LA MORT WHY-WHY.
Two years had passed like a dream in the pleasant valley which, in far later ages, the Romans called Vallis Aurea, and which we call Vallauris. Here, at a distance of some thirty miles from the cave and the tribe, dwelt in fancied concealment Why-Why and Verva. The clear stream was warbling at their feet, in the bright blue weather of spring; the scent of the may blossoms was poured abroad, and, lying in the hollow of Why-Why’s shield, a pretty little baby with Why-Why’s dark eyes and Verva’s golden locks was crowing to his mother. Why-Why sat beside her, and was busily making the first European pipkin with the clay which he had found near Vallauris. All was peace.
* * * * *
There was a low whizzing sound, something seemed to rush past Why-Why, and with a scream Verva fell on her face. A spear had pierced her breast. With a yell like that of a wounded lion, Why-Why threw himself on the bleeding body of his bride. For many moments he heard no sound but her long, loud and unconscious breathing. He did not mark the yells of his tribesmen, nor feel the spears that rained down on himself, nor see the hideous face of the chief medicine-man peering at his own. Verva ceased to breathe. There was a convulsion, and her limbs were still. Then Why-Why rose. In his right hand was his famous club, “the watcher of the fords;” in his left his shield. These had never lain far from his hand since he fled with Verva.
He knew that the end had come, as he had so often dreamt of it; he knew that he was trapped and taken by his offended tribesmen. His first blow shattered the head of the chief medicine-man. Then he flung himself, all bleeding from the spears, among the press of savages who started from every lentisk bush and tuft of tall flowering heath. They gave back when four of their chief braves had fallen, and Why-Why lacked strength and will to pursue them. He turned and drew Verva’s body beneath the rocky wall, and then he faced his enemies. He threw down shield and club and raised his hands. A light seemed to shine about his face, and his first word had a strange tone that caught the ear and chilled the heart of all who heard him. “Listen,” he said, “for these are the last words of Why-Why. He came like the water, and like the wind he goes, he knew not whence, and he knows not whither. He does not curse you, for you are that which you are. But the day will come” (and here Why-Why’s voice grew louder and his eyes burned), “the day will come when you will no longer be the slave of things like that dead dog,” and here he pointed to the shapeless face of the slain medicine-man. “The day will come, when a man shall speak unto his sister in loving kindness, and none shall do him wrong. The day will come when a woman shall unpunished see the face and name the name of her husband. As the summers go by you will not bow down to the hyænas, and the bears, and worship the adder and the viper. You will not cut and bruise the bodies of your young men, or cruelly strike and seize away women in the darkness. Yes, and the time will be when a man may love a woman of the same family name as himself”—but here the outraged religion of the tribesmen could endure no longer to listen to these wild and blasphemous words. A shower of spears flew out, and Why-Why fell across the body of Verva. His own was “like a marsh full of reeds,” said the poet of the tribe, in a song which described these events, “so thick the spears stood in it.”
* * * * *
When he was dead, the tribe knew what they had lost in Why-Why. They bore his body, with that of Verva, to the cave; there they laid the lovers—Why-Why crowned with a crown of sea-shells, and with a piece of a rare magical substance (iron) at his side. {208} Then the tribesmen withdrew from that now holy ground, and built them houses, and forswore the follies of the medicine-men, as Why-Why had prophesied. Many thousands of years later the cave was opened when the railway to Genoa was constructed, and the bones of Why-Why, with the crown, and the fragment of iron, were found where they had been laid by his repentant kinsmen. He had bravely asserted the rights of the individual conscience against the dictates of Society; he had lived, and loved, and died, not in vain. Last April I plucked a rose beside his cave, and laid it with another that had blossomed at the door of the last house which covered the homeless head of SHELLEY.
The prophecies of Why-Why have been partially fulfilled. Brothers, if they happen to be on speaking terms, may certainly speak to their sisters, though we are still, alas, forbidden to marry the sisters of our deceased wives. Wives may see their husbands, though in Society, they rarely avail themselves of the privilege. Young ladies are still forbidden to call young men at large by their Christian names; but this tribal law, and survival of the classificatory system, is rapidly losing its force. Burials in the savage manner to which Why-Why objected, will soon, doubtless, be permitted to conscientious Nonconformists in the graveyards of the Church of England. The teeth of boys are still knocked out at public and private schools, but the ceremony is neither formal nor universal. Our advance in liberty is due to an army of forgotten Radical martyrs of whom we know less than we do of Mr. Bradlaugh.
A DUCHESS’S SECRET.
When I was poor, and honest, and a novelist, I little thought that I should ever be rich, and something not very unlike a Duke; and, as to honesty, but an indifferent character. I have had greatness thrust on me. I am, like Simpcox in the dramatis personæ of “Henry IV.,” “an impostor;” and yet I scarcely know how I could have escaped this deplorable (though lucrative) position. “Love is a great master,” says the “Mort d’Arthur,” and I perhaps may claim sympathy and pity as a victim of love. The following unaffected lines (in which only names and dates are disguised) contain all the apology I can offer to a censorious world.
Two or three years ago I was dependent on literature for my daily bread. I was a regular man-of-all-work. Having the advantage of knowing a clerk in the Foreign Office who went into society (he had been my pupil at the university), I picked up a good deal of scandalous gossip, which I published in the Pimlico Postboy, a journal of fashion. I was also engaged as sporting prophet to the Tipster, and was not less successful than my contemporaries as a vaticinator of future events. At the same time I was contributing a novel (anonymously) to the Fleet Street Magazine, a very respectable publication, though perhaps a little dull. The editor had expressly requested me to make things rather more lively, and I therefore gave my imagination free play in the construction of my plot. I introduced a beautiful girl, daughter of a preacher in the Shaker community. Her hand was sought in marriage by a sporting baronet, who had seen her as he pursued the chase through the pathless glens of the New Forest. This baronet she married after suffering things intolerable from the opposition of the Shakers. Here I had a good deal of padding about Shakers and their ways; and, near the end of the sixth chapter my heroine became the wife of Sir William Buckley. But the baronet proved a perfect William Rufus for variegated and versatile blackguardism. Lady Buckley’s life was made impossible by his abominable conduct. At this juncture my heroine chanced to be obliged to lunch at a railway refreshment-room. My last chapter had described the poor lady lunching lonely in the bleak and gritty waiting room of Swilby Junction, lonely except for the company of her little boy. I showed how she fell into a strange and morbid vein of reflection suggested by the qualities of the local sherry. If she was to live, her lord and master, Sir W. Buckley, must die! And I described how a fiendish temptation was whispered to her by the glass of local sherry. “William’s constitution, strong as it is,” she murmured inwardly, “could never stand a dozen of that sherry. Suppose he chanced to partake of it—accidentally—rather late in the evening.” Amidst these reflections I allowed the December instalment of “The Baronet’s Wife” to come to a conclusion in the Fleet Street Magazine. Obviously crime was in the wind.
It is my habit to read the “Agony Column” (as it is flippantly called), the second column in the outer sheet of the Times. Who knows but he may there see something to his advantage; and, besides, the mysterious advertisements may suggest ideas for plots. One day I took up the “Agony Column,” as usual, at my club, and, to my surprise, read the following advertisement:—
“F. S. M.—SHERRY WINE. WRECK OF THE “JINGO.”—WRETCHED BOY: Stay your unhallowed hand! Would you expose an erring MOTHER’S secret? Author will please communicate with Messrs. Mantlepiece and Co., Solicitors, Upton-on-the-Wold.”
