt Dora sitting there, for the family had long ago given up the “Newbury Street ” house.

But the night before — the very first night they had come to Boston — Elsie was waked up by her sister’s restlessness, and she saw Dora get up in the middle of the night and go to the window, and draw the curtain — then, because Dora started and gave a little cry, Elsie got up too, and quietly stood by her side.

There, in the opposite window, was a lady sitting, but in a dress of the olden time. A soft light fell across her figure, and they could plainly see how she wore, not the dress of the present day, but a ruff about her neck, and her hair drawn up in high powdered rolls, and a flower in the side turned towards them. She seemed to be leaning back in an old-fashioned chair with high sides, and with her hands crossed over each other in her lap — waiting — waiting.

The two girls said nothing to each other. There was a noise in the street below. They looked down; when they looked back, the lady was gone. They could see no more, and went silently to bed. This was the very night they arrived; and all the next day, in the hurry of their first arrival, and seeing many people, they had not spoken to each other of it, perhaps had not thought much of it; but in the talk of the evening I have told you of, it had all come back. This was why they had looked at each other:0, but had said nothing till now they were at the window again. But now Elsie went on:

“I do think, Dora, that must have been Aunt Dora we saw last night. Poor thing l I suppose the racket they make at the theaters frightened her away; and that opposite row must be about the height that the chamber story of the old house would have been, only it is all farther front, but perhaps that makes no difference to ghosts.”

“Oh, don’t joke about it,” exclaimed Dora, whispering. “Do you know I trust it is she indeed, grand-aunt Dora, and that she came purposely to me, to me because it is all so much the same — my fate is so like hers. Oh, Elsie, I think it was truly she.”

Elsie wanted to laugh, for they always used to laugh a little over grand-aunt Dora’s story, but she knew what her sister meant and what her real sorrow was.

Only two months before Dora had sat waiting, yes, waiting — just that way, — in the window of their old country home, where they had lived all their lives so happily — with her hat on, ready for a drive, laughing and joking with Elsie.

And then — and then — he had not come. She sat waiting, then wondering, took off her hat, put it on again, but sat there all the afternoon, then looked for some message, but none ever came. Richard did not come — he never came. She had heard of him in Boston, at the West; he was going to be married, somebody said. And how it made her cheeks redden, and how it pained her to the heart to think she had waited!

Since then, sad events had befallen. They were forced to leave the dear old home, and for the saddest of causes. Their only brother, much older than they, who should have cared for them, had wasted their little property, — it seemed the old country house must be sold, and they must come to Boston, and “do something.” They were very fortunate, so they thought, for Elsie found a place in the Public Library, only a temporary place,’ but she was so quick and ready we felt they could never get along without her when once they had learned her value. For they came to the house where I was living, and that is howl learned to know them, being a connection, but never having met them before. With a little bit of their earnings Dora was to take lessons in singing, for with such a voice as she had she might command a place in any choir, if only it had more cultivation.

So the two were talking together, far into the night, with hushed voices, sitting by the window, when both started. Again the same light appeared as on the night before — and again the same figure at the opposite window, and the light seemed to gather about it, like the radiance that glows in some old pictures of saints. They sat silent for some minutes, till Elsie whispered, “They said, you know, those English ladies, that if two saw — it — together, if there were two that saw it, it really was — a ghost!”

“And do you remember,” Dora said, scarcely above her breath, “how they said they got attached to their ghosts, and would hate to have them go away, and that it seems natural to have them — a sort of protection? and I almost feel the same at seeing her now, only, Elsie, must it be my fate, mine — to sit waiting, waiting that way? Must I grow like that? See, she seems no longer young, as she must have been when she died, or did she fade away when she did die? She looks like a rose that has been put away in a book — withered and dry — the color all gone from that scarlet poppy they told us of, and her hands crossed so quietly, looking off, waiting still. Do you think she shows herself there to encourage me, because she knows my sorrow? She makes no sign; she sits there, sits there. Perhaps always has been sitting there these long years, as you say, because she has been disturbed from the old place. But must she sit there still? How dreadful to wait and wait all this life long, and then wait on and on, and on for how long, for generations and generations!”

“Oh, don’t go on so,” cried Elsie, breaking down, and bursting into tears, as she had never done before, she was always so strong. Dora leaned over to kiss and comfort her, for her sister was kneeling by her side, and when the two turned to look back all was dark opposite — no light, no figure in the window.

“We are in a bad state,” said Dora; “we must go to bed.”

And the next morning when they got up, even Elsie felt gloomy, and hated to leave her sister early as she must, she looked so sad. But Dora would not let her think of staying; she was to go to her lesson herself, and her practice always cheered her up.

But afterwards it was such a comforting day. The postman in the afternoon brought a long letter to Dora, that she was long in reading, and Elsie had unexpected visitors at the Library. Dora’s letter had been traveling round for two or three days, had been to the country post-office and been returned. Such a long letter, and it might just as well have been shorter, for all that Dora cared for in the letter was the news that Richard was coming — might be there, so she caculated from the date, that very afternoon! She had forgotten with this news all the agony of the last two months, and would have never remembered it at this moment, if it had lasted for years, and never would have asked an explanation, nor wanted one. Some time or other they would laugh it all over together. He had missed his train that day, it seemed, two months ago, and there was no later train to connect. It was just such an absurd accident as that had kept him! But then he foolishly sent a telegram to explain his delay, and that he could not come the next day. It was foolish, for there was no telegraph office at the little branch station, and telegrams had to go to the junction, where nobody knew them, for they never used the telegraph. How foolish indeed!

All the rest was very confused, and perhaps she never rightly understood it. How that very afternoon of the day he missed the train, he, Richard, was summoned out West, on the death of an uncle. And how he did not write because he met her brother down in the depths of despair, and ready to kill himself with repentance and despondency, everything gone wrong. It was either in Montana or Arizona, Dora always mixed up the Western States. And then Richard’s own affairs were changed, because the uncle had left him money or mines, or something, and he didn’t want to write to Dora till he could write certainly, and explain and plan all things for their brother, for them, and mostly for Dora and himself, and would she see him as soon as he came?

That question was easily answered, for after reading the letter over and over — for there he was, and their brother with him; and they had picked up Elsie at the Library; they had to wait for her, for she was way up on the top of some steps looking for 14- 90-22, or some such, and when she came down had to wait and advise some boys on their way home from school what books they had better take out and find these books for them. She would not have cared after she had once seen them, Richard and her brother, and knew it was all right, but she wanted to send them to Dora. But they waited till her hours were over, and she could come too. And such a long happy talk they had together in the evening!

The next morning, before they went down to breakfast, the two sisters stood at the window, looking across to the opposite houses.

A housemaid stood in the window there, with a whisk in her hand, and a duster over her arm. She was brushing away on the sill of the window-chairs and furniture pushed back, a rug hanging from the other window, where the blinds were wide open.

“What cobwebs she is brushing away!” said Elsie; “do you know I think there must be some electric light below that gave that strange light on the window, and made us fancy what we saw.”

“No, sister,” said Dora, taking Elsie by the arm. “Let me tell you — last night I could not sieep — naturally — but I could only think of her in all my joy — and late in the night I got up and went to the window again and pulled the curtain—”

“She was there again?” asked Elsie.

“She sat there so quietly, just as before,” answered Dora, “but presently she slowly turned — you know we have not seen her move before — and she looked across at me — and how the face changed l — all that anxious look gone — and a smile came — for she saw me, and she seemed ready to speak, and I thought she had something to say to me, and I did not want to lose her words — and I opened the window, as if I could hear what she would say, but when I put out my head there was dampness in the air, a rain was falling between, and all was darkness there l I left the window open a little that I might be sure it was no dream, and I had really stood here. And you know you spoke of the damp air in the morning.”

“Yes,” said Elsie, “and I knew I shut it the last thing — but do you know we were so happy that last night I forgot all about Aunt Dora.”

“I think she will not come again,” said Dora. “I think perhaps she only came to console me — perhaps her waiting is really over — she came only for me.”

“No,” she cannot come again,” exclaimed Elsie, “for see all those children trooping in — and a carriage at the door, and a new family come to the rooms. And there is the nursemaid — it is to be a nursery — with the gay clatter of children—”

Dora was called away by Richard’s voice, as Elsie went on: “No more room for thee, poor old ghost! Poor Aunt Dora!”

That was what I found her saying, and she told me the rest.

“Swinton’s Story-Teller”, 05 Dec. 1883

“THEY”

Rudyard Kipling

1904

THE RETURN
OF THE CHILDREN

Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs’ dove-winged races —

Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome;

Plucking the radiant robes of the passers by, and with pitiful faces

Begging what Princes and Powers refused: — “Ah, please will you let us go home?”

Over the jeweled floor, nigh weeping, ran to them Mary the Mother,

Kneeled and caressed and made promise with kisses, and drew them along to the gateway —

Yea, the all-iron unbribable Door which Peter must guard and none other.

Straightway She took the Keys from his keeping, and opened and freed them straightway

Then to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled, She said: “On the night that I bore Thee

What didst Thou care for a love beyond mine or a heaven that was not my arm?

Didst Thou push from the nipple, O Child, to hear the angels adore Thee?

When we two lay in the breath of the kine?” And He said: — “Thou hast done no harm.”

So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand in hand,

Looking neither to left nor right where the breathless Heavens stood still;

And the Guards of the Void re-sheathed their swords, for they heard the Command.

“Shall I that have suffered the children to come to me hold them against their will?”

One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping forward of a lever, I let the country flow under my wheels. The orchid-studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and gray grass of the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States, I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung gray Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple. Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little farther on I disturbed a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.

As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty miles across the low countries. I judged that the lie of the country would bring me across some westward running road that went to his feet, but I did not allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick turn plunged me first into a green cutting brimful of liquid sunshine, next into a gloomy tunnel where last year’s dead leaves whispered and scuffled about my tires. The strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a couple of generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered oak and beech to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a carpeted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked bluebells nodded together. As the slope favored I shut off the power and slid over the whirled leaves, expecting every moment to meet a keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off, arguing against the silence under the twilight of the trees.

Still the track descended. I was on the point of reversing and working my way back on the second speed ere I ended in some swamp, when I saw sunshine through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.

It was down again at once. As the light beat across my face my fore-wheels took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen ten feet high with leveled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek round-headed maids of honor — blue, black, and glistening — all of clipped yew. Across the lawn — the marshaled woods besieged it on three sides — stood an ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows and roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by semi-circular walls, also rose-red, that closed the lawn on the fourth side, and at their feet a box hedge grew man-high. There were doves on the roof about the slim brick chimneys, and I caught a glimpse of an octagonal dove-house behind the screening wall.

Here, then, I stayed; a horseman’s green spear laid at my breast; held by the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that setting.

“If I am not packed off for a trespasser, or if this knight does not ride a wallop at me,” thought I, “Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at least must come out of that half-open garden door and ask me to tea.”

A child appeared at an upper window, and I thought the little thing waved a friendly hand. But it was to call a companion, for presently another bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among the yew-peacocks, and turning to make sure (till then I had been watching the house only) I saw the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun. The doves on the roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes I caught the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief.

The garden door — heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall — opened further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time-hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.

“I heard you,” she said. “Isn’t that a motor car?”

“I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake in my road. I should have turned off up above — I never dreamed” — I began.

“But I’m very glad. Fancy a motor car coming into the garden! It will be such a treat—” She turned and made as though looking about her. “You — you haven’t seen anyone have you — perhaps?”

“No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance.”

“Which?”

“I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little chap in the grounds.”

“Oh, lucky you!” she cried, and her face brightened. “I hear them, of course, but that’s all. You’ve seen them and heard them?”

“Yes,” I answered. “And if I know anything of children one of them’s having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should imagine.”

“You’re fond of children?”

I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.

“Of course, of course,” she said. “Then you understand. Then you won’t think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once or twice — quite slowly. I’m sure they’d like to see it. They see so little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but—” she threw out her hands towards the woods. “We’re so out of the world here.”

“That will be splendid,” I said. “But I can’t cut up your grass.”

She faced to the right. “Wait a minute,” she said. “We’re at the South gate, aren’t we? Behind those peacocks there’s a flagged path. We call it the Peacock’s Walk. You can’t see it from here, they tell me, but if you squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock and get on to the flags.”

It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin lay like one star-sapphire.

“May I come too?” she cried. “No, please don’t help me. They’ll like it better if they see me.”

She felt her way lightly to the front of the car, and with one foot on the step she called: “Children, oh, children! Look and see what’s going to happen!”

The voice would have drawn lost souls from the Pit, for the yearning that underlay its sweetness, and I was not surprised to hear an answering shout behind the yews. It must have been the child by the fountain, but he fled at our approach, leaving a little toy boat in the water. I saw the glint of his blue blouse among the still horsemen.

Very disposedly we paraded the length of the walk and at her request backed again. This time the child had got the better of his panic, but stood far off and doubting.

“The little fellow’s watching us,” I said. “I wonder if he’d like a ride.”

“They’re very shy still. Very shy. But, oh, lucky you to be able to see them! Let’s listen.”

I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the doves.

“Oh, unkind!” she said wearily.

“Perhaps they’re only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window looks tremendously interested.”

“Yes?” She raised her head. “It was wrong of me to say that. They are really fond of me. It’s the only thing that makes life worth living — when they’re fond of you, isn’t it? I daren’t think what the place would be without them. By the way, is it beautiful?”

“I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen.”

“So they all tell me. I can feel it, of course, but that isn’t quite the same thing.”

“Then have you never — -?” I began, but stopped abashed.

“Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old, they tell me. And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream about colors. I see light in my dreams, and colors, but I never see them. I only hear them just as I do when I’m awake.”

“It’s difficult to see faces in dreams. Some people can, but most of us haven’t the gift,” I went on, looking up at the window where the child stood all but hidden.

“I’ve heard that too,” she said. “And they tell me that one never sees a dead person’s face in a dream. Is that true?”

“I believe it is — now I come to think of it.”

“But how is it with yourself — yourself?” The blind eyes turned towards me.

“I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream,” I answered.

“Then it must be as bad as being blind.”

The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of a glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The house, accepting another day at end, as it had accepted an hundred thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.

“Have you ever wanted to?” she said after the silence.

“Very much sometimes,” I replied. The child had left the window as the shadows closed upon it.

“Ah! So’ve I, but I don’t suppose it’s allowed. … Where d’you live?”

“Quite the other side of the county — sixty miles and more, and I must be going back. I’ve come without my big lamp.”

“But it’s not dark yet. I can feel it.”

“I’m afraid it will be by the time I get home. Could you lend me someone to set me on my road at first? I’ve utterly lost myself.”

“I’ll send Madden with you to the cross-roads. We are so out of the world, I don’t wonder you were lost! I’ll guide you round to the front of the house; but you will go slowly, won’t you, till you’re out of the grounds? It isn’t foolish, do you think?”

“I promise you I’ll go like this,” I said, and let the car start herself down the flagged path.

We skirted the left wing of the house, whose elaborately cast lead guttering alone was worth a day’s journey; passed under a great rose-grown gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front of the house which in beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that all others I had seen.

“Is it so very beautiful?” she said wistfully when she heard my raptures. “And you like the lead-figures too? There’s the old azalea garden behind. They say that this place must have been made for children. Will you help me out, please? I should like to come with you as far as the cross-roads, but I mustn’t leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to show this gentleman the way to the cross-roads. He has lost his way but — he has seen them.”

A butler appeared noiselessly at the miracle of old oak that must be called the front door, and slipped aside to put on his hat. She stood looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the first time that she was beautiful.

“Remember,” she said quietly, “if you are fond of them you will come again,” and disappeared within the house.

The butler in the car said nothing till we were nearly at the lodge gates, where catching a glimpse of a blue blouse in a shrubbery I swerved amply lest the devil that leads little boys to play should drag me into child-murder.

“Excuse me,” he asked of a sudden, “but why did you do that, Sir?”

“The child yonder.”

“Our young gentleman in blue?”

“Of course.”

“He runs about a good deal. Did you see him by the fountain, Sir?”

“Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn here?”

“Yes, Sir. And did you ’appen to see them upstairs too?”

“At the upper window? Yes.”

“Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, Sir?”

“A little before that. Why d’you want to know?”

He paused a little. “Only to make sure that — that they had seen the car, Sir, because with children running about, though I’m sure you’re driving particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, Sir. Here are the cross-roads. You can’t miss your way from now on. Thank you, Sir, but that isn’t our custom, not with—”

“I beg your pardon,” I said, and thrust away the British silver.

“Oh, it’s quite right with the rest of ’em as a rule. Goodbye, Sir.”

He retired into the Armour-plated conning tower of his caste and walked away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honor of his house, and interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.

Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with motor cars had small right to live — much less to “go about talking like carriage folk.” They were not a pleasant-mannered community.

When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser. Hawkin’s Old Farm appeared to be the survey title of the place, and the old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my difficulty to a neighbor — a deep-rooted tree of that soil — and he gave me a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.

A month or so later — I went again, or it may have been that my car took the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the high-walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the cross roads where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed an internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the sun and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that wood which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit, spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the children would not be far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though the birds had mated) that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a sudden noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: “Children, oh children, where are you?” and the stillness made slow to close on the perfection of that cry. She came towards me, half feeling her way between the tree boles, and though a child it seemed clung to her skirt, it swerved into the leafage like a rabbit as she drew nearer.

“Is that you?” she said, “from the other side of the county?”

“Yes, it’s me from the other side of the county.”

“Then why didn’t you come through the upper woods? They were there just now.”

“They were here a few minutes ago. I expect they knew my car had broken down, and came to see the fun.”

“Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?”

“In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first.”

She laughed merrily at the tiny joke, cooed with delicious laughter, and pushed her hat back.

