Читать онлайн книгу "In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit"

In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit
E. Nesbit

Hugh Lamb


Edith Nesbit’s natural gift for storytelling has brought her worldwide renown as a classic children’s author. But beyond her beloved children’s stories lay a darker side to her imagination, revealed here in her chilling tales of the supernatural.Haunted by lifelong phobias which provoked, in her own words, �nights and nights of anguish and horror, long years of bitterest fear and dread’, Nesbit was inspired to pen terrifying stories of a twilight world where the dead walked the earth.All but forgotten for almost a hundred years until In the Dark was first published 30 years ago, this collection finally restored Nesbit’s reputation as a one of the most accomplished and entertaining ghost-story writers of the Victorian age.With seven extra newly-discovered stories now appearing for the first time in paperback, this revised edition includes an introduction by Hugh Lamb exploring the life of the woman behind these tales and the events and experiences that contributed to her fascination with the macabre.









IN THE DARK

E. Nesbit


Edited, with an Introduction, by

HUGH LAMB









Copyright (#u11f95d39-6586-5c88-b91d-94bc38cbe7e0)







HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by Equation 1988

Selection, Introduction, and Notes В© Hugh Lamb 2017

Cover design by Mike Topping В© HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover images В© Shutterstock.com

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008249014

Ebook Edition В© September 2017 ISBN: 9780008249021

Version: 2017-08-10




Dedication (#u11f95d39-6586-5c88-b91d-94bc38cbe7e0)


To the beautiful Marisol – my partner and guardian angel.


Table of Contents

Cover (#uea821a03-32ad-50ac-9d40-170d75384bfe)

Title Page (#u7210c5f8-2010-52ae-a252-b5d62ed08685)

Copyright (#ubd8824ea-2640-5638-b918-34341fcf5ffe)

Dedication (#ue90ba2c7-4ab5-5d47-aa17-0fecd7e819ec)

Introduction (#u78013819-a74a-5b80-abb4-e80cf430e2d5)

Man-Size in Marble (#u6134805d-7e02-52f1-ab48-48524fcf2cc9)

Uncle Abraham’s Romance (#ube8bd1ca-fc91-52ce-a6a0-29df2f77a90a)



From the Dead (#ud93fdddc-1a8f-5cda-8230-122c26e23c4f)



The Haunted Inheritance (#u90caed8a-c3ba-5964-b391-6eec81217768)



The Three Drugs (#uea79c22d-09db-5248-9adb-d789b9ef5b46)



The Letter in Brown Ink (#litres_trial_promo)



The Violet Car (#litres_trial_promo)



John Charrington’s Wedding (#litres_trial_promo)



No. 17 (#litres_trial_promo)



The Pavilion (#litres_trial_promo)



The House of Silence (#litres_trial_promo)



The Mystery of the Semi-Detached (#litres_trial_promo)



In the Dark (#litres_trial_promo)



The Head (#litres_trial_promo)



The Ebony Frame (#litres_trial_promo)



Hurst of Hurstcote (#litres_trial_promo)



The Five Senses (#litres_trial_promo)



The Haunted House (#litres_trial_promo)



The Shadow (#litres_trial_promo)



The Detective (#litres_trial_promo)



The Power of Darkness (#litres_trial_promo)



Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)



Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




INTRODUCTION (#u11f95d39-6586-5c88-b91d-94bc38cbe7e0)


There can be few children over the past hundred years who have never encountered the works of E. Nesbit. Even nowadays, in spite of the distractions of playstations and the Internet, her children’s stories entertain and enchant young readers. Lionel Jeffries’s 1972 film of The Railway Children (1906) is a perennial television favourite.

At the same time, it is almost certain that very few adult readers know of, or have read, E. Nesbit’s tales of terror. Apart from one often-reprinted story, they have been largely neglected in the various revivals of supernatural fiction over the years. This is a shame, for not only are they intrinsically interesting, but they pre-date her famous children’s books and represent their author’s growing literary accomplishment and skill, developed very quickly in the hothouse of economic necessity.

You will note I wrote �her children’s books’. This is to clear up a misunderstanding, which still persists, regarding the gender of E. Nesbit. Because she published everything under the cloak of that terse initial, Edith Nesbit was often thought to be a man (something she was quite happy to encourage, by all accounts). H.G. Wells was convinced she was male – to the extent of conjuring up suitable �E’ male names – until he met her. As late as 1931 (seven years after her death), the noted editor Montague Summers mistakenly called her �Evelyn Nesbit’ in his Supernatural Omnibus, a mistake repeated five years later by the anonymous editor of the famous Century of Ghost Stories.

Edith Nesbit was born on 15 August 1858, in Kennington, the youngest of the six children of John Collis Nesbit, a teacher and scientist who ran an agricultural college. She was educated in England and on the Continent and is reported to have lived in at least two haunted houses as a child: excellent grounding for what was to follow. Her childhood also brought her several life-long fears and phobias which were to find expression in her stories, as will be discussed later.

Her father died when Edith was only three years old, and declining fortunes brought the Nesbits back to London in the 1870s. She had already started writing poetry and met with some success while still in her teens. The magazines Good Words and Sunday Magazine bought some of her poetry in 1876, and she became a frequent contributor of poetry to various journals from then on.

In 1877 she met her future husband, Hubert Bland, three years her senior, and, it seems, quite a character: tall, dark, and handsome, with military bearing, and sporting a monocle (which was for more than show – his eyesight was very poor), he was just the type to sweep Edith the literary daydreamer off her feet. And sweep her off her feet he did – straight on to her back. Hubert Bland, as Doris Langley Moore puts it, �could not by any effort of nature leave women alone’. Put less elegantly, Bland would tackle anything that moved and wore skirts; this facet of his character was to dominate their marriage.

He got Edith pregnant in short order, and they were married in April 1880, Edith being two months away from her first baby. Bland had started a small brush factory which seemed to be pottering along quietly. Then, in that same year of 1880, he contracted smallpox – twice – and during his long illness his partner in the factory absconded to Spain with the funds. The Blands were penniless and very much up against it.

Edith Nesbit was never the type to sit back and wail, however. She turned to writing flat out, and it was during this time that she started to produce short stories, some of which can be found in this volume, and poetry of a more lasting kind than she had written before. She also discovered an unusual money-maker: designing and painting Christmas cards, inscribed with her own verses. Hubert caught the writing bug as well, for they collaborated on a joint novel, The Prophet’s Mantle, published in 1885 (it was a failure). Edith and Hubert did, however, pursue separate – and successful – writing careers. Hubert became the editor of Today, a respected literary journal, and published new work by authors such as Shaw, Ibsen, Whitman and William Morris.

The early 1880s saw another collaboration with Hubert that became more permanent. Despite his physically domineering manner and his relish for the opposite sex, Hubert was no clod. He was well read and intellectually active, and was a keen socialist. The Victorian era and its obsession with capitalism had produced widespread dissatisfaction among liberal-minded thinkers, and Hubert belonged to several idealistic sets. Increasing divisions amongst them led to the founding, in 1884, of the Fabian Society. Hubert was a leading light in its formation, chairing the first meeting on 4 January 1884, and Edith was also actively involved. The new society’s name even affected the Blands’ first novel, The Prophet’s Mantle. It was published under the pseudonym �Fabian Bland’.

Edith had contributed a steady flow of stories to the many journals of the day, including Longman’s Magazine, Temple Bar, Argosy, Illustrated London News, the Sketch and the Victorian. Another magazine which published a good deal of her work was Sylvia’s Home Journal, and it was this magazine which brought about another major change in Edith’s life.

A young Yorkshire girl, Alice Hoatson, worked on Sylvia’s Home Journal as a reader and, in 1882, met Edith when she brought in a story for consideration. The two women, both in their early twenties, struck up a warm friendship, and Alice was eventually invited to move in with the Blands. This proved to be a disastrous move. Alice and Edith had a friendship that was to span more than thirty years but, despite this, Alice was the last person who should have been sharing a roof with the priapic Hubert Bland. She very quickly became his mistress and remained so until he died. More than that, she bore him two children, in 1886 and 1899, both chez Bland, and Edith adopted both of them.

What a household it must have been! Hubert dividing his attentions between the two of them and anyone else he could find; Alice forced in public to treat her two children as Edith’s; and Edith obliged to treat Alice’s children as her own while always aware of the circumstances of their birth. And, it seems, she didn’t let on to either of them what the real story was for a long time.

Hubert, while fond of bestowing his favours where he could, was not too happy when others tried the same game. Julia Briggs recounts an amusing incident when H.G. Wells (as bad as Bland in his own way) tried to run away with Rosamund Bland, Hubert and Edith’s daughter. Hubert cornered them at Paddington and gave Wells a piece of his mind and, ultimately, a thick ear, all on the platform. There is no greater irony in all the Blands’ history than the thought of Hubert giving Wells a few belts round the ear for the cardinal sin of seducing his daughter. A lot of Edith Nesbit’s problems might have been avoided – it is hard to think otherwise – if she had had a father to give Hubert a good thumping at some early stage in their relationship.

The Blands’ marriage never foundered, despite Hubert, and despite Edith herself indulging in some extra-marital fun (who could blame her?). They had a wide circle of famous friends, among them Rider Haggard, G.K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Lang, Laurence Housman, R.H. Benson and Grant Allen – and George Bernard Shaw.

Shaw was a profound influence on Edith’s life. She developed a strong passion for him, but it would seem to have been one-sided romance. This was not the case with several other men with whom she became involved over the years, including the author Richard le Gallienne and the famous Egyptologist Dr Wallis Budge. Perhaps the balancing of Edith’s fun on the side with Bland’s adventures gave the marriage some needed stability.

Edith’s first solo book, a volume of poetry called Lays and Legends, appeared in 1886. This was moderately successful and she became more established as an author. She published her first children’s book, The Voyage of Columbus, in 1890. Her career reached a peak in 1901 and started a gradual decline thereafter (though not seriously until about 1910 onwards).

The turn of the century also brought real tragedy. The Blands’ eldest son, fifteen-year-old Fabian, died in 1900 after an operation to remove his tonsils. Edith was stricken. Darker days lay ahead. In 1910, Hubert fell ill with heart trouble and failing eyesight. He finally went blind when his one good eye failed, and in April 1914 he died of what seems to have been another, final heart attack.

Edith found herself in straitened circumstances. The war years obliged her to take paying guests at her home, Well Hall in Eltham, and she ran a poultry farm and market garden. This did not help much and, despite being awarded a Civil List pension of ВЈ60 a year for her services to literature, these must have been black times.

She never regained her literary feet, but gained some return of happiness when she married an old friend and fellow socialist, Thomas Tucker, in 1917. He persuaded her to move out of Well Hall, and they set up home at Jesson St Mary on Romney Marsh in Kent in 1922. She even published one or two more books. Life must have been hard, but Tucker was not Bland, and the marriage seems to have been a fairly happy one, despite her move to Kent coinciding with the onset of bronchial disease, which was in the end to kill her.

The last two years at Jesson St Mary were increasingly burdened by her growing incapacity. Though her mind was as active as ever, her body failed her. Letters written during this period show the strain and agony she suffered, drugged with morphia or racked with pain. Finally, on 4 May 1924, she died; it seems to have been a blessed release. She is buried in St Mary’s in the Marsh churchyard, near Dymchurch. Her gravestone (actually a wooden memorial made by Tucker himself) says simply, �Resting. E. Nesbit. Mrs Bland-Tucker. Poet and Author.’ I think she earned her rest.

* * *

Most writers have two or three styles but E. Nesbit experimented in about a dozen … horror stories, sentimental love stories, stories in dialect; she wrote poetry for public recitation, poetry for the nursery, Socialist propaganda poetry … work for children, birthday books, a volume on dogs, little plays …

Doris Langley Moore Edith Nesbit, 1933

Edith Nesbit as a writer of ghost and horror stories stands apart from her contemporaries. An obvious comparison would be with Mrs Molesworth, who wrote children’s books and ghost stories; but there the similarity ends. Mrs Molesworth would never have given �Man-Size in Marble’ its vicious ending; the hero’s wife would have been saved in the nick of time.

�Man-Size in Marble’ is probably Edith Nesbit’s best known story, and its appeal to modern readers is not surprising. It is unremittingly savage; the hero’s wife does absolutely nothing to deserve her fate, except by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is instructive to imagine what her fellow female ghost story writers would have made of it; Edith Wharton, for instance, would have smothered it in language (Nesbit seems neither to have met Henry James or, if she did, take much notice of him – happily for her writing). The story’s success is all the more interesting as we see hardly anything at all other than an empty space where something should have been and a bit of a statue at the end. Mrs Molesworth would probably have given us the lot before her happy ending, shuffling marble feet and all.

Edith Nesbit had a strong dread of being buried alive, caused, it seems, by the experience of a relative who had been actually placed in his coffin before it was discovered he was still alive. �The Five Senses’ can only be read as an attempt to work out her own fear in literary form.

�The Power of Darkness’ was inspired by Edith’s visit in 1905 to the Musée Grévin in Paris, a macabre waxwork show which must have put the wind up her no end. There are traces of it in �The Head’ as well. That story also owes a lot to her more happy pastime of building miniature towns and cities, one of which she exhibited at the 1912 Children’s Welfare Exhibition, at London’s Olympia.