As soon as I saw this advertisement, as soon as my eyes fell on “Sherry Wine” and “Author,” I felt that here was something for me. “F. S. M.” puzzled me at first, but I read it Fleet Street Magazine, by a flash of inspiration. “Wretched Boy” seemed familiar and unappropriate—I was twenty-nine—but what of that? Of course I communicated with Messrs. Mantlepiece, saying that I had reason for supposing that I was the “author” alluded to in the advertisement. As to the words, “Wreck of the Jingo” they entirely beat me, but I hoped that some light would be thrown on their meaning by the respectable firm of solicitors. It did occur to me that if any one had reasons for communicating with me, it would have been better and safer to address a letter to me, under cover, to the editor of the Fleet Street Magazine. But the public have curious ideas on these matters. Two days after I wrote to Messrs. Mantlepiece I received a very guarded reply, in which I was informed that their client wished to make my acquaintance, and that a carriage would await me, if I presented myself at Upton-on-the-Wold Station, by the train arriving at 5.45 on Friday. Well, I thought to myself, I may as well do a “week-ending,” as some people call it, with my anonymous friend as anywhere else. At the same time I knew that the “carriage” might be hired by enemies to convey me to the Pauper Lunatic Asylum or to West Ham, the place where people disappear mysteriously. I might be the victim of a rival’s jealousy (and many men, novelists of most horrible imaginings, envied my talents and success), or a Nihilist plot might have drawn me into its machinery. But I was young, and I thought I would see the thing out. My journey was unadventurous, if you except a row with a German, who refused to let me open the window. But this has nothing to do with my narrative, and is not a false scent to make a guileless reader keep his eye on the Teuton. Some novelists permit themselves these artifices, which I think untradesmanlike and unworthy. When I arrived at Upton, the station-master made a charge at my carriage, and asked me if I was “The gentleman for the Towers?” The whole affair was so mysterious that I thought it better to answer in the affirmative. My luggage (a Gladstone bag) was borne by four stately and liveried menials to a roomy and magnificent carriage, in which everything, from the ducal crown on the silver foot-warmers to the four splendid bays, breathed of opulence, directed and animated by culture. I dismissed all thoughts of the Pauper Lunatic Asylum and the Nihilists, and was whirled through miles of park and up an avenue lighted by electricity. We reached the baronial gateway of the Towers, a vast Gothic pile in the later manner of Inigo Jones, and a seneschal stood at the foot of a magnificent staircase to receive me. I had never seen a seneschal before, but I recognized him by the peeled white wand he carried, by his great silver chain, and his black velvet coat and knee-breeches.
“Your lordship’s room,” says the seneschal (obviously an old and confidential family servant), “is your old one—the Tapestried Chamber. Her Grace is waiting anxiously for you.”
Then two menials marched, with my Gladstone bag, to the apartment thus indicated. For me, I felt in a dream, or like a man caught up into the fairyland of the “Arabian Nights.” “Her Grace” was all very well—the aristocracy always admired my fictitious creations; but “Your Lordship!” Why your Lordship? Then the chilling idea occurred to me that I had not been “the gentleman for the Towers;” that I was in the position of the hero of “Happy Thoughts” when he went to the Duke’s by mistake for the humble home of the Plyte Frazers. But I was young. “Her Grace” could not eat me, and I determined, as I said before, to see it out.
I dressed very deliberately, and that process over, was led by the worthy seneschal into a singular octagonal boudoir, hung with soft dark blue arras. The only person in the room was a gaunt, middle-aged lady, in deep mourning. Though I knew no more of the British aristocracy than Mr. W. D. Howells, of New York, I recognized her for the Duchess by her nose, which resembled those worn by the duchesses of Mr. Du Maurier. As soon as we were alone, she rose, drew me to her bosom, much to my horror, looked at me long and earnestly, and at last exclaimed, “How changed you are, Percy!” (My name is Thomas—Thomas Cobson.) Before I could reply, she was pouring out reproaches on me for having concealed my existence, and revealed in my novel what she spoke of as “the secret.”
When she grew, not calm, but fatigued, I ventured to ask why she had conferred on me the honour of her invitation, and how I had been unfortunate enough to allude to affairs of which I had certainly no knowledge. Her reply was given with stately dignity. “You need not pretend,” she said, “to have forgotten what I told you in this very room, before you left England for an African tour in the Jingo. I then revealed to you the secret of my life, the secret of the Duke’s death. Your horror when you heard how that most unhappy man compelled me to free myself from his tyranny, by a method which his habits rendered only too easy—in short, by a dose of cheap sherry, was deep and natural. Oh, Percy, you did not kiss your mother before starting on your ill-omened voyage. As soon as I heard of the wreck of the Jingo, and that you were the only passenger drowned, I recognized an artifice, un vieux truc, by which you hoped to escape from a mother of whom you were ashamed. You had only pretended to be the victim of Ocean’s rage! People who are drowned in novels always do reappear: and, Percy, your mother is an old novel-reader! My agents have ever since been on your track, but it was reserved for me to discover the last of the Birkenheads in the anonymous author of the ‘Baronet’s Wife.’ That romance, in which you have had the baseness to use your knowledge of a mother’s guilt as a motif in your twopenny plot, unveiled to me the secret of your hidden existence. You must stop the story, or alter the following numbers; you must give up your discreditable mode of life. Heavens, that a Birkenhead should be a literary character! And you must resume your place in my house and in society.”
Here the Duchess of Stalybridge paused; she had quite recovered that repose of manner and icy hauteur which, I understand, is the heritage of the house of Birkenhead. For my part, I had almost lost the modest confidence which is, I believe, hereditary in the family of Cobson. It was a scene to make the boldest stand aghast. Here was an unknown lady of the highest rank confessing a dreadful crime to a total stranger, and recognizing in that stranger her son, and the heir to an enormous property and a title as old—as old as British dukedoms, however old they may be. Ouida would have said “heir to a title older than a thousand centuries,” but I doubt if the English duke is so ancient as that, or a direct descendant of the Dukes of Edom mentioned in Holy Writ. I began pouring out an incoherent flood of evidence to show that I was only Thomas Cobson, and had never been any one else, but at that moment a gong sounded, and a young lady entered the room. She also was dressed in mourning, and the Duchess introduced her to me as my cousin, Miss Birkenhead. “Gwyneth was a child, Percy,” said my august hostess, “when you went to Africa.” I shook hands with my cousin with as much composure as I could assume, for, to tell the truth, I was not only moved by my recent adventures, but I had on the spot fallen hopelessly in love with my new relative. It was le coup de foudre of a French writer on the affections—M. Stendhal. Miss Birkenhead had won my heart from the first moment of our meeting. Why should I attempt to describe a psychological experience as rare as instantaneous conversion, or more so? Miss Birkenhead was tall and dark, with a proud pale face, and eyes which unmistakably indicated the possession of a fine sense of humour. Proud pale people seldom look when they first meet a total stranger—still more a long-lost cousin—as if they had some difficulty in refraining from mirth. Miss Birkenhead’s face was as fixed and almost as pure as marble, but I read sympathy and amusement and kindness in her eyes.
Presently the door opened again, and an elderly man in the dress of a priest came in. To him I was presented—
“Your old governor, Percy.”