“Let me hear,” she said.

“Wait a moment,” I cried, “and I’ll get you a cushion.”

She set her foot on the rug all covered with spare parts, and stooped above it eagerly. “What delightful things!” The hands through which she saw glanced in the chequered sunlight. “A box here — another box! Why you’ve arranged them like playing shop!”

“I confess now that I put it out to attract them. I don’t need half those things really.”

“How nice of you! I heard your bell in the upper wood. You say they were here before that?”

“I’m sure of it. Why are they so shy? That little fellow in blue who was with you just now ought to have got over his fright. He’s been watching me like a Red Indian.”

“It must have been your bell,” she said. “I heard one of them go past me in trouble when I was coming down. They’re shy — so shy even with me.” She turned her face over her shoulder and cried again: “Children! Oh, children! Look and see!”

“They must have gone off together on their own affairs,” I suggested, for there was a murmur behind us of lowered voices broken by the sudden squeaking giggles of childhood. I returned to my tinkerings and she leaned forward, her chin on her hand, listening interestedly.

“How many are they?” I said at last. The work was finished, but I saw no reason to go.

Her forehead puckered a little in thought. “I don’t quite know,” she said simply. “Sometimes more — sometimes less. They come and stay with me because I love them, you see.”

“That must be very jolly,” I said, replacing a drawer, and as I spoke I heard the inanity of my answer.

“You — you aren’t laughing at me,” she cried. “I — I haven’t any of my own. I never married. People laugh at me sometimes about them because — because—”

“Because they’re savages,” I returned. “It’s nothing to fret for. That sort laugh at everything that isn’t in their own fat lives.”

“I don’t know. How should I? I only don’t like being laughed at about them. It hurts; and when one can’t see…. I don’t want to seem silly,” her chin quivered like a child’s as she spoke, “but we blindies have only one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It’s different with you. You’ve such good defenses in your eyes — looking out — before anyone can really pain you in your soul. People forget that with us.”

I was silent reviewing that inexhaustible matter — the more than inherited (since it is also carefully taught) brutality of the Christian peoples, beside which the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger is clean and restrained. It led me a long distance into myself.

“Don’t do that!” she said of a sudden, putting her hands before her eyes.

“What?”

She made a gesture with her hand.

“That! It’s — it’s all purple and black. Don’t! That color hurts.”

“But, how in the world do you know about colors?” I exclaimed, for here was a revelation indeed.

“Colors as colors?” she asked.

“No. Those Colors which you saw just now.”

“You know as well as I do,” she laughed, “else you wouldn’t have asked that question. They aren’t in the world at all. They’re in you — when you went so angry.”

“D’you mean a dull purplish patch, like port-wine mixed with ink?” I said.

“I’ve never seen ink or port-wine, but the colors aren’t mixed. They are separate — all separate.”

“Do you mean black streaks and jags across the purple?”

She nodded. “Yes — if they are like this,” and zigzagged her finger again, “but it’s more red than purple — that bad color.”

“And what are the colors at the top of the — whatever you see?”

Slowly she leaned forward and traced on the rug the figure of the Egg itself.

“I see them so,” she said, pointing with a grass stem, “white, green, yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the red — as you were just now.”

“Who told you anything about it — in the beginning?” I demanded.

“About the colors? No one. I used to ask what colors were when I was little — in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see — because some colors hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got older that was how I saw people.” Again she traced the outline of the Egg which it is given to very few of us to see.

“All by yourself?” I repeated.

“All by myself. There wasn’t anyone else. I only found out afterwards that other people did not see the Colors.”

She leaned against the tree-hole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.

“Now I am sure you will never laugh at me,” she went on after a long silence. “Nor at them.”

“Goodness! No!” I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. “A man who laughs at a child — unless the child is laughing too — is a heathen!”

“I didn’t mean that of course. You’d never laugh at children, but I thought — I used to think — that perhaps you might laugh about them. So now I beg your pardon…. What are you going to laugh at?”

I had made no sound, but she knew.

“At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was disgraceful of me — inexcusable.”

She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk — long and steadfastly — this woman who could see the naked soul.

“How curious,” she half whispered. “How very curious.”

“Why, what have I done?”

“You don’t understand … and yet you understood about the Colors. Don’t you understand?”

She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller, and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips. They, too, had some child’s tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly astray there in the broad sunlight.

“No,” I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note. “Whatever it is, I don’t understand yet. Perhaps I shall later — if you’ll let me come again.”

“You will come again,” she answered. “You will surely come again and walk in the wood.”

“Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play with them — as a favor. You know what children are like.”

“It isn’t a matter of favor but of right,” she replied, and while I wondered what she meant, a disheveled woman plunged round the bend of the road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped forward. “What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?” she asked.

The woman flung her apron over her head and literally grovelled in the dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits end, and so forth, with repetitions and bellowings.

“Where’s the next nearest doctor?” I asked between paroxysms.

“Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I’ll attend to this. Be quick!” She half-supported the fat woman into the shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the front of the House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the crisis like a butler and a man.

A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away. Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the verdict.

“Useful things cars,” said Madden, all man and no butler. “If I’d had one when mine took sick she wouldn’t have died.”

“How was it?” I asked.

“Croup. Mrs. Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight miles in a tax cart for the doctor. She was choked when we came back. This car ’d ha’ saved her. She’d have been close on ten now.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were rather fond of children from what you told me going to the cross-roads the other day.”

“Have you seen ’em again, Sir — this mornin’?”

“Yes, but they’re well broke to cars. I couldn’t get any of them within twenty yards of it.”

He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger — not as a menial should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.

“I wonder why,” he said just above the breath that he drew.

We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses, whitened already with summer dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.

A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the sweetmeat shop.

“I’ve be’n listenin’ in de back-yard,” she said cheerily. “He says Arthur’s unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck just now? Unaccountable bad. I reckon t’will come Jenny’s turn to walk in de wood nex’ week along, Mr. Madden.”

“Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is slipping,” said Madden deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.

“What does she mean by ‘walking in the wood’?” I asked.

“It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I’m from Norfolk myself,” said Madden. “They’re an independent lot in this county. She took you for a chauffeur, Sir.”

I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with Death. “Dat sort,” she wailed — “dey’re just as much to us dat has ’em as if dey was lawful born. Just as much — just as much! An’ God he’d be just as pleased if you saved ’un, Doctor. Don’t take it from me. Miss Florence will tell ye de very same. Don’t leave ’im, Doctor!”

“I know. I know,” said the man, “but he’ll be quiet for a while now. We’ll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as we can.” He signaled me to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what followed; but I saw the girl’s face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.

The Doctor was a man of some humor, for I remember he claimed my car under the Oath of Aesculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick bed till the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis), and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great houses — magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois — all hostile to motors — gave the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short cuts of the Doctor’s invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle; round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented, gray-painted corridors of the County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.

I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the wild rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear from the south-west, that brought the hills within hand’s reach — a day of unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across copper-colored haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first day sample of autumn leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the brick-fields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill gray. We were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my lips.

Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers — mallow of the wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden — showed gay in the mist, and beyond the sea’s breath there was little sign of decay in the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare-legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout “pip-pip” at the stranger.

I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me with a fat woman’s hospitable tears. Jenny’s child, she said, had died two days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow, would not willingly insure such stray lives. “Not but what Jenny didn’t tend to Arthur as though he’d come all proper at de end of de first year — like Jenny herself.” Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst’s opinion, more than covered the small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and without, the glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.

“But how’s the mother?” I asked.

“Jenny? Oh, she’ll get over it. I’ve felt dat way with one or two o’ my own. She’ll get over. She’s walkin’ in de wood now.”

“In this weather?”

Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.

“I dunno but it opens de ’eart like. Yes, it opens de ’eart. Dat’s where losin’ and bearin’ comes so alike in de long run, we do say.”

Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers, and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road, that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the lodge gates of the House Beautiful.

“Awful weather!” I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.

“Not so bad,” she answered placidly out of the fog. “Mine’s used to ’un. You’ll find yours indoors, I reckon.”

Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind inquiries for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.

I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed with a delicious wood fire — a place of good influence and great peace. (Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the truth of those who have lived in it.) A child’s cart and a doll lay on the black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the children had only just hurried away — to hide themselves, most like — in the many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing — from the soul:

In the pleasant orchard-closes.

And all my early summer came back at the call.

In the pleasant orchard-closes,

God bless all our gains say we —

But may God bless all our losses,

Better suits with our degree,

She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated —

Better suits with our degree!

I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against the oak.

“Is that you — from the other side of the county?” she called.

“Yes, me — from the other side of the county,” I answered laughing.

“What a long time before you had to come here again.” She ran down the stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. “It’s two months and four days. Summer’s gone!”

“I meant to come before, but Fate prevented.”

“I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won’t let me play with it, but I can feel it’s behaving badly. Hit it!”

I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.

“It never goes out, day or night,” she said, as though explaining. “In case anyone comes in with cold toes, you see.”

“It’s even lovelier inside than it was out,” I murmured. The red light poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses and lions of the gallery took color and motion. An old eagle-topped convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad window I could see valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves. “Yes, it must be beautiful,” she said. “Would you like to go over it? There’s still light enough upstairs.”

I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.

“Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children.” She swung a light door inward.

“By the way, where are they?” I asked. “I haven’t even heard them today.”

She did not answer at once. Then, “I can only hear them,” she replied softly. “This is one of their rooms — everything ready, you see.”

She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate tables and children’s chairs. A doll’s house, its hooked front half open, faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a child’s scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.

“Surely they’ve only just gone,” I whispered. In the failing light a door creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet — quick feet through a room beyond.

“I heard that,” she cried triumphantly. “Did you? Children, O children, where are you?”

The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note, but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There were bolt-holes innumerable — recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or twice had seen the silhouette of a child’s frock against some darkening window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.

“No, I haven’t seen her either this evening, Miss Florence,” I heard her say, “but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed.”

“Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the hall, Mrs. Madden.”

I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind an old gilt leather screen. By child’s law, my fruitless chase was as good as an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an outline.

“And now we’ll have some tea,” she said. “I believe I ought to have offered it you at first, but one doesn’t arrive at manners somehow when one lives alone and is considered — h’m — peculiar.” Then with very pretty scorn, “would you like a lamp to see to eat by?”

“The firelight’s much pleasanter, I think.” We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden brought tea.

I took my chair in the direction of the screen ready to surprise or be surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.

“Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?” I asked idly. “Why, they are tallies!”

“Of course,” she said. “As I can’t read or write I’m driven back on the early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I’ll tell you what it meant.”

I passed her an unburned hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her thumb down the nicks.

“This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last year, in gallons,” said she. “I don’t know what I should have done without tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It’s out of date now for everyone else; but my tenants respect it. One of them’s coming now to see me. Oh, it doesn’t matter. He has no business here out of office hours. He’s a greedy, ignorant man — very greedy or — he wouldn’t come here after dark.”

“Have you much land then?”

“Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this Turpin is quite a new man — and a highway robber.”

“But are you sure I sha’n’t be — ?”

“Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn’t any children.”

“Ah, the children!” I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly touched the screen that hid them. “I wonder whether they’ll come out for me.”

There was a murmur of voices — Madden’s and a deeper note — at the low, dark side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.

“Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin,” she said.

“If — if you please, Miss, I’ll — I’ll be quite as well by the door.” He clung to the latch as he spoke like a frightened child. Of a sudden I realized that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.

“Well?”

“About that new shed for the young stock — that was all. These first autumn storms settin’ in … but I’ll come again, Miss.” His teeth did not chatter much more than the door latch.

“I think not,” she answered levelly. “The new shed — m’m. What did my agent write you on the 15th?”

“I — fancied p’raps that if I came to see you — ma — man to man like, Miss. But—”

His eyes rolled into every corner of the room wide with horror. He half opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again — from without and firmly.

“He wrote what I told him,” she went on. “You are overstocked already. Dunnett’s Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks — even in Mr. Wright’s time. And he used cake. You’ve sixty-seven and you don’t cake. You’ve broken the lease in that respect. You’re dragging the heart out of the farm.”

“I’m — I’m getting some minerals — superphosphates — next week. I’ve as good as ordered a truck-load already. I’ll go down to the station tomorrow about ’em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the daylight…. That gentleman’s not going away, is he?” He almost shrieked.

I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.

“No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin.” She turned in her chair and faced him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of scheming that she forced from him — his plea for the new cowshed at his landlady’s expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next year’s rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that ran wet on his forehead.

I ceased to tap the leather — was, indeed, calculating the cost of the shed — when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers….

The little brushing kiss fell in the center of my palm — as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half-reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when grown-ups were busiest — a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.

Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window.

I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that she knew.

What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in the chair very close to the screen.

“Now you understand,” she whispered, across the packed shadows.

“Yes, I understand — now. Thank you.”

“I — I only hear them.” She bowed her head in her hands. “I have no right, you know — no other right. I have neither borne nor lost — neither borne nor lost!”

“Be very glad then,” said I, for my soul was torn open within me.

“Forgive me!”

She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.

“It was because I loved them so,” she said at last, brokenly. “That was why it was, even from the first — even before I knew that they — they were all I should ever have. And I loved them so!”

She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadow.

“They came because I loved them — because I needed them. I — I must have made them come. Was that wrong, think you?”

“No — no.”

“I — I grant you that the toys and — and all that sort of thing were nonsense, but — but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was little.” She pointed to the gallery. “And the passages all empty. … And how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose—”

“Don’t! For pity’s sake, don’t!” I cried. The twilight had brought a cold rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.

“And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. I don’t think it so foolish — do you?”

I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.

“I did all that and lots of other things — just to make believe. Then they came. I heard them, but I didn’t know that they were not mine by right till Mrs. Madden told me—”

“The butler’s wife? What?”

“One of them — I heard — she saw. And knew. Hers! Not for me. I didn’t know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand that it was only because I loved them, not because — … Oh, you must bear or lose,” she said piteously. “There is no other way — and yet they love me. They must! Don’t they?”

There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the screen.

“Don’t think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but — but I’m all in the dark, you know, and you can see.”

In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I would stay since it was the last time.

“You think it is wrong, then?” she cried sharply, though I had said nothing.

“Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right…. I am grateful to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only….”

“Why?” she said, but passed her hand before her face as she had done at our second meeting in the wood. “Oh, I see,” she went on simply as a child. “For you it would be wrong.” Then with a little indrawn laugh, “and, d’you remember, I called you lucky — once — at first. You who must never come here again!”

She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of her feet die out along the gallery above.

“Scribner’s Magazine”, Aug. 1904

THE FURNISHED ROOM

O. Henry

1904

Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever — transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing “Home, Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.

Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests.

One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths.

To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.

He asked if there was a room to let.

“Come in,” said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her throat seemed lined with fur. “I have the third floor back, vacant since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?”

The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.

“This is the room,” said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. “It’s a nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last summer — no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The water’s at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B’retta Sprowls — you may have heard of her — Oh, that was just the stage names — right there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It’s a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long.”

“Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?” asked the young man.

“They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the theaters. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes.”

He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.

“A young girl — Miss Vashner — Miss Eloise Vashner — do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow.”

“No, I don’t remember the name. Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don’t call that one to mind.”

No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theaters from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of today buried tomorrow in ooze and slime.

The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.

The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry.

A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house — The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port — a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.

One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name “Marie.” It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury — perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness — and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.

The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house — a dank savor rather than a smell — a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.

Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odor of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud: “What, dear?” as if he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odor clung to him and wrapped him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be peremptorily called by an odor? Surely it must have been a sound. But, was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?

“She has been in this room,” he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of mignonette, the odor that she had loved and made her own — whence came it?

The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins — those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theater programme, a pawnbroker’s card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of dreams. In the last was a woman’s black satin hair bow, which halted him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hair-bow also is femininity’s demure, impersonal, common ornament, and tells no tales.

And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he answered loudly: “Yes, dear!” and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and color and love and outstretched arms in the odor of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that odor, and since when have odors had a voice to call? Thus he groped.

He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes. These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no trace.

And then he thought of the housekeeper.

He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as best he could.

“Will you tell me, madam,” he besought her, “who occupied the room I have before I came?”

“Yes, sir. I can tell you again. ’Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss B’retta Sprowls it was in the theaters, but Missis Mooney she was. My house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over—”

“What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls — in looks, I mean?”

“Why, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They left a week ago Tuesday.”

“And before they occupied it?”

“Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember.”

He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odor of moldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.

The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself gratefully upon the bed.

It was Mrs. McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where house-keepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.

“I rented out my third floor, back, this evening,” said Mrs. Purdy, across a fine circle of foam. “A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours ago.”

“Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am?” said Mrs. McCool, with intense admiration. “You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him, then?” she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.

“Rooms,” said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, “are furnished for to rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.”

“’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin’ of a room if they be told a suicide has been after dyin’ in the bed of it.”

“As you say, we has our living to be making,” remarked Mrs. Purdy.

“Yis, ma’am; ’tis true. ’Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay out the third floor, back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin’ herself wid the gas — a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am.”

“She’d a-been called handsome, as you say,” said Mrs. Purdy, assenting but critical, “but for that mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.”

“The (NY) Sunday World” 14 Aug. 1904

ONLY A DREAM…

RIDER HAGGARD

1905

Footprints – footprints – the footprints of one dead. How ghastly they look as they fall before me! Up and down the long hall they go, and I follow them. Pit, pat they fall, those unearthly steps, and beneath them starts up that awful impress. I can see it grow upon the marble, a damp and dreadful thing.

Tread them down; tread them out; follow after them with muddy shoes, and cover them up. In vain. See how they rise through the mire! Who can tread out the footprints of the dead?