We can only guess at what burrowed away in her mind to produce the strong streak of necrophilia discernible in �Hurst of Hurstcote’ and �From the Dead’. In the former, John Hurst breaks open his wife’s coffin and is found lying on the vault floor with her in his arms; while in the latter, the hero’s wife returns from the dead. Not unusual in this genre, admittedly; but consider Nesbit’s description: �The figure of my dead wife came in … it came straight towards the bed [note the �it’] … its wide eyes were open and looked at me with love unspeakable. I could have shrieked aloud.’ Hardly a happy family reunion.

Husbands and wives are not seen in the best light in her stories. The husbands are either longing for dead wives or seeing the ones they’ve got die. There seem to be few Hubert Blands in the stories; perhaps not surprising – his thrusting type, with a penchant for the occasional punch-up, is not conducive to a creepy story.

One romantic triangle, in �The Pavilion’, is very strangely resolved, by an unusual relic of the sixteenth century. First published late in her career, Edith Nesbit seems, in this tale, to be striking off in a new direction. It certainly stands out from the rest.

Two stories – �The Five Senses’ and �The Three Drugs’ – bear the hallmarks of a rudimentary attempt at science fiction. The wonder potion story was in vogue in the 1890s, after Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In both cases, Nesbit brings in her own phobias, more so than other writers on the theme.

There are traces in most of the stories of what seems to have been her dominant phobia – the dead returning to life. In 1896, Edith wrote about a childhood visit to see the mummified corpses in the church of Saint Michel, Bordeaux. They made a deep impression:

A small vault, as my memory serves me, about 15 feet square … round three sides of the room ran a railing, and behind it – standing against the wall with a ghastly look of life in death – were about 200 skeletons, hung on wires … skeletons with the flesh hardened on their bones, with their long dry hair hanging on each side of their brown faces, where the skin in drying had drawn itself back from their gleaming teeth and empty eye-sockets. Skeletons draped in mouldering shreds of shrouds and grave-clothes, their lean figures still clothed with dry skin, seemed to reach out towards me … I was paralysed with horror … not daring to turn my head lest one of those charnel-house faces should peep out at me.

These charming exhibits (who on earth thought them suitable for children’s entertainment?) were �the crowning horror of my childish life,’ she wrote. �It is to them, I think, more than to any other thing that I owe nights and nights of anguish and horror, long years of bitterest fear and dread … my children, I resolved, should never know such fear. And to guard them from it I must banish it from my own soul.’

It is all too easy to see works of fiction as standing for something significant to the author’s life. Too often, I suspect, works written with an eye to making a few pounds quickly are invested by critics with a significance far beyond their author’s intentions. Edith Nesbit’s stories were written with money in mind, no doubt about it. But I think there may have been enough of the author in them to make them doubly interesting. You can see Edith Nesbit scribbling away, trying to push back the sight of the Bordeaux mummies creeping up behind her chair or standing in the corner, watching her with dried-up eyes. Or thrusting away the vision of being alive in her coffin, sensitive to all around her but unable to attract any attention to her plight. Or even trying to exorcise the demon of Hubert Bland rampant, impregnating anything he could get his hands on, even under their own roof.

Edith Nesbit’s biographers give her ghost stories minimal treatment. Anthea Bell and Noel Streatfeild never mention them. Very unfairly, Doris Langley Moore brushes Nesbit’s stories aside, in her otherwise warm and affectionate book, as being �singularly ineffectual and now deservedly forgotten’. Julia Briggs, on the other hand, does not dismiss them, but merely mentions them, though she does go at length into �Man-Size in Marble’, which she sees as having sexual connotations. With the amount of sex in Edith’s life – her own and other people’s – that would not be surprising.

I hope readers today will approach Edith Nesbit’s stories with a sympathetic eye. In a genre now heavily laden with massive novels and complex plots, the bald simplicity of her tales of terror comes as a pleasant and refreshing change. They certainly deserve a new audience after all this time.

Hugh Lamb

Sutton, Surrey

May 2017




MAN-SIZE IN MARBLE (#u11f95d39-6586-5c88-b91d-94bc38cbe7e0)


Although every word of this tale is true, I do not expect people to believe it. Nowadays a �rational explanation’ is required before belief is possible. Let me, at once, offer the �rational explanation’ which finds most favour among those who have heard the tale of my life’s tragedy. It is held that we were �under a delusion’, she and I, on that 31st of October; and that this supposition places the whole matter on a satisfactory and believable basis. The reader can judge, when he, too, has heard my story, how far this is an �explanation’, and in what sense it is �rational’. There were three who took part in this; Laura and I and another man. The other man lives still, and can speak to the truth of the least credible part of my story.

I never knew in my life what it was to have as much money as would supply the most ordinary needs of life – good colours, canvasses, brushes, books, and cab-fares – and when we were married we knew quite well that we should only be able to live at all by �strict punctuality and attention to business’. I used to paint in those days, and Laura used to write, and we felt sure we could keep the pot at least simmering. Living in London was out of the question, so we went to look for a cottage in the country, which should be at once sanitary and picturesque. So rarely do these two qualities meet in one cottage that our search was for some time quite fruitless. We tried advertisements, but most of the desirable rural residences which we did look at, proved to be lacking in both essentials, and when a cottage chanced to have drains, it always had stucco as well and was shaped like a tea-caddy. And if we found a vine or a rose-covered porch, corruption invariably lurked within. Our minds got so befogged by the eloquence of house-agents, and the rival disadvantages of the fever-traps and outrages to beauty which we had seen and scorned, that I very much doubt whether either of us, on our wedding morning, knew the difference between a house and a haystack. But when we got away from friends and house-agents on our honeymoon, our wits grew clear again, and we knew a pretty cottage when at last we saw one. It was at Brenzett – a little village set on a hill, over against the southern marshes. We had gone there from the little fishing village, where we were staying, to see the church, and two miles from the church we found this cottage. It stood quite by itself about two miles from Brenzett village. It was a low building with rooms sticking out in unexpected places. There was a bit of stonework – ivy-covered and moss-grown, just two old rooms, all that was left of a big house that once stood there – and round this stone-work the house had grown up. Stripped of its roses and jasmine, it would have been hideous. As it stood it was charming, and after a brief examination, enthusiasm usurped the place of discretion and we took it. It was absurdly cheap. The rest of our honeymoon we spent in grubbing about in second-hand shops in Ashford, picking up bits of old oak and Chippendale chairs for our furnishing. We wound up with a run up to town and a visit to Liberty’s, and soon the low, oak-beamed, lattice-windowed rooms began to be home. There was a jolly old-fashioned garden, with grass paths and no end of hollyhocks, and sunflowers, and big lilies, and roses with thousands of small sweet flowers. From the window you could see the marsh-pastures, and beyond them the blue, thin line of the sea. We were as happy as the summer was glorious, and settled down into work sooner than we ourselves expected. I was never tired of sketching the view and the wonderful cloud effects from the open lattice, and Laura would sit at the table and write verses about them, in which I mostly played the part of foreground.

We got a tall, old, peasant woman to do for us. Her face and figure were good, though her cooking was of the homeliest; but she understood all about gardening, and told us all the old names of the coppices and cornfields, and the stories of the smugglers and the highwaymen, and, better still, of the �things that walked’, and of the �sights’ which met one in lonely lanes of a starlight night. She was a great comfort to us, because Laura hated housekeeping as much as I loved folk-lore, and we soon came to leave all the domestic business to Mrs Dorman, and to use her legends in little magazine stories which brought in guineas.

We had three months of married happiness. We did not have a single quarrel. And then it happened. One October evening I had been down to smoke a pipe with the doctor – our only neighbour – a pleasant young Irishman. Laura had stayed at home to finish a comic sketch of a village episode for the Monthly Marplot. I left her laughing over her own jokes, and came in to see her a crumpled heap of pale muslin, weeping on the window seat.

�Good heavens, my darling, what’s the matter?’ I cried, taking her in my arms. She leaned her head against my shoulder, and went on crying. I had never seen her cry before – we had always been so happy, you see – and I felt sure some frightful misfortune had happened.

�What is the matter? Do speak!’

�It’s Mrs Dorman,’ she sobbed.

�What has she done?’ I inquired, immensely relieved.

�She says she must go before the end of the month, and she says her niece is ill; she’s gone down to see her now, but I don’t believe that’s the reason, because her niece is always ill. I believe someone has been setting her against us. Her manner was so queer—’

�Never mind, Pussy,’ I said. �Whatever you do, don’t cry, or I shall have to cry, too, to keep you in countenance, and then you’ll never respect your man again.’

She dried her eyes obediently on my handkerchief, and even smiled faintly.

�But, you see,’ she went on, �it is really serious, because these village people are so sheepy; and if one won’t do a thing, you may be sure none of the others will. And I shall have to cook the dinners and wash up all the hateful, greasy plates; and you’ll have to carry cans of water about, and clean the boots and knives – and we shall never have any time for work, or earn any money or anything. We shall have to work all day, and only be able to rest when we are waiting for the kettle to boil!’

I represented to her that, even if we had to perform these duties, the day would still present some margin for other toils and recreations. But she refused to see the matter in any but the greyest light. She was very unreasonable, and I told her so, but in my heart … well, who wants a woman to be reasonable?

�I’ll speak to Mrs Dorman when she comes back, and see if I can’t come to terms with her,’ I said. �Perhaps she wants a rise in her screw. It will be all right. Let’s walk up to the church.’

The church was a large and lonely one, and we loved to go there, especially upon bright nights. The path skirted a wood, cut through it once, and ran along the crest of the hill through two meadows and round the churchyard wall, over which the old yews loomed in black masses of shadow. This path, which was partly paved, was called the �bier-balk’, for it had long been the way by which the corpses had been carried to burial. The churchyard was richly treed, and was shaded by great elms, which stood just outside and stretched their kind arms out over the dead. A large, low porch let one into the building by a Norman doorway and a heavy oak door studded with iron. Inside, the arches rose into darkness, and between them shone the reticulated windows, which stood out white in the moonlight. In the chancel, the windows were of rich glass, which showed in faint light their noble colouring and made the black oak of the choir pews hardly more solid than the shadows. But on each side of the altar lay a grey marble-figure of a knight in full armour, lying upon a low slab, with hands held up in everlasting prayer, and these figures, oddly enough, were always to be seen if there was any glimmer of light in the church. Their names were lost, but the peasants told of them that they had been fierce and wicked men, marauders by land and sea, who had been the scourge of their time, and had been guilty of deeds so foul that the house they had lived in – the big house, by the way, that had stood on the site of our cottage – had been stricken by lightning and the vengeance of Heaven. But for all that, the gold of their heirs had bought them a place in the church. Looking at the bad, hard faces reproduced in the marble, this story was easily believed.

The church looked at its best on that night, for the shadows of the yew trees fell through the windows upon the floor of the nave, and touched the pillars with tattered shadow. We sat down together without speaking, and watched the solemn beauty of the old church with some of that awe which inspired its early builders. We walked to the chancel and looked at the sleeping warriors. Then we rested on the stone seat in the porch, looking out over the stretch of quiet moonlit meadows, feeling in every fibre of our being the peace of the night and of our happy love; and came away at last with a sense that even scrubbing and black-leading were, at their worst, but small troubles.

Mrs Dorman had come back from the village, and I at once invited her to a tГЄte-Г -tГЄte.

�Now, Mrs Dorman,’ I said, when I had got her into my painting-room, �what’s all this about your not staying with us?’

�I should be glad to get away, sir, before the end of the month,’ she answered, with her usual placid dignity.

�Have you any fault to find, Mrs Dorman?’

�None at all, sir; you and your lady have always been most kind, I’m sure—’

�Well, what is it? Are your wages not high enough?’

�No, sir, I gets quite enough.’

�Then why not stay?’

�I’d rather not,’ with some hesitation. �My niece is ill.’

�But your niece has been ill ever since we came.’

No answer. There was a long and awkward silence. I broke it.

�Can’t you stay for another month?’ I asked.

�No, sir. I’m bound to go on Thursday.’

And this was Monday.

�Well, I must say, I think you might have let us know before. There’s no time now to get anyone else, and your mistress is not fit to do heavy housework. Can’t you stay till next week?’

�I might be able to come back next week.’

I was now convinced that all she wanted was a brief holiday, which we should have been willing enough to let her have as soon as we could get a substitute.

�But why must you go this week?’ I persisted. �Come, out with it.’

Mrs Dorman drew the little shawl, which she always wore, tightly across her bosom, as though she were cold. Then she said, with a sort of effort:

�They say, sir, as this was a big house in Catholic times, and there was a many deeds done here.’

The nature of the �deeds’ might be vaguely inferred from the inflection of Mrs Dorman’s voice, which was enough to make one’s blood run cold. I was glad that Laura was not in the room. She was always nervous, as highly strung natures are, and I felt that these tales about our house, told by this old peasant woman with her impressive manner and contagious credulity, might have made our home less dear to my wife.

�Tell me all about it, Mrs Dorman,’ I said. �You needn’t mind about telling me. I’m not like the young people, who make fun of such things.’

Which was partly true.

�Well, sir,’ she sank her voice, �you may have seen in the church, beside the altar, two shapes—’

�You mean the effigies of the knights in armour?’ I said cheerfully.

�I mean them two bodies drawed out man-size in marble,’ she returned; and I had to admit that her description was a thousand times more graphic than mine.

�They do say as on All Saints’ Eve them two bodies sits up on their slabs and gets off them, and then walks down the aisle in their marble’ – (another good phrase, Mrs Dorman) – �and as the church clock strikes eleven, they walks out of the church door, and over the graves, and along the bier-balk, and if it’s a wet night there’s the marks of their feet in the morning.’

