by Graeme Davis
Every rooming, when his tea was set down by the housekeeper upon the rickety table in his dismantled bedroom, Mr. Little would unfold, with trembling fingers, the local newspaper, half expecting that his eye would fall upon a notice headed “Hotspur Hall.” And there were moments when he could scarce resist the impulse of rushing to the station, and buying a ticket for the village nearest Hotspur.
But a stop was put to such fears about a week after his arrival at Newcastle; alas! only to be succeeded by fears much more terrible. Returning home one day he saw a letter on his table; a presentiment told him it was about that. Yet he shook all over when he saw the address on the back of the envelope, “Hotspur Hall, Northumberland.” He sank on to a chair, and was for some time unable to open the letter. It was from Sir Hugh—Sir Hugh writing to the guest, the cousin who had betrayed all the sacred laws of hospitality, to inform him of all the horrors in which his act had involved an innocent, honorable, and happy household. Mr. Little groaned, and held the letter unopened. Then suddenly be opened it, tore it open madly. It ran as follows:
“MY DEAR Little:—I have been too busy of late to let you know that Edwardes discovered in your room here, two days after your sudden departure from Hotspur, a whole outfit which you had apparently forgotten. It consists of a shirt, a pair of check breeches, two white ties, a colored silk handkerchief, a sponge, and a razorstrop. Let us know where you wish all this to be sent. I write to relieve your mind on the subject, as you have doubtless missed these valuables. Lady Hotspur and Harry unite in hoping that you are enjoying yourself, and that we may see you soon again.
Yours, sincerely,
Hugh North Hotspur.
P. S.—I may tell you—but in strict confidence—a piece of news that will doubtless give you pleasure. Our Hal is engaged since the day before yesterday to the Honorable Cynthia Blenkinsop, whom you admired the evening of the Yeomanry ball. The wedding is for next May.”
What did this mean? They did not suspect him, that was clear; and nothing terrible had occurred, that was clear also. What then? Was it possible that. . . . But Mr. Little’s eyes rested on the postscript. Harry Hotspur engaged to the Honorable Cynthia Blenkinsop: a marriage between the two hereditary enemies, whose enmity dated from the time of Chevy Chase!‡ And there returned to his mind the ancient Northumbrian prophecy (he could not quite pronounce it in the original), that as long as the fell is green and the moor is purple, as long as deer haunt the woods (they don’t, thought Mr. Little) and the seamew the rocks, as long as the secret door at the Hall remains closed, so long will never a Hotspur wed a Blenkinsop.
The secret door had been opened, they knew it, and with its opening the curse had been removed from the family. The heir might laugh, though he had come of age (he had laughed at Mr. Little’s wet clothes, if you remember); he might marry a Miss Blenkinsop; the door had been opened, and he had opened it!
Mr. Little jumped up from his chair and rushed to his friend’s door.
“Esmé,” he cried, “we’ll dine at the Kafe” (that being the local pronunciation of the word Cafe) “to-night; and here’s a sovereign for the poor woman who broke her leg. . . . Harry Hotspur is going—” But he stopped himself, and when the clergyman opened the door, astounded at these high spirits, and asking why this sudden launching into festivities and lavish charities, he could only answer, “Only a letter I’ve had from Sir Hugh Hotspur. It seems—it seems I left quite a lot of things behind; a pair of check trowsers among others. Quite valuable, you know—quite valuable!”
But Mr. Little’s happiness—nay, self-congratulation—came to a speedy end. That night, as he lay awake, owing to the unwonted luxury of coffee after dinner, a thought struck him. If the—the thing, the mystery, the whatever it was, had been liberated from the secret chamber, as was proved beyond doubt, not only by his consciousness of having opened the door, but by the news in Sir Hugh’s letter; and if, at the same time, it had not manifested itself to the inhabitants of the Hall, as was likewise clearly the case from the cheerful tone in which the master of Hotspur wrote, why, then what had become of it? Mr. Little, who believed in the indestructibility of force, could not have imagined it to have come to an end; and, if still existing, it must be somewhere.
At this moment a sound—a moan, which made his blood run cold—issued from the darkness of the room. Mr. Little struck a light. The bare, dismantled room, with its wainscoted walls and torn lath ceiling, was empty, and its bareness admitted of no hiding-place anywhere.
“It is the wind in the chimney!” he said to himself, and extinguished his candle.
But the ghastly moan, this time ending in a sort of gurgling laugh, was repeated, and with it a horrible thought flashed across Mr. Little’s mind: What if that mysterious something should attach itself to the man who had disturbed its long seclusion—if the Terror of Hotspur Hall should have fastened upon the rash creature who had let it loose!