And so on, up and down the dim vista of the past, following the sound of the dead feet that wander so restlessly, stamping upon the impress that will not be stamped out. Rave on, wild wind, eternal voice of human misery; fall, dead footsteps, eternal echo of human memory; stamp, miry feet; stamp into forgetfulness that which will not be forgotten.

And so on, on to the end.

Pretty ideas these for a man about to be married, especially when they float into his brain at night like ominous clouds into a summer sky, and he is going to be married tomorrow. There is no mistake about it – the wedding, I mean. To be plain and matter-of-fact, why there stand the presents, or some of them, and very handsome presents they are, ranged in solemn rows upon the long table. It is a remarkable thing to observe when one is about to make a really satisfactory marriage how scores of unsuspected or forgotten friends crop up and send little tokens of their esteem. It was very different when I married my first wife, I remember, but then that marriage was not satisfactory – just a love-match, no more.

There they stand in solemn rows, as I have said, and inspire me with beautiful thoughts about the innate kindness of human nature, especially the human nature of our distant cousins. It is possible to grow almost poetical over a silver teapot when one is going to be married tomorrow. On how many future mornings shall I be confronted with that teapot? Probably for all my life; and on the other side of the teapot will be the cream jug, and the electroplated urn will hiss away behind them both. Also, the chased sugar basin will be in front, full of sugar, and behind everything will be my second wife.

“My dear,” she will say, “will you have another cup of tea?” and probably I shall have another cup.

Well, it is very curious to notice what ideas will come into a man’s head sometimes. Sometimes something waves a magic wand over his being, and from the recesses of his soul dim things arise and walk. At unexpected moments they come, and he grows aware of the issues of his mysterious life, and his heart shakes and shivers like a lightning-shattered tree. In that drear light all earthly things seem far, and all unseen things draw near and take shape and awe him, and he knows not what is true and what is false, neither can he trace the edge that marks off the Spirit from the Life. Then it is that the footsteps echo, and the ghostly footprints will not be stamped out.

Pretty thoughts again! and how persistently they come! It is one o’clock and I will go to bed. The rain is falling in sheets outside. I can hear it lashing against the window panes, and the wind wails through the tall wet elms at the end of the garden. I could tell the voice of those elms anywhere; I know it as well as the voice of a friend. What a night it is; we sometimes get them in this part of England in October. It was just such a night when my first wife died, and that is three years ago. I remember how she sat up in her bed.

“Ah! those horrible elms,” she said; “I wish you would have them cut down, Frank; they cry like a woman,” and I said I would and just after that she died, poor dear. And so the old elms stand, and I like their music. It is a strange thing; I was half broken-hearted, for I loved her dearly, and she loved me with all her life and strength, and now – I am going to be married again.

“Frank, Frank, don’t forget me!” Those were my wife’s last words; and, indeed, though I am going to be married again tomorrow, I have not forgotten her. Nor shall I forget how Annie Guthrie (whom I am going to marry now) came to see her the day before she died. I know that Annie always liked me more or less, and I think that my dear wife guessed it. After she had kissed Annie and bid her a last goodbye, and the door had closed, she spoke quite suddenly: “There goes your future wife, Frank,” she said; “You should have married her at first instead of me; she is very handsome and very good, and she has two thousand a year; she would never have died of a nervous illness.” And she laughed a little, and then added:

“Oh, Frank dear, I wonder if you will think of me before you marry Annie Guthrie. Wherever I am I shall be thinking of you.”

And now that time which she foresaw has come, and Heaven knows that I have thought of her, poor dear. Ah! those footsteps of one dead that will echo through our lives, those woman’s footprints on the marble flooring which will not be stamped out. Most of us have heard and seen them at some time or other, and I hear and see them very plainly tonight. Poor dead wife, I wonder if there are any doors in the land where you have gone through which you can creep out to look at me tonight? I hope that there are none. Death must indeed be a hell if the dead can see and feel and take measure of the forgetful faithlessness of their beloved. Well, I will go to bed and try to get a little rest. I am not so young or so strong as I was, and this wedding wears me out. I wish that the whole thing were done or had never been begun.

What was that? It was not the wind, for it never makes that sound here, and it was not the rain, since the rain has ceased its surging for a moment; nor was it the howling of a dog, for I keep none. It was more like the crying of a woman’s voice; but what woman can be abroad on such a night or at such an hour – half-past one in the morning?

There it is again – a dreadful sound; it makes the blood turn chill, and yet has something familiar about it. It is a woman’s voice calling round the house. There, she is at the window now, and rattling it, and, great heavens! she is calling me.

“Frank! Frank! Frank!” she calls.

I strive to stir and unshutter that window, but before I can get there she is knocking and calling at another.

Gone again, with her dreadful wail of “Frank! Frank!” Now I hear her at the front door, and, half mad with a horrible fear, I run down the long, dark hall and unbar it. There is nothing there – nothing but the wild rush of the wind and the drip of the rain from the portico. But I can hear the wailing voice going round the house, past the patch of shrubbery. I close the door and listen. There, she has got through the little yard, and is at the back door now. Whoever it is, she must know the way about the house. Along the hall I go again, through a swing door, through the servants’ hall, stumbling down some steps into the kitchen, where the embers of the fire are still alive in the grate, diffusing a little warmth and light into the dense gloom.

Whoever it is at the door is knocking now with her clenched hand against the hard wood, and it is wonderful, though she knocks so low, how the sound echoes through the empty kitchen.

There I stood and hesitated, trembling in every limb; I dared not open the door. No words of mine can convey the sense of utter desolation that overpowered me. I felt as though I were the only living man in the whole world.

“Frank! Frank!” cried the voice with the dreadful familiar ring in it. “Open the door; I am so cold. I have so little time.”

My heart stood still, and yet my hands were constrained to obey. Slowly, slowly I lifted the latch and unbarred the door, and, as I did so, a great rush of air snatched it from my hands and swept it wide. The black clouds had broken a little overhead, and there was a patch of blue, rain-washed sky and with just a start or two glimmering in it fitfully. For a moment I could only see this bit of sky, but by degrees I made out the accustomed outline of the great trees swinging furiously against it, and the rigid line of the coping of the garden wall beneath them. Then a whirling leaf hit me smartly on the face, and instinctively I dropped my eyes on to something that as yet I could not distinguish – something small and black and wet.

“What are you?” I gasped. Somehow I seemed to feel that it was not a person – I could not say, Who are you?

“Don’t you know me?” wailed the voice, with the far-off familiar ring about it. “And I mayn’t come in and show myself. I haven’t the time. You were so long opening the door, Frank, and I am so cold – oh, so bitterly cold! Look there, the moon is coming out, and you will be able to see me. I suppose that you long to see me, as I have longed to see you.”

As the figure spoke, or rather wailed, a moonbeam struggled through the watery air and fell on it. It was short and shrunken, the figure of a tiny woman. Also it was dressed in black and wore a black covering over the whole head, shrouding it, after the fashion of a bridal veil. From every part of this veil and dress the water fell in heavy drops.

The figure bore a small basket on her left arm, and her hand – such a poor thin little hand – gleamed white in the moonlight. I noticed that on the third finger was a red line, showing that a wedding-ring had once been there. The other hand was stretched towards me as though in entreaty.

All this I saw in an instant, as it were, and as I saw it, horror seemed to grip me by the throat as though it were a living thing, for as the voice had been familiar, so was the form familiar, though the churchyard had received it long years ago. I could not speak – I could not even move.

“Oh, don’t you know me yet?” wailed the voice; “and I have come from so far to see you, and I cannot stop. Look, look,” and she began to pluck feverishly with her poor thin hand at the black veil that enshrouded her. At last it came off, and, as in a dream, I saw what in a dim frozen way I had expected to see – the white face and pale yellow hair of my dead wife. Unable to speak or to stir, I gazed and gazed. There was no mistake about it, it was she, ay, even as I had last seen her, white with the whiteness of death, with purple circles round her eyes and the grave-cloth yet beneath her chin. Only her eyes were wide open and fixed upon my face; and a lock of the soft yellow hair had broken loose, and the wind tossed it.

“You know me now, Frank – don’t you, Frank? It has been so hard to come to see you, and so cold! But you are going to be married tomorrow, Frank; and I promised – oh, a long time ago – to think of you when you were going to be married wherever I was, and I have kept my promise, and I have come from whence I am and brought a present with me. It was bitter to die so young! I was so young to die and leave you, but I had to go. Take it – take it; be quick, I cannot stay any longer. I could not give you my life, Frank, so I brought you my death – take it!”

The figure thrust the basket into my hand, and as it did so the rain came up again, and began to obscure the moonlight.

“I must go, I must go,” went on the dreadful, familiar voice, in a cry of despair. “Oh, why were you so long opening the door? I wanted to talk to you before you married Annie; and now I shall never see you again – never! never! never! I have lost you for ever! ever! ever!”

As the last wailing notes died away the wind came down with a rush and a whirl and the sweep as of a thousand wings, and threw me back into the house, bringing the door to with a crash after me.

I staggered into the kitchen, the basket in my hand, and set it on the table. Just then some embers of the fire fell in, and a faint little flame rose and glimmered on the bright dishes on the dresser, even revealing a tin candlestick, with a box of matches by it. I was well-nigh mad with the darkness and fear, and, seizing the matches, I struck one, and held it to the candle. Presently it caught, and I glanced round the room. It was just as usual, just as the servants had left it, and above the mantelpiece the eight-day clock ticked away solemnly. While I looked at it it struck two, and in a dim fashion I was thankful for its friendly sound.

Then I looked at the basket. It was of very fine white plaited work with black bands running up it, and a chequered black-and-white handle. I knew it well. I have never seen another like it. I bought it years ago at Madeira, and gave it to my poor wife. Ultimately it was washed overboard in a gale in the Irish Channel. I remember that it was full of newspapers and library books, and I had to pay for them. Many and many is the time that I have seen that identical basket standing there on that very kitchen table, for my dear wife always used it to put flowers in, and the shortest cut from that part of the garden where her roses grew was through the kitchen. She used to gather the flowers, and then come in and place her basket on the table, just where it stood now, and order the dinner.

All this passed through my mind in a few seconds as I stood there with the candle in my hand, feeling indeed half dead, and yet with my mind painfully alive, I began to wonder if I had gone asleep, and was the victim of a nightmare. No such thing. I wish it had only been a nightmare. A mouse ran out along the dresser and jumped on to the floor, making quite a crash in the silence.

What was in the basket? I feared to look, and yet some power within me forced me to it. I drew near to the table and stood for a moment listening to the sound of my own heart. Then I stretched out my hand and slowly raised the lid of the basket.

“I could not give you my life, so I have brought you my death!” Those were her words. What could she mean – what could it all mean? I must know or I should go mad. There it lay, whatever it was, wrapped up in linen.

Ah, heaven help me! It was a small bleached human skull!

A dream! After all, only a dream by the fire, but what a dream. And I am to be married tomorrow.

Can I be married tomorrow?

“Harry Furniss’s Christmas Annual” 1905, as “A Wedding Gift”

THE HOUSE THAT WAS LOST

Tom Gallon

1908

The events I set down here occurred some three years ago, and I write of them now with as much wonderment as I regarded them then. Let me say at the outset that I have puzzled and puzzled over the mystery, and have arrived at no actual solution of it, nor do I know whether any solution will ever be arrived at, or whether, even if such is the case, I shall ever hear of it.

I am a commercial clerk, earning a small salary sufficient to keep my wife and two children and myself in modest comfort. My name is Paul Jenner, and I live at No. — , Drawbridge Crescent, — . Well, never mind the precise locality. I give you these particulars in order that you may understand that I am a very ordinary and commonplace person, not given to romancing. I want you to understand that I am setting down in bald and simple language what actually happened to me on a certain night in January three years ago.

It was on a Saturday night, and I had, as usual, come home on that day from the City early in the afternoon. It had been a black and foggy day, and I remember that the gas had been lighted in the streets and in the office where I worked from early morning. The fog was very bad at the time I returned home, and I congratulated myself on the fact that I had not to go out again that night. I sat with my wife and the two children in our little sitting-room all the evening, with that comfortable feeling that I was my own master until Monday morning, and that I need trouble about nothing outside the house. In due course the children went to bed, and then it was Mary reminded me of a letter that must be written and posted that night. Sufficient is it for me to say that the letter was to an elderly relative of some means who lived in the country, and who had taken great interest in the children. My wife (prudent woman) remembered that the following day was the birthday of this relative, and that she should receive proper greeting by the Sunday morning post in the country town in which she lived.

Frankly, I did not want the bother of it, but Mary always knows best in these matters, and so I wrote my note and sealed it up. Let me add here that I had read nothing exciting during the evening — nothing to stir my imagination in any way.

I stamped the letter and proceeded to the front door. Judge of my astonishment when, on throwing it open, I saw nothing but the gray wall of fog coming up to the very house; even the railings, not ten yards in front of our little house, were blotted out completely, I called softly back into the house to my wife to come and look.

“Don’t lose yourself, Paul,” she said, half laughing. “What a terrible night!”

“I shan’t lose myself” I replied, laughing in turn. “The pillar-box is only at the end of the crescent, if I stick to the railings, I can’t possibly miss it. Don’t wait here,” I added solicitously. “I’ll leave the door ajar, so that I can slip in easily when I come back. I’ve left my keys on my writing desk.”

Mary went in, and I pulled the door close, and then stepped out boldly for the front gate. Imagine me standing there, just outside my own gate, and with my back to the crescent, knowing that I had to go to the left to find the pillar-box which was at the end of the crescent. There are nine houses, and mine is the third, so that I knew I had to pass six more before reaching the pillar-box. I knew also that the gate of each house had an ornamental center-piece standing up above it, and that I must touch six of those ornamental center-pieces before I stepped away from the crescent at the end to reach the pillar-box. That I knew would be something of an adventure, for the fog was the densest I have ever seen; I could only see the faint glow of the lamp in the center of the crescent above me when I came opposite to the lamp-post; the post itself was invisible.

I counted the six gates, and then stood at the end of the last line of railings. I knew that the pillar-box was exactly opposite me. I took three quick steps, and literally cannoned into it. I was a little proud of my own judgment in getting it so nicely. Then I fumbled for the mouth of it, and dropped in my letter.

All this may sound very commonplace and ordinary, but you shall hear what followed. I am an observant man, and I had noticed always that the mouth of the pillar-box faced directly along the crescent, thus standing at right angles to the road. At the moment that I had my right hand in that mouth, therefore, I argued that if I stood out at the stretch of my arm I must be facing the crescent; I had but to move straight forward again to touch the friendly railings. I was putting that plan into operation, and had let go of the mouth of the pillar-box, when a man, coming hurriedly round the corner, ran straight into me, muttered a gruff apology, and was lost in the fog again in a moment. And in that accidental collision he had spun me round and tossed me aside — and I was lost!

That is literally true. I took a step and found myself slipping off the curbstone into the road; stumbled back again, and strove to find my way along by sticking to the edge of the pavement. After a minute or two I was so sure of myself that I ventured to cross the pavement, and by great good luck touched in a moment one of those ornamental center-pieces of one of the gates — or so, at least, it seemed. I went on with renewed confidence until I saw certain bushes which topped the railings of one particular house, and then I knew that the next house must be mine. I pushed open the gate with confidence, stepped quickly up the little path, and reached the door. I was right; the door yielded to my touch, and I went hurriedly in.

I had taken off my hat, and had held it towards the familiar hat-stand before I realized that it was not a familiar hat-stand at all; it was one I did not know. I looked round in some confusion, meaning to make good my escape without being observed, and yet wondering into what house I could have come so near my own, when I stopped stock still, with the hat held in my hand, listening. From a room near at hand I heard the sound of a low, long-drawn moan, as from someone in pain. More than that, it was almost the wail of someone in acute terror.

Now l am a mild and inoffensive man, and I confess that my first instinct was to fly. There was the door within a foot of me; I could open it again noiselessly and slip out, and leave whoever was moaning to his or her own trouble. My next instinct, however, was a braver one; I might be able to help. Putting my hat on, and so leaving my hands free, I moved cautiously towards the sound, which was coming intermittently.

I found that the house was built in exactly the same fashion that mine was; there was the same number of steps leading to a room downstairs, which in my case was used as a playroom for the children. I went down these steps slowly and cautiously, with my flesh creeping a little, I must admit, as that weird moaning went on, and almost inclined to turn back with every step I took. But at last I got into the basement, and came to the door of the room from which the sound proceeded. I was in the very act of recklessly thrusting open the door when another sound broke upon my ears that held me still. The sound of someone singing in a raucous voice.

It was a sea song I remembered to have heard when a boy, and the words of which I have forgotten; it was something about “Blow the man down”. The door of the room was open a little way, and through the crack of it I was able to peer in; and there I saw a sight that for a moment made me doubt my own eyes. I remember that I rubbed my eyes in a stupid way and looked again, and this is what I saw:

The room was in a neglected state, with strips of wallpaper hanging down from the walls and with a blackened ceiling. There was a table in the center of it, and at that table a man was seated, with a square black bottle and a glass before him, and a candle burning near his left hand. I can see the whole room now as plainly and as clearly as I saw it then. He was a man so villainously ugly that I had a thought that he was not a man at all, but some hideous thing out of a nightmare. He had very long arms — so long that they were stretched across the table, and his hands gripped the opposite edge of it, a great heavy head, crowned with a mass of red hair, was set low between enormously broad shoulders; his eyes, half closed, were high up and close together on either side of a nose that was scarcely a nose at all; the lips were thick and heavy.