�And where do they go?’ I asked, rather fascinated.

�They comes back to their old home, sir, and if anyone meets them—’

�Well, what then?’ I asked.

But no, not another word could I get from her, save that her niece was ill, and that she must go. After what I had heard I scorned to discuss the niece, and tried to get from Mrs Dorman more details of the legend. I could get nothing but warnings.

�Whatever you do, sir, lock the door early on All Saints’ Eve, and make the blessed cross-sign over the doorstep and on the windows.’

�But has anyone ever seen these things?’ I persisted.

�That’s not for me to say. I know what I know.’

�Well, who was here last year?’

�No one, sir. The lady as owned the house only stayed here in the summer, and she always went to London a full month afore the night. And I’m sorry to inconvenience you and your lady, but my niece is ill, and I must go on Thursday.’

I could have shaken her for her reiteration of that obvious fiction.

She was determined to go, nor could our united entreaties move her in the least.

I did not tell Laura the legend of the shapes that �walked in their marble’, partly because a legend concerning our house might trouble my wife, and partly, I think, for some more occult reason. This was not quite the same to me as any other story, and I did not want to talk about it till the day was over. I had very soon almost ceased to think of the legend, however. I was painting a portrait of Laura, against the lattice window, and I could not think of much else. I had got a splendid background of yellow and grey sunset, and was working away with enthusiasm at her face. On Thursday Mrs Dorman went. She relented, at parting, so far as to say:

�Don’t you put yourselves about too much, ma’am, and if there’s any little thing I can do next week, I’m sure I shan’t mind.’

From which I inferred that she wished to come back to us after Hallowe’en. Up to the last she adhered to the fiction of the niece.

Thursday passed off pretty well. Laura showed marked ability in the matter of steak and potatoes, and I confess that my knives, and the plates, which I insisted upon washing, were better done than I had dared to expect. It was all so good, so simple, so pleasant. As I write of it, I almost forget what came after. But now I must remember, and tell.

Friday came. It is about what happened on that Friday that this is written. I wonder if I should have believed it if anyone had told it to me. I will write the story of it as quickly and plainly as I can. Everything that happened on that day is burnt into my brain. I shall not forget anything, nor leave anything out.

I got up early, I remember, and lighted the kitchen fire, and had just achieved a smoky success, when my wife came running down, as sunny and sweet as the clear October morning itself. We prepared breakfast together, and found it very good fun. The housework was soon done, and when brushes and brooms and pails were quiet again, the house was still indeed. It is wonderful what a difference one makes in a house. We really missed Mrs Dorman, quite apart from considerations of pots and pans. We spent the day in dusting our books and putting them straight, and dined gaily on cold steak and coffee. Laura was, if possible, brighter and gayer and sweeter than usual, and I began to think that a little domestic toil was really good for her. We had never been so merry since we were married, and the walk we had that afternoon was, I think, the happiest time of all my life. When we had watched the deep scarlet clouds slowly pale into leaden grey against a pale-green sky, and saw the white mists curl up along the hedgerows in the distant marsh, we came back to the house, silently, hand in hand.

�You are sad, Pussy,’ I said half-jestingly, as we sat down together in our little parlour. I expected a disclaimer, for my own silence had been the silence of complete happiness. To my surprise, she said:

�Yes, I think I am sad, or rather I am uneasy. I hope I am not going to be ill. I have shivered three or four times since we came in, and it’s not really cold, is it?’

�No,’ I said, and hoped it was not a chill caught from the treacherous marsh mists that roll up from the marshes in the dying light. No, she said, she did not think so. Then, after a silence, she spoke suddenly:

�Do you ever have presentiments of evil?’

�No,’ I said, smiling; �and I shouldn’t believe in them if I had.’

�I do,’ she went on; �the night my father died I knew it, though he was right away in the north of Scotland.’ I did not answer in words.

She sat looking at the fire in silence for some time, gently stroking my hand. At last she sprang up, came behind me, and drawing my head back, kissed me.

�There, it’s over now,’ she said. �What a baby I am. Come, light the candles, and we’ll have some of these new Rubinstein duets.’

And we spent a happy hour or two at the piano.

At about half-past ten, I began to fill the goodnight pipe, but Laura looked so white that I felt that it would be brutal of me to fill our sitting-room with the fumes of strong cavendish.

�I’ll take my pipe outside,’ I said.

�Let me come too.’

�No, sweetheart, not tonight; you’re much too tired. I shan’t be long. Get to bed, or I shall have an invalid to nurse tomorrow, as well as the boots to clean.’

I kissed her and was turning to go, when she flung her arms round my neck and held me very closely. I stroked her hair.

�Come, Pussy, you’re over-tired. The housework has been too much for you.’

She loosened her clasp a little and drew a deep breath.

�No. We’ve been very happy today, Jack, haven’t we? Don’t stay out too long.’

�I won’t, Puss cat,’ I said.

I strolled out of the front door, leaving it unlatched. What a night it was! The jagged masses of heavy, dark cloud were rolling at intervals from horizon to horizon, and thin, white wreaths covered the stars. Through all the rush of the cloud river, the moon swam, breasting the waves and disappearing again in the darkness. When, now and again, her light reached the woodlands, they seemed to be slowly and noiselessly waving in time to the clouds above them. There was a strange, grey light over all the earth; the fields had that shadowy bloom over them which only comes from the marriage of dew and moonshine, or frost and starlight.

I walked up and down, drinking in the beauty of the quiet earth and changing sky. The night was absolutely silent. Nothing seemed to be abroad. There was no scurrying of rabbits, or twitter of half-asleep birds. And though the clouds went sailing across the sky, the wind that drove them never came low enough to rustle the dead leaves in the woodland paths. Across the meadow, I could see the church tower standing out black and grey against the sky. I walked there, thinking over our three months of happiness, and of my wife – her dear eyes, her pretty ways. Oh, my girl! my own little girl; what a vision came to me then of a long, glad life for you and me together!

I heard a bell-beat from the church. Eleven already! I turned to go in, but the night held me. I could not go back into our little warm rooms yet. I would go right on up to the church. I felt vaguely that it would be good to carry my love and thankfulness to the sanctuary, whither so many loads of sorrow and gladness had been borne by men and women dead long since.

I looked in at the low window as I went by. Laura was half lying on her chair in front of the fire. I could not see her face, only her head showed dark against the pale blue wall. She was quite still. Asleep no doubt. My heart reached out to her, as I went on. There must be a God, I thought, and a God that was good. How otherwise could anything so sweet and dear as she ever have been imagined?

I walked slowly along the edge of the wood. A sound broke the stillness of the night. I stopped and listened. The sound stopped too. I went on, and now distinctly I heard another step than mine answer mine like an echo. It was a poacher or a wood-stealer, most likely, for these were not unknown in our Arcadia. But, whoever it was, he was a fool not to step more lightly. I turned into the wood, and now the footstep seemed to come from the path I had just left. It must be an echo, I thought. The wood lay lovely in the moonlight. The large, dying ferns and the brushwood showed where, through thinning foliage, the pale light came down. The tree trunks stood up like Gothic columns all around me. They reminded me of the church, and I turned into the bier-balk and passed through the corpse-gate between the graves to the low porch. I paused for a moment on the stone seat where Laura and I had last night watched the fading landscape. Then I noticed that the door of the church was open, and I blamed myself for having left it unlatched the other night. We were the only people who ever cared to come to the church except on Sundays, and I was vexed to think that through our carelessness the damp autumn airs had had a chance of getting in and injuring the old fabric. I went in. It will seem strange perhaps that I should have gone half-way up the aisle before I remembered – with a sudden chill, followed by as sudden a rush of self-contempt – that this was the very day and hour when, according to tradition, the �shapes drawed out man-size in marble’, began to walk.

Having thus remembered the legend, and remembered it with a shiver of which I was ashamed, I could not do otherwise than walk up towards the altar, just to look at the figures – as I said to myself; really what I wanted was to assure myself, first, that I did not believe the legend, and, secondly, that it was not true. I was rather glad that I had come. I thought that now I could tell Mrs Dorman how vain her fancies were, and how peacefully the marble figures slept on through the ghostly hour. With my hands in my pockets, I passed up the aisle. In the grey, dim light, the eastern end of the church looked larger than usual, and the arches above the tombs looked larger too. The moon came out and showed me the reason. I stopped short, my heart gave a great leap that nearly choked me, and then sank sickeningly.

The �bodies drawed out man-size’ were gone, and their marble slabs lay wide and bare in the vague moonlight that slanted through the west window.

Were they really gone? or was I mad? Clenching my nerves, I stooped and passed my hand over the smooth slabs and felt their flat unbroken surface. Had someone taken the things away? Was it some vile practical joke? I would make sure, anyway. In an instant I had made a torch of a newspaper which happened to be in my pocket, and lighting it held it high above my head. Its yellow glare illumined the dark arches and those slabs. The figures were gone. And I was alone in the church; or was I alone?

And then a horror seized me, a horror indefinable and indescribable – an overwhelming certainty of supreme and accomplished calamity. I flung down the torch and tore along the aisle and out through the door, biting my lips as I ran to keep myself from shrieking aloud. Was I mad – or what was this that possessed me? I leaped the churchyard wall and took the straight cut across the fields, led by the light from our windows. Just as I got over the first stile, a dark figure seemed to spring out of the ground. Mad still with the certainty of misfortune, I made for the thing that stood in my path, shouting �Get out of the way, can’t you?’

But my push met with a very vigorous resistance. My arms were caught just above the elbow and held as in a vice, and the raw-boned Irish doctor actually shook me.

�Would ye?’ he cried in his own unmistakable accents – �would ye, then?’

�Let me go, you fool,’ I gasped. �The marble figures have gone from the church; I tell you they’ve gone.’

He broke into a ringing laugh. �I’ll have to give ye a draught tomorrow, I see. Ye’ve been smoking too much and listening to old wives’ tales.’

�I’ll tell you I’ve seen the bare slabs.’

�Well, come back with me. I’m going up to old Palmer’s – his daughter’s ill – it’s only hysteria, but it’s as bad as it can be; we’ll look in at the church and let me see the bare slabs.’

�You go if you like,’ I said, a little less frantic for his laughter, �I’m going home to my wife.’

�Rubbish, man,’ said he; �D’ye think I’ll permit of that? Are ye to go saying all yer life that ye’ve seen solid marble endowed with vitality, and me to go all my life saying ye were a coward? No, sir – ye shan’t do ut!’

The night – a human voice – and I think also the physical contact with this six feet of solid common sense, brought me back a little to my ordinary self, and the word �coward’ was a shower-bath.

�Come on, then,’ I said sullenly, �perhaps you’re right.’

He still held my arm tightly. We got over the stile and back to the church. All was still as death. The place smelt very damp and earthy. We walked up the aisle. I am not ashamed to confess I shut my eyes; I knew the figures would not be there, I heard Kelly strike a match.

�Here they are, ye see, right enough; ye’ve been dreaming or drinking, asking yer pardon for the imputation.’

I opened my eyes. By Kelly’s expiring vesta I saw two shapes lying �in their marble’ on their slabs. I drew a deep breath and caught his hand.

�I’m awfully indebted to you,’ I said. �It must have been some trick of the light, or I have been working rather hard, perhaps that’s it. Do you know, I was quite convinced they were gone.’

�I’m aware of that,’ he answered rather grimly; �ye’ll have to be careful of that brain of yours, my friend, I assure you.’

He was leaning over and looking at the right-hand figure, whose stone face was the most villainous and deadly in expression. He struck another match.

�By Jove!’ he said, �something has been going on here – this hand is broken.’

And so it was. I was certain that it had been perfect the last time Laura and I had been there.

�Perhaps someone has tried to remove them,’ said the young doctor.

�That won’t account for my impression,’ I objected.

�Too much painting and tobacco will account for what you call your impression,’ he said.

�Come along,’ I said, �or my wife will be getting anxious. You’ll come in and have a drop of whisky, and drink confusion to ghosts and better sense to me.’

�I ought to go up to Palmer’s, but it’s so late now, I’d best leave it till the morning,’ he replied. �I was kept late at the Union, and I’ve had to see a lot of people since. All right, I’ll come back with ye.’

I think he fancied I needed him more than did Palmer’s girl, so, discussing how such an illusion could have been possible, and deducing from this experience large generalities concerning ghostly apparitions, we saw, as we walked up the garden path, that bright light streamed out of the front door, and presently saw that the parlour door was open too. Had she gone out?

�Come in,’ I said, and Dr Kelly followed me into the parlour. It was all ablaze with candles, not only the wax ones, but at least a dozen guttering, glaring, tallow dips, stuck in vases and ornaments in unlikely places. Light, I knew, was Laura’s remedy for nervousness. Poor child! Why had I left her? Brute that I was.

We glanced round the room, and at first we did not see her. The window was open and the draught set all the candles flaring one way. Her chair was empty, and her handkerchief and book lay on the floor. I turned to the window. There, in the recess of the window, I saw her. Oh, my child, my love, had she gone to that window to watch for me? And what had come into the room behind her? To what had she turned with that look of frantic fear and horror? Had she thought that it was my step she heard and turned to meet – what?

She had fallen back against a table in the window, and her body lay half on it and half on the window-seat, and her head hung down over the table, the brown hair loosened and fallen to the carpet. Her lips were drawn back and her eyes wide, wide open. They saw nothing now. What had they last seen?