For a moment my unhappy middle-class association made me suppose that the elderly ecclesiastic was my “old Guv’nor,”—my father, the late Duke. But an instant’s reflection proved to me that her Grace meant “tutor” by governor. I am ashamed to say that I now entered into the spirit of the scene, shook the holy man warmly by the hand, and quoted a convenient passage from Horace.
He appeared to fall into the trap, and began to speak of old recollections of my boyhood.
Stately liveried menials now, greatly to my surprise, brought in tea. I was just declining tea (for I expected dinner in a few minutes), when a voice (a sweet low voice) whispered—
“Take some!”
I took some, providentially, as it turned out. Again, I was declining tea-cake, when I could have sworn I heard the same voice (so low that it seemed like the admonition of a passing spirit) say—
“Take some!”
I took some, for I was exceedingly hungry; and then the conversation lapsed, began again vaguely, and lapsed again.
We all know that wretched quarter of an hour, or half hour, which unpunctual guests make us pass in famine and fatigue while they keep dinner waiting. Upon my word, we waited till half-past eleven before dinner was announced. But for the tea, I must have perished; for, like the butler in Sir George Dasent’s novel, “I likes my meals regular.”
The Duchess had obviously forgotten all about dinner. There was a spinning-wheel in the room, and she sat and span like an elderly Fate. When dinner was announced at last, I began to fear it would never end. The menu covered both sides of the card. The Duchess ate little, and “hardly anything was drunk.” At last the ladies left us, about one in the morning. I saw my chance, and began judiciously to “draw” the chaplain. It appeared that the Duchess did not always dine at half-past eleven. The feast was a movable one, from eight o’clock onwards. The Duchess and the establishment had got into these habits during the old Duke’s time. A very strange man the old Duke; rarely got up till eight in the evening, often prolonged breakfast till next day.
“But I need not tell you all this, Percy, my old pupil,” said the chaplain; and he winked as a clergyman ought not to wink.
“My dear sir,” cried I, encouraged by this performance, “for Heaven’s sake tell me what all this means? In this so-called nineteenth century, in our boasted age of progress, what does the Duchess mean by her invitation to me, and by her conduct at large? Indeed, why is she at large?”
The chaplain drew closer to me. “Did ye ever hear of a duchess in a madhouse?” said he; and I owned that I never had met with such an incident in my reading (unless there is one in Webster’s plays, somewhere).
“Well, then, who is to make a beginning?” asked the priest. “The Duchess has not a relation in the world but Miss Birkenhead, the only daughter of a son of the last Duke but one. The late Duke was a dreadful man, and he turned the poor Duchess’s head with the life he led her. The drowning of her only son in the Jingo finished the business. She has got that story about”—(here he touched the decanter of sherry: I nodded)—“she has got that story into her head, and she believes her son is alive; otherwise she is as sane and unimaginative as—as—as Mr. Chaplin,” said he, with a flash of inspiration. “Happily you are an honest man, or you seem like one, and won’t take advantage of her delusion.”
This was all I could get out of the chaplain; indeed, there was no more to be got. I went to bed, but not to sleep. Next day, and many other days, I spent wrestling in argument with the Duchess. I brought her my certificate of baptism, my testamurs in Smalls and Greats, an old passport, a bill of Poole’s, anything I could think of to prove my identity. She was obdurate, and only said—“If you are not Percy, how do you know my secret?” I had in the meantime to alter the intended course of my novel—“The Baronet’s Wife.” The Baronet was made to become a reformed character. But in all those days at the lonely Towers, and in the intervals of arguing with the poor Duchess, I could not but meet Gwyneth Birkenhead. We met, not as cousins, for Miss Birkenhead had only too clearly appreciated the situation from the moment she first met me. The old seneschal, too, was in the secret; I don’t know what the rest of the menials thought. They were accustomed to the Duchess. But if Gwyneth and I did not meet as cousins, we met as light-hearted young people, in a queer situation, and in a strange, dismal old house.
We could not in the selfsame mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
We could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by.
Indeed I could not sit at meals without being gratefully reminded of Gwyneth’s advice about “taking some” on the night of my first arrival at the Towers.
These queer happy times ended.
One day a party of archæologists came to visit the Towers. They were members of a “Society for Badgering the Proprietors of Old Houses,” and they had been lunching at Upton-on-the-Wold. After luncheon they invaded the Towers, personally conducted by Mr. Bulkin, a very learned historian. Bulkin had nearly plucked me in Modern History, and when I heard his voice afar off I arose and fled swiftly. Unluckily the Duchess chanced, by an unprecedented accident, to be in the library, a room which the family never used, and which was, therefore, exhibited to curious strangers. Into this library Bulkin precipitated himself, followed by his admirers, and began to lecture on the family portraits. Beginning with the Crusaders (painted by Lorenzo Credi) he soon got down to modern times. He took no notice of the Duchess, whom he believed to be a housekeeper; but, posting himself between the unfortunate lady and the door, gave a full account of the career of the late Duke. This was more than the Duchess (who knew all about the subject of the lecture) could stand; but Mr. Bulkin, referring her to his own Appendices, finished his address, and offered the Duchess half-a-crown as he led his troop to other victories. From this accident the Duchess never recovered. Her spirits, at no time high, sank to zero, and she soon passed peacefully away. She left a will in which her personal property (about £40,000 a year) was bequeathed to Gwyneth, “as my beloved son, Percy, has enough for his needs,” the revenues of the dukedom of Stalybridge being about £300,000 per annum before the agricultural depression. She might well have thought I needed no more. Of course I put in no claim for these estates, messuages, farms, mines, and so forth, nor for my hereditary ducal pension of £15,000. But Gwyneth and I are not uncomfortably provided for, and I no longer contribute paragraphs of gossip to the Pimlico Postboy, nor yet do I vaticinate in the columns of the Tipster. Perhaps I ought to have fled from the Towers the morning after my arrival. And I declare that I would have fled but for Gwyneth and “Love, that is a great Master.”
THE HOUSE OF STRANGE STORIES.
The House of Strange Stories, as I prefer to call it (though it is not known by that name in the county), seems the very place for a ghost. Yet, though so many peoples have dwelt upon its site and in its chambers, though the ancient Elizabethan oak, and all the queer tables and chairs that a dozen generations have bequeathed, might well be tenanted by ancestral spirits, and disturbed by rappings, it is a curious fact that there is not a ghost in the House of Strange Stories. On my earliest visit to this mansion, I was disturbed, I own, by a not unpleasing expectancy. There must, one argued, be a shadowy lady in green in the bedroom, or, just as one was falling asleep, the spectre of a Jesuit would creep out of the priest’s hole, where he was starved to death in the “spacious times of great Elizabeth,” and would search for a morsel of bread. The priest was usually starved out, sentinels being placed in all the rooms and passages, till at last hunger and want of air would drive the wretched man to give himself up, for the sake of change of wretchedness. Then perhaps he was hanged, or he “died in our hands,” as one of Elizabeth’s officers euphemistically put it, when the Jesuit was tortured to death in the Tower. No “House of Seven Gables” across the Atlantic can have quite such memories as these, yet, oddly enough, I do not know of more than one ghost of a Jesuit in all England. He appeared to a learned doctor in a library, and the learned doctor described the phantom, not long ago, in the Athenæum.
“Does the priest of your ‘priest-hole’ walk?” I asked the squire one winter evening in the House of Strange Stories.
Darkness had come to the rescue of the pheasants about four in the afternoon, and all of us, men and women, were sitting at afternoon tea in the firelit study, drowsily watching the flicker of the flame on the black panelling. The characters will introduce themselves, as they take part in the conversation.