But it was not the man that I looked at first, it was at two other figures in the room. These figures were seated on chairs facing the table at which the man was, and the strangeness of them lay in the fact that each was securely bound to the chair on which he and she sat, for it was a man and a woman. The man, who was quite young was not only bound, but gagged securely also; the woman was more lightly tied to her chair by the arms only, and her mouth was free. She was leaning back, with her eyes closed, and it was from her lips that that strange wailing sound was coming, and mingling with the raucous singing of the man at the table. My first impression was that the man at the table was some sort of unclean, bestial judge, and the others his prisoners.

He stopped his singing to pour some liquor from the square bottle into his glass and to drink it off then he resumed his former attitude, with his fingers locked over the edge of the table. And now I noticed that while the woman, who was, by the way, quite young and very pretty, with a fair, dainty prettiness, still kept her eyes closed, the eyes of the bound man never left that dreadful figure seated at the other side of the table.

“Wouldn’t you like to speak, you dog?” said the red-haired man. “What would you give now to have the use of your limbs — the free wagging of your tongue? What would you say to me; what would you do to me?”

The man who was bound could, of course, answer nothing. I saw his face flush and darken, and I guessed what his thoughts were. For myself I was too fascinated by the scene before me to do anything else than peer through the crack and watch what was going on.

“Lovers — eh?” exclaimed the man at the table. “You thought I was unsuspicious; you thought I knew nothing and suspected nothing — didn’t you? While I was safely out of the way you could meet, the pair of you — day after day, and week after week, and this puppy could steal from me what was mine by right.”

The woman opened her eyes for the first time and spoke. “It isn’t true,” she said, a sob breaking her voice. “It was all innocent — Dick and I have done no wrong.”

“You lie!” thundered the man, bringing his fist down upon the table with a blow that might have split it “You’ve always lied — lied from the moment your father gave you to me — from the very hour I married you. You always hated me; I’ve seen you shudder many and many a time at the mere sight of me. Don’t I know it; haven’t I felt you stab me a thousand times more deeply than you could have stabbed me with any weapon? You white devil! I’ve come at last to hate you as much as you hate me.”

The woman turned her head slowly and looked at the younger man; a faint smile crossed her lips. In an instant the red-haired man had leapt to his feet, showing me astonishingly enough that he was a dwarf with the shortest legs surely ever a man had. But the bulk of him was enormous, and I could guess, with a shudder, at his strength. He caught up the glass, crossed the room, and flung the contents in the face of the man.

“It’s a waste of good liquor — but that’s for the look she gave you. I wish there was some death more horrible than any invented yet that I could deal out to you,” he added, standing with the glass in his hand and glaring at his victim. “The death I mean for you is too easy.”

He walked across to the fireplace in a curious purposeless way, and stirred a great fire that was blazing there. Then from a corner of the room he dragged with ease a great sack that appeared to contain wood and shavings; so much I saw in a rent in the side of it. This he dropped down near the fire, as if in readiness for something, and then went back to his seat, applying himself again to the drink that was on the table. And still I watched, as a man may watch a play, wondering how it will end.

“I got the best of you tonight,” he said presently. “You might have been too much for me if I hadn’t come upon you from behind; but I was ready and waiting. I’ve been watching longer than you think, I had everything mapped out clearly days ago. Tonight sees the end of all things for the pair of you; tomorrow sees me miles away from here. You came in secret, you dog you’ll go in secret.”

“We have done no wrong,” said the woman again. “We loved each other years ago, when we were boy and girl; there was no sin in that.”

“Bah! — I don’t believe a word of it. Don’t I know that in your black heart you’ve compared the two of us every day of your life since first I saw you. His straightness for my crookedness; his sleek, black hair for my red; his prettiness for this face of mine” — he struck his own face relentlessly with one hand as he spoke — “that women shudder at. Don’t I know all that?”

It was the strangest and most pitiful thing that the creature sitting there before his victims suddenly covered his face with his hands and groaned. If ever I had seen a soul in torment, I saw it then, and though I loathed him I could have wept for him. After a moment or two he dropped his hands and seized the bottle, and poured out the last drops into the glass and drank them off; then flung the bottle and glass crashing into the fireplace, as though there was an end to that business. And now, as he got down again from the chair, I saw the eyes of the woman open wide and follow his every movement with a dreadful look of terror in them.

“I’ll kill you both — here in the place where you’ve met — and then I’ll fire the house,” went on the dwarf “I’ve planned it all. Look your last on each other, for tonight you die — and this house shall be your funeral pyre!”

“I swear to you,” panted the woman eagerly, “by all I hold most holy and most dear, that if you’ll let us go, we’ll never see each other again. For pity’s sake! — for the sake of Dick!”

“For the sake of Dick!” sneered the dwarf. “That shows you in your true colors; that shows who you are and what you are. There’s one poor satisfaction left to you; you’ll die together.”

What held me then it would be impossible to say. I can only plead that in the dreadful thing that followed I was as a man who sits at a play, wondering what will happen next, and with never a thought in him of interfering. I think in my anxiety I had pressed open the door a little to get a dearer view, so that I saw every movement of the dwarf For myself, I had forgotten everything — my own home, and my wife, and the babies who slept in their quiet room above. It was as though I had stepped straight into a new world.

I saw the dwarf advance towards the man in the chair, carrying his right hand stiff and straight beside him, gripping something, I could not tell what it was that he held. I saw him come straight at him, and I saw the eyes of the woman in the opposite chair watching him as one fascinated. Then I saw two movements; one with the left hand of the dwarf, when he struck the other man on the face; then with the right hand, when he raised something that gleamed in the light of the candle and brought it down with a sound that was new and horrible to me on the breast of the other man. And I saw the face of the man change, and start as it were into new life, and then fall as it were into death. And I saw his head drop forward, and his eyes were closed.

Then, above it all, and yet seeming as a sort of dreadful chorus to it all, rang out the scream from the woman in the other chair. I do not think that the dwarf heard it, he had drawn back from what had been the living man, and was staring like one mad upon what he had done. And still piercing the air of the place rang the scream of the woman — not for her lover alone, but for herself.

That sound seemed at last to break in upon the senses of the dwarf and to call him partially to himself. I had watched him to the point where he drew himself together and crouched like a wild beast ready to spring, with that in his hand that dripped red, when, in some fashion, I flung myself round the partially open door and stumbled into the room. I think I must have been a little mad myself; otherwise, frail and commonplace creature that I was, I could not have battled with this madman. I came upon him from behind and gripped him, seizing him by the throat and by the head, and all the while shouting something to him quite unintelligible.

The attack had been so sudden and so unexpected that I had him, in a sense, at my mercy. He could not know who had attacked him; he struggled madly, not alone to get away from me, but also to discover who I was. I struggled to keep his face away from me, gripped him by the neck and by the hair, and fought with him for what I knew then was my own life. And so struggling we stumbled at last horribly against that still figure bound in the chair and brought it over crashing with us to the floor. And then in a sudden I felt the dwarf inert in my hands, and knew that I had conquered.

What I must have looked like in that room, kneeling there, panting and struggling to get my breath, I cannot now tell; the whole business was so like a nightmare. I remember seeing the dwarf lying there — huddled up and very still. I remember that other figure, bound grotesquely in the chair and lying, still bound, upon its side; and I remember, too, the woman, with her arms close fastened behind her, sitting there and sobbing wildly.

The dwarf must have been stunned, he lay there quite still, with the knife that was dreadfully red fallen from his hand, and lying beside him.

When at last I staggered to my knees I saw that the girl was staring at me with a face that seemed to suggest that here, perhaps, was another ruffian come to kill her.

“Who — who are you?” she asked in a frightened whisper.

“A friend — one who stumbled in by accident,” I panted.

“Look at the man that’s tied to the chair,” she whispered hoarsely. “He can’t be dead.”

I knew that he was, but still I looked, as she bade me. I had no need to look twice; the poor fellow was quite dead. The blow had been strong and sure. On my knees beside him, I looked up and nodded slowly to her, there was no need for words.

She leaned back in her chair again and closed her eyes. “Set me free,” she said in a faint voice.

I could not touch that knife that lay there; in a mechanical, methodical way I took from my waistcoat pocket the decent, respectable little bone-handled penknife I carried always with me. With that I cut her bonds, noting as I did so how cruelly they had cut into the white flesh; and after a moment or two she swung her arms listlessly against her sides and opened her eyes, and then, with an effort raised her hands and pressed them against her temples.

“What will you do?” I asked, looking at her curiously.

“I — I don’t know,” she said; and then, breaking into weeping, sobbed out “Oh — dear God — that it should have come to this! What shall I do — what shall I do?”

“You must get away,” I said, watching the dwarf, who was beginning to stir a little. “If he wakes, you know what will happen.”

“I know — I know,” she said; and got to her feet and began to move towards that bound figure still lying tied to the chair.

But at that I got before her, and with my hands against her shoulders held her back, and pleaded passionately to her that she should go, and leave the dead alone. She listened, with that strange look in her eyes of a child wakened from sleep and not clearly understanding, but she yielded to me, and stumbled under my guidance to the door.

We had reached it, and I had opened it for her to pass out, when suddenly the dwarf twisted over on to his hands and knees, and then raised himself upright He did not seem to realize for a moment what had happened; then he caught sight of the woman, and, with a snarl, crawled forward and gripped the hilt of the knife. At that she pushed suddenly past me and fled like a hare up the stairs. I heard the swift passage of her footsteps in the little hall of the house — then the slamming of the outer door.

And now I had to look to myself, for I saw in the eyes of the man that he would not let this witness escape if he could catch him. I had managed to get through the door by the time that he had got to his feet, and in a dazed fashion was stumbling towards me, knife in hand. With a sudden swoop he reached the table and blew out the candle, and at the same moment I ran up the stairs, and in the darkness stumbled along the hall and fumbled with the catch of the door. By great good fortune I got the door open, and literally fell out into the fog.

I could not see him as he tore after me; in a faintness I had fallen to my knees, and I heard him, as he raced past me, panting heavily. Then the fog swallowed him up, and I knelt there on the pavement alone, shaking from head to foot

I had, of course, no means of knowing exactly which house it was in which I had had my adventure; I could only judge roughly that it must be about the middle of the crescent. I started along again, in the right direction, as I hoped, and thought to find my own house; missed the railings, after going what seemed to be an interminable distance, and came up hard against a pillar-box. Scarcely knowing what I did, I set my right hand in the mouth of it, and performed the same maneuver I had done before; advanced three paces, and touched railings again. Stumbling along these, I came blindly to a house that I thought might be mine, walked up the path, and pushed open a door that yielded; and there, with the face of my Mary looking at me in alarm and wonderment, I fell in a dead faint at her feet.

******

It has to be recorded that I never found the house again. I know everyone that lives in Drawbridge Crescent — all highly respectable people, of humdrum lives. Over and over again, in clear weather, I have walked to that pillar-box and have closed my eyes, and have tried to remember what steps I took on that particular night, after a stranger had cannoned into me and twisted me round, but all in vain. Whether in some house in some other road nearby lies the body of a man who was foully murdered on that particular night; or whether in one of the innocent- looking houses of the Crescent itself the crime was committed; or whether, in some strange supernatural fashion, I saw that night a deed committed that had been committed long before, I shall never know. That it is no mere figment of the imagination, and that something really happened that night, is proved by one fact. My wife, in raising me from the floor that night when I fell at her feet, found my fingers locked close upon something, and, forcing them open, disclosed what it was.

A tuft of red hair!

“The Story-teller” Jun. 1908

THE TRAVELING-COMPANION

H. F. W. Tatham

1910

It was midday in the woods but it was not very light. Mark lay on his back and looked up through the green leaves to the clear blue sky, from which the light, softened and broken up into a thousand dappled patches, filtered through, and cast a chequered pattern on the short woodland turf and moss which spread around. The scene was indescribably peaceful, and he felt a strange content. Then he looked across at his companion.

They had only met that morning. How well Mark remembered the exact spot and moment of the meeting! He had been crossing a heathy, open piece of ground, and a second before he could almost have sworn that the heath was empty of all human beings save himself. But, as he walked round a big clump of gorse, all yellow and fragrant with bloom, he had come full upon the stranger, and the acquaintance had at once begun and ripened strangely fast.

It had seemed inevitable that they should go on their way together, and now, though the friendship was only a few hours old, Mark had fallen completely under the spell of the strange man who sat beside him and gazed into the wood with those inscrutable eyes. The face seemed oddly familiar, and Mark felt that somehow, somewhere, he had seen it before. Was it in some previous existence, or was it only a trick of the brain, such as we all experience when the impression comes upon us that we have done all we are doing at the moment at some previous time, and each trivial circumstance makes the impression more vivid? To quote Tennyson —

As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood,

And ebb into a former life, or seem

To lapse far back in some confused dream

To states of mystical similitude

If one but speaks or hems or stirs his chair,

Ever the wonder waxeth more and more,

So that we say, “All this hath been before,

All this hath been, I know not when or where.”

In any case the impression was there, and it grew stronger rather than weaker.

Presently they journeyed on, and that night they came to a large farm with prosperous outbuildings and homestead, and fields of wheat, barley, and oats standing round, some cut, some only ready for the sickle. The farmer, a great, genial, bearded giant, whose own the land that he farmed was, bade them welcome and set a supper before them. At supper he talked volubly, but sensibly, about the farming in the country. His was the largest farm by far in all that district. Many of his neighbors had been farmers, and some had failed, some had gone to try their luck elsewhere, some had made their money and given up the business; and he had added field to field and farm to farm, till his estates spread around for many a mile — cornland, and meadows, and waving woodland, and on the sunny southern slopes of the hill even a vineyard or two. But he was proudest of his corn. He could feed nearly the whole county, he said; and his crops had never failed, even in the times of blight, that came so often in that district, and sometimes laid whole farms waste and bare and blackened in a single night.

By and by bedtime came, and Mark lay down and slept soundly. But at midnight he was awakened suddenly by a loud crying in the house, and, starting up, he saw the whole room was red with a dancing light, and he knew that it was fire. He rushed to the window, and saw to his horror that the whole of the fields of dry corn on the windward side of the house were crackling and blazing, and the vanguard of the flames was creeping nearer and nearer and even beginning to lick the thatched roof of the great barn that stood near the house itself. He looked round to warn his friend; but the other bed was empty. To run down the stairs was the work of a moment, and instantly he saw that there was no safety but in flight. Across the damp meadowland and over the stream on the house’s leeward side he fled, and reached a place of safety. Round him stood the farm-folk, men and maids, and the farmer himself, all bowed and shaking, with his great face pale as death and the tears in his eyes. And just then his companion joined him — he could not see from where, nor, somehow, did he dare to ask.

* * *

They sat down to rest again at noon the next day, — they had left the farm as soon as possible, after they had said what they could to console the poor owner, — and Mark noticed his companion unfasten a handkerchief that was bound round his right hand and dip it in the stream to moisten it before again wrapping it round the hand; and then Mark saw that on the hand was a large blister, puffy, swollen, and white.

* * *

The evening of that day again saw them drawing near to a large house. It stood some way back from the road, and all round it was a garden, full of flowers beautiful to the eye and sweet to the smell. Through the great iron gates in the wall of mellow red brick that ran all about it the stately building could be seen, pillared and ornamented, with the carved escutcheon over the door; and down the path paced a grave man of middle age, richly dressed in a furred robe, with a book in his hand. He called to the two travelers, who were passing at the moment by the gate, and with the ready hospitality of that age and country bade them come in and be welcome. They as readily assented, and he led them along the path towards the door of the house. When they entered they found everything within as splendid as it was without. Pictures, statues, cabinets, oak paneling, stained glass in the great windows, everything gave the impression of great wealth, wisely and tastefully expended. And at the supper to which their host presently bade them the food and wines were the best, though there was no ostentation or excess.

Mark slept soundly that night, but at breakfast the morning noticed that his host seemed anxious and distressed, answering shortly and away from the point, till at last Mark asked him outright if anything was the matter. The host tried to put him off for a while, but at last admitted that he had suffered during the night a most serious loss. A great sum of money that he had left in a safe had been stolen, the safe being broken open despite the protection of the ingenious lock that fastened it. The money was a large part of his fortune, and worse than that, a considerable portion of it had been deposited there in readiness to pay for many of the pictures and statues that had recently been placed in the house, and now they could only be paid for by trenching on the rest of the sadly diminished fortune. All that was left in the safe was an old coin stamped with the effigy of Otho III., the present king’s grandfather, a coin comparatively rare; but the host said that several of the kind had been among the money that was stored in the safe.

“I shall be a poor man now,” he said, “and shall have to sell my house and furniture; but I must not repine,” he added.

Presently the two companions took their leave, and, passing out of the iron gate, came into the road and continued their onward journey.

They had come to a country now that was hilly and rough, and presently the path led them up a steepish slope to a neck between two hills that faced the setting sun. The companion was in front, and he led the way down the slope on the further side, which was even steeper than that they had ascended. About half-way down the declivity a loose stone turned beneath his foot, and he stumbled and fell. As he did so, something slipped from his pocket and rolled and spun swiftly across the path, shining in the sun, and finally striking with a ringing sound against a boulder at the side. Mark, who was close behind, and almost at whose feet it stopped, stooped and picked it up. It was a gold coin, old and worn, and on the reverse side the arms of the country were barely visible. But on the other side the bearded and crowned head of an aged man was clearly to be made out, and round the edge ran the letters in Latin, Otho Tertius, Rex. Mark started and glanced at his comrade, who had risen and now stood beside him striking the dust from his garments. But the glance which he turned was so steady, so inscrutable, so mysterious, that Mark’s eyes fell, and the words that he had on his lips died suddenly away.