The doctor moved towards her. But I pushed him aside and sprang to her; caught her in my arms, and cried:

�It’s all right, Laura! I’ve got you safe, dear!’

She fell into my arms in a heap. I clasped her and kissed her, and called her by all her pet names, but I think I knew all the time that she was dead. Her hands were tightly clenched. In one of them she held something fast. When I was quite sure that she was dead, and that nothing mattered at all any more, I let him open her hand to see what she held.

It was a grey marble finger.




UNCLE ABRAHAM’S ROMANCE (#u11f95d39-6586-5c88-b91d-94bc38cbe7e0)


�No, my dear,’ my Uncle Abraham answered me, �no – nothing romantic ever happened to me – unless – but no; that wasn’t romantic either—’

I was. To me, I being eighteen, romance was the world. My Uncle Abraham was old and lame. I followed the gaze of his faded eyes, and my own rested on a miniature that hung at his elbow-chair’s right hand, a portrait of a woman, whose loveliness even the miniature painter’s art had been powerless to disguise – a woman with large eyes that shone, and face of that alluring oval which one hardly sees nowadays.

I rose to look at it. I had looked at it a hundred times. Often enough in my baby days I had asked, �Who’s that, uncle?’ and always the answer was the same: �A lady who died long ago, my dear.’

As I looked again at this picture, I asked, �Was she like this?’

�Who?’

�Your – your romance!’

Uncle Abraham looked hard at me. �Yes,’ he said at last. �Very – very like.’

I sat down on the floor by him. �Won’t you tell me about her?’

�There’s nothing to tell,’ he said. �I think it was fancy mostly, and folly; but it’s the realest thing in my life, my dear.’

A long pause. I kept silent. You should always give people time, especially old people.

�I remember,’ he said in the dreamy tone always promising so well to the ear that loves a story – �I remember, when I was a young man, I was very lonely indeed. I never had a sweetheart. I was always lame, my dear, from quite a boy; and the girls used to laugh at me.’

Silence again. Presently he went on:

�And so I got into the way of mooning off by myself in lonely places, and one of my favourite walks was up through our churchyard, which was set on a hill in the middle of the marsh country. I liked that because I never met anyone there. It’s all over, years ago. I was a silly lad; but I couldn’t bear of a summer evening to hear a rustle and a whisper from the other side of the hedge, or maybe a kiss, as I went by.

�Well, I used to go and sit all by myself in the churchyard, which was always sweet with the thyme and quite light (on account of its being so high) long after the marshes were dark. I used to watch the bats flitting about in the red light, and wonder why God didn’t make everyone’s legs straight and strong, and wicked follies like that. But by the time the light was gone I had always worked it off, so to speak, and could go home quietly, and say my prayers without bitterness.

�Well, one hot night in August, when I had watched the sunset fade and the crescent moon grow golden, I was just stepping over the low stone wall of the churchyard when I heard a rustle behind me. I turned round, expecting it to be a rabbit or a bird. It was a woman.’

He looked at the portrait. So did I.

�Yes,’ he said, �that was her very face. I was a bit scared and said something – I don’t know what – she laughed and said, did I think she was a ghost? and I answered back; and I stayed talking to her over the churchyard wall till ’twas quite dark, and the glow-worms were out in the wet grass all along the way home.

�Next night, I saw her again; and the next, and the next. Always at twilight time; and if I passed any lovers leaning on the stiles in the marshes it was nothing to me now.’

Again my uncle paused. �It was very long ago,’ he said shyly, �and I’m an old man; but I know what youth means, and happiness, though I was always lame, and the girls used to laugh at me. I don’t know how long it went on – you don’t measure time in dreams – but at last your grandfather said I looked as if I had one foot in the grave, and he would be sending me to stay with our kin at Bath, and take the waters. I had to go. I could not tell my father why I would rather die than go.’

�What was her name, uncle?’ I asked.

�She never would tell me her name, and why should she? I had names enough in my heart to call her by. Marriage? My dear, even then I knew marriage was not for me. But I met her night after night, always in our churchyard where the yew trees were, and the old crooked gravestones so thick in the grass. It was there we always met and always parted. The last time was the night before I went away. She was very sad, and dearer than life itself. And she said:

�“If you come back before the new moon, I shall meet you here just as usual. But if the new moon shines on this grave and you are not here – you will never see me again any more.”

�She laid her hand on the tomb against which we had been leaning. It was an old, lichened weather-worn stone, and its inscription was just

SUSANNAH KINGSNORTH,

Ob. 1723.

�“I shall be here,” I said.

�“I mean it,” she said, very seriously and slowly, “it is no fancy. You will be here when the new moon shines?”

�I promised, and after a while we parted.

�I had been with my kinsfolk at Bath for nearly a month. I was to go home on the next day when, turning over a case in the parlour, I came upon that miniature. I could not speak for a minute. At last I said, with dry tongue, and heart beating to the tune of heaven and hell:

�“Who is this?”

�“That?” said my aunt. “Oh! she was betrothed to one of our family years ago, but she died before the wedding. They say she was a bit of witch. A handsome one, wasn’t she?”

�I looked again at the face, the lips, the eyes of my dear lovely love, whom I was to meet tomorrow night when the new moon shone on that tomb in our churchyard.

�“Did you say she was dead?” I asked, and I hardly knew my own voice.

�“Years and years ago! Her name’s on the back – �Susannah Kingsnorth, Ob. 1723.’”

�That was in 1823.’ My uncle stopped short.

�What happened?’ I asked breathlessly.

�I believe I had a fit,’ my uncle answered slowly, �at any rate, I was very ill.’

�And you missed the new moon on the grave?’

�I missed the new moon on the grave.’

�And you never saw her again?’

�I never saw her again—’

�But, uncle, do you really believe? Can the dead – was she – did you—’

My uncle took out his pipe and filled it.

�It’s a long time ago,’ he said, �a many, many years. Old man’s tales, my dear! Old man’s tales. Don’t you take any notice of them.’

He lighted the pipe, and puffed silently a moment or two before he said: �But I know what youth means, and love and happiness, though I was always lame, and the girls used to laugh at me.’




FROM THE DEAD (#ulink_39549f4e-fc00-54b4-bb17-9343e9fc0214)


I

�But true or not true, your brother is a scoundrel. No man – no decent man – tells such things.’

�He did not tell me. How dare you suppose it? I found the letter in his desk; and since she was my friend and your sweetheart, I never thought there could be any harm in my reading anything she might write to my brother. Give me back the letter. I was a fool to tell you.’

Ida Helmont held out her hand for the letter.

�Not yet,’ I said, and I went to the window. The dull red of a London sunset burned on the paper, as I read in the pretty handwriting I knew so well, and had kissed so often:

DEAR: I do – I do love you; but it’s impossible. I must marry Arthur. My honour is engaged. If he would only set me free – but he never will. He loves me foolishly. But as for me – it is you I love – body, soul, and spirit. There is no one in my heart but you. I think of you all day, and dream of you all night. And we must part. Goodbye – Yours, yours, yours,

ELVIRA

I had seen the handwriting, indeed, often enough. But the passion there was new to me. That I had not seen.

I turned from the window. My sitting-room looked strange to me. There were my books, my reading-lamp, my untasted dinner still on the table, as I had left it when I rose to dissemble my surprise at Ida Helmont’s visit – Ida Helmont, who now sat looking at me quietly.

�Well – do you give me no thanks?’

�You put a knife in my heart, and then ask for thanks?’

�Pardon me,’ she said, throwing up her chin. �I have done nothing but show you the truth. For that one should expect no gratitude – may I ask, out of pure curiosity, what you intend to do?’

�Your brother will tell you—’

She rose suddenly, very pale, and her eyes haggard.

�You will not tell my brother?’

She came towards me – her gold hair flaming in the sunset light.

�Why are you so angry with me?’ she said. �Be reasonable. What else could I do?’

�I don’t know.’

�Would it have been right not to tell you?’

�I don’t know. I only know that you’ve put the sun out, and I haven’t got used to the dark yet.’

�Believe me,’ she said, coming still nearer to me, and laying her hands in the lightest touch on my shoulders, �believe me, she never loved you.’

There was a softness in her tone that irritated and stimulated me. I moved gently back, and her hands fell by her sides.

�I beg your pardon,’ I said. �I have behaved very badly. You were quite right to come, and I am not ungrateful. Will you post a letter for me?’

I sat down and wrote:

I give you back your freedom. The only gift of mine that can please you now.—

ARTHUR

I held the sheet out to Miss Helmont, but she would not look at it. I folded, sealed, stamped, and addressed it.

�Goodbye,’ I said then, and gave her the letter. As the door closed behind her, I sank into my chair, and cried like a child, or a fool, over my lost play-thing – the little, dark-haired woman who loved someone else with �body, soul, and spirit’.

I did not hear the door open or any foot on the floor, and therefore I started when a voice behind me said:

�Are you so very unhappy? Oh, Arthur, don’t think I am not sorry for you!’

�I don’t want anyone to be sorry for me, Miss Helmont,’ I said.

She was silent a moment. Then, with a quick, sudden, gentle movement she leaned down and kissed my forehead – and I heard the door softly close. Then I knew that the beautiful Miss Helmont loved me.

At first that thought only fleeted by – a light cloud against a grey sky – but the next day reason woke, and said:

�Was Miss Helmont speaking the truth? Was it possible that—’

I determined to see Elvira, to know from her own lips whether by happy fortune this blow came, not from her, but from a woman in whom love might have killed honesty.

I walked from Hampstead to Gower Street. As I trod its long length, I saw a figure in pink come out of one of the houses. It was Elvira. She walked in front of me to the corner of Store Street. There she met Oscar Helmont. They turned and met me face to face, and I saw all I needed to see. They loved each other. Ida Helmont had spoken the truth. I bowed and passed on. Before six months were gone, they were married, and before a year was over, I had married Ida Helmont.

What did it, I don’t know. Whether it was remorse for having, even for half a day, dreamed that she could be so base as to forego a lie to gain a lover, or whether it was her beauty, or the sweet flattery of the preference of a woman who had half her acquaintance at her feet, I don’t know; anyhow, my thoughts turned to her as to their natural home. My heart, too, took that road, and before very long I loved her as I never loved Elvira. Let no one doubt that I loved her – as I shall never love again – please God!

There never was anyone like her. She was brave and beautiful, witty and wise, and beyond all measure adorable. She was the only woman in the world. There was a frankness – a largeness of heart – about her that made all other women seem small and contemptible. She loved me and I worshipped her. I married her, I stayed with her for three golden weeks, and then I left her. Why?

Because she told me the truth. It was one night – late – we had sat all the evening in the veranda of our seaside lodging, watching the moonlight on the water, and listening to the soft sound of the sea on the sand. I have never been so happy; I shall never be happy any more, I hope.

�My dear, my dear,’ she said, leaning her gold head against my shoulder, �how much do you love me?’

�How much?’

�Yes – how much? I want to know what place I hold in your heart. Am I more to you than anyone else?’

�My love!’

�More than yourself?’

�More than my life.’

�I believe you,’ she said. Then she drew a long breath, and took my hands in hers. �It can make no difference. Nothing in heaven or earth can come between us now.’

�Nothing,’ I said. �But, my dear one, what is it?’

For she was trembling, pale.

�I must tell you,’ she said; �I cannot hide anything now from you, because I am yours – body, soul, and spirit.’

The phrase was an echo that stung.

The moonlight shone on her gold hair, her soft, warm, gold hair, and on her pale face.

�Arthur,’ she said, �you remember my coming to Hampstead with that letter.’

�Yes, my sweet, and I remember how you—’

�Arthur!’ she spoke fast and low – �Arthur, that letter was a forgery. She never wrote it. I—’

She stopped, for I had risen and flung her hands from me, and stood looking at her. God help me! I thought it was anger at the lie I felt. I know now it was only wounded vanity that smarted in me. That I should have been tricked, that I should have been deceived, that I should have been led on to make a fool of myself. That I should have married the woman who had befooled me. At that moment she was no longer the wife I adored – she was only a woman who had forged a letter and tricked me into marrying her.

I spoke: I denounced her; I said I would never speak to her again. I felt it was rather creditable in me to be so angry. I said I would have no more to do with a liar and a forger.

I don’t know whether I expected her to creep to my knees and implore forgiveness. I think I had some vague idea that I could by-and-by consent with dignity to forgive and forget. I did not mean what I said. No, oh no, no; I did not mean a word of it. While I was saying it, I was longing for her to weep and fall at my feet, that I might raise her and hold her in my arms again.

But she did not fall at my feet; she stood quietly looking at me.

�Arthur,’ she said, as I paused for breath, �let me explain – she – I—’

�There is nothing to explain,’ I said hotly, still with that foolish sense of there being something rather noble in my indignation, the kind of thing one feels when one calls one’s self a miserable sinner. �You are a liar and a forger, that is enough for me. I will never speak to you again. You have wrecked my life—’

�Do you mean that?’ she said, interrupting me, and leaning forward to look at me. Tears lay on her cheeks, but she was not crying now.

I hesitated. I longed to take her in my arms and say: �What does all that old tale matter now? Lay your head here, my darling, and cry here, and know how I love you.’

But instead I said nothing.

�Do you mean it?’ she persisted.

Then she put her hand on my arm. I longed to clasp it and draw her to me.

Instead, I shook it off, and said:

�Mean it? Yes – of course I mean it. Don’t touch me, please. You have ruined my life.’