“No,” said the squire, “even the priest does not walk. Somehow very few of the Jesuits have left ghosts in country houses. They are just the customers you would expect to ‘walk,’ but they don’t.”
There is, to be sure, one priestly ghost-story, which you may or may not know, and I tell it here, though I don’t believe it, just as I heard it from the Bishop of Dunchester himself. According to this most affable and distinguished prelate, now no more, he once arrived in a large country house shortly before dinner-time; he was led to his chamber, he dressed, and went downstairs. Not knowing the plan of the house, he found his way into the library, a chamber lined with the books of many studious generations. Here the learned bishop remained for a few minutes, when the gong sounded for dinner, and a domestic, entering the apartment showed the prelate the way to the drawing-room, where the other guests were now assembled. The bishop, when the company appeared complete, and was beginning to manœuvre towards the dining-room, addressed his host (whom we shall call Lord Birkenhead), and observed that the ecclesiastic had not yet appeared.
“What ecclesiastic?” asked his lordship.
“The priest,” replied the bishop, “whom I met in the library.”
Upon this Lord Birkenhead’s countenance changed somewhat, and, with a casual remark, he put the question by. After dinner, when the ladies had left the men to their wine, Lord Birkenhead showed some curiosity as to “the ecclesiastic,” and learned that he had seemed somewhat shy and stiff, yet had the air of a man just about to enter into conversation.
“At that moment,” said the bishop, “I was summoned to the drawing-room, and did not at first notice that my friend the priest had not followed me. He had an interesting and careworn face,” added the bishop.
“You have certainly seen the family ghost,” said Lord Birkenhead; “he only haunts the library, where, as you may imagine, his retirement is but seldom disturbed.” And, indeed, the habits of the great, in England, are not studious, as a rule.
“Then I must return, Lord Birkenhead, to your library,” said the bishop, “and that without delay, for this appears to be a matter in which the services of one of the higher clergy, however unworthy, may prove of incalculable benefit.”
“If I could only hope,” answered Lord Birkenhead (who was a Catholic) with a deep sigh, “that his reverence would recognize Anglican orders!”
The bishop was now, as may be fancied, on his mettle, and without further parley, retired to the library. The rest of the men awaited his return, and beguiled the moments of expectation with princely havannas.
In about half an hour the bishop reappeared, and a close observer might have detected a shade of paleness on his apostolic features, yet his face was radiant like that of a good man who has performed a good action. Being implored to relieve the anxiety of the company, the worthy prelate spoke as follows:
“On entering the library, which was illuminated by a single lamp, I found myself alone. I drew a chair to the fire, and, taking up a volume of M. Renan’s which chanced to be lying on the table, I composed myself to detect the sophistries of this brilliant but unprincipled writer. Thus, by an effort of will, I distracted myself from that state of ‘expectant attention’ to which modern science attributes such phantoms and spectral appearances as can neither be explained away by a morbid condition of the liver, nor as caused by the common rat (Mus rattus). I should observe by the way,” said the learned bishop, interrupting his own narrative, “that scepticism will in vain attempt to account, by the latter cause, namely rats, for the spectres, Lemures, simulacra, and haunted houses of the ancient Greeks and Romans. With these supernatural phenomena, as they prevailed in Athens and Rome, we are well acquainted, not only from the Mostellaria of Plautus, but from the numerous ghost-stories of Pliny, Plutarch, the Philopseudes of Lucian, and similar sources. But it will at once be perceived, and admitted even by candid men of science, that these spiritual phenomena of the classical period cannot plausibly, nor even possibly, be attributed to the agency of rats, when we recall the fact that the rat was an animal unknown to the ancients. As the learned M. Sélys Longch observes in his Études de Micromammalogie (Paris, 1839, p. 59), ‘the origin of the rat is obscure, the one thing certain is that the vermin was unknown to the ancients, and that it arrived in Europe, introduced, perhaps, by the Crusaders, after the Middle Ages.’ I think,” added the prelate, looking round, not without satisfaction, “that I have completely disposed of the rat hypothesis, as far, at least, as the ghosts of classical tradition are concerned.”
“Your reasoning, bishop,” replied Lord Birkenhead, “is worthy of your reputation; but pray pardon the curiosity which entreats you to return from the simulacra of the past to the ghost of the present.”
“I had not long been occupied with M. Renan,” said the bishop, thus adjured, “when I became aware of the presence of another person in the room. I think my eyes had strayed from the volume, as I turned a page, to the table, on which I perceived the brown strong hand of a young man. Looking up, I beheld my friend the priest, who was indeed a man of some twenty-seven years of age, with a frank and open, though somewhat careworn, aspect. I at once rose, and asked if I could be of service to him in anything, and I trust I did not betray any wounding suspicion that he was other than a man of flesh and blood.
“‘You can, indeed, my lord, relieve me of a great burden,’ said the young man, and it was apparent enough that he did acknowledge the validity of Anglican orders. ‘Will you kindly take from the shelf that volume of Cicero “De Officiis,” he said, pointing to a copy of an Elzevir variorum edition,—not the small duodecimo Elzevir,—‘remove the paper you will find there, and burn it in the fire on the hearth.’
“‘Certainly I will do as you say, but will you reward me by explaining the reason of your request?’
“‘In me,’ said the appearance, ‘you behold Francis Wilton, priest. I was born in 1657, and, after adventures and an education with which I need not trouble you, found myself here as chaplain to the family of the Lord Birkenhead of the period. It chanced one day that I heard in confession, from the lips of Lady Birkenhead, a tale so strange, moving, and, but for the sacred circumstances of the revelation, so incredible, that my soul had no rest for thinking thereon. At last, neglecting my vow, and fearful that I might become forgetful of any portion of so marvellous a narrative, I took up my pen and committed the confession to the security of manuscript. Litera scripta manet. Scarcely had I finished my unholy task when the sound of a distant horn told me that the hunt (to which pleasure I was passionately given) approached the demesne. I thrust the written confession into that volume of Cicero, hurried to the stable, saddled my horse with my own hands, and rode in the direction whence I heard the music of the hounds. On my way a locked gate barred my progress. I put Rupert at it, he took off badly, fell, and my spirit passed away in the fall. But not to the place of repose did my sinful spirit wing its flight. I found myself here in the library, where, naturally, scarcely any one ever comes except the maids. When I would implore them to destroy the unholy document that binds me to earth, they merely scream; nor have I found any scion of the house, nor any guest, except your lordship, of more intrepid resolution or more charitable mood. And now, I trust, you will release me.’
“I rose (for I had seated myself during his narrative), my heart was stirred with pity; I took down the Cicero, and lit on a sheet of yellow paper covered with faded manuscript, which, of course, I did not read. I turned to the hearth, tossed on the fire the sere old paper, which blazed at once, and then, hearing the words pax vobiscum, I looked round. But I was alone. After a few minutes, devoted to private ejaculations, I returned to the dining-room; and that is all my story. Your maids need no longer dread the ghost of the library. He is released.”
“Will any one take any more wine?” asked Lord Birkenhead, in tones of deep emotion. “No? Then suppose we join the ladies.”
“Well,” said one of the ladies, the Girton girl, when the squire had finished the prelate’s narrative, “I don’t call that much of a story. What was Lady Birkenhead’s confession about? That’s what one really wants to know.”
“The bishop could not possibly have read the paper,” said the Bachelor of Arts, one of the guests; “not as a gentleman, nor a bishop.”