Presently they came to the valley bottom. A stream ran over large stones, brown and blue and gray, on their right; all round rose the great bare hills, some green and steep and smooth, some russet with bracken and ling, others brown and swart, like the skin of some great monster lying asleep. The sun had sunk below the heights that closed the valley in front, but its rays still fell with a clear yellow light on the hilltops that lay behind, guarding the pass over which the travelers had lately come. The place was singularly calm and tranquil, and the peace that reigned over it and the absolute solitude seemed rather increased than lessened by the presence of a low white cottage which lay beneath its group of sycamores, near a place where a tumbling cascade from the hills joined the main stream that flowed along the valley. A woman’s form could be seen moving about the garden, and presently a boy came running down the hillside, and, climbing the fence, joined her as she walked along the path towards the house. The two travelers came up to the fence and greeted the woman, who returned their greeting courteously and kindly. She was plainly of humble station, but neatly and cleanly dressed, as was the boy by her side; and it was clear from the resemblance between them that they were mother and son. The boy was about ten or eleven years old; he stood by his mother, leaning against her and encircling one of her arms with both of his hands, while somewhat lazily he peeped at the strangers. The mother bade the two enter and accept such hospitality as her humble roof could offer; and they willingly enough consented, for the day’s journey had been long and tiring, and there was no other house in view anywhere near.

The cottage was but small, and the rooms low and sparsely furnished, but everything was spotlessly clean, and the fare that was presently set before the travelers at supper — bread and fruit and milk — seemed delicious to them after their long walk. The mother waited upon them diligently, and seemed most anxious to do all that lay in her power to make them comfortable and happy, but what struck them most was her manifest devotion to her boy. Her eyes scarcely ever left him, even when she was busied in her household duties, and when he was out of the room she seemed to listen for his every footstep on the stairs or on the garden path. Her absorption in him seemed utter and complete. As for him, though his manner was affectionate and kind, he did not seem to return the feeling in anything like the same degree; but between the young and the old that is often, at least outwardly, the case; and he seemed to be a good-hearted, cheerful-natured lad, in whom it would not be natural to expect either demonstrative affection or depth of feeling.

He went to bed soon after supper, and a little later the widow showed the two companions to their room. This was a comparatively large apartment, that filled up most of the upper storey of the house. There were three beds in the room, and she begged them, as her son already lay asleep in one of them, to go in and lie down as quietly as possible, so as not to wake him. They readily promised to obey, and were soon in bed themselves. Mark was thoroughly tired, and his eyes closed almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. About midnight he woke with a suddenness which left him lying open-eyed and startled, staring across the room. The window was uncurtained, and through it shone the bright, full harvest moon, throwing a broad path of white light across the room and the bed where the boy lay sleeping. Mark could see his face on the pillow, and the bedclothes moving softly as he breathed. There was no sound for a few seconds; then Mark was startled by the noise of something gently tapping the floor. It came from the direction of his companion’s bed, and, looking that way, he saw dimly — for it lay in the dark part of the room — his figure standing by the bedside. By and by the figure stole forward, and when it came into the path of moonlight Mark saw that the man held a pillow in his hand.

Slowly and silently across the room the figure passed till it stood above the head of the sleeping boy. Then it raised the pillow, and a moment after pressed it suddenly hard down upon the mouth and nostrils that lay below. Mark strove to move, to cry out, but he was as if in some dreadful dream where the limbs and tongue are tied, and motion and speech are alike impossible. He saw the boy’s limbs quiver and struggle under the clothes, as the stranger pressed down his body with one hand and held the pillow firmly with the other; but no cry came, and presently the limbs were still. Then the stranger turned in the moonlight and looked straight at Mark. A great darkness came upon the room, thick and heavy as a velvet curtain, and there came a humming and buzzing in his ears, so that every sense was darkened and confused.

Presently the darkness cleared away. Mark found himself, to his great surprise, seated as it were in a theater. He was alone, but in front of him the lights were burning, as for a play; the heavy green curtain cut off the view of the stage. At that moment three knocks sounded from behind and the curtain slowly rolled up.

The scene was a court of justice. The judge sat at the back, facing Mark; the prisoner, at the front of the stage, had his face turned away, but Mark could see that he grasped the spikes of the dock, and that his great form shook with terror and distress. The judge had risen to his feet, and was delivering judgment in a low and even voice, every word of which came distinctly and dreadfully to the listener’s ear.

“Prisoner,” the voice was saying, “God gave you house and lands, good fortune and good capacity, and you prospered and grew rich and bounty was added to you. You should have fed the hungry and saved the poor from want and suffering in times of dearth and famine. The gains of honest trade were not forbidden you; but with those you were not content. When blight and mildew smote such crops as your few neighbors had, and the corn and bread of the whole land were in your hands, the temptation proved too much for you, and you fell. You cared not for the starving wretch who died for want of a crust to eat; you cared not for the family who at all times had barely, and with hard struggles, kept the wolf from the door; and, as prices rose higher and higher, you locked your garner doors the closer, if only you might transmute the golden grain into golden coin. But you forgot in your greed and folly that there was an ancient statute which forbade such deeds as that. You forgot that the old statute held the man who kept bread from the starving to be guilty of murder. Far better had it been, for you if you had lost your crops and riches years ago by some calamity — some flood or war or fire. But you added field to field; and this night shall your soul be required of you.”

And the judge rose and put on the black cap. At the sight the man in the dock turned his head away with a cry of fear, and Mark saw his face. It was the face of the farmer. And the curtain came down, and the lights died out, and there was darkness for a while.

* * *

Presently the lights again burned up; again the curtain became visible; again it rose.

This time the scene was familiar to Mark. A great hall full of costly furniture, with windows full of glass richly stained, and adorned with rare pictures and statues. A man in a splendid dress sat at a table in the midst. His head was buried in his hands, and he seemed to be dejected and sad. Presently he raised his head, drew forth a letter and read it through. Then he spoke, as if to himself but aloud. “I cannot do it,” he said. “Why should I sell my rare pictures and statues? Why should I give my money to a spendthrift? What has he or his father, my brother though he was, ever done for me? Let him earn his livelihood.” And his head fell again into his hands.

A servant entered the room. He bowed low.

“A beggar lies at your gate, my lord,” he said. “He craves but the crumbs that fall from your table. Poor fellow, he is both sorely diseased and sorely in want. The very dogs seem to pity him. ”

But the man at the table broke in. “Diseased?” he cried; “away with him from the gate! He may infect the whole household. Who am I that every beggar in the countryside should lay him at my doors and beg for alms? Away with him! I say.” And the servant withdrew.

Then Mark saw suddenly, as it were in letters of fire, these words form themselves on the wall at the back of the stage: “And the rich man died and was buried; and in hell he lift up his eyes.” And then he knew who the man was who sat at the table; and a voice seemed to say in his ear, “In all time of our wealth, Good Lord, deliver us.” Then came once more the curtain and the thick darkness.

* * *

Slowly the light came back and the curtain rolled up for the third time. The stage was filled with a crowd, evidently awaiting some interesting sight. They were laughing and jesting, it is true; but at intervals all heads kept turning to the right, as if looking for something to come that way. But what arrested Mark’s attention specially was a dark object which was above their heads. It consisted of an upright post, from the top of which a bar of wood projected at right angles. Upon this sat a man from the extremity of the projecting bar dangled a rope with a noose at the end. Mark saw that it was the gallows.

Soon the sound of a horse’s hoofs was heard, and a cart came slowly upon the stage. It contained a young man, who sat in deep dejection, with his hands tied behind his back.

His face was turned away from Mark. The cart stopped just beneath the gallows. The hangman prepared to drop down into it. But at that moment there came an interruption. An old woman burst from the crowd and flung herself against the cart, vainly struggling with enfeebled arms to reach the man who sat in it. She was dragged away, and burst into bitter wailing.

“Give me my son,” she cried aloud, “my boy, my little boy! I never denied him anything when he was young, and can you deny me this now? You can never hang him, surely?” she shrieked. Then when she saw the hangman had dropped and was standing in the cart — “Would that he had died when he was an innocent boy!” she wailed. “Would that he had been taken from the evil to come! Would that I had died for thee, my son, my son!” The man, at that, turned his face round. Rage, despair, terror were written on his debased and brutal countenance; but through them all Mark saw the features of the little lad who had stood by his mother’s side in the cottage garden.

The hangman, with a sudden movement, pulled the white cap over the face.

When the darkness rolled away Mark found himself in broad daylight. He was crossing a heathy, open piece of ground, and just in front of him was a big clump of gorse all yellow and fragrant with blossom. In a moment he had passed it. The heath was empty of all human beings save himself.

The Footprints in the Snow (1910)

THE STONE COFFIN

“B”

1913

~ 1 ~

The year was 1754, the month October. The Chapel at Magdalene had been undergoing renovation all the summer, at the hands of the ingenious Mr. Collins, of Clare Hall — indeed, since the beginning of the Easter Term the College services had been held in St Giles’ Church adjacent.

~ 2 ~

Mr. Dobree the Bursar, a big bluff man, was pacing in the Court in the autumn sunshine. Some workmen were carrying planks and poles out of the doorway of the Chapel staircase. The Bursar’s companion, a little meager figure in rusty black, peering about him through big horn spectacles, was Mr. Janeway, the President of the College. Presently they went in at the Chapel door, and stood regarding the building. “Dear now!” said Mr. Janeway, staring about him, “I hardly see where I am! A great change, no doubt! But it is a chaste design!”

It certainly was a change! but out of a Gothic building with an open roof, much as we see it now, the ingenious Mr. Collins had made a place more like, one would have said, the dining-room of a Roman consul than a Christian church. The roof was cut off by a flat plaster ceiling, heavily ornamented. A classical arch spanned the sanctuary, and the East window was obliterated by a columned piece of statuary. The floor was elegantly paved with black and white marble.

Mr. Dobree looked complacently about him. “It is not such a change to my eyes,” he said, “Because I have watched the work from the beginning. It seems to me a very respectable place!”

“And pray what does the Master [Dr. Chapman] think of it all?” said Mr. Janeway.

“That I cannot tell,” said Mr. Dobree rather curtly. “Has he seen the progress of the work?” said Mr. Janeway.

“The Master,” said Mr. Dobree, “Has been, to my knowledge, twice in the chapel since the work began. He ran in once without his wig, in a greasy cassock, and spoke rudely to the workmen about the noise they made — as if such work could be done in silence! He was disturbed at his accounts, he said. Once again he met Mr. Collins in the chapel, when the carved piece over the table was up. He said to Mr. Collins that he was given to understand that the figures were those of saints and angels, but that they appeared to him to be something much more indelicate. Then he laughed, and said he supposed it was the effect of the plaster work, at which Mr. Collins was greatly mortified. But so long as he can find fault and has nothing to pay, the College may go hang for him. He has gotten a Prebend of Durham, they say, by interest, this last week, and that is all he cares for.”

“Tut, tut” said Mr. Janeway soothingly.

“Now,” said Mr. Dobree, striding up the chapel. “Come hither with me, and I will relate to you a curiosity. About six weeks ago the workmen were laying the floor, and one came to me and said they had found somewhat. It was hereabouts, by this step.” He stamped on the pavement, and then continued, “When I came in, they had uncovered and broken in pieces the lid of a stone coffin just here, and I bade them take the bits out. I tell you it was a strange sight underneath! There lay a man, his head in a niche made for it in the stone, robed from head to foot in an embroidered robe, of the color of a butterfly — one of the orange-brown ones that you may see sitting on summer flowers — with figures and patterns inwrought. The flesh was all perished, and the skull, with its dark eye-holes, stared very dismally out, with something like hair atop of it. I doubt he had lain there since monkish days, and it displeased me very much. I stooped down and picked at the robe, and it all came away in my hands, falling to dust, leaving but a few colored threads. The bones had mouldered too, all but the thigh-bones, and they were brittle.

“‘Come,’ said I, ‘the less we look on this the better!’ So I took a besom in my hand and swept the whole carcase, bones and dust and robe and all, to one end of the coffin; and it made but a little heap there. I prodded the skull out of its niche, and that all came to dust too. But while I brushed, I heard a tinkling, and I picked out of the mess a little cup and platter of some metal, very dark, and a big ring with a blue stone — all very Popish and disgraceful to my eyes. I have them in my chamber, and I shall send them to Mr. Gray, at Pembroke Hall, who cares about such oddities. Then I had the coffin broken up, and carried to the stonemasons’ yard, and dropt all the dust into the hole thus made, saw that they put soil on the place and battered it well down. A good riddance, I think!”

“Dear now!” said Mr. Janeway, musing. “That is a strange story — a very strange story! But, Mr. Dobree, if you will pardon me, I do not like your action very well. It seems to me that the man, whoever he was, was piously bestowed here, and had a right to his rest — so it appears to me, but I speak under correction!”

“Pish!” said Mr. Dobree. “Here’s a pother about a parcel of old Popish bones! I am one who hold by the glorious Reformation, and I would cleanse the temple of all such recusants, if I had my choice. Why, the thought of that ugly figure, under my feet, would have made me very squeamish at my prayers. I wonder at you, Mr. Janeway, indeed I do!”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Janeway, “There are many opinions; but I cannot like the business. Maybe he was a holy man, even if he died in sad error. I doubt if he could have known better.”

“A sincere study of the Word would have shown him his abominations,” said Mr. Dobree. “I am a Protestant, born and bred, and I have no patience with old mummeries.”

Mr. Janeway sighed and said no more, and presently they went away.

~ 3 ~

It might have been a week later that Mr. Dobree awoke suddenly at night in his room, which was in the right-hand corner of the first Court, as you come in by the gate, on the ground floor. He awoke half in terror and half in anger, troubled by a dream, and thought that he heard someone moving very softly about his room; which was lighted only by a little high window in a deep recess that looked out towards the river, on to what was then a little street or lane of houses, running parallel to the College. The window was bare of any curtain, and Mr. Dobree thought that he saw a very faint figure cross the glimmering panes, it being bright moonlight without.

Mr. Dobree was as bold as a lion. He sate up in bed and shouted out in his great voice, EH, WHAT? HOLLA-HO! WHO IS THAT? EH, WHAT DID YOU SAY? WHAT DO YOU THERE, SIRRAH?

His voice reverberated in the little bare room, and died away, leaving a shocking silence. Nothing moved or spoke. He felt for his tinder-box and made a light, and then jumping out of bed, in nightcap and nightgown, looked about everywhere, first in his bedroom, then through his two keeping-rooms, and even in his cupboards, but he saw no sign of anything living. After some time he went back to bed, but not to sleep. He was angry with himself for being afraid, and half suspected a trick; but his door was firmly latched, and no one seemed to have come in that way, while the windows into the court were safely shuttered.

In the morning, after a draught of small beer, which he used for his breakfast, and when he had made his toilet, he felt better; but for all that he wished for company, and made his way to Mr. Janeway’s rooms in the second Court as soon as might be. He found Mr. Janeway reading in a book, with coffee beside him, and sitting down he told him his adventure rather shamefacedly. Mr. Janeway nodded his head and said very little, save this, that he too, when his stomach was at all disordered, suffered from disturbing dreams. “A little sick fancy, no doubt!” he added comfortably.

“It may be!” said Mr. Dobree moodily; “But I think there was someone with me in the room. Yet what sticks even more in my mind was a dream I had dreamed, which I cannot fully recall.”

“What was it like?” said Mr. Janeway.

“What was it?” said Mr. Dobree; “That I cannot quite tell — but it was an ill dream. I was in a dull place, methought between buildings. They were buildings, I believe; and a dark sort of thing poked its head out in front of me in an ugly way. It seems to me now that it had on a parti-colored robe, of black or white, or both — like a gown, and like a surplice. There was something drawn over the head of it; and the face was very white; now, as I think of it, I believe it had no eyes; it said something to me, which still sounds in my ears like Latin, in a very low voice; and it seemed to be angry — Yes, Sir, it was angry, was that person!”

“Dear now!” said Mr. Janeway, looking over his glasses at Mr. Dobree, “That’s a bad story and a confused story! Is it your way to dream like that, Mr. Dobree? It seems to me a dark affair.”

“Why, Sir!” said Mr. Dobree with a sudden anger, “It appears to me that you are but very poor company this morning! I come to my old friend to be made cheer with, and you can only shake your head and look dismal. This is not friendly, Sir! You are not speaking your mind!”

“Nay, Sir,” said Mr. Janeway, “Be not so peevish! There is something that presses upon my spirits, since you spoke your dream, and I am grown very heavy. You must think no more of it, Sir. It was but a touch of vapors, such as comes to us lonely men, as we get older and more solitary.”

Mr. Dobree got up, shaking his head and looking very sullen, and marched off without a word. He went about his business as usual, but found himself day by day in a disordered mood. He ate little and spoke not at all, though he had been ever ready with his tongue. He slept brokenly; and presently as he sate alone in his room, he began to hear whispers in his ear, or he would think that he was called; and his brother Fellows began to be concerned about him, wondering why he peered so often into the corners of the room, and why he wheeled round so sharply in the street to look behind him as he walked alone.

~ 4 ~

It was a very wet and dull afternoon at the end of November, and Mr. Dobree had sate all day indoors. Just about dusk he remembered that he had a word to say to the stonemason who worked for the College, about some tiling on the roof. He went out of his rooms and found the whole place very still, with a light rain falling. He walked out of the gate, and turned to the left at once, down the lane that ran close by the College, the stonemason’s yard being at the end of it, by the water’s edge.

When he got there he found the mason with a lantern in his hand looking about among some piled-up stones in the yard. Mr. Dobree went to speak to him, and broke off in the middle. He felt very much displeased to see what was evidently the head-piece of the old stone coffin lying on the ground. “How comes that there?” he said with a sudden sharpness. “Why, Sir,” said the mason “You ordered me to take it and break it all up, and it has lain there ever since.” “What is that which lies inside it?” said Mr. Dobree in a loud voice. The mason turned his lantern on the piece. It was roughly worked, the strokes of the chisel being visible where the head had lain, and it was pierced with a hole, the use of which Mr. Dobree did not like to guess. “There is nothing here!” said the mason. “No,” said Mr. Dobree, “There is not — I see plainly now. I was dazzled — It was but the shadow. Yet I certainly thought…” He broke off, turned on his heel and went away, the business being still unsettled. The mason stood, lantern in hand, watching him as he marched out of the yard. Then he shook his head, and went into the house.