And again there issued from the darkness of that dismantled room the moan, the gurgling laugh. In what shape would it reveal itself ? Mr. Little, in the course of his studies, had read M. Maury’s “Magie en Moyen Age”; a similar work by the Rev. Baring Gould; the valuable “Essay on Superstition in the Middle Ages,” by Dr. Schindler, Royal Prussian Sanitary Councilor and Man-midwife at Greiffenberg; he had also once bought the works of Theophrastus Bombastes of Hohenheim, called “Paracelsus,” but found them too boring to read. So that his mind was well stocked with alternatives among which a mediaeval mystery could select. His suspicions were one day aroused by a strange-looking man, dark and grimy, who got on to the Tyne steamer one evening at Wallsend, kept his hat over his face and his eyes fixed upon Mr. Little, and then dodged him up and down Newcastle to the very door of his house. “Who are you?” suddenly exclaimed Mr. Little, stopping short and facing him. He half expected the man to unmask—that is, to take off his hat, and, displaying the face of a corpse, to answer, like the mysterious stranger in Calderon’s play, “I am thyself.” But the man muttered something about its being very hard on a fellow; that since Mr. St. John had been good to the wife, he ought also to be good to the husband; that he had never touched a drop of liquor till after his marriage with that woman—he hadn’t, etc. Mr. Little turned away in disgust. On another occasion, his suspicions were awakened by a large black dog, which insisted upon following him, and even walked into his room, but he proved to have his master’s address on his collar, and was consequently sent home next morning. One day, again, as Mr. Little was leaning out of the lattice window, looking at the red roofs of Gateshead, the solitary black church on the green mound, surrounded by cinder-heaps and chemical refuse, above the Tyne, his eyes fell upon the gray mass of water which rolled slowly below him; and it seemed to him as if, suddenly, in the curl of a heavy-laden wave, he had seen a face, upturned eyes staring at him. “Pooh!” said Esmé St. John, whom slumming had made slightly cynical, “it’s only some wretched creature who’s drowned himself. They’ll take him up at the next dead-house.”
But Mr. Little shook his head: those eyes had looked at him.
Mr. Little had wondered whether he would be haunted: he soon began to be so, or very nearly. He scarcely ventured to enter his room alone, lest he should find waiting for him, he knew not what; or to approach his own bed, lest, on raising the sheet, he should find it already horribly occupied. Every knock made him start; and it was only by an effort that he could induce himself to cry “Come in!” to the old woman who brought him his hot water. But the day was serene compared with the night. He would lie awake for hours listening to the sullen lapping of the Tyne under the windows, to the scurrying of the rats round the walls, the creaking of broken woodwork in the wind, the rattling of the incessant trains over the high-level bridge close by: lie awake breathless, feeling a presence in the room, but never daring to open his eyes; feeling it coming nearer and nearer, and at the same time expanding, filling the place, choking him, yet never daring to look; until the horrible consciousness would die away as it had c
ome, and there remain only the sickening terror it had brought, and the speculations, while listening to the strokes of the Gateshead clock, as to what the terror might be. Yet, was it something visible, definable, or was it merely a vague curse?
“Esmé,” said Mr. Little one day, “do you consider—do you consider—that a man who knows his life to be under a curse; well, suppose something like insanity, you know: but not that—nothing really hereditary, merely a personal thing, a curse, a something making life quite unbearable to him and every one else—do you think that such a man would have a right to marry?’’
Mr. St. John looked at him long and fixedly. “Such a man, in my humble opinion, ought to have a good course of iron, or phosphorus, or, best of all, of whipping, to take down his conceit; and he certainly oughtn’t to get married, unless he knew for certain that the lady would administer some such treatment to him.”
“You have grown very coarse, Esmé!” exclaimed Mr. Little, “I admit that you do a great deal of good to others, but I sometimes question whether a man of refinement by associating wholesale with laundresses and bargees does much good to himself.”
“Very likely not,” replied the clergyman, dryly. “Happily, some men aren’t always thinking all day long whether they are doing good to themselves or not.”
“He is right, all the same, he is right,” said Mr. Little to himself.
Whatever the coarseness of fibre of Mr. St. John, and his lack of all power of sympathy and intuition, there was no denying that he had given expression to a very sound ethical view.
No; a man in the position of Decimus Little must not marry. He must not drag another life into the atmosphere of horror with which, in one second of lawlessness, he had surrounded himself. It was impossible to conceive a happy home with the mysterious horror of Hotspur Hall constantly in the background. No; he must never marry. But had he not foreseen this answer before putting the question to his friend? Nay, had he not always felt, long before setting his foot in Hotspur Hall, that some dark fate would come between him and happiness; that the joys of wife and children were not for a creature like him, unreal and lawless, marked for some strange and horrible destiny? All this had not been mere silly despondency, or, as his friend Esmé would have thought, morbid self-importance.