“I wish I had had the chance,” said the Girton girl.
“Perhaps the confession was in Latin,” said the Bachelor of Arts.
The Girton girl disdained to reply to this unworthy sneer.
“I have often observed,” she said in a reflective voice, “that the most authentic and best attested bogies don’t come to very much. They appear in a desultory manner, without any context, so to speak, and, like other difficulties, require a context to clear up their meaning.”
These efforts of the Girton girl to apply the methods of philology to spectres, were received in silence. The women did not understand them, though they had a strong personal opinion about their learned author.
“The only ghost I ever came across, or, rather, came within measurable distance of, never appeared at all so far as one knew.”
“Miss Lebas has a story,” said the squire, “Won’t she tell us her story?”
The ladies murmured, “Do, please.”
“It really cannot be called a ghost-story,” remarked Miss Lebas, “it was only an uncomfortable kind of coincidence, and I never think of it without a shudder. But I know there is not any reason at all why it should make any of you shudder; so don’t be disappointed.
“It was the Long Vacation before last,” said the Girton girl, “and I went on a reading-party to Bantry Bay, with Wyndham and Toole of Somerville, and Clare of Lady Margaret’s. Leighton coached us.”
“Dear me! With all these young men, my dear?” asked the maiden aunt.
“They were all women of my year, except Miss Leighton of Newnham, who was our coach,” answered the Girton girl composedly.
“Dear me! I beg your pardon for interrupting you,” said the maiden aunt.
“Well, term-time was drawing near, and Bantry Bay was getting pretty cold, when I received an invitation from Lady Garryowen to stay with them at Dundellan on my way south. They were two very dear, old, hospitable Irish ladies, the last of their race, Lady Garryowen and her sister, Miss Patty. They were so hospitable that, though I did not know it, Dundellan was quite full when I reached it, overflowing with young people. The house has nothing very remarkable about it: a grey, plain building, with remains of the château about it, and a high park wall. In the garden wall there is a small round tower, just like those in the precinct wall at St. Andrews. The ground floor is not used. On the first floor there is a furnished chamber with a deep round niche, almost a separate room, like that in Queen Mary’s apartments in Holy Rood. The first floor has long been fitted up as a bedroom and dressing-room, but it had not been occupied, and a curious old spinning-wheel in the corner (which has nothing to do with my story, if you can call it a story), must have been unused since ’98, at least. I reached Dublin late—our train should have arrived at half-past six—it was ten before we toiled into the station. The Dundellan carriage was waiting for me, and, after an hour’s drive, I reached the house. The dear old ladies had sat up for me, and I went to bed as soon as possible, in a very comfortable room. I fell asleep at once, and did not waken till broad daylight, between seven and eight, when, as my eyes wandered about, I saw, by the pictures on the wall, and the names on the books beside my bed, that Miss Patty must have given up her own room to me. I was quite sorry and, as I dressed, determined to get her to let me change into any den rather than accept this sacrifice. I went downstairs, and found breakfast ready, but neither Lady Garryowen nor Miss Patty. Looking out of the window into the garden, I heard, for the only time in my life, the wild Irish keen over the dead, and saw the old nurse wailing and wringing her hands and hurrying to the house. As soon as she entered she told me, with a burst of grief, and in language I shall not try to imitate, that Miss Patty was dead.
“When I arrived the house was so full that there was literally no room for me. But ‘Dundellan was never beaten yet,’ the old ladies had said. There was still the room in the tower. But this room had such an evil reputation for being ‘haunted’ that the servants could hardly be got to go near it, at least after dark, and the dear old ladies never dreamed of sending any of their guests to pass a bad night in a place with a bad name. Miss Patty, who had the courage of a Bayard, did not think twice. She went herself to sleep in the haunted tower, and left her room to me. And when the old nurse went to call her in the morning, she could not waken Miss Patty. She was dead. Heart-disease, they called it. Of course,” added the Girton girl, “as I said, it was only a coincidence. But the Irish servants could not be persuaded that Miss Patty had not seen whatever the thing was that they believed to be in the garden tower. I don’t know what it was. You see the context was dreadfully vague, a mere fragment.”
There was a little silence after the Girton girl’s story.
“I never heard before in my life,” said the maiden aunt, at last, “of any host or hostess who took the haunted room themselves, when the house happened to be full. They always send the stranger within their gates to it, and then pretend to be vastly surprised when he does not have a good night. I had several bad nights myself once. In Ireland too.”
“Tell us all about it, Judy,” said her brother, the squire.
“No,” murmured the maiden aunt. “You would only laugh at me. There was no ghost. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t even smell anything, as they do in that horrid book, ‘The Haunted Hotel.’”
“Then why had you such bad nights?”
“Oh, I felt” said the maiden aunt, with a little shudder.
“What did you feel, Aunt Judy?”
“I know you will laugh,” said the maiden aunt, abruptly entering on her nervous narrative. “I felt all the time as if somebody was looking through the window. Now, you know, there couldn’t be anybody. It was in an Irish country house where I had just arrived, and my room was on the second floor. The window was old-fashioned and narrow, with a deep recess. As soon as I went to bed, my dears, I felt that some one was looking through the window, and meant to come in. I got up, and bolted the window, though I knew it was impossible for anybody to climb up there, and I drew the curtains, but I could not fall asleep. If ever I began to dose, I would waken with a start, and turn and look in the direction of the window. I did not sleep all night, and next night, though I was dreadfully tired, it was just the same thing. So I had to take my hostess into my confidence, though it was extremely disagreeable, my dears, to seem so foolish. I only told her that I thought the air, or something, must disagree with me, for I could not sleep. Then, as some one was leaving the house that day, she implored me to try another room, where I slept beautifully, and afterwards had a very pleasant visit. But, the day I went away, my hostess asked me if I had been kept awake by anything in particular, for instance, by a feeling that some one was trying to come in at the window. Well, I admitted that I had a nervous feeling of that sort, and she said that she was very sorry, and that every one who lay in the room had exactly the same sensation. She supposed they must all have heard the history of the room, in childhood, and forgotten that they had heard it, and then been consciously reminded of it by reflex action. It seems, my dears, that that is the new scientific way of explaining all these things, presentiments and dreams and wraiths, and all that sort of thing. We have seen them before, and remember them without being aware of it. So I said I’d never heard the history of the room; but she said I must have, and so must all the people who felt as if some one was coming in by the window. And I said that it was rather a curious thing they should all forget they knew it, and all be reminded of it without being aware of it, and that, if she did not mind, I’d like to be reminded of it again. So she said that these objections had all been replied to (just as clergymen always say in sermons), and then she told me the history of the room. It only came to this, that, three generations before, the family butler (whom every one had always thought a most steady, respectable man), dressed himself up like a ghost, or like his notion of a ghost, and got a ladder, and came in by the window to steal the diamonds of the lady of the house, and he frightened her to death, poor woman! That was all. But, ever since, people who sleep in the room don’t sleep, so to speak, and keep thinking that some one is coming in by the casement. That’s all; and I told you it was not an interesting story, but perhaps you will find more interest in the scientific explanation of all these things.”