A moment later Mr. Dobree was hurrying up the lane. It was very dark, and the rain kept all men at home. On his right, the wall of the College towered up in the misty air, and he could see a few lighted windows, very high above. The houses on his left seemed all dark and comfortless. He went on until he was close outside his own rooms, which lay next the street.

Suddenly out of the window of his own bedroom, just above him, not a yard away, there came with a silent haste the head and shoulders of a man, wrapped up, it seemed to Mr. Dobree, in a parti-colored robe, black and white, with a hood over the face, but the face itself was visible, a dead yellow-white, like baked clay, with holes for eyes. There came a faint, thin voice upon the air, and words that sounded in Mr. Dobree’s agonized ears like “Quare inquietasti me ut suscitarer?” [‘Why have you disturbed me to raise me up?’] (*)

But Mr. Dobree heard no more. He fell all his length in the wet road, and presently turned over on his back, where they afterwards found him, still looking upwards.

(*) A quote from the Vulgate, 1 Samuel 28, v.15 — given in the King James Bible as: “Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?”. This is what the ghost of Samuel says to King Saul after it has been raised by the Witch of Endor.

“Magdalene College Magazine”, Dec. 1913

THE DUENNA

Marie Belloc Lowndes

1926

~1~

Laura Delacourt, after a long and gallant defense of what those who formed the old-fashioned world to which she belonged would have called her virtue, had capitulated to the entreaties of Julian Treville. They had been friends – from tomorrow they would be lovers.

As she lay enfolded in his arms, her head resting on his breast, while now and again their lips met in a trembling, clinging kiss, the strangest and, in some ways, the most incongruous thoughts flitted shadow-wise through her mind, mingled with terror at the possible, though not the probable, consequences of her surrender.

Her husband, Roger Delacourt, was thirty years older than herself. Though still a vigorous man, he had come to a time of life when even a vigorous man longs instinctively for warmth; so he had left London the day after Christmas Day to join a friend’s yacht for a month’s cruise in the Mediterranean. And now, just a week later, the wife whom he considered a negligible quantity in his self-indulgent, still agreeable existence, had consented to embark on what she knew must be a perilous adventure in a one-storied stone house, well named The Folly, built by Julian Treville’s great-grandfather.

Long, low, fantastic – it stood at the narrow end of a wide lake on the confines of his property; and a French dancer, known in the Paris of her day as La Belle Julie, had spent there a lifetime in exile.

Though Laura in her lover’s arms felt strangely at peace, her homing joy was threaded with terror. Constantly her thoughts reverted to her child, David, who, till the man who now held her so closely to him had come into her life, had been the only thing that made that then mournful life worth living.

The boy was spending the New Year with his mother’s one close woman friend and her houseful of happy children, so Laura hoped her little son did not miss her. At any other time the thought that this might be so would have stabbed her with unreasonable pain, but what now filled her heart with shrinking fear was the dread thought of David’s father, and of the punishment he would exact if he found her out.

Like so many men of his type and generation Roger Delacourt had a poor opinion of women. He believed that the woman tempted always falls. But, again true to type, he made, in this one matter, an exception as to his own wife. That Laura might be tempted was a possibility which never entered his shrewd and cynical mind; and had he been compelled to admit the temptation, he would have felt confident as to her power of resistance. So it was that she faced the awful certainty that were she ever “found out”, immediate separation from her son, followed by a divorce, would be her punishment.

She had been a child of seventeen when her mother had elected to sell her into the slavery of marriage with the voluptuary to whom she had now been married ten years. For three years she had been her husband’s plaything, and then, suddenly, when their boy was about two years old, he had tired of her. Even so, they lived, both in London and in the country, under the same roof, and many of the people about them thought the Delacourts got on better than do most modern couples. They were, however, often apart for weeks at a time, for Roger Delacourt still hunted, still shot, still fished, with unabated zest, and his wife did none of these things.

As time went on, Laura’s joyless life was at once illumined and shadowed by her passionate love for her child, for all great love brings with it fear. A year ago, by his father’s decree, David had been sent to a noted preparatory school, leaving his young mother forlornly lonely. It was then that she had met Julian Treville.

By one of those odd accidents of which human life is full, he and she had been the only two guests of an aged brother and sister, distant connections of Laura’s own, in a Yorkshire country house. Cousin John and Cousin Mary had watched the sudden friendship with approval. “Dear Laura Delacourt is just the friend for Julian Treville,” said old Mary to old John. She had added, pensively, “It is so very nice for a nice young man to have a nice married woman as a nice friend.”

That had been eight months ago, and since then Treville had altered the whole of his life for Laura’s sake, she, till today, taking everything and giving nothing, as is so often the way with a woman who believes herself to be good …

During their long drive the lovers scarcely spoke; to be alone together, as they were now, was sufficient bliss.

Treville had met her at a distant railway junction where a motor had been hired in the name of “Mrs. Darcy.” This was part of the plan which was to make the few who must perforce know of her presence at The Folly believe her there as the guest of Treville’s stepmother, who was now abroad.

Darcy had been Laura’s maiden name, and it was the only name she felt she had the right to call herself. She and her lover were both amateurs in the most dangerous and most exciting drama for which a man and woman can be cast.

The hireling motor had brought them across wide stretches of solitary downland, but now they were speeding through one of the long avenues of Treville Place, their journey nearly at an end.

His neighbors would have told you that Julian Treville was a reserved, queer kind of chap. Laura Delacourt was the first woman he had ever loved; and even now, in this hour of unexpected, craved-for joy, he was asking himself if even his great love gave him the right to make her run what seemed an exceedingly slight risk of detection and consequent disgrace.

Each felt a sense of foreboding, though Laura’s reason told her that her terrors were vain, and that it was conscience alone that made her feel afraid. Every possible danger had been countered by her companion. Her pride, her delicacy, her sense of shame – was it false shame? – had been studied by him with a selfless devotion which had deeply moved her. Thus he was leaving her to spend a lonely evening, tended by the old Frenchwoman, who, together with her husband, waited on The Folly’s infrequent occupants.

The now aged couple in their hot youth had been on the losing side in the Paris Commune of 1871. They had been saved from imprisonment, possibly worse, by Julian Treville’s grandmother, a lawless, high-minded Scotchwoman who called herself a Liberal. She had brought them to England, and for fifty odd years they had lived in a cottage a quarter of a mile from The Folly. There was small reason, as Treville could have argued with perfect truth, to be afraid of this old pair. But Laura did feel afraid, and so it had been arranged between the lovers that only tomorrow, after she had spent at The Folly a solitary night and day, would he, at the close of a day’s hunting, share “Mrs. Darcy’s” simple dinner …

The motor stopped, and the man and woman, who had been clasped in each other’s arms, drew quickly apart.

“We have to get out here,” muttered Treville, “for there is no carriage-way down to The Folly. I’ll carry your bag.”

Keeping up the sorry comedy she paid off and dismissed the chauffeur.

In the now fading daylight Laura saw that to her left the ground sloped steeply down to the shores of a lake whose now gray waters narrowed to a point beyond which there stood a low, pillared building. It was more like an eighteenth-century orangery than a house meant for human habitation. Eerily beautiful, and yet exceedingly desolate, to Laura The Folly appeared unreal – a fairy dwelling in that Kingdom of Romance whither her feet had never strayed, rather than a place where men and women had joyed and sorrowed, lived and died.

“If only I could feel that you will never regret that you came here,” Treville whispered.

She answered quickly, “I shall always be glad, not sorry, Julian.”

He took her hand and raised it to his lips. Then he said: “Old Célestine will have it that The Folly is haunted by La Belle Julie. You’re not afraid of ghosts, my dearest?”

Laura smiled a little wanly in the twilight. “Far more afraid of flesh and blood than ghosts,” she murmured. “Where do Célestine and her husband live, Julian?”

“We can’t see their cottage from here; but it’s quite close by.” His voice sank: “I’ve told them that you’re not afraid of being in the house alone at night.”

They went down a winding footpath, she clinging to him for very joy in his nearness, till they reached the stone-paved space which lay between the shore of the lake and the low gray building. And then, suddenly, while they were walking towards the high front door, Laura gave a stifled cry, for a gnome-like figure had sprung, as if from nowhere, across their path.

“Here’s old Jacques,” exclaimed Treville vexedly. “He always shows an excess of zeal!”

The little Frenchman was gesticulating and talking eagerly, explaining that fires had been burning all day in the three rooms which were to be occupied by the visitor. He further told, at unnerving length, that Célestine would be at The Folly herself very shortly to install “Madame.”

When the old chap had shuffled off, Julian Treville put a key in the lock of the heavy old door; taking Laura’s slight figure up into his strong arms, he lifted her over the threshold straight into an enchanting living-room where nothing had been altered for over a hundred years.

She gave a cry of delight. “What a delicious place, Julian! I never thought it would be like this—”

A log fire threw up high flames in the deep fire-place, and a lighted lamp stood on a round, gilt-rimmed, marble table close to a low and roomy, if rather stiff, square arm-chair. The few pieces of fine Empire furniture were covered with faded yellow satin which had been brought from Paris when Napoleon was ironing out the frontiers of Europe, for the Treville of that day had furnished The Folly to please the Frenchwoman he loved. The walls of the room were hung with turquoise silk. There was a carved-wood gilt mirror over the mantelpiece, and on the right-hand wall there hung an oval pastel of La Belle Julie.

Hand in hand they stood, looking up at the lovely smiling face.

“According to tradition,” said Treville, “that picture was the only thing the poor soul brought with her when she left France. The powdered hair proves it must have been done when Julie was in her teens, before the Revolution. My great-great-grandfather fell in love with her when she must have been well over thirty—”

Then, dropping the mask he had worn since they had left the motor, “Laura!” he exclaimed; “Beloved! At last – at last!”

For him, and for her, too, the world sank away, though, even so, that which is now called her subconscious self was listening, full of shrinking fear, for the sound of a key in the lock …

He said at last in a low, shaken voice, “And now I suppose that I must leave you? …”

Her lips formed the words telling him that he had been overscrupulous in his care for her, that they might as well brave the curious eyes of old Célestine tonight as tomorrow. And then, before she could utter them, there came the sound of steps on the stone path outside.

“It’s Célestine, come before her time,” muttered Treville.

The front door opened and Laura, turning round quickly, saw a tall, thin, old woman, clad in a black stuff dress; a white muslin cap lay on her white hair, and over her shoulders a fur cape.

Standing just within the door, which she had shut behind her, she cast a long, measuring glance at her master, and at the lady who had come to spend a week at The Folly at this untoward time of the year.

It was a kindly, even an indulgent, glance, but it made Laura feel suddenly afraid.

“I come to ask,” exclaimed Célestine in very fair English, “if Madame is comfortable? Is there anything I can do for Madame besides laying the table and cooking Madame’s dinner?”

“I don’t think so – everything is delightful,” murmured Laura.

The old woman, taking a few steps forward, vanished into what the newcomer was soon to learn was the dining-room.

Treville said wistfully, “And now I must leave you—”

Laura whispered faintly, “I am a coward, Julian.”

He answered eagerly, “I would not have you other than you are.”

She took his hand in hers, and laid it against her cheek. “It’s because of David – only because of David – that I feel afraid.”

And as she said the word “afraid”, the old Frenchwoman came back into the room. “Would Madame like me to come in to sleep each night?” she asked.

Treville answered for Laura. “Mrs. Darcy prefers being here alone. She will live as does my stepmother, when she is staying at The Folly.”

He turned to Laura. “I will say good night now, but after I come in from hunting tomorrow I’ll come down, as you have kindly asked me to do, to dinner.”

She answered in a low voice, “I shall be so glad to see you tomorrow evening.”

“By the way—” he waited a moment.

Why did Célestine stand there, looking at them? Why didn’t she go away, as she would have hastened to do if his companion had been his stepmother?

But at last he ended his sentence with “ — there’s a private telephone from The Folly to my study, if you have occasion to speak to me.”

After her lover had left her with a quiet clasp of the hand, and after old Célestine had gone off, at last, to her own quarters, Laura sat down and covered her face with her hands; she felt both happy and miserable, exultant and afraid.

At last she threw a tender thought to La Belle Julie, who had given up everything that to her should have seemed worth living for, in a material sense, to follow the man she loved into what must have been a piteous exile. And yet Laura felt tonight that she too would have had that cruel courage, had she not been the mother of a child.

She got up at last, and walked across the room, wondering how lovely Julie had fared during the long, weary hours she must have waited here for her lover.

Would the Treville of that day have done for his Julie what Julian had done for his Laura tonight? Would he have respected her cowardly fears? She felt sure not. Julie’s Treville might have gone away, but Julie’s Treville would have come back. Well, she knew that Laura’s Treville would not return tonight.

And then she turned round quickly, for across the still air of the room had fallen the sound of a deep sigh.

Swiftly Laura went across to the door, masked by a stiff curtain of tapestry, which led into the corridor linking the various rooms of The Folly.

She lifted the curtain, and slipped out into the dimly lit corridor, but there was no one there.

Coming back into the sitting-room she sat down again by the fire, convinced that her nerves had played her a trick, and once more she found herself thinking of La Belle Julie. She felt as if there was a bond between herself and the long dead dancer; the bond which links all poor women who embark on the danger-fraught adventure of secret, illicit love.

~2~

That evening Célestine proved that her hand had not lost its French cunning. But Laura was too excited, as well as too tired, to eat. The old woman made no comment as to that, but when at last she found with delight that “Mrs. Darcy” spoke excellent French, she did tell her that if she heard strange signs, or maybe a stifled sob, she was not to feel afraid, as it would only be the wraith of La Belle Julie expatiating her sin where that sin had not only been committed but exulted in.

But it was not the ghost of Julie of whom Laura was afraid – it was Célestine, with her gleaming brown eyes and shrewd face, whom she feared. She breathed more easily when the old Frenchwoman was gone….

The bedchamber where she was to sleep had also been left unaltered for a hundred years and more. It was hung with faded lavender silk, and on the floor lay an Aubusson carpet, while at the farther end of the room was the wide, low, Directoire bed which had been brought from the Paris of the young Napoleon.

The telephone of which Treville had told her stood on a table close to her pillow. How amazed would Julie have been to hear that a day would come when a woman lying in what had been her bed would be able to speak from there to her lover – the man who, like Julie’s own lover, was master of the great house which stood over a mile away from The Folly.

Célestine had forgotten to draw the heavy embroidered yellow silk curtains, and Laura walked to the nearest window and looked out on to the gleaming waters of the lake.

Across to the right rose dense clumps of dark ilexes; to the left tall trees, now stripped of leaves, stood black and drear against the winter sky.

The telephone bell tinkled. She turned and ran across the room, and then she heard Julian Treville’s voice as strong, as clear, as love-laden, as if he were with her here, tonight.

The next day’s sun illumined a beautiful soft winter morning, and Laura felt not only tremblingly happy, but also what she had not thought to feel – at peace. She went for a walk round the lake, then enjoyed the luncheon Célestine had prepared for her. Célestine, so much was clear, was set on waiting on her far more assiduously than she did on her own mistress, old Mr. Treville.

About three o’clock Laura went again out of doors, to come in, an hour later, to find the lamp in the drawing-room lit, though it was not yet dark.

She went through into her bedroom, and then she heard the telephone ring – not loudly, insistently, as it had rung last night, but with a thin, tenuous sound.

Eagerly she went over to the side of the bed and took off the receiver, and then, as if coming from infinitely far away, she heard Julian Treville’s voice.

“Are you there, my darling? I am in darkness, but our love is my beacon, and my heart is full of you,” and his voice, his dear voice, sank away …

Then he was home from hunting far sooner than he had thought to be? This surely meant that very soon he would be here.

She took off her hat and coat, put on a frock Julian had once said he loved to see her wear, and then went back to wait for his coming in the sitting-room. But the moments became minutes, and the minutes quarters of an hour, and the time went by very slowly.

At last a key turned in the lock of the front door, and she stood up – then felt a pang of bitter disappointment, for it was only the old Frenchwoman who passed through into the room.

Célestine shut the door behind her, and then she came close up to where Laura had sat down again, wearily, by the fire.

“Madame!” she exclaimed. And then she stopped short, a tragic look on her pale withered face.

Laura’s thoughts flew to her child. She leapt up from her chair. “What is it, Célestine? A message for me?”

Very solemnly Célestine said the fearful words: “Prepare for ill news.”

“Ill news?” Oh! how could she have left her child? “What do you mean?” cried Laura violently.

“There is no message come for you. But – but – our good kind master, Mr. Treville, is dead. He was killed out hunting today. I was in the village when the news was brought.” She went on, speaking in quick gasps: “His horse – how say you?—” she waited, and then, finding the word she sought, “stumbled,” she sobbed.

Laura for a moment stood still, as if she had not heard, or did not understand the purport of, the other’s words, and then she gave a strangled cry, as Célestine, gathering her to her gaunt breast, said quickly in French, “My poor, poor lady! Well did I see that my master loved you – and that you loved him. You must leave The Folly tonight, at once. They have already telegraphed for old Mr. Treville.”

~3~

An hour later Laura was dressed, ready for departure. In a few minutes from now Célestine would be here to carry her bag to the car which the old Frenchwoman had procured to take her to the distant station where Julian Treville had met her yesterday. Yesterday? It seemed aeons of time ago.

Suddenly there came a loud knock on the heavy door, and at once she walked across the room and opened it wide.