She turned away without a word, went into our room, and shut the door.

I longed to follow her, to tell her that if there was anything to forgive, I forgave it.

Instead, I went out on the beach, and walked away under the cliffs.

The moonlight and the solitude, however, presently brought me to a better mind. Whatever she had done, had been done for love of me – I knew that. I would go home and tell her so – tell her that whatever she had done, she was my dear life, my heart’s one treasure. True, my ideal of her was shattered, at least I felt I ought to think that it was shattered, but, even as she was, what was the whole world of women compared to her? And to be loved like that … was that not sweet food for vanity? To be loved more than faith and fair dealing, and all the traditions of honesty and honour? I hurried back, but in my resentment and evil temper I had walked far, and the way back was very long. I had been parted from her for three hours by the time I opened the door of the little house where we lodged. The house was dark and very still. I slipped off my shoes and crept up the narrow stairs, and opened the door of our room quite softly. Perhaps she would have cried herself to sleep, and I would lean over her and waken her with my kisses, and beg her to forgive me. Yes, it had come to that now.

I went into the room – I went towards the bed. She was not there. She was not in the room, as one glance showed me. She was not in the house, as I knew in two minutes. When I had wasted a precious hour in searching the town for her, I found a note on my pillow:

�Goodbye! Make the best of what is left of your life. I will spoil it no more.’

She was gone, utterly gone. I rushed to town by the earliest morning train, only to find that her people knew nothing of her. Advertisement failed. Only a tramp said he had seen a white lady on the cliff, and a fisherman brought me a handkerchief, marked with her name, which he had found on the beach.

I searched the country far and wide, but I had to go back to London at last, and the months went by. I won’t say much about those months, because even the memory of that suffering turns me faint and sick at heart. The police and detectives and the Press failed me utterly. Her friends could not help me, and were, moreover, wildly indignant with me, especially her brother, now living very happily with my first love.

I don’t know how I got through those long weeks and months. I tried to write; I tried to read; I tried to live the life of a reasonable human being. But it was impossible. I could not endure the companionship of my kind. Day and night I almost saw her face – almost heard her voice. I took long walks in the country, and her figure was always just round the next turn of the road – in the next glade of the wood. But I never quite saw her, never quite heard her. I believe I was not all together sane at that time. At last, one morning, as I was setting out for one of those long walks that had no goal but weariness, I met a telegraph boy, and took the red envelope from his hand.

On the pink paper inside was written:

Come to me at once I am dying you must come IDA

Apinshaw Farm Mellor Derbyshire.

There was a train at twelve to Marple, the nearest station. I took it. I tell you there are some things that cannot be written about. My life for those long months was one of them, that journey was another. What had her life been for those months? That question troubled me, as one is troubled in every nerve by the sight of a surgical operation, or a wound inflicted on a being dear to one. But the overmastering sensation was joy – intense, unspeakable joy. She was alive. I should see her again. I took out the telegram and looked at it: �I am dying.’ I simply did not believe it. She could not die till she had seen me. And if she had lived all these months without me, she could live now, when I was with her again, when she knew of the hell I had endured apart from her, and the heaven of our meeting. She must live; I could not let her die.

There was a long drive over bleak hills. Dark, jolting, infinitely wearisome. At last we stopped before a long, low building, where one or two lights gleamed faintly. I sprang out.

The door opened. A blaze of light made me blink and draw back. A woman was standing in the doorway.

�Art thee Arthur Marsh?’ she said.

�Yes.’

�Then th’art ower late. She’s dead.’

II

I went into the house, walked to the fire, and held out my hands to it mechanically, for though the night was May, I was cold to the bone. There were some folks standing round the fire, and lights flickering. Then an old woman came forward, with the northern instinct of hospitality.

�Thou’rt tired,’ she said, �and mazed-like. Have a sup o’ tea.’

I burst out laughing. I had travelled two hundred miles to see her. And she was dead, and they offered me tea. They drew back from me as if I had been a wild beast, but I could not stop laughing. Then a hand was laid on my shoulder and someone led me into a dark room, lighted a lamp, set me in a chair, and sat down opposite me. It was a bare parlour, coldly furnished with rush chairs and much-polished tables and presses. I caught my breath, and grew suddenly grave, and looked at the woman who sat opposite me.

�I was Miss Ida’s nurse,’ said she, �and she told me to send for you. Who are you?’

�Her husband—’

The woman looked at me with hard eyes, where intense surprise struggled with resentment.

�Then may God forgive you!’ she said. �What you’ve done I don’t know, but it’ll be hard work forgivin’ you, even for Him!’

�Tell me,’ I said, �my wife—’

�Tell you!’ The bitter contempt in the woman’s tone did not hurt me. What was it to the self-contempt that had gnawed my heart all these months. �Tell you! Yes, I’ll tell you. Your wife was that ashamed of you she never so much as told me she was married. She let me think anything I pleased sooner than that. She just come ’ere, an’ she said, “Nurse, take care of me, for I am in mortal trouble. And don’t let them know where I am,” says she. An’ me being well married to an honest man, and well-to-do here, I was able to do it, by the blessing.’

�Why didn’t you send for me before?’ It was a cry of anguish wrung from me.

�I’d never ’a sent for you. It was her doin’. Oh, to think as God A’mighty’s made men able to measure out such-like pecks o’ trouble for us womenfolk! Young man, I don’t know what you did to ’er to make ’er leave you; but it muster bin something cruel, for she loved the ground you walked on. She useter sit day after day a-lookin’ at your picture, an’ talkin’ to it, an’ kissin’ of it, when she thought I wasn’t takin’ no notice, and cryin’ till she made me cry too. She useter cry all night ’most. An’ one day, when I tells ’er to pray to God to ’elp ’er through ’er trouble, she outs with your putty face on a card, she does, an’, says she, with her poor little smile, “That’s my god, Nursey,” she says.’

�Don’t!’ I said feebly, putting out my hands to keep off the torture; �not any more. Not now.’

�Don’t!’ she repeated. She had risen, and was walking up and down the room with clasped hands. �Don’t, indeed! No, I won’t; but I shan’t forget you! I tell you, I’ve had you in my prayers time and again, when I thought you’d made a light-o’-love of my darling. I shan’t drop you outer them now, when I know she was your own wedded wife, as you chucked away when you tired of her, and left ’er to eat ’er ’eart out with longin’ for you. Oh! I pray to God above us to pay you scot and lot for all you done to ’er. You killed my pretty. The price will be required of you, young man, even to the uttermost farthing. Oh God in Heaven, make him suffer! Make him feel it!’

She stamped her foot as she passed me. I stood quite still. I bit my lip till I tasted the blood hot and salt on my tongue.

�She was nothing to you,’ cried the woman, walking faster up and down between the rush chairs and the table; �any fool can see that with half an eye. You didn’t love her, so you don’t feel nothin’ now; but some day you’ll care for someone, and then you shall know what she felt – if there’s any justice in Heaven.’

I, too, rose, walked across the room, and leaned against the wall. I heard her words without understanding them.

�Can’t you feel nothin? Are you mader stone? Come an’ look at ’er lyin’ there so quiet. She don’t fret arter the likes o’ you no more now. She won’t sit no more a-lookin’ outer winder an’ sayin’ nothin’ – only droppin’ ’er tears one by one, slow, slow on ’er lap. Come an’ see ’er; come an’ see what you done to my pretty – an’ then you can go. Nobody wants you ’ere. She don’t want you now. But p’raps you’d like to see ’er safe under ground afore yer go? I’ll be bound you’ll put a big stone slab on ’er – to make sure she don’t rise again.’

I turned on her. Her thin face was white with grief and rage. Her claw-like hands were clenched.

�Woman,’ I said, �have mercy.’

She paused and looked at me.

�Eh?’ she said.

�Have mercy!’ I said again.

�Mercy! You should ’a thought o’ that before. You ’adn’t no mercy on ’er. She loved you – she died loving you. An’ if I wasn’t a Christian woman, I’d kill you for it – like the rat you are! That I would, though I ’ad to swing for it afterwards.’

I caught the woman’s hands and held them fast, though she writhed and resisted.

�Don’t you understand?’ I said savagely. �We loved each other. She died loving me. I have to live loving her. And it’s her you pity. I tell you it was all a mistake – a stupid, stupid mistake. Take me to her, and for pity’s sake, let me be left alone with her.’

She hesitated; then said, in a voice only a shade less hard: �Well, come along, then.’

We moved towards the door. As she opened it, a faint, weak cry fell on my ear. My heart stood still.

�What’s that?’ I asked, stopping on the threshold.

�Your child,’ she said shortly.

That too! Oh, my love! oh, my poor love! All these long months!

�She allus said she’d send for you when she’d got over ’er trouble,’ the woman said, as we climbed the stairs. �“I’d like him to see his little baby, nurse,” she says; “our little baby. It’ll be all right when the baby’s born,” she says. “I know he’ll come to me then. You’ll see.” And I never said nothin’, not thinkin’ you’d come if she was your leavin’s, and not dreamin’ you could be ’er ’usband an’ could stay away from ’er a hour – ’er bein’ as she was. Hush!’

She drew a key from her pocket and fitted it to a lock. She opened the door, and I followed her in. It was a large, dark room, full of old-fashioned furniture and a smell of lavender, camphor, and narcissus.

The big four-poster bed was covered with white.

�My lamb – my poor, pretty lamb!’ said the woman, beginning to cry for the first time as she drew back the sheet. �Don’t she look beautiful?’

I stood by the bedstead. I looked down on my wife’s face. Just so I had seen it lie on the pillow beside me in the early morning, when the wind and the dawn came up from beyond the sea. She did not look like one dead. Her lips were still red, and it seemed to me that a tinge of colour lay on her cheek. It seemed to me, too, that if I kissed her she would awaken, and put her slight hand on my neck, and lay her cheek against mine – and that we should tell each other everything, and weep together, and understand, and be comforted.

So I stooped and laid my lips to hers as the old nurse stole from the room.

But the red lips were like marble, and she did not waken. She will not waken now ever anymore.

I tell you again there are some things that cannot be written.

III

I lay that night in a big room, filled with heavy dark furniture, in a great four-poster hung with heavy, dark curtains – a bed, the counterpart of that other bed from whose side they had dragged me at last.

They fed me, I believe, and the old nurse was kind to me. I think she saw now that it is not the dead who are to be pitied most.

I lay at last in the big, roomy bed, and heard the household noises grow fewer and die out, the little wail of my child sounding latest. They had brought the child to me, and I had held it in my arms, and bowed my head over its tiny face and frail fingers. I did not love it then. I told myself it had cost me her life. But my heart told me it was I who had done that. The tall clock at the stair-head sounded the hours – eleven, twelve, one, and still I could not sleep. The room was dark and very still.

I had not yet been able to look at my life quietly. I had been full of the intoxication of grief – a real drunkenness, more merciful than the sober calm that comes afterwards.

Now I lay still as the dead woman in the next room, and looked at what was left of my life. I lay still, and thought, and thought, and thought. And in those hours I tasted the bitterness of death. It must have been about three when I first became aware of a slight sound that was not the ticking of a clock. I say I first became aware, and yet I knew perfectly that I had heard that sound more than once before, and had yet determined not to hear it, because it came from the next room – the room where the corpse lay.

And I did not wish to hear that sound, because I knew it meant that I was nervous – miserably nervous – a coward, and a brute. It meant that I, having killed my wife as surely as though I had put a knife in her breast, had now sunk so low as to be afraid of her dead body – the dead body that lay in the next room to mine. The heads of the beds were placed against the same wall: and from that wall I had fancied that I heard slight, slight, almost inaudible sounds. So that when I say I became aware of them, I mean that I, at last, heard a sound so definite as to leave no room for doubt or question. It brought me to a sitting position in the bed, and the drops of sweat gathered heavily on my forehead and fell on my cold hands, as I held my breath and listened.

I don’t know how long I sat there – there was no further sound – and at last my tense muscles relaxed, and I fell back on the pillow.

�You fool!’ I said to myself; �dead or alive, is she not your darling, your heart’s heart? Would you not go near to die of joy, if she came back to you? Pray God to let her spirit come back and tell you she forgives you!’

�I wish she would come,’ myself answered in words, while every fibre of my body and mind shrank and quivered in denial.

I struck a match, lighted a candle, and breathed more freely as I looked at the polished furniture – the commonplace details of an ordinary room. Then I thought of her, lying alone so near me, so quiet under the white sheet. She was dead; she would not wake or move. But suppose she did move? Suppose she turned back the sheet and got up and walked across the floor, and turned the door-handle?

As I thought it, I heard – plainly, unmistakably heard – the door of the chamber of death open slowly. I heard slow steps in the passage, slow, heavy steps. I heard the touch of hands on my door outside, uncertain hands that felt for the latch.

Sick with terror, I lay clenching the sheet in my hands.

I knew well enough what would come in when that door opened – that door on which my eyes were fixed. I dreaded to look, yet dared not turn away my eyes. The door opened slowly, slowly, slowly, and the figure of my dead wife came in. It came straight towards the bed, and stood at the bed foot in its white grave-clothes, with the white bandage under its chin. There was a scent of lavender and camphor and white narcissus. Its eyes were wide open, and looked at me with love unspeakable.

I could have shrieked aloud.

My wife spoke. It was the same dear voice that I had loved so to hear, but it was very weak and faint now; and now I trembled as it listened.