The story of the maiden aunt, so far as it recounted her own experience, did not contain anything to which the judicial faculties of the mind refused assent. Probably the Bachelor of Arts felt that something a good deal more unusual was wanted, for he instantly started, without being asked, on the following narrative:—
“I also was staying,” said the Bachelor of Arts, “at the home of my friends, the aristocracy in Scotland. The name of the house, and the precise rank in the peerage of my illustrious host, it is not necessary for me to give. All, however, who know those more than feudal and baronial halls, are aware that the front of the castle looks forth on a somewhat narrow drive, bordered by black and funereal pines. On the night of my arrival at the castle, although I went late to bed, I did not feel at all sleepy. Something, perhaps, in the mountain air, or in the vicissitudes of baccarat, may have banished slumber. I had been in luck, and a pile of sovereigns and notes lay, in agreeable confusion, on my dressing-table. My feverish blood declined to be tranquillized, and at last I drew up the blind, threw open the latticed window, and looked out on the drive and the pine-wood. The faint and silvery blue of dawn was just wakening in the sky, and a setting moon hung, with a peculiarly ominous and wasted appearance, above the crests of the forest. But conceive my astonishment when I beheld, on the drive, and right under my window, a large and well-appointed hearse, with two white horses, with plumes complete, and attended by mutes, whose black staffs were tipped with silver that glittered pallid in the dawn.
I exhausted my ingenuity in conjectures as to the presence of this remarkable vehicle with the white horses, so unusual, though, when one thinks of it, so appropriate to the chariot of Death. Could some belated visitor have arrived in a hearse, like the lady in Miss Ferrier’s novel? Could one of the domestics have expired, and was it the intention of my host to have the body thus honourably removed without casting a gloom over his guests?
Wild as these hypotheses appeared, I could think of nothing better, and was just about to leave the window, and retire to bed, when the driver of the strange carriage, who had hitherto sat motionless, turned, and looked me full in the face. Never shall I forget the appearance of this man, whose sallow countenance, close-shaven dark chin, and small, black moustache, combined with I know not what of martial in his air, struck into me a certain indefinable alarm. No sooner had he caught my eye, than he gathered up his reins, just raised his whip, and started the mortuary vehicle at a walk down the road. I followed it with my eyes till a bend in the avenue hid it from my sight. So wrapt up was my spirit in the exercise of the single sense of vision that it was not till the hearse became lost to view that I noticed the entire absence of sound which accompanied its departure. Neither had the bridles and trappings of the white horses jingled as the animals shook their heads, nor had the wheels of the hearse crashed upon the gravel of the avenue. I was compelled by all these circumstances to believe that what I had looked upon was not of this world, and, with a beating heart, I sought refuge in sleep.
“Next morning, feeling far from refreshed, I arrived among the latest at a breakfast which was a desultory and movable feast. Almost all the men had gone forth to hill, forest, or river, in pursuit of the furred, finned, or feathered denizens of the wilds—”
“You speak,” interrupted the schoolboy, “like a printed book! I like to hear you speak like that. Drive on, old man! Drive on your hearse!”
The Bachelor of Arts “drove on,” without noticing this interruption. “I tried to ‘lead up’ to the hearse,” he said, “in conversation with the young ladies of the castle. I endeavoured to assume the languid and preoccupied air of the guest who, in ghost-stories, has had a bad night with the family spectre. I drew the conversation to the topic of apparitions, and even to warnings of death. I knew that every family worthy of the name has its omen: the Oxenhams a white bird, another house a brass band, whose airy music is poured forth by invisible performers, and so on. Of course I expected some one to cry, ‘Oh, we’ve got a hearse with white horses,’ for that is the kind of heirloom an ancient house regards with complacent pride. But nobody offered any remarks on the local omen, and even when I drew near the topic of hearses, one of the girls, my cousin, merely quoted, ‘Speak not like a death’s-head, good Doll’ (my name is Adolphus), and asked me to play at lawn-tennis.
In the evening, in the smoking-room, it was no better, nobody had ever heard of an omen in this particular castle. Nay, when I told my story, for it came to that at last, they only laughed at me, and said I must have dreamed it. Of course I expected to be wakened in the night by some awful apparition, but nothing disturbed me. I never slept better, and hearses were the last things I thought of during the remainder of my visit. Months passed, and I had almost forgotten the vision, or dream, for I began to feel apprehensive that, after all, it was a dream. So costly and elaborate an apparition as a hearse with white horses and plumes complete, could never have been got up, regardless of expense, for one occasion only, and to frighten one undergraduate, yet it was certain that the hearse was not ‘the old family coach.’ My entertainers had undeniably never heard of it in their lives before. Even tradition at the castle said nothing of a spectral hearse, though the house was credited with a white lady deprived of her hands, and a luminous boy.
Here the Bachelor of Arts paused, and a shower of chaff began.
“Is that really all?” asked the Girton girl.
“Why, this is the third ghost-story to-night without any ghost in it!”
“I don’t remember saying that it was a ghost-story,” replied the Bachelor of Arts; “but I thought a little anecdote of a mere ‘warning’ might not be unwelcome.”
“But where does the warning come in?” asked the schoolboy.
“That’s just what I was arriving at,” replied the narrator, “when I was interrupted with as little ceremony as if I had been Mr. Gladstone in the middle of a most important speech. I was going to say that, in the Easter Vacation after my visit to the castle, I went over to Paris with a friend, a fellow of my college. We drove to the Hôtel d’Alsace (I believe there is no hotel of that name; if there is, I beg the spirited proprietor’s pardon, and assure him that nothing personal is intended). We marched upstairs with our bags and baggage, and jolly high stairs they were. When we had removed the soil of travel from our persons, my friend called out to me, ‘I say, Jones, why shouldn’t we go down by the lift.’ {256} ‘All right,’ said I, and my friend walked to the door of the mechanical apparatus, opened it, and got in. I followed him, when the porter whose business it is to ‘personally conduct’ the inmates of the hotel, entered also, and was closing the door.
“His eyes met mine, and I knew him in a moment. I had seen him once before. His sallow face, black, closely shaven chin, furtive glance, and military bearing, were the face and the glance and bearing of the driver of that awful hearse!
“In a moment—more swiftly than I can tell you—I pushed past the man, threw open the door, and just managed, by a violent effort, to drag my friend on to the landing. Then the lift rose with a sudden impulse, fell again, and rushed, with frightful velocity, to the basement of the hotel, whence we heard an appalling crash, followed by groans. We rushed downstairs, and the horrible spectacle of destruction that met our eyes I shall never forget. The unhappy porter was expiring in agony; but the warning had saved my life and my friend’s.”
“I was that friend,” said I—the collector of these anecdotes; “and so far I can testify to the truth of Jones’s story.”
At this moment, however, the gong for dressing sounded, and we went to our several apartments, after this emotional specimen of “Evenings at Home.”
IN CASTLE PERILOUS.
“What we suffer from most,” said the spectre, when I had partly recovered from my fright, “is a kind of aphasia.”
The spectre was sitting on the armchair beside my bed in the haunted room of Castle Perilous.
“I don’t know,” said I, as distinctly as the chattering of my teeth would permit, “that I quite follow you. Would you mind—excuse me—handing me that flask which lies on the table near you. . . . Thanks.”
The spectre, without stirring, so arranged the a priori sensuous schemata of time and space {261} that the silver flask, which had been well out of my reach, was in my hand. I poured half the contents into a cup and offered it to him.
“No spirits,” he said curtly.
I swallowed eagerly the heady liquor, and felt a little more like myself.
“You were complaining,” I remarked, “of something like aphasia?”