Nothing mattered to her now; and when Roger Delacourt strode into the room she felt scarce any surprise, and that though she had believed him a thousand miles away.

“Are you alone, Laura?” he asked harshly.

There was a look of savage anger in his face. His vanity – the vanity of a man no longer young who has had a strong allure for women – felt bruised in its tenderest part.

As she said nothing, only looked at him with an air of tragic pain and defiance, he went on, jeeringly, “No doubt you are asking yourself how I found out where you were, and on what pretty business you were engaged? I will give you a clue, and you can guess the rest for yourself. I had to come back unexpectedly to England, and the one person to whom you gave this address – I presume so you might have news of the boy – unwittingly gave you away!”

She still said nothing, and he went on bitterly: “I thought you – fool that I was – a good woman. But from what I hear I now know that your lover, Julian Treville, is no new friend. But I do not care, I do not enquire, how often you have been here—”

“This is the first time,” she said dully, “that I have been here.”

And then it was as if something outside herself impelled her to add the untrue words, “I am not, as you seem to think, Roger, alone—” for with a sharp thrill of intense fear she had remembered her child.

“Not alone?” he repeated incredulously. And then he saw the tapestried curtain which hung over the door, opposite to where he stood, move, and he realized that someone was behind it, listening.

He took a few steps forward, and pulled the curtain roughly back. But the dimly illumined corridor was empty; whoever had been there eavesdropping had scurried away into shelter.

He came back to the spot where he had been standing before. Baffled, angry, still full of doubt, and yet, deep in his heart, unutterably relieved. Already a half-suspicion that Laura was sheltering some woman friend engaged in an intrigue had flashed into his mind, and the suspicion crystallized into certainty as he looked loweringly into her pale, set face. She did not look as more than once, in the days of his good fortunes, he had seen a guilty wife look.

Yes, that must be the solution of this queer secret escapade! Laura, poor fool! had been the screen behind which hid a pair of guilty lovers. Thirty years ago a woman had played the same thankless part in an intrigue of his own.

“Who is your friend?” he asked roughly.

Her lips did not move, and he told himself, with a certain satisfaction, that she was paralyzed with fear.

“How long have you and your friend been here? That, at least, you can tell me.”

At last she whispered what sounded like the absurd answer, “Just a hundred years.”

Then, turning quickly, she went through the door which gave into the dining-room, and shut it behind her.

Roger Delacourt began pacing about the room; he felt what he had very seldom come to feel in his long, hard, if till now fortunate, life, just a little foolish, but relieved – unutterably relieved – and glad.

The Folly? Well named indeed! The very setting for a secret love-affair. Beautiful, too, in its strange and romantic aloofness from everyday life.

He went and gazed up at the pastel, which was the only picture in the room. What an exquisite, flower-like face! It reminded him of a French girl he had known when he was a very young man. Her name had been Zélie Mignard, and she had been reader-companion to an old marquise with whose son he had spent a long summer and autumn on the Loire. From the first moment he had seen Zélie she had attracted him violently, and though little more than a boy, he had made up his mind to seduce her. But she had resisted him, and then, in spite of himself, he had come to love her with that ardent first love which returns no more.

Suddenly there fell on the air of the still room the sound of a long, deep sigh. He wheeled sharply round to see that between himself and the still uncurtained window there stood a slender young woman – Laura’s peccant friend, without a doubt!

He could not see her very clearly, yet of that he was not sorry, for he was not and he had never been – he told himself with an inward chuckle – the man to spoil sport.

Secretly he could afford to smile at the thought of his cold, passionless wife acting as duenna. Hard man as he was, his old heart warmed to the erring stranger, the more so that her sudden apparition had removed a last lingering doubt from his mind.

She threw out her slender hands with a gesture that again seemed to fill his mind with memories of his vanished youth, and there floated across the dark room the whispered words, “Be not unkind.” And then – did she say “Remember Zélie?”

No, no – it was his heart, less atrophied than he had thought it to be, which had evoked, quickened into life, the name of his first love, the French girl who, if alive, must be – hateful, disturbing thought – an old woman today.

Then, as he gazed at her, the shadowy figure swiftly walked across the room, and so through the tapestry curtain.

He waited a moment, then slowly passed through the dining-room, and so into the firelit bedroom beyond.

His wife was standing by the window, looking as wraith-like as had done, just now, her friend. She was staring out into the darkness, her arms hanging by her side. She had not turned round when she had heard the door of the room open.

“Laura!” said her husband gruffly. And then she turned and cast on him a suffering alien glance.

“I accept your explanation of your presence here. And, well, I apologize for my foolish suspicions. Still, you’re not a child! The part you’re playing is not one any man would wish his wife to play. How long do you – and your friend – intend to stay here?”

“We meant to stay ten days,” she said listlessly, “but as you’re home, Roger, I’ll leave now, if you like.”

“And your friend, Laura, what of her?”

“I think she has already left The Folly.”

She waited a moment, then forced herself to add, “Julian Treville was killed today out hunting – as I suppose you know.”

“Good God! How awful! Believe me, I did not know—”

Roger Delacourt was sincerely affected, as well he might be, for already he had arranged, in his own mind, to go to Leicestershire next week.

And, strange to say, as the two traveled up to town together, he was more considerate in his manner to his wife than he had been for many years. For one thing, he felt that this curious episode proved Laura to have more heart than he had given her credit for. But, being the manner of man and of husband he happened to be, he naturally did not approve of her having risked her spotless reputation in playing the part of duenna to a friend who had loved not wisely but too well. He trusted that what had just happened would prove a lesson to his wife and, for the matter of that, to himself.

The Ghost Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith (1926)

THE CROWN DERBY PLATE

Marjorie Bowen

1931

Martha Pym said that she had never seen a ghost and that she would very much like to do so, “particularly at Christmas, for you can laugh as you like, that is the correct time to see a ghost.”

“I don’t suppose you ever will,” replied her cousin Mabel comfortably, while her cousin Clara shuddered and said that she hoped they would change the subject for she disliked even to think of such things.

The three elderly, cheerful women sat round a big fire, cosy and content after a day of pleasant activities; Martha was the guest of the other two, who owned the handsome, convenient country house; she always came to spend her Christmas with the Wyntons and found the leisurely country life delightful after the bustling round of London, for Martha managed an antique shop of the better sort and worked extremely hard. She was, however, still full of zest for work or pleasure, though sixty years old, and looked backwards and forwards to a succession of delightful days.

The other two, Mabel and Clara, led quieter but none the less agreeable lives; they had more money and fewer interests, but nevertheless enjoyed themselves very well.

“Talking of ghosts,” said Mabel, “I wonder how that old woman at Hartleys is getting on, for Hartleys, you know, is supposed to be haunted.”

“Yes, I know,” smiled Miss Pym, “but all the years that we have known of the place we have never heard anything definite, have we?”

“No,” put in Clara; “but there is that persistent rumor that the House is uncanny, and for myself, nothing would induce me to live there!”

“It is certainly very lonely and dreary down there on the marshes,” conceded Mabel. “But as for the ghost — you never hear what it is supposed to be even.”

“Who has taken it?” asked Miss Pym, remembering “Hartleys” as very desolate indeed, and long shut up.

“A Miss Lefain, an eccentric old creature — I think you met her here once, two years ago—”

“I believe that I did, but I don’t recall her at all.”

“We have not seen her since, Hartleys is so un-get-at-able and she didn’t seem to want visitors. She collects china, Martha, so really you ought to go and see her and talk ‘shop.’”

With the word “china” some curious associations came into the mind of Martha Pym; she was silent while she strove to put them together, and after a second or two they all fitted together into a very clear picture.

She remembered that thirty years ago — yes, it must be thirty years ago, when, as a young woman, she had put all her capital into the antique business, and had been staying with her cousins (her aunt had then been alive) that she had driven across the marsh to “Hartleys,” where there was an auction sale; all the details of this she had completely forgotten, but she could recall quite clearly purchasing a set of gorgeous china which was still one of her proud delights, a perfect set of Crown Derby save that one plate was missing.

“How odd,” she remarked, “that this Miss Lefain should collect china too, for it was at Hartleys that I purchased my dear old Derby service — I’ve never been able to match that plate—”

“A plate was missing? I seem to remember,” said Clara. “Didn’t they say that it must be in the house somewhere and that it should be looked for?”

“I believe they did, but of course I never heard any more and that missing plate has annoyed me ever since. Who had Hartleys?”

“An old connoisseur, Sir James Sewell; I believe he was some relation to this Miss Lefain, but I don’t know—”

“I wonder if she has found the plate,” mused Miss Pym. “I expect she has turned out and ransacked the whole place—”

“Why not trot over and ask?” suggested Mabel. “It’s not much use to her, if she has found it, one odd plate.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Clara. “Fancy going over the marshes, this weather, to ask about a plate missed all those years ago. I’m sure Martha wouldn’t think of it—”

But Martha did think of it; she was rather fascinated by the idea; how queer and pleasant it would be if, after all these years, nearly a lifetime, she should find the Crown Derby plate, the loss of which had always irked her! And this hope did not seem so altogether fantastical, it was quite likely that old Miss Lefain, poking about in the ancient house, had found the missing piece.

And, of course, if she had, being a fellow-collector, she would be quite willing to part with it to complete the set.

Her cousin endeavored to dissuade her; Miss Lefain, she declared, was a recluse, an odd creature who might greatly resent such a visit and such a request.

“Well, if she does I can but come away again,” smiled Miss Pym. “I suppose she can’t bite my head off, and I rather like meeting these curious types — we’ve got a love for old china in common, anyhow.”

“It seems so silly to think of it — after all these years — a plate!”

“A Crown Derby plate,” corrected Miss Pym. “It is certainly strange that I didn’t think of it before, but now that I have got it into my head I can’t get it out. Besides,” she added hopefully, “I might see the ghost.”

So full, however, were the days with pleasant local engagements that Miss Pym had no immediate chance of putting her scheme into practice; but she did not relinquish it, and she asked several different people what they knew about “Hartleys” and Miss Lefain.

And no one knew anything save that the house was supposed to be haunted and the owner “cracky.”

“Is there a story?” asked Miss Pym, who associated ghosts with neat tales into which they fitted as exactly as nuts into shells.

But she was always told: “Oh, no, there isn’t a story, no one knows anything about the place, don’t know how the idea got about; old Sewell was half-crazy, I believe, he was buried in the garden and that gives a house a nasty name—”

“Very unpleasant,” said Martha Pym, undisturbed.

This ghost seemed too elusive for her to track down; she would have to be content if she could recover the Crown Derby plate; for that at least she was determined to make a try and also to satisfy that faint tingling of curiosity roused in her by this talk about “Hartleys” and the remembrance of that day, so long ago, when she had gone to the auction sale at the lonely old house.

So the first free afternoon, while Mabel and Clara were comfortably taking their afternoon repose, Martha Pym, who was of a more lively habit, got out her little governess cart and dashed away across the Essex flats.

She had taken minute directions with her, but she had soon lost her way.

Under the wintry sky, which looked as gray and hard as metal, the marshes stretched bleakly to the horizon, the olive-brown broken reeds were harsh as scars on the saffron-tinted bogs, where the sluggish waters that rose so high in winter were filmed over with the first stillness of a frost; the air was cold but not keen, everything was damp; faintest of mists blurred the black outlines of trees that rose stark from the ridges above the stagnant dykes; the flooded fields were haunted by black birds and white birds, gulls and crows, whining above the long ditch grass and wintry wastes.

Miss Pym stopped the little horse and surveyed this spectral scene, which had a certain relish about it to one sure to return to a homely village, a cheerful house and good company.

A withered and bleached old man, in color like the dun landscape, came along the road between the sparse alders.

Miss Pym, buttoning up her coat, asked the way to “Hartley” as he passed her; he told her, straight on, and she proceeded, straight indeed across the road that went with undeviating length across the marshes.

“Of course,” thought Miss Pym, “if you live in a place like this, you are bound to invent ghosts.”

The house sprang up suddenly on a knoll ringed with rotting trees, encompassed by an old brick wall that the perpetual damp had overrun with lichen, blue, green, white colors of decay.

“Hartleys,” no doubt, there was no other residence of human being in sight in all the wide expanse; besides, she could remember it, surely, after all this time, the sharp rising out of the marsh, the colony of tall trees, but then fields and trees had been green and bright — there had been no water on the flats, it had been summertime.

“She certainly,” thought Miss Pym, “must be crazy to live here. And I rather doubt if I shall get my plate.”

She fastened up the good little horse by the garden gate which stood negligently ajar and entered; the garden itself was so neglected that it was quite surprising to see a trim appearance in the house, curtains at the window and a polish on the brass door knocker, which must have been recently rubbed there, considering the taint in the sea damp which rusted and rotted everything.

It was a square-built, substantial house with “nothing wrong with it but the situation,” Miss Pym decided, though it was not very attractive, being built of that drab plastered stone so popular a hundred years ago, with flat windows and door, while one side was gloomily shaded by a large evergreen tree of the cypress variety which gave a blackish tinge to that portion of the garden.

There was no pretense at flower-beds nor any manner of cultivation in this garden where a few rank weeds and straggling bushes matted together above the dead grass; on the enclosing wall which appeared to have been built high as protection against the ceaseless winds that swung along the flats were the remains of fruit trees; their crucified branches, rotting under the great nails that held them up, looked like the skeletons of those who had died in torment.

Miss Pym took in these noxious details as she knocked firmly at the door; they did not depress her; she merely felt extremely sorry for anyone who could live in such a place.

She noticed, at the far end of the garden, in the corner of the wall, a headstone showing above the sodden colorless grass, and remembered what she had been told about the old antiquary being buried there, in the grounds of “Hartleys.”

As the knock had no effect she stepped back and looked at the house; it was certainly inhabited — with those neat windows, white curtains and drab blinds all pulled to precisely the same level.

And when she brought her glance back to the door she saw that it had been opened and that someone, considerably obscured by the darkness of the passage, was looking at her intently.

“Good afternoon,” said Miss Pym cheerfully. “I just thought that I would call to see Miss Lefain — it is Miss Lefain, isn’t it?”

“It’s my house,” was the querulous reply.

Martha Pym had hardly expected to find any servants here, though the old lady must, she thought, work pretty hard to keep the house so clean and tidy as it appeared to be.

“Of course,” she replied. “May I come in? I’m Martha Pym, staying with the Wyntons, I met you there—”

“Do come in,” was the faint reply. “I get so few people to visit me, I’m really very lonely.”

“I don’t wonder,” thought Miss Pym; but she had resolved to take no notice of any eccentricity on the part of her hostess, and so she entered the house with her usual agreeable candor and courtesy.

The passage was badly lit, but she was able to get a fair idea of Miss Lefain; her first impression was that this poor creature was most dreadfully old, older than any human being had the right to be, why, she felt young in comparison — so faded, feeble, and pallid was Miss Lefain.

She was also monstrously fat; her gross, flaccid figure was shapeless and she wore a badly cut, full dress of no color at all, but stained with earth and damp where Miss Pym supposed she had been doing futile gardening; this gown was doubtless designed to disguise her stoutness, but had been so carelessly pulled about that it only added to it, being rucked and rolled “all over the place” as Miss Pym put it to herself.

Another ridiculous touch about the appearance of the poor old lady was her short hair; decrepit as she was, and lonely as she lived she had actually had her scanty relics of white hair cropped round her shaking head.

“Dear me, dear me,” she said in her thin treble voice. “How very kind of you to come. I suppose you prefer the parlor? I generally sit in the garden.”

“The garden? But not in this weather?”

“I get used to the weather. You’ve no idea how used one gets to the weather.”

“I suppose so,” conceded Miss Pym doubtfully. “You don’t live here quite alone, do you?”

“Quite alone, lately. I had a little company, but she was taken away, I’m sure I don’t know where. I haven’t been able to find a trace of her anywhere,” replied the old lady peevishly.

“Some wretched companion that couldn’t stick it, I suppose,” thought Miss Pym. “Well, I don’t wonder — but someone ought to be here to look after her.”

They went into the parlor, which, the visitor was dismayed to see, was without a fire but otherwise well kept.

And there, on dozens of shelves was a choice array of china at which Martha Pym’s eyes glistened.

“Aha!” cried Miss Lefain. “I see you’ve noticed my treasures! Don’t you envy me? Don’t you wish that you had some of those pieces?”

Martha Pym certainly did and she looked eagerly and greedily round the walls, tables, and cabinets while the old woman followed her with little thin squeals of pleasure.

It was a beautiful little collection, most choicely and elegantly arranged, and Martha thought it marvelous that this feeble ancient creature should be able to keep it in such precise order as well as doing her own housework.

“Do you really do everything yourself here and live quite alone?” she asked, and she shivered even in her thick coat and wished that Miss Lefain’s energy had risen to a fire, but then probably she lived in the kitchen, as these lonely eccentrics often did.

“There was someone,” answered Miss Lefain cunningly, “but I had to send her away. I told you she’s gone, I can’t find her, and I am so glad. Of course,” she added wistfully, “it leaves me very lonely, but then I couldn’t stand her impertinence any longer. She used to say that it was her house and her collection of china! Would you believe it? She used to try to chase me away from looking at my own things!”

“How very disagreeable,” said Miss Pym, wondering which of the two women had been crazy. “But hadn’t you better get someone else.”

“Oh, no,” was the jealous answer. “I would rather be alone with my things, I daren’t leave the house for fear someone takes them away — there was a dreadful time once when an auction sale was held here—”

“Were you here then?” asked Miss Pym; but indeed she looked old enough to have been anywhere.

“Yes, of course,” Miss Lefain replied rather peevishly and Miss Pym decided that she must be a relation of old Sir James Sewell. Clara and Mabel had been very foggy about it all. “I was very busy hiding all the china — but one set they got — a Crown Derby tea service—”

“With one plate missing!” cried Martha Pym. “I bought it, and do you know, I was wondering if you’d found it—”

“I hid it,” piped Miss Lefain.