�You aren’t afraid of me, darling, are you, though I am dead? I heard all you said to me when you came, but I couldn’t answer. But now I’ve come back from the dead to tell you. I wasn’t really so bad as you thought me. Elvira had told me she loved Oscar. I only wrote the letter to make it easier for you. I was too proud to tell you when you were so angry, but I am not proud anymore now. You’ll love again now, won’t you, now I am dead. One always forgives dead people.’

The poor ghost’s voice was hollow and faint. Abject terror paralysed me. I could answer nothing.

�Say you forgive me,’ the thin, monotonous voice went on, �say you love me again.’

I had to speak. Coward as I was, I did manage to stammer:

�Yes; I love you. I have always loved you, God help me.’

The sound of my own voice reassured me, and I ended more firmly than I began. The figure by the bed swayed a little, unsteadily.

�I suppose,’ she said wearily, �you would be afraid, now I am dead, if I came round to you and kissed you?’

She made a movement as though she would have come to me.

Then I did shriek aloud, again and again, and covered my face with all my force. There was a moment’s silence. Then I heard my door close, and then a sound of feet and of voices, and I heard something heavy fall. I disentangled my head from the sheet. My room was empty. Then reason came back to me. I leaped from the bed.

�Ida, my darling, come back! I am not afraid! I love you. Come back! Come back!’

I sprang to my door and flung it open. Someone was bringing a light along the passage. On the floor, outside the door of the death chamber, was a huddled heap – the corpse, in its grave-clothes. Dead, dead, dead.

She is buried in Mellor churchyard, and there is no stone over her.

Now, whether it was catalepsy, as the doctor said, or whether my love came back, even from the dead, to me who loved her, I shall never know; but this I know, that if I had held out my arms to her as she stood at my bed-foot – if I had said, �Yes, even from the grave, my darling – from hell itself, come back, come back to me!’ – if I had had room in my coward’s heart for anything but the unreasoning terror that killed love in that hour, I should not now be here alone. I shrank from her – I feared her – I would not take her to my heart. And now she will not come to me anymore.

Why do I go on living?

You see, there is the child. It is four years old now, and it has never spoken and never smiled.




THE HAUNTED INHERITANCE (#ulink_262f35d7-3fbb-5307-ab14-f80aa98b7c21)


The most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me was my going back to town on that day. I am a reasonable being; I do not do such things. I was on a bicycling tour with another man. We were far from the mean cares of an unremunerative profession; we were men not fettered by any given address, any pledged date, any preconcerted route. I went to bed weary and cheerful, fell asleep a mere animal – a tired dog after a day’s hunting – and awoke at four in the morning that creature of nerves and fancies which is my other self, and which has driven me to all the follies I have ever kept company with. But even that second self of mine, whining beast and traitor as it is, has never played me such a trick as it played then. Indeed, something in the result of that day’s rash act sets me wondering whether after all it could have been I, or even my other self, who moved in the adventure; whether it was not rather some power outside both of us … but this is a speculation as idle in me as uninteresting to you, and so enough of it.

From four to seven I lay awake, the prey of a growing detestation of bicycling tours, friends, scenery, physical exertion, holidays. By seven o’clock I felt that I would rather perish than spend another day in the society of the other man – an excellent fellow, by the way, and the best of company.

At half-past seven the post came. I saw the postman through my window as I shaved. I went down to get my letters – there were none, naturally.

At breakfast I said: �Edmundson, my dear fellow, I am extremely sorry; but my letters this morning compel me to return to town at once.’

�But I thought,’ said Edmundson – then he stopped, and I saw that he had perceived in time that this was no moment for reminding me that, having left no address, I could have had no letters.

He looked sympathetic, and gave me what there was left of the bacon. I suppose he thought that it was a love affair or some such folly. I let him think so; after all, no love affair but would have seemed wise compared with the blank idiocy of this unseen determination to cut short a delightful holiday and go back to those dusty, stuffy rooms in Gray’s Inn.

After that first and almost pardonable lapse, Edmundson behaved beautifully. I caught the 9.17 train, and by half-past eleven I was climbing my dirty staircase.

I let myself in and waded through a heap of envelopes and wrappered circulars that had drifted in through the letter-box, as dead leaves drift into the areas of houses in squares. All the windows were shut. Dust lay thick on everything. My laundress had evidently chosen this as a good time for her holiday. I wondered idly where she spent it. And now the close, musty smell of the rooms caught at my senses, and I remembered with a positive pang the sweet scent of the earth and the dead leaves in that wood through which, at this very moment, the sensible and fortunate Edmundson would be riding.

The thought of dead leaves reminded me of the heap of correspondence. I glanced through it. Only one of all those letters interested me in the least. It was from my mother:



Elliot’s Bay, Norfolk, 17th August.

DEAR LAWRENCE: I have wonderful news for you. Your great-uncle Sefton has died, and left you half his immense property. The other half is left to your second cousin Selwyn. You must come home at once. There are heaps of letters here for you, but I dare not send them on, as goodness only knows where you may be. I do wish you would remember to leave an address. I send this to your rooms, in case you have had the forethought to instruct your charwoman to send your letters on to you. It is a most handsome fortune, and I am too happy about your accession to it to scold you as you deserve, but I hope this will be a lesson to you to leave an address when next you go away. Come home at once.

Your loving Mother, MARGARET SEFTON.

P.S.: It is the maddest will; everything divided evenly between you two except the house and estate. The will says you and your cousin Selwyn are to meet there on the 1st of September following his death, in presence of the family, and decide which of you is to have the house. If you can’t agree, it’s to be presented to the county for a lunatic asylum. I should think so! He was always so eccentric. The one who doesn’t have the house, etc., gets £20,000 extra. Of course you will choose that.

P.P.S.: Be sure to bring your under-shirts with you – the air here is very keen of an evening.

I opened both the windows and lit a pipe. Sefton Manor, that gorgeous old place – I knew its picture in Hasted, cradle of our race, and so on – and a big fortune. I hoped my cousin Selwyn would want the £20,000 more than he wanted the house. If he didn’t – well, perhaps my fortune might be large enough to increase that £20,000 to a sum that he would want.

And then suddenly, I became aware that this was the 31st of August, and that tomorrow was the day on which I was to meet my cousin Selwyn and �the family’, and come to a decision about the house. I had never, to my knowledge, heard of my cousin Selwyn. We were a family rich in collateral branches. I hoped he would be a reasonable young man. Also, I had never seen Sefton Manor House, except in a print. It occurred to me that I would rather see the house before I saw the cousin.

I caught the next train to Sefton.

�It’s but a mile by the field way,’ said the railway porter. �You take the stile – the first on the left – and follow the path till you come to the wood. Then skirt along the left of it, cater across the meadow at the end, and you’ll see the place right below you in the vale.’

�It’s a fine old place, I hear,’ said I.

�All to pieces, though,’ said he. �I shouldn’t wonder if it cost a couple o’ hundred to put it to rights. Water coming through the roof and all.’

�But surely the owner—’

�Oh, he never lived there; not since his son was taken. He lived in the lodge; it’s on the brow of the hill looking down on the Manor House.’

�Is the house empty?’

�As empty as a rotten nutshell, except for the old sticks o’ furniture. Anyone who likes,’ added the porter, �can lie there o’ nights. But it wouldn’t be me!’

�Do you mean there’s a ghost?’ I hope I kept any note of undue elation out of my voice.

�I don’t hold with ghosts,’ said the porter firmly, �but my aunt was in service at the lodge, and there’s no doubt but something walks there.’

�Come,’ I said, �this is very interesting. Can’t you leave the station, and come across to where beer is?’

�I don’t mind if I do,’ said he. �That is so far as your standing a drop goes. But I can’t leave the station, so if you pour my beer you must pour it dry, sir, as the saying is.’

So I gave the man a shilling, and he told me about the ghost at Sefton Manor House. Indeed, about the ghosts, for there were, it seemed, two; a lady in white, and a gentleman in a slouch hat and black riding cloak.

�They do say,’ said my porter, �as how one of the young ladies once on a time was wishful to elope, and started so to do – not getting further than the hall door; her father, thinking it to be burglars, fired out of the window, and the happy pair fell on the doorstep, corpses.’

�Is it true, do you think?’

The porter did not know. At any rate there was a tablet in the church to Maria Sefton and George Ballard – �and something about in their death them not being divided.’

I took the stile, I skirted the wood, I �catered’ across the meadow – and so I came out on a chalky ridge held in a net of pine roots, where dog violets grew. Below stretched the green park, dotted with trees. The lodge, stuccoed but solid, lay below me. Smoke came from its chimneys. Lower still lay the Manor House – red brick with grey lichened mullions, a house in a thousand, Elizabethan – and from its twisted beautiful chimneys no smoke arose. I hurried across the short turf towards the Manor House.

I had no difficulty in getting into the great garden. The bricks of the wall were everywhere displaced or crumbling. The ivy had forced the coping stones away; each red buttress offered a dozen spots for foothold. I climbed the wall and found myself in a garden – oh! but such a garden. There are not half a dozen such in England – ancient box hedges, rosaries, fountains, yew tree avenues, bowers of clematis (now feathery in its seeding time), great trees, grey-grown marble balustrades and steps, terraces, green lawns, one green lawn, in especial, girt round with a sweet briar hedge, and in the middle of this lawn a sundial. All this was mine, or, to be more exact, might be mine, should my cousin Selwyn prove to be a person of sense. How I prayed that he might not be a person of taste! That he might be a person who liked yachts or racehorses or diamonds, or motor-cars, or anything that money can buy, not a person who liked beautiful Elizabethan houses, and gardens old beyond belief.

The sundial stood on a mass of masonry, too low and wide to be called a pillar. I mounted the two brick steps and leaned over to read the date and the motto:

Tempus fugit manet amor.

The date was 1617, the initials S.S. surmounted it. The face of the dial was unusually ornate – a wreath of stiffly drawn roses was traced outside the circle of the numbers. As I leaned there a sudden movement on the other side of the pedestal compelled my attention. I leaned over a little further to see what had rustled – a rat – a rabbit? A flash of pink struck at my eyes. A lady in a pink dress was sitting on the step at the other side of the sundial.

I suppose some exclamation escaped me – the lady looked up. Her hair was dark, and her eyes; her face was pink and white, with a few little gold-coloured freckles on nose and on cheek bones. Her dress was of pink cotton stuff, thin and soft. She looked like a beautiful pink rose.

Our eyes met.

�I beg your pardon,’ said I, �I had no idea—’ there I stopped and tried to crawl back to firm ground. Graceful explanations are not best given by one sprawling on his stomach across a sundial.

By the time I was once more on my feet she too was standing.

�It is a beautiful old place,’ she said gently, and, as it seemed, with a kindly wish to relieve my embarrassment. She made a movement as if to turn away.

�Quite a show place,’ said I stupidly enough, but I was still a little embarrassed, and I wanted to say something – anything – to arrest her departure. You have no idea how pretty she was. She had a straw hat in her hand, dangling by soft black ribbons. Her hair was all fluffy-soft – like a child’s. �I suppose you have seen the house?’ I asked.

She paused, one foot still on the lower step of the sundial, and her face seemed to brighten at the touch of some idea as sudden as welcome.

�Well – no,’ she said. �The fact is – I wanted frightfully to see the house; in fact, I’ve come miles and miles on purpose, but there’s no one to let me in.’

�The people at the lodge?’ I suggested.

�Oh, no,’ she said. �I – the fact is I – I don’t want to be shown round. I want to explore!’

She looked at me critically. Her eyes dwelt on my right hand, which lay on the sundial. I have always taken reasonable care of my hands, and I wore a good ring, a sapphire, cut with the Sefton arms: an heirloom, by the way. Her glance at my hand preluded a longer glance at my face. Then she shrugged her pretty shoulders.

�Oh well,’ she said, and it was as if she had said plainly, �I see that you are a gentleman and a decent fellow. Why should I not look over the house in your company? Introductions? Bah!’

All this her shrug said without ambiguity as without words.

�Perhaps,’ I hazarded, �I could get the keys.’

�Do you really care very much for old houses?’

�I do,’ said I; �and you?’

�I care so much that I nearly broke into this one. I should have done it quite if the windows had been an inch or two lower.’

�I am an inch or two higher,’ said I, standing squarely so as to make the most of my six-feet beside her five-feet-five or thereabouts.

�Oh – if you only would!’ she said.

�Why not?’ said I.

She led the way past the marble basin of the fountain, and along the historic yew avenue, planted, like all old yew avenues, by that industrious gardener our Eighth Henry. Then across a lawn, through a winding, grassy, shrubbery path, that ended at a green door in the garden wall.

�You can lift this latch with a hairpin,’ said she, and therewith lifted it.

We walked into a courtyard. Young grass grew green between the grey flags on which our steps echoed.

�This is the window,’ said she. �You see there’s a pane broken. If you could get on to the window-sill, you could get your hand in and undo the hasp, and—’

�And you?’

�Oh, you’ll let me in by the kitchen door.’

I did it. My conscience called me a burglar – in vain. Was it not my own, or as good as my own house?

I let her in at the back door. We walked through the big dark kitchen where the old three-legged pot towered large on the hearth, and the old spits and firedogs still kept their ancient place. Then through another kitchen where red rust was making its full meal of a comparatively modern range.

Then into the great hall, where the old armour and the buff-coats and round-caps hang on the walls, and where the carved stone staircases run at each side up to the gallery above.