“I was,” he replied. “You know what aphasia is in the human subject? A paralysis of certain nervous centres, which prevents the patient, though perfectly sane, from getting at the words which he intends to use, and forces others upon him. He may wish to observe that it is a fine morning, and may discover that his idea has taken the form of an observation about the Roman Calendar under the Emperor Justinian. That is aphasia, and we suffer from what, I presume, is a spiritual modification of that disorder.”
“Yet to-night,” I responded, “you are speaking like a printed book.”
“To-night,” said the spectre, acknowledging the compliment with a bow, “the conditions are peculiarly favourable.”
“Not to me,” I thought, with a sigh.
“And I am able to manifest myself with unusual clearness.”
“Then you are not always in such form as I am privileged to find you in?” I inquired.
“By no means,” replied the spectre. “Sometimes I cannot appear worth a cent. Often I am invisible to the naked eye, and even quite indiscernible by any of the senses. Sometimes I can only rap on the table, or send a cold wind over a visitor’s face, or at most pull off his bedclothes (like the spirit which appeared to Caligula, and is mentioned by Suetonius) and utter hollow groans.”
“That’s exactly what you did,” I said, “when you wakened me. I thought I should have died.”
“I can’t say how distressed I am,” answered the spectre. “It is just an instance of what I was trying to explain. We don’t know how we are going to manifest ourselves.”
“Don’t apologize,” I replied, “for a constitutional peculiarity. To what do you attribute your success to night?”
“Partly to your extremely receptive condition, partly to the whisky you took in the smoking-room, but chiefly to the magnetic environment.”
“Then you do not suffer at all from aphasia just now?”
“Not a touch of it at this moment, thank you; but, as a rule, we all do suffer horribly. This accounts for everything that you embodied spirits find remarkable and enigmatic in our conduct. We mean something, straight enough; but our failure is in expression. Just think how often you go wrong yourselves, though your spirits have a brain to play on, like the musician with a piano. Now we have to do as well as we can without any such mechanical advantage as a brain of cellular tissue”—here he suddenly took the form of a white lady with a black sack over her head, and disappeared in the wainscot.
“Excuse me,” he said a moment afterwards, quite in his ordinary voice, “I had a touch of it, I fancy. I lost the thread of my argument, and am dimly conscious of having expressed myself in some unusual and more or less incoherent fashion. I hope it was nothing at all vulgar or distressing?”
“Nothing out of the way in haunted houses, I assure you,” I replied, “merely a white lady with a black sack over her head.”
“Oh, that was it,” he answered with a sigh; “I often am afflicted in that way. Don’t mind me if I turn into a luminous boy, or a very old man in chains, or a lady in a green gown and high-heeled shoes, or a headless horseman, or a Mauth hound, or anything of that sort. They are all quite imperfect expressions of our nature,—symptoms, in short, of the malady I mentioned.”
“Then the appalling manifestations to which you allude are not the apparitions of the essential ghost? It is not in those forms that he appears among his friends?”
“Certainly not,” said the spectre; “and it would be very promotive of good feeling between men and disembodied spirits if this were more generally known. I myself—”
Here he was interrupted by an attack of spirit rappings. A brisk series of sharp faint taps, of a kind I never heard before, resounded from all the furniture of the room. {265} While the disturbance continued, the spectre drummed nervously with his fingers on his knee. The sounds ended as suddenly as they had begun, and he expressed his regrets. “It is a thing I am subject to,” he remarked; “nervous, I believe, but, to persons unaccustomed to it, alarming.”
“It is rather alarming,” I admitted.
“A mere fit of sneezing,” he went on; “but you are now able to judge, from the events of to-night, how extremely hard it is for us, with the best intentions, to communicate coherently with the embodied world. Why, there is the Puddifant ghost—in Lord Puddifant’s family, you know: he has been trying for generations to inform his descendants that the drainage of the castle is execrable. Yet he can never come nearer what he means than taking the form of a shadowy hearse-and-four, and driving round and round Castle Puddifant at midnight. And old Lady Wadham’s ghost, what a sufferer that woman is! She merely desires to remark that the family diamonds, lost many years ago, were never really taken abroad by the valet and sold. He only had time to conceal them in a secret drawer behind the dining-room chimney-piece. Now she can get no nearer expressing herself than producing a spirited imitation of the music of the bagpipes, which wails up and down the house, and frightens the present Sir Robert Wadham and his people nearly out of their wits. And that’s the way with almost all of us: there is literally no connection (as a rule) between our expressions and the things we intend to express. You know how the Psychical Society make quite a study of rappings, and try to interpret them by the alphabet? Well, these, as I told you, are merely a nervous symptom; annoying, no doubt, but not dangerous. The only spectres, almost, that manage to hint what they really mean are Banshees.”
“They intend to herald an approaching death?” I asked.
“They do, and abominably bad taste I call it, unless a man has neglected to insure his life, and then I doubt if a person of honour could make use of information from—from that quarter. Banshees are chiefly the spectres of attached and anxious old family nurses, women of the lower orders, and completely destitute of tact. I call a Banshee rather a curse than a boon and a blessing to men. Like most old family servants, they are apt to be presuming.”
It occurred to me that the complacent spectre himself was not an unmixed delight to the inhabitants of Castle Perilous, or at least to their guests, for they never lay in the Green Chamber themselves.
“Can nothing be done,” I asked sympathetically, “to alleviate the disorders which you say are so common and distressing?”
“The old system of spiritual physic,” replied the spectre, “is obsolete, and the holy-water cure, in particular, has almost ceased to number any advocates, except the Rev. Dr F. G. Lee, whose books,” said this candid apparition, “appear to me to indicate superstitious credulity. No, I don’t know that any new discoveries have been made in this branch of therapeutics. In the last generation they tried to bolt me with a bishop: like putting a ferret into a rabbit-warren, you know. Nothing came of that, and lately the Psychical Society attempted to ascertain my weight by an ingenious mechanism. But they prescribed nothing, and made me feel so nervous that I was rapping at large, and knocking furniture about for months. The fact is that nobody understands the complaint, nor can detect the cause that makes the ghost of a man who was perfectly rational in life behave like an uneducated buffoon afterwards. The real reason, as I have tried to explain to you, is a solution of continuity between subjective thought and will on the side of the spectre, and objective expression of them—confound it—”
Here he vanished, and the sound of heavy feet was heard promenading the room, and balls of incandescent light floated about irresolutely, accompanied by the appearance of a bearded man in armour. The door (which I had locked and bolted before going to bed) kept opening and shutting rapidly, so as to cause a draught, and my dog fled under the bed with a long low howl.
“I do hope,” remarked the spectre, presently reappearing, “that these interruptions (only fresh illustrations of our malady) have not frightened your dog into a fit. I have known very valuable and attached dogs expire of mere unreasoning terror on similar unfortunate occasions.”
“I’m sure I don’t wonder at it,” I replied; “but I believe Bingo is still alive; in fact, I hear him scratching himself.”
“Would you like to examine him?” asked the spectre.
“Oh, thanks, I am sure he is all right,” I answered (for nothing in the world would have induced me to get out of bed while he was in the room). “Do you object to a cigarette?”
“Not at all, not at all; but Lady Perilous, I assure you, is a very old fashioned châtelaine. However, if you choose to risk it—”
I found my cigarette-case in my hand, opened it, and selected one of its contents, which I placed between my lips. As I was looking round for a match-box, the spectre courteously put his forefinger to the end of the cigarette, which lighted at once.
“Perhaps you wonder,” he remarked, “why I remain at Castle Perilous, the very one of all my places which I never could bear while I was alive—as you call it?”
“I had a delicacy about asking,” I answered.