“Oh, you did, did you? Well, that’s rather funny behavior. Why did you hide the stuff away instead of buying it?”

“How could I buy what was mine?”

“Old Sir James left it to you, then?” asked Martha Pym, feeling very muddled.

“She bought a lot more,” squeaked Miss Lefain, but Martha Pym tried to keep her to the point.

“If you’ve got the plate,” she insisted, “you might let me have it — I’ll pay quite handsomely, it would be so pleasant to have it after all these years.”

“Money is no use to me,” said Miss Lefain mournfully. “Not a bit of use. I can’t leave the house or the garden.”

“Well, you have to live, I suppose,” replied Martha Pym cheerfully. “And, do you know, I’m afraid you are getting rather morbid and dull, living here all alone — you really ought to have a fire — why, it’s just on Christmas and very damp.”

“I haven’t felt the cold for a long time,” replied the other; she seated herself with a sigh on one of the horsehair chairs and Miss Pym noticed with a start that her feet were covered only by a pair of white stockings; “one of those nasty health fiends,” thought Miss Pym, “but she doesn’t look too well for all that.”

“So you don’t think that you could let me have the plate?” she asked briskly, walking up and down, for the dark, neat, clean parlor was very cold indeed, and she thought that she couldn’t stand this much longer; as there seemed no sign of tea or anything pleasant and comfortable she had really better go.

“I might let you have it,” sighed Miss Lefain, “since you’ve been so kind as to pay me a visit. After all, one plate isn’t much use, is it?”

“Of course not, I wonder you troubled to hide it—”

“I couldn’t bear,” wailed the other, “to see the things going out of the house!”

Martha Pym couldn’t stop to go into all this; it was quite clear that the old lady was very eccentric indeed and that nothing very much could be done with her; no wonder that she had “dropped out” of everything and that no one ever saw her or knew anything about her, though Miss Pym felt that some effort ought really to be made to save her from herself.

“Wouldn’t you like a run in my little governess cart?” she suggested. “We might go to tea with the Wyntons on the way back, they’d be delighted to see you, and I really think that you do want taking out of yourself.”

“I was taken out of myself some time ago,” replied Miss Lefain. “I really was, and I couldn’t leave my things — though,” she added with pathetic gratitude, “it is very, very kind of you—”

“Your things would be quite safe, I’m sure,” said Martha Pym, humoring her. “Who ever would come up here, this hour of a winter’s day?”

“They do, oh, they do! And she might come back, prying and nosing and saying that it was all hers, all my beautiful china, hers!”

Miss Lefain squealed in her agitation and rising up, ran round the wall fingering with flaccid yellow hands the brilliant glossy pieces on the shelves.

“Well, then, I’m afraid that I must go, they’ll be expecting me, and it’s quite a long ride; perhaps some other time you’ll come and see us?”

“Oh, must you go?” quavered Miss Lefain dolefully. “I do like a little company now and then and I trusted you from the first — the others, when they do come, are always after my things and I have to frighten them away!”

“Frighten them away!” replied Martha Pym. “However do you do that?”

“It doesn’t seem difficult, people are so easily frightened, aren’t they?”

Miss Pym suddenly remembered that “Hartleys” had the reputation of being haunted — perhaps the queer old thing played on that; the lonely house with the grave in the garden was dreary enough around which to create a legend.

“I suppose you’ve never seen a ghost?” she asked pleasantly. “I’d rather like to see one, you know—”

“There is no one here but myself,” said Miss Lefain.

“So you’ve never seen anything? I thought it must be all nonsense. Still, I do think it rather melancholy for you to live here all alone—”

Miss Lefain sighed:

“Yes, it’s very lonely. Do stay and talk to me a little longer.” Her whistling voice dropped cunningly. “And I’ll give you the Crown Derby plate!”

“Are you sure you’ve really got it?” Miss Pym asked.

“I’ll show you.”

Fat and waddling as she was, she seemed to move very lightly as she slipped in front of Miss Pym and conducted her from the room, going slowly up the stairs — such a gross odd figure in that clumsy dress with the fringe of white hair hanging on to her shoulders.

The upstairs of the house was as neat as the parlor, everything well in its place; but there was no sign of occupancy; the beds were covered with dust sheets, there were no lamps or fires set ready. “I suppose,” said Miss Pym to herself, “she doesn’t care to show me where she really lives.”

But as they passed from one room to another, she could not help saying:

“Where do you live, Miss Lefain?”

“Mostly in the garden,” said the other.

Miss Pym thought of those horrible health huts that some people indulged in.

“Well, sooner you than I,” she replied cheerfully.

In the most distant room of all, a dark, tiny closet, Miss Lefain opened a deep cupboard and brought out a Crown Derby plate which her guest received with a spasm of joy, for it was actually that missing from her cherished set.

“It’s very good of you,” she said in delight. “Won’t you take something for it, or let me do something for you?”

“You might come and see me again,” replied Miss Lefain wistfully.

“Oh, yes, of course I should like to come and see you again.”

But now that she had got what she had really come for, the plate, Martha Pym wanted to be gone; it was really very dismal and depressing in the house and she began to notice a fearful smell — the place had been shut up too long, there was something damp rotting somewhere, in this horrid little dark closet no doubt.

“I really must be going,” she said hurriedly.

Miss Lefain turned as if to cling to her, but Martha Pym moved quickly away.

“Dear me,” wailed the old lady. “Why are you in such haste?”

“There’s — a smell,” murmured Miss Pym rather faintly.

She found herself hastening down the stairs, with Miss Lefain complaining behind her.

“How peculiar people are — she used to talk of a smell—”

“Well, you must notice it yourself.”

Miss Pym was in the hall; the old woman had not followed her, but stood in the semi-darkness at the head of the stairs, a pale shapeless figure.

Martha Pym hated to be rude and ungrateful but she could not stay another moment; she hurried away and was in her cart in a moment — really — that smell —

“Good-bye!” she called out with false cheerfulness, “and thank you somuch!”

There was no answer from the house.

Miss Pym drove on; she was rather upset and took another way than that by which she had come, a way that led past a little house raised above the marsh; she was glad to think that the poor old creature at “Hartleys” had such near neighbors, and she reined up the horse, dubious as to whether she should call someone and tell them that poor old Miss Lefain really wanted a little looking after, alone in a house like that, and plainly not quite right in her head.

A young woman, attracted by the sound of the governess cart, came to the door of the house and seeing Miss Pym called out, asking if she wanted the keys of the house?

“What house?” asked Miss Pym.

“Hartleys, mum, they don’t put a board out, as no one is likely to pass, but it’s to be sold. Miss Lefain wants to sell or let it—”

“I’ve just been up to see her—”

“Oh, no, mum — she’s been away a year, abroad somewhere, couldn’t stand the place, it’s been empty since then, I just run in every day and keep things tidy—”

Loquacious and curious the young woman had come to the fence; Miss Pym had stopped her horse.

“Miss Lefain is there now,” she said. “She must have just come back—”

“She wasn’t there this morning, mum, ’tisn’t likely she’d come, either — fair scared she was, mum, fair chased away, didn’t dare move her china. Can’t say I’ve noticed anything myself, but I never stay long — and there’s a smell—”

“Yes,” murmured Martha Pym faintly, “there’s a smell. What — what — chased her away?”

The young woman, even in that lonely place, lowered her voice.

“Well, as you aren’t thinking of taking the place, she got an idea in her head that old Sir James — well, he couldn’t bear to leave Hartleys, mum, he’s buried in the garden, and she thought he was after her, chasing round them bits of china—”

“Oh!” cried Miss Pym.

“Some of it used to be his, she found a lot stuffed away, he said they were to be left in Hartleys, but Miss Lefain would have the things sold, I believe — that’s years ago—”

“Yes, yes,” said Miss Pym with a sick look. “You don’t know what he was like, do you?”

“No, mum — but I’ve heard tell he was very stout and very old — I wonder who it was you saw up at Hartleys?”

Miss Pym took a Crown Derby plate from her bag.

“You might take that back when you go,” she whispered. “I shan’t want it, after all—”

Before the astonished young woman could answer Miss Pym had darted off across the marsh; that short hair, that earth-stained robe, the white socks, “I generally live in the garden—”

Miss Pym drove away, breakneck speed, frantically resolving to mention to no one that she had paid a visit to “Hartleys,” nor lightly again to bring up the subject of ghosts.

She shook and shuddered in the damp, trying to get out of her clothes and her nostrils — that indescribable smell.

Grace Latouche and the Warringtons (1931)

The Last Bouquet — Some Twilight Tales (1933)

RETRIBUTION

Frederick Ignatius Cowles

1938

“Strange things can be brought about by suggestion,” said Dawson in his ponderous manner. “I have known witch-doctors will a certain person to die and, sure enough, the man has died. But in every case the witch-doctor took good care to let his victim know that he had cast a spell upon him.”

We were sitting around the fire in the club lounge and the talk was about mysterious deaths. A magazine article had raised the subject and Dawson, who having spent some years out East, prides himself on his knowledge of native superstitions, had had quite a lot to say. His last utterance was calculated to finally settle all argument. Dawson was like that. He had an unfortunate habit of ending a discussion by giving to some very ordinary remark all the pomposity of a pontifical decree. Most of us had got so used to him and his mannerisms that we were usually content to abandon the subject whenever he felt it time to assume the rôle of judge and declare the verdict.

But on this occasion Dawson wasn’t to have it all his own way. Another voice chimed in, and to our surprise it was that of Father Price, the quiet little Roman Catholic priest, who was a comparative newcomer to the district.

“I have often wondered,” he said, “exactly what part suggestion does play in such cases and how a death, that is by normal standards unnatural, can be explained by fear. Personally I wish that some rational answer was always possible. But there are happenings that, to the most unbiased observer, must appear to be super-normal. I was once, by an unfortunate chance, the witness of a death which defied all logical explanation, and still troubles me to this day.”

I saw Dawson frown and give an annoyed grunt, but before he could speak I said, “Won’t you tell us the story, Father? I am sure we should all be interested.”

A chorus of assent endorsed my request and the priest nodded as he lit his pipe.

“It happened many years ago,” he began. “I was a young man in charge of my first parish in a south-country town. The church was a wooden hut and the rectory was a little semi-detached house in a typical suburban avenue. I was quite new to the place, and the only friend I had made was the Anglican vicar. We used to dine together and play chess on Mondays and Wednesdays. I had a service on Thursday and heard confessions on Saturday, so Tuesday and Friday were my lonely nights. I fell into the habit, which is common with lonely people, of sometimes sitting at the window and watching the passers-by.

“Towards the end of September a gang of workmen appeared in our quiet avenue and began to carry out excavations to lay a new electric cable. At night a watchman kept guard over the hole in the road, and I often strolled out for a chat with the old fellow. He was a friendly soul, and it was pleasant to stand by his glowing brazier and discuss the topics of the day.

“One evening I was standing by my window when I noticed a well-dressed woman coming down the road. It was raining slightly and she carried no umbrella, but walked with her head lowered against the wind. Suddenly she looked up and seemed to observe, for the first time, the fire blazing in front of the watchman’s hut. She stopped dead and a look of horror came over her face. Then she appeared to pull herself together, deliberately crossed to the opposite side of the road, and passed the fire with averted eyes.

“‘Now why,’ thought I to myself, ‘should any woman be afraid of a fire in a brazier?’”

“There are certain people who suffer from a strange complex — ” Dawson was interrupting when Coates silenced him with a gesture, and the priest continued.

“I thought about the matter several times during the following week, but the affairs of the parish soon drove it from my mind. It must have been a couple of months later when I met Dr Masters. He was a cheery kind of chap and invited me to his house for a meal. I went, and to my surprise, discovered that Mr. Masters was the lady who had crossed the road. The dinner was good, my reception most cordial, but one thing I couldn’t help but notice. Neither in the hall, the dining-room, nor the lounge was there a coal fire. The rooms were furnished with electric radiators, and Sylvia Masters seemed to keep as far away as possible from these.

“Later in the evening the doctor and I were left alone for a short time, and in semi-jocular fashion I said, ‘You seem to favor electric radiators. I suppose they make less dirt than a coal fire?’

“He hesitated a moment and then replied, ‘It isn’t exactly that. My wife has a morbid horror of fire. One of her best friends was burned to death, and since then she has been terrified of even a fire in a grate. It has become an obsession and there seems to be no cure for it.’

“This appeared to be a reasonable explanation of Mr. Masters’s aversion, but I never felt quite satisfied about it. I became very friendly with both the doctor and his wife, and they liked me to drop in at odd times. Gradually I became convinced that it wasn’t just a fear of fire that was troubling Sylvia Masters. There was something else — some secret terror which dominated her whole life.

“Then one afternoon — it was about six or seven months after my first introduction to the house — she opened her heart to me. I must here explain that neither she nor her husband were Catholics, so there was no question of confession. She simply told me the story because she had to confide in someone. The burden of the secret was too much for her. As all who are concerned in the tale are dead now, and as her name wasn’t Masters, I am betraying nothing in telling the yarn.

“Briefly the facts she related were these. When she was a girl she had a friend — let us call her Diana Chapman. They were at school together and remained close companions when schooldays were over. They had the misfortune to fall in love with the same man, and that man happened to be Doctor Masters. Of the two he seemed to prefer Diana, and the gossips in the small northern town where they lived were daily expecting the announcement of an engagement. Sylvia was mad with jealousy, but was clever enough to disguise her feelings.

“Both the girls were members of a club which used to meet on the top floor of a high building which had formerly been a warehouse. Diana was the secretary and often worked on the premises when the club was closed. One night the two were there together after eleven o’clock. The club was shut for the night and they were alone in the place. Diana confided to her friend that Doctor Masters had hinted that he intended to propose to her on the following day.

“Sylvia was furious and would most likely have betrayed her feelings had not a smell of burning disturbed them. They ran to the door and found that the whole place was ablaze. Escape was easy for the building was fitted with an external fire-escape, and it was a simple matter to descend this. But, as they were preparing to leave, Diana remembered that some of the club books should be saved. She rushed back to the secretary’s office and inadvertently closed the door, which was fitted with a patent lock. The key was in her handbag which she had left in a downstairs room, and it was one of those locks which can only be opened with a key. Sylvia knew that she could not descend the stairs to obtain Diana’s bag, and like a suggestion from hell itself, came the thought that should anything happen to her friend she would stand a reasonable chance of becoming Mr. Masters. With this idea uppermost in her mind she made her way down the fire-escape. The brigade arrived very quickly and she at once explained that Diana was locked in the secretary’s office. But by that time the building was a blazing inferno. The poor girl was, of course, burned to death, and her friend was morally responsible. Yes, make what allowances you like, Sylvia was a murderess.

“The doctor mourned Diana for a few months and then married Sylvia. On the actual wedding night Mr. Masters had a disturbing dream. She dreamed that Diana Chapman appeared to her and said, ‘You have him now, but ten years from the day of my death you too shall be as I am.’

“In time Sylvia Masters might have forgotten the part she had played in her friend’s death, but the dream created a dread of something intangible. The horror of fire was easily explained to her husband and their immediate circle of friends by her experience in the blazing warehouse. Yet she herself knew that it was inspired by the dream and the fear that she would also be burned to death. They had moved from the town where the tragedy occurred, but the memory of the threat was an ever-present terror.

“I think the reason she confided in me was the fact that the tenth anniversary of Diana Chapman’s untimely end was fast approaching, and Mr. Masters was slowly but surely working herself up into a state of acute mental alarm.

“The actual date of the anniversary was June 15th, and I was invited to dine with the Masters’s on that evening. When I arrived at the house the doctor was in the lounge mixing cocktails, and he explained that his wife had been delayed in town and was still in her room dressing. He handed me a gin and lime and I was raising it to my lips when shriek upon shriek of terror rang out. We simultaneously rushed for the door and dashed upstairs. The doctor led the way to a room at the end of the corridor and tried the door. It was locked, and from the other side came a sound of moaning — like an animal in pain. Masters banged on the panels and kicked at the lock, but it was a strong door and resisted his efforts. We charged it together but made no impression. By this time a frightened maid had joined us and the doctor sent her off for a coal-hammer. It was then I noticed the smell. It was like burning meat — the acrid odor of scorched flesh.

“When the maid returned with the hammer we were soon able to break our way into the room. I shall never forget the sight that met our eyes. Before the window lay the charred corpse of Sylvia Masters. Yet, of actual fire there was no sign at all. Only on the carpet were the burnt-in marks of two small feet, and upon the polished wood of the dressing-table was the black impression of a hand.

“It seemed almost as though Sylvia had been struck by lightning and that, of course, is the only logical explanation. But remember, gentlemen, that she was burned to death on the tenth anniversary of the day on which she had left her friend to suffer a similar fate. And do not forget the footprints burnt into the carpet and the outline of a hand on the dressing-table.”

We were silent for a moment or so, and then Dawson coughed and removed the cigar from his lips.

“It’s a queer story,” he conceded. “Yet it only goes to prove the truth of my theory that these things can be brought about by suggestion.”

“Perhaps you are right,” agreed the priest. “I still think it was a case of just retribution, and I should like to know whose feet and hand made those marks.”

The Night Wind Howls (1938)

CHRISTMAS RE-UNION

Sir Andrew Caldecott

1946

“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 marvelous presents he gives them.”

“Much too marvelous. 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 pretense 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 harbor 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 wrist-watch 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 parlor-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 canceled 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 canceled? 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 Mrs. 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 civilization, 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 traveling 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 rumors 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 temporized, “perhaps not exactly ghosts.”

Not Exactly Ghosts (1946)