The long tables in the middle of the hall were scored by the knives of the many who had eaten meat there – initials and dates were cut into them. The roof was groined, the windows low-arched.

�Oh, but what a place!’ said she; �this must be much older than the rest of it—’

�Evidently. About 1300, I should say.’

�Oh, let us explore the rest,’ she cried; �it is really a comfort not to have a guide, but only a person like you who just guesses comfortably at dates. I should hate to be told exactly when this hall was built.’

We explored ballroom and picture gallery, white parlour and library. Most of the rooms were furnished – all heavily, some magnificently – but everything was dusty and faded.

It was in the white parlour, a spacious panelled room on the first floor, that she told me the ghost story, substantially the same as my porter’s tale, only in one respect different.

�And so, just as she was leaving this very room – yes, I’m sure it’s this room, because the woman at the inn pointed out this double window and told me so – just as the poor lovers were creeping out of the door, the cruel father came quickly out of some dark place and killed them both. So now they haunt it.’

�It is a terrible thought,’ said I gravely. �How would you like to live in a haunted house?’

�I couldn’t,’ she said quickly.

�Nor I; it would be too—’ my speech would have ended flippantly, but for the grave set of her features.

�I wonder who will live here?’ she said. �The owner is just dead. They say it is an awful house, full of ghosts. Of course one is not afraid now’ – the sunlight lay golden and soft on the dusty parquet of the floor – �but at night, when the wind wails, and the doors creak, and the things rustle, oh, it must be awful!’

�I hear the house has been left to two people, or rather one is to have the house, and the other a sum of money,’ said I. �It’s a beautiful house, full of beautiful things, but I should think at least one of the heirs would rather have the money.’

�Oh yes, I should think so. I wonder whether the heirs know about the ghost? The lights can be seen from the inn, you know, at twelve o’clock, and they see the ghost in white at the window.’

�Never the black one?’

�Oh yes, I suppose so.’

�The ghosts don’t appear together?’

�No.’

�I suppose,’ said I, �whoever it is that manages such things knows that the poor ghosts would like to be together, so it won’t let them.’

She shivered.

�Come,’ she said, �we have seen all over the house; let us get back into the sunshine. Now I will go out, and you shall bolt the door after me, and then you can come out by the window. Thank you so much for all the trouble you have taken. It has really been quite an adventure …’

I rather liked that expression, and she hastened to spoil it.

�… Quite an adventure going all over this glorious old place, and looking at everything one wanted to see, and not just at what the housekeeper didn’t mind one’s looking at.’

She passed through the door, but when I had closed it and prepared to lock it, I found that the key was no longer in the lock. I looked on the floor – I felt in my pockets, and at last, wandering back into the kitchen, discovered it on the table, where I swear I never put it.

When I had fitted that key into the lock and turned it, and got out of the window and made that fast, I dropped into the yard. No one shared its solitude with me. I searched garden and pleasure grounds, but never a glimpse of pink rewarded my anxious eyes. I found the sundial again, and stretched myself along the warm brick of the wide step where she had sat: and called myself a fool.

I had let her go. I did not know her name; I did not know where she lived; she had been at the inn, but probably only for lunch. I should never see her again, and certainly in that event I should never see again such dark, soft eyes, such hair, such a contour of cheek and chin, such a frank smile – in a word, a girl with whom it would be so delightfully natural for me to fall in love. For all the time she had been talking to me of architecture and archaeology, of dates and periods, of carvings and mouldings, I had been recklessly falling in love with the idea of falling in love with her. I had cherished and adored this delightful possibility, and now my chance was over. Even I could not definitely fall in love after one interview with a girl I was never to see again! And falling in love is so pleasant! I cursed my lost chance, and went back to the inn. I talked to the waiter.

�Yes, a lady in pink had lunched there with a party. Had gone on to the Castle. A party from Tonbridge it was.’

Barnhurst Castle is close to Sefton Manor. The inn lays itself out to entertain persons who come in brakes and carve their names on the walls of the Castle keep. The inn has a visitors’ book. I examined it. Some twenty feminine names. Any one might be hers. The waiter looked over my shoulder. I turned the pages.

�Only parties staying in the house in this part of the book,’ said the waiter.

My eye caught one name. �Selwyn Sefton’, in a clear, round, black handwriting.

�Staying here?’ I pointed to the name.

�Yes, sir; came today, sir.’

�Can I have a private sitting-room?’

I had one. I ordered my dinner to be served in it, and I sat down and considered my course of action. Should I invite my cousin Selwyn to dinner, ply him with wine, and exact promises? Honour forbade. Should I seek him out and try to establish friendly relations? To what end?

Then I saw from my window a young man in a light-checked suit, with a face at once pallid and coarse. He strolled along the gravel path, and a woman’s voice in the garden called �Selwyn’.

He disappeared in the direction of the voice. I don’t think I ever disliked a man so much at first sight.

�Brute,’ said I, �why should he have the house? He’d stucco it all over as likely as not; perhaps let it! He’d never stand the ghosts, either—’

Then the inexcusable, daring idea of my life came to me, striking me rigid – a blow from my other self. It must have been a minute or two before my muscles relaxed and my arms fell at my sides.

�I’ll do it,’ I said.

I dined. I told the people of the house not to sit up for me. I was going to see friends in the neighbourhood, and might stay the night with them. I took my Inverness cape with me on my arm and my soft felt hat in my pocket. I wore a light suit and a straw hat.

Before I started I leaned cautiously from my window. The lamp at the bow window next to mine showed me the pallid young man, smoking a fat, reeking cigar. I hoped he would continue to sit there smoking. His window looked the right way; and if he didn’t see what I wanted him to see some one else in the inn would. The landlady had assured me that I should disturb no one if I came in at half-past twelve.

�We hardly keep country hours here, sir,’ she said, �on account of so much excursionist business.’

I bought candles in the village, and, as I went down across the park in the soft darkness, I turned again and again to be sure that the light and the pallid young man were still at that window. It was now past eleven.

I got into the house and lighted a candle, and crept through the dark kitchens, whose windows, I knew, did not look towards the inn. When I came to the hall I blew out my candle. I dared not show light prematurely, and in the unhaunted part of the house.

I gave myself a nasty knock against one of the long tables, but it helped me to get my bearings, and presently I laid my hand on the stone balustrade of the great staircase. You would hardly believe me if I were to tell you truly of my sensations as I began to go up these stairs. I am not a coward – at least, I had never thought so till then – but the absolute darkness unnerved me. I had to go slowly, or I should have lost my head and blundered up the stairs three at a time, so strong was the feeling of something – something uncanny – just behind me.

I set my teeth. I reached the top of the stairs, felt along the walls, and after a false start, which landed me in the great picture gallery, I found the white parlour, entered it, closed the door, and felt my way to a little room without a window, which we had decided must have been a powdering-room.

Here I ventured to re-light my candle.

The white parlour, I remembered, was fully furnished. Returning to it I struck one match, and by its flash determined the way to the mantelpiece.

Then I closed the powdering-room door behind me. I felt my way to the mantelpiece and took down the two brass twenty-lighted candelabra. I placed these on a table a yard or two from the window, and in them set up my candles. It is astonishingly difficult in the dark to do anything, even a thing so simple as the setting up of a candle.

Then I went back into my little room, put on the Inverness cape and the slouch hat, and looked at my watch. Eleven-thirty. I must wait. I sat down and waited. I thought how rich I was – the thought fell flat; I wanted this house. I thought of my beautiful pink lady; but I put that thought aside; I had an inward consciousness that my conduct, more heroic than enough in one sense, would seem mean and crafty in her eyes. Only ten minutes had passed. I could not wait till twelve. The chill of the night and of the damp, unused house, and, perhaps, some less material influence, made me shiver.

I opened the door, crept on hands and knees to the table, and, carefully keeping myself below the level of the window, I reached up a trembling arm, and lighted, one by one, my forty candles. The room was a blaze of light. My courage came back to me with the retreat of the darkness. I was far too excited to know what a fool I was making of myself. I rose boldly, and struck an attitude over against the window, where the candle-light shone upon as well as behind me. My Inverness was flung jauntily over my shoulder, my soft, black felt twisted and slouched over my eyes.

There I stood for the world, and particularly for my cousin Selwyn, to see, the very image of the ghost that haunted that chamber. And from my window I could see the light in that other window, and indistinctly the lounging figure there. Oh, my cousin Selwyn, I wished many things to your address in that moment! For it was only a moment that I had to feel brave and daring in. Then I heard, deep down in the house, a sound, very slight, very faint. Then came silence. I drew a deep breath. The silence endured. And I stood by my lighted window.

After a very long time, as it seemed, I heard a board crack, and then a soft rustling sound that drew near and seemed to pause outside the very door of my parlour.

Again I held my breath, and now I thought of the most horrible story Poe ever wrote – �The Fall of the House of Usher’ – and I fancied I saw the handle of that door move. I fixed my eyes on it. The fancy passed: and returned.

Then again there was silence. And then the door opened with a soft, silent suddenness, and I saw in the doorway a figure in trailing white. Its eyes blazed in a death-white face. It made two ghostly, gliding steps forward, and my heart stood still. I had not thought it possible for a man to experience so sharp a pang of sheer terror. I had masqueraded as one of the ghosts in this accursed house. Well, the other ghost – the real one – had come to meet me. I do not like to dwell on that moment. The only thing which it pleases me to remember is that I did not scream or go mad. I think I stood on the verge of both.

The ghost, I say, took two steps forward; then it threw up its arms, the lighted taper it carried fell on the floor, and it reeled back against the door with its arms across its face.

The fall of the candle woke me as from a nightmare. It fell solidly, and rolled away under the table.

I perceived that my ghost was human. I cried incoherently: �Don’t, for Heaven’s sake – it’s all right.’

The ghost dropped its hands and turned agonised eyes on me. I tore off my cloak and hat.

�I – didn’t – scream,’ she said, and with that I sprang forward and caught her in my arms – my poor, pink lady – white now as a white rose.

I carried her into the powdering-room, and left one candle with her, extinguishing the others hastily, for now I saw what in my extravagant folly had escaped me before, that my ghost exhibition might bring the whole village down on the house. I tore down the long corridor and double locked the doors leading from it to the staircase, then back to the powdering-room and the prone white rose. How, in the madness of that night’s folly, I had thought to bring a brandy-flask passes my understanding. But I had done it. Now I rubbed her hands with the spirit. I rubbed her temples, I tried to force it between her lips, and at last she sighed and opened her eyes.

�Oh – thank God – thank God!’ I cried, for indeed I had almost feared that my mad trick had killed her. �Are you better? oh, poor little lady, are you better?’

She moved her head a little on my arm.

Again she sighed, and her eyes closed. I gave her more brandy. She took it, choked, raised herself against my shoulder.

�I’m all right now,’ she said faintly. �It served me right. How silly it all is!’ Then she began to laugh, and then she began to cry.

It was at this moment that we heard voices on the terrace below. She clutched at my arm in a frenzy of terror, the bright tears glistening on her cheeks.

�Oh! not any more, not any more,’ she cried. �I can’t bear it.’

�Hush,’ I said, taking her hands strongly in mine. �I’ve played the fool; so have you. We must play the man now. The people in the village have seen the lights – that’s all. They think we’re burglars. They can’t get in. Keep quiet, and they’ll go away.’

But when they did go away they left the local constable on guard. He kept guard like a man till daylight began to creep over the hill, and then he crawled into the hayloft and fell asleep, small blame to him.

But through those long hours I sat beside her and held her hand. At first she clung to me as a frightened child clings, and her tears were the prettiest, saddest things to see. As we grew calmer we talked.

�I did it to frighten my cousin,’ I owned. �I meant to have told you today, I mean yesterday, only you went away. I am Lawrence Sefton, and the place is to go either to me or to my cousin Selwyn. And I wanted to frighten him off it. But you, why did you—?’

Even then I couldn’t see. She looked at me.

�I don’t know how I ever could have thought I was brave enough to do it, but I did want the house so, and I wanted to frighten you—’

�To frighten me. Why?’

�Because I am your cousin Selwyn,’ she said, hiding her face in her hands.

�And you knew me?’ I asked.

�By your ring,’ she said. �I saw your father wear it when I was a little girl. Can’t we get back to the inn now?’

�Not unless you want everyone to know how silly we have been.’

�I wish you’d forgive me,’ she said when we had talked awhile, and she had even laughed at the description of the pallid young man on whom I had bestowed, in my mind, her name.

�The wrong is mutual,’ I said; �we will exchange forgivenesses.’

�Oh, but it isn’t,’ she said eagerly. �Because I knew it was you, and you didn’t know it was me: you wouldn’t have tried to frighten me.’

�You know I wouldn’t.’ My voice was tenderer than I meant it to be.

She was silent.

�And who is to have the house?’ she said.

�Why you, of course.’

�I never will.’

�Why?’

�Oh, because!’

�Can’t we put off the decision?’ I asked.

�Impossible. We must decide tomorrow – today I mean.’

�Well, when we meet tomorrow – I mean today – with lawyers and chaperones and mothers and relations, give me one word alone with you.’

�Yes,’ she answered, with docility.

�Do you know,’ she said presently, �I can never respect myself again? To undertake a thing like that, and then be so horribly frightened. Oh! I thought you really were the other ghost.’

�I will tell you a secret,’ said I. �I thought you were, and I was much more frightened than you.’

�Oh well,’ she said, leaning against my shoulder as a tired child might have done, �if you were frightened too, Cousin Lawrence, I don’t mind so very, very much.’