“Well,” he continued, “I am the family genius.”
“I might have guessed that,” I said.
He bowed and went on. “It is hereditary in our house, and I hold the position of genius till I am relieved. For example, when the family want to dig up the buried treasure under the old bridge, I thunder and lighten and cause such a storm that they desist.”
“Why on earth do you do that?” I asked. “It seems hardly worth while to have a genius at all.”
“In the interests of the family morality. The money would soon go on the turf, and on dice, drink, etc., if they excavated it; and then I work the curse, and bring off the prophecies, and so forth.”
“What prophecies?”
“Oh, the rigmarole the old family seer came out with before they burned him for an unpalatable prediction at the time of the ’15. He was very much vexed about it, of course, and he just prophesied any nonsense of a disagreeable nature that came into his head. You know what these crofter fellows are—ungrateful, vindictive rascals. He had been in receipt of outdoor relief for years. Well, he prophesied stuff like this: ‘When the owl and the eagle meet on the same blasted rowan tree, then a lassie in a white hood from the east shall make the burn of Cross-cleugh run full red,’ and drivel of that insane kind. Well, you can’t think what trouble that particular prophecy gave me. It had to be fulfilled, of course, for the family credit, and I brought it off as near as, I flatter myself, it could be done.”
“Lady Perilous was telling me about it last night,” I said, with a shudder. “It was a horrible affair,”
“Yes, no doubt, no doubt; a cruel business! But how I am to manage some of them I’m sure I don’t know. There’s one of them in rhyme. Let me see, how does it go?
“‘When Mackenzie lies in the perilous ha’,
The wild Red Cock on the roof shall craw,
And the lady shall flee ere the day shall daw,
And the land shall girn in the deed man’s thraw.’
“The ‘crowing of the wild Red Cock’ means that the castle shall be burned down, of course (I’m beginning to know his style by this time), and the lady is to elope, and the laird—that’s Lord Perilous—is to expire in the ‘deed man’s thraw’: that is the name the old people give the Secret Room. And all this is to happen when a Mackenzie, a member of a clan with which we are at feud, sleeps in the Haunted Chamber—where we are just now. By the way, what is your name?”
I don’t know what made me reply, “Allan Mackenzie.” It was true, but it was not politic.
“By Jove!” said the spectre, eagerly. “Here’s a chance! I don’t suppose a Mackenzie has slept here for those hundred years. And now, how is it to be done? Setting fire to the castle is simple”—here I remembered how he had lighted my cigarette—“but who on earth is to elope with Lady Perilous? She’s fifty if she’s a day, and evangelical à tout casser! Oh no; the thing is out of the question. It really must be put off for another generation or two. There is no hurry.”
I felt a good deal relieved. He was clearly a being of extraordinary powers, and might, for anything I knew, have made me run away with Lady Perilous. And then, when the pangs of remorse began to tell on her ladyship, never a very lively woman at the best of times—However, the spectre seemed to have thought better of it.
“Don’t you think it is rather hard on a family,” I asked, “to have a family genius, and prophecies, and a curse, and—”
“And everything handsome about them,” he interrupted me by exclaiming; “and you call yourself a Mackenzie of Megasky! What has become of family pride? Why, you yourselves have Gruagach of the Red Hand in the hall, and he, I can tell you, is a very different sort of spectre from me. Pre-Christian, you know—one of the oldest ghosts in Ross-shire. But as to ‘hard on a family,’ why, noblesse oblige.”
“Considering that you are the family genius, you don’t seem to have brought them much luck,” I put in, for the house of Perilous is neither rich in gold nor very distinguished in history.
“Yes, but just think what they would have been without a family genius, if they are what they are with one! Besides, the prophecies are really responsible,” he added, with the air of one who says, “I have a partner—Mr. Jorkins.”
“Do you mind telling me one thing?” I asked eagerly. “What is the mystery of the Secret Chamber—I mean the room whither the heir is taken when he comes of age, and he never smiles again, nor touches a card except at baccarat?”
“Never smiles again!” said the spectre. “Doesn’t he? Are you quite certain that he ever smiled before?”
This was a new way of looking at the question, and rather disconcerted me.
“I did not know the Master of Perilous before he came of age,” said I; “but I have been here for a week, and watched him and Lord Perilous, and I never observed a smile wander over their lips. And yet little Tompkins” (he was the chief social buffoon of the hour) “has been in great force, and I may say that I myself have occasionally provoked a grin from the good-natured.”
“That’s just it,” said the spectre. “The Perilouses have no sense of humour—never had. I am entirely destitute of it myself. Even in Scotland, even here, this family failing has been remarked—been the subject, I may say, of unfavourable comment. The Perilous of the period lost his head because he did not see the point of a conundrum of Macbeth’s. We felt, some time in the fifteenth century, that this peculiarity needed to be honourably accounted for, and the family developed that story of the Secret Chamber, and the Horror in the house. There is nothing in the chamber whatever,—neither a family idiot aged three hundred years, nor a skeleton, nor the devil, nor a wizard, nor missing title-deeds. The affair is a mere formality to account creditably for the fact that we never see anything to laugh at—never see the joke. Some people can’t see ghosts, you know” (lucky people! thought I), “and some can’t see jokes.”
“This is very disappointing,” I said.
“I can’t help it,” said the spectre; “the truth often is. Did you ever hear the explanation of the haunted house in Berkeley Square?”
“Yes,” said I. “The bell was heard to ring thrice with terrific vehemence, and on rushing to the fatal scene they found him beautiful in death.”
“Fudge!” replied the spectre. “The lease and furniture were left to an old lady, who was not to underlet the house nor sell the things. She had a house of her own in Albemarle Street which she preferred, and so the house in Berkeley Square was never let till the lease expired. That’s the whole affair. The house was empty, and political economists could conceive no reason for the waste of rent except that it was haunted. The rest was all Miss Broughton’s imagination, in ‘Tales for Christmas Eve.’”
He had evidently got on his hobby, and was beginning to be rather tedious. The contempt which a genuine old family ghost has for mere parvenus and impostors is not to be expressed in mere words apparently, for Mauth-hounds of prodigious size and blackness, with white birds, and other disastrous omens, now began to display themselves profusely in the Haunted Chamber. Accustomed as I had become to regard all these appearances as mere automatic symptoms, I confess that I heard with pleasure the crow of a distant cock.
“You have enabled me to pass a most instructive evening, most agreeable, too, I am sure,” I remarked to the spectre, “but you will pardon me for observing that the first cock has gone. Don’t let me make you too late for any appointment you may have about this time—anywhere.”
“Oh, you still believe in that old superstition about cock-crow, do you?” he sneered. “‘I thought you had been too well educated. ‘It faded on the crowing of the cock,’ did it, indeed, and that in Denmark too,—almost within the Arctic Circle! Why, in those high latitudes, and in summer, a ghost would not have an hour to himself on these principles. Don’t you remember the cock Lord Dufferin took North with him, which crowed at sunrise, and ended by crowing without intermission and going mad, when the sun did not set at all? You must observe that any rule of that sort about cock-crow would lead to shocking irregularities, and to an early-closing movement for spectres in summer, which would be ruinous to business—simply ruinous—and, in these days of competition, intolerable.”
This was awful, for I could see no way of getting rid of him. He might stay to breakfast, or anything.
“By the way,” he asked, “who does the Cock at the Lyceum just now? It is a small but very exacting part—‘Act I. scene I. Cock crows.’”