It was soon afterwards that, cautiously looking out of the parlour window for the twentieth time, I had the happiness of seeing the local policeman disappear into the stable rubbing his eyes.

We got out of the window on the other side of the house, and went back to the inn across the dewy park. The French window of the sitting-room which had let her out let us both in. No one was stirring, so no one save she and I were any the wiser as to that night’s work.

It was like a garden party next day, when lawyers and executors and aunts and relations met on the terrace in front of Sefton Manor House.

Her eyes were downcast. She followed her aunt demurely over the house and the grounds.

�Your decision,’ said my great-uncle’s solicitor, �has to be given within the hour.’

�My cousin and I will announce it within that time,’ I said, and I at once gave her my arm.

Arrived at the sundial we stopped.

�This is my proposal,’ I said: �We will say that we decide that the house is yours – we will spend the £20,000 in restoring it and the grounds. By the time that’s done we can decide who is to have it.’

�But how?’

�Oh, we’ll draw lots, or toss a halfpenny, or anything you like.’

�I’d rather decide now,’ she said; �you take it.’

�No, you shall.’

�I’d rather you had it. I – I don’t feel so greedy as I did yesterday,’ she said.

�Neither do I. Or at any rate not in the same way.’

�Do – do take the house,’ she said very earnestly.

Then I said: �My cousin Selwyn, unless you take the house, I shall make you an offer of marriage.’

�Oh!’ she breathed.

�And when you have declined it, on the very proper ground of our too slight acquaintance, I will take my turn at declining. I will decline the house. Then, if you are obdurate, it will become an asylum. Don’t be obdurate. Pretend to take the house and—’

She looked at me rather piteously.

�Very well,’ she said, �I will pretend to take the house, and when it is restored—’

�We’ll spin the penny.’

So before the waiting relations the house was adjudged to my cousin Selwyn. When the restoration was complete I met Selwyn at the sundial. We had met there often in the course of the restoration, in which business we both took an extravagant interest.

�Now,’ I said, �we’ll spin the penny. Heads you take the house, tails it comes to me.’

I spun the coin – it fell on the brick steps of the sundial, and stuck upright there, wedged between two bricks. She laughed; I laughed.

�It’s not my house,’ I said.

�It’s not my house,’ said she.

�Dear,’ said I, and we were neither of us laughing then, �can’t it be our house?’

And, thank God, our house it is.




THE THREE DRUGS (#ulink_d38d7735-7762-5dcd-98ad-3f59b3880699)


I

Roger Wroxham looked round his studio before he blew out the candle, and wondered whether, perhaps, he looked for the last time. It was large and empty, yet his trouble had filled it, and, pressing against him in the prison of those four walls, forced him out into the world, where lights and voices and the presence of other men should give him room to draw back, to set a space between it and him, to decide whether he would ever face it again – he and it alone together. The nature of his trouble is not germane to this story. There was a woman in it, of course, and money, and a friend, and regrets and embarrassments – and all of those reached out tendrils that wove and interwove till they made a puzzle-problem of which heart and brain were now weary. It was as though his life depended on his deciphering the straggling characters traced by some spider who, having fallen into the ink-well, had dragged clogged legs in a black zig-zag across his map of the world.

He blew out the candle and went quietly downstairs. It was nine at night, a soft night of May in Paris. Where should he go? He thought of the Seine, and took – an omnibus. The chestnut trees of the Boulevards brushed against the sides of the one that he boarded blindly in the first light street. He did not know where the omnibus was going. It did not matter. When at last it stopped he got off, and so strange was the place to him that for an instant it almost seemed as though the trouble itself had been left behind. He did not feel it in the length of three or four streets that he traversed slowly. But in the open space, very light and lively, where he recognised the Taverne de Paris and knew himself in Montmartre, the trouble set its teeth in his heart again, and he broke away from the lamps and the talk to struggle with it in the dark quiet streets beyond.

A man braced for such a fight has little thought to spare for the detail of his surroundings. The next thing that Wroxham knew of the outside world was the fact that he had known for some time that he was not alone in the street. There was someone on the other side of the road keeping pace with him – yes, certainly keeping pace, for, as he slackened his own, the feet on the other pavement also went more slowly. And now they were four feet, not two. Where had the other man sprung from? He had not been there a moment ago. And now, from an archway a little ahead of him, a third man came.

Wroxham stopped. Then three men converged upon him, and, like a sudden magic-lantern picture on a sheet prepared, there came to him all that he had heard and read of Montmartre – dark archways, knives, Apaches, and men who went away from homes where they were beloved and never again returned. He, too – well, if he never returned again, it would be quicker than the Seine, and, in the event of ultramundane possibilities, safer.

He stood still and laughed in the face of the man who first reached him.

�Well, my friend?’ said he, and at that the other two drew close.

�Monsieur walks late,’ said the first, a little confused, as it seemed, by that laugh.

�And will walk still later, if it pleases him,’ said Roger. �Goodnight, my friends.’

�Ah!’ said the second, �friends do not say adieu so quickly. Monsieur will tell us the hour.’

�I have not a watch,’ said Roger, quite truthfully.

�I will assist you to search for it,’ said the third man, and laid a hand on his arm.

Roger threw it off. That was instinctive. One may be resigned to a man’s knife between one’s ribs, but not to his hands pawing one’s shoulders. The man with the hand staggered back.

�The knife searches more surely,’ said the second.

�No, no,’ said the third quickly, �he is too heavy. I for one will not carry him afterwards.’

They closed round him, hustling him between them. Their pale, degenerate faces spun and swung round him in the struggle. For there was a struggle. He had not meant that there should be a struggle. Someone would hear – someone would come.

But if any heard, none came. The street retained its empty silence, the houses, masked in close shutters, kept their reserve. The four were wrestling, all pressed close together in a writhing bunch, drawing breath hardly through set teeth, their feet slipping, and not slipping, on the rounded cobble-stones.

The contact with these creatures, the smell of them, the warm, greasy texture of their flesh as, in the conflict, his face or neck met neck or face of theirs – Roger felt a cold rage possess him. He wrung two clammy hands apart and threw something off – something that staggered back clattering, fell in the gutter, and lay there.

It was then that Roger felt the knife. Its point glanced off the cigarette-case in his breast pocket and bit sharply at his inner arm. And at the sting of it Roger knew that he did not desire to die. He feigned a reeling weakness, relaxed his grip, swayed sideways, and then suddenly caught the other two in a new grip, crushed their faces together, flung them off, and ran. It was but for an instant that his feet were the only ones that echoed in the street. Then he knew that the others too were running.

It was like one of those nightmares wherein one runs for ever, leaden-footed, through a city of the dead. Roger turned sharply to the right The sound of the other footsteps told that the pursuers also had turned that corner. Here was another street – a steep ascent. He ran more swiftly – he was running now for his life – the life that he held so cheap three minutes before. And all the streets were empty – empty like dream-streets, with all their windows dark and unhelpful, their doors fast closed against his need.

Far away down the street and across steep roofs lay Paris, poured out like a pool of light in the mist of the valley. But Roger was running with his head down – he saw nothing but the round heads of the cobble stones. Only now and again he glanced to right or left, if perchance some window might show light to justify a cry for help, some door advance the welcome of an open inch.

There was at last such a door. He did not see it till it was almost behind him. Then there was the drag of the sudden stop – the eternal instant of indecision. Was there time? There must be. He dashed his fingers through the inch-crack, grazing the backs of them, leapt within, drew the door after him, felt madly for a lock or bolt, found a key, and, hanging his whole weight on it, strove to get the door home. The key turned. His left hand, by which he braced himself against the door-jamb, found a hook and pulled on it. Door and door-post met – the latch clicked – with a spring as it seemed. He turned the key, leaning against the door, which shook to the deep sobbing breaths that shook him, and to the panting bodies that pressed a moment without. Then someone cursed breathlessly outside; there was the sound of feet that went away.

Roger was alone in the strange darkness of an arched carriageway, through the far end of which showed the fainter darkness of a courtyard, with black shapes of little formal tubbed orange trees. There was no sound at all there but the sound of his own desperate breathing; and, as he stood, the slow, warm blood crept down his wrist, to make a little pool in the hollow of his hanging, half-clenched hand. Suddenly he felt sick.

This house, of which he knew nothing, held for him no terrors. To him at that moment there were but three murderers in all the world, and where they were not, there safety was. But the spacious silence that soothed at first, presently clawed at the set, vibrating nerves already overstrained. He found himself listening, listening, and there was nothing to hear but the silence, and once, before he thought to twist his handkerchief round it, the drip of blood from his hand.

By and by, he knew that he was not alone in this house, for from far away there came the faint sound of a footstep, and, quite near, the faint answering echo of it. And at a window, high up on the other side of the courtyard, a light showed. Light and sound and echo intensified, the light passing window after window, till at last it moved across the courtyard, and the little trees threw back shifting shadows as it came towards him – a lamp in the hand of a man.

It was a short, bald man, with pointed beard and bright, friendly eyes. He held the lamp high as he came, and when he saw Roger, he drew his breath in an inspiration that spoke of surprise, sympathy, and pity.

�Hold! hold!’ he said, in a singularly pleasant voice, �there has been a misfortune? You are wounded, monsieur?’

�Apaches,’ said Roger, and was surprised at the weakness of his own voice.

�Your hand?’

�My arm,’ said Roger.

�Fortunately,’ said the other, �I am a surgeon. Allow me.’

He set the lamp on the step of a closed door, took off Roger’s coat, and quickly tied his own handkerchief round the wounded arm.

�Now,’ he said, �courage! I am alone in the house. No one comes here but me. If you can walk up to my rooms, you will save us both much trouble. If you cannot, sit here and I will fetch you a cordial. But I advise you to try and walk. That porte cochère is, unfortunately, not very strong, and the lock is a common spring lock, and your friends may return with their friends; whereas the door across the courtyard is heavy and the bolts are new.’

Roger moved towards the heavy door whose bolts were new. The stairs seemed to go on for ever. The doctor lent his arm, but the carved banisters and their lively shadows whirled before Roger’s eyes. Also, he seemed to be shod with lead, and to have in his leg bones that were red-hot. Then the stairs ceased, and there was light, and cessation of the dragging of those leaden feet. He was on a couch, and his eyes might close. There was no need to move anymore, nor to look, nor to listen.

When next he saw and heard, he was lying at ease, the close intimacy of a bandage clasping his arm, and in his mouth the vivid taste of some cordial.

The doctor was sitting in an armchair near a table, looking benevolent through gold-rimmed pince-nez.

�Better?’ he said. �No, lie still, you’ll be a new man soon.’

�I am desolated,’ said Roger, �to have occasioned you all this trouble.’

�Not at all,’ said the doctor. �We live to heal, and it is a nasty cut, that in your arm. If you are wise, you will rest at present. I shall be honoured if you will be my guest for the night.’

Roger again murmured something about trouble.

�In a big house like this,’ said the doctor, as it seemed a little sadly, �there are many empty rooms, and some rooms which are not empty. There is a bed altogether at your service, monsieur, and I counsel you not to delay in seeking it. You can walk?’

Wroxham stood up. �Why, yes,’ he said, stretching himself. �I feel, as you say, a new man.’

A narrow bed and rush-bottomed chair showed like doll’s-house furniture in the large, high, gaunt room to which the doctor led him.

�You are too tired to undress yourself,’ said the doctor, �rest – only rest,’ and covered him with a rug, roundly tucked him up, and left him.

�I leave the door open,’ he said, �in case you have any fever. Goodnight. Do not torment yourself. All goes well.’

Then he took away the lamp, and Wroxham lay on his back and saw the shadows of the window-frames cast on the wall by the moon now risen. His eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness, perceived the carving of the white panelled walls and mantelpiece. There was a door in the room, another door from the one which the doctor had left open. Roger did not like open doors. The other door, however, was closed. He wondered where it led, and whether it were locked. Presently he got up to see. It was locked. He lay down again.

His arm gave him no pain, and the night’s adventure did not seem to have overset his nerves. He felt, on the contrary, calm, confident, extraordinarily at ease, and master of himself. The trouble – how could that ever have seemed important? This calmness – it felt like the calmness that precedes sleep. Yet sleep was far from him. What was it that kept sleep away? The bed was comfortable – the pillows soft. What was it? It came to him presently that it was the scent which distracted him, worrying him with a memory that he could not define. A faint scent of – what was it? perfumery? Yes – and camphor – and something else – something vaguely disquieting. He had not noticed it before he had risen and tried the handle of that other door. But now— He covered his face with the sheet, but through the sheet he smelt it still. He rose and threw back one of the long French windows. It opened with a click and a jar, and he looked across the dark well of the courtyard. He leaned out, breathing the chill, pure air of the May night, but when he withdrew his head, the scent was there again. Camphor – perfume – and something else. What was it that it reminded him of? He had his knee on the bed-edge when the answer came to that question. It was the scent that had struck at him from a darkened room when, a child, clutching at a grown-up hand, he had been led to the bed where, amid flowers, something white lay under a sheet – his mother they had told him. It was the scent of death, disguised with drugs and perfumes.




Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.


Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/e-nesbit/in-the-dark-tales-of-terror-by-e-nesbit/) на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.



Если текст книги отсутствует, перейдите по ссылке

Возможные причины отсутствия книги:
1. Книга снята с продаж по просьбе правообладателя
2. Книга ещё не поступила в продажу и пока недоступна для чтения