He determined to write to his cousin and break off at once. But how convey to this charming, buoyant, and decidedly positivistic and positive young student of Girton a fact so contrary to all her beliefs and tendencies, as that an unknown terror, inclosed for centuries in the secret chamber of a border castle, had suddenly, through his fault, shunted itself upon him? Mr. Little revolved the matter in his mind, and found a melancholy little pleasure in so doing. He determined at last upon merely telling the young lady that this marriage had become impossible, and hinting dimly to her that this was due to no diminution of affection, no want of duty on his part, but to a terrible and mysterious curse (not insanity, nor consumption—he would underline that) under which he was laboring, and which forbade his ever sharing a life which meant unspeakable horror.
Mr. Little sat for a long time before his writing-case, resting his chin on his hand, and jotting down half sentences at intervals.
Yes, he could see it all: the surprise and mystification of the dear girl, her tears of rage (he knew she would rage), her feeling of faintness and sickness, her sudden calling upon her bosom friend, Miss Hopper (the student of political economy, with the cropped hair and divided skirts)—he had always disliked Miss Hopper, an unwomanly young person—to shed light upon it. And even Miss Hopper, who, he knew, had once said she was surprised her Gwendolen could love any man, and least of all a little, gray-haired muff—even Miss Hopper would have to admit that her friend’s unhappy lover was marvelously magnanimous. And then Gwendolen would write imploringly to know what had happened; nay, rather (he knew her well), she would come herself, arrive at Newcastle, drive to his house, and then there would be a grand explanation. Esmé St. John would be present, that would make everything proper, and Esmé would be so astounded; and Gwendolen would go on her knees to him and he on his knees to Gwendolen, and finally they would bid each other farewell, and Esmé would take her hand, and bid her kiss Decimus, and then lead her away to the nearest sisterhood, where she would immediately proceed to turn hospital nurse for the rest of her days, and wear a lock of Decimus’s hair round her neck under a scapular.
Mr. Little covered his eyes with his bands, and began to cry. For the first time since opening that door he felt quite peaceable and pleased with himself.
He was startled by the entrance of Martha, Mr. St. John’s old housekeeper.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” she said, making a violent effort over a strong northern accent, “but would you mind my dusting a little?”
“Dust away,” answered Mr. Little, sadly, implying that he, too, was dust and ashes.
In a room as scantily furnished as was Mr. Little’s, the operation of dusting would, one might imagine, be necessarily a brief one; but Martha contrived to prolong it singularly. She was passing the duster for the fourth or fifth time over the lid of Mr. Little’s portmanteau, when she suddenly turned round, and said—
“I beg your pardon, sir.”
“I did not say anything,” answered Mr. Little, gloomily.
“No, sir, no more you did, sir. But I was a-saying, sir, if as I might take the liberty, sir, as I see—but there was no prying, sir, I assure you, for I’m greatly averse to prying into folks’ concerns, especially the gentry’s, and it was all casual like, as we say. I was a-saying, sir, seeing how you received a letter from Sir Hugh Hotspur the other day; if you would just put in a word for me now as they’ve got a new butler, for it would indeed be a charity, let alone all the injustice, to get a body back into her rights, and a widow, too, as I’ve been these fifteen years, and with only a third cousin in the world.”
“My good woman,” interrupted Mr. Little, “explain yourself. I fail to comprehend a word.”
“Well, then, sir,” proceeded Martha, resuming the violent efforts to get the better of her Northumbrian accent, “you should know that I was once in a better place than this, as good a place as any of them have, . . . for I was laundress at Hotspur Hall, and a better laundress you never seed, sir, nor linen better kept than mine was. And then, as Heaven would have it, on account of the wickedness of men, I lost my place through no fault of mine, but merely all along of that room in the peel tower, the room as is lit from the top and as has no windows, as perhaps, sir, you know.”
“Hush!” cried Mr. Little, with a gesture like that of a man fainting, “for mercy’s sake, woman . . . explain . . . that room . . . the room on the topmost landing of the peel tower. . . .”
“Yes, sir, with a door as is hidden in the wall—secret like.”
“You opened that door! You were sent away for opening that door! Answer me—for Heaven’s sake, Martha, answer me!” and Mr. Little clutched the old lady’s arm.
“Lor, sir! there was no harm meant. I did not mean to be prying into other folks’ concerns, as I always says is best left alone. Although there is such as is always a-prying into everything—’’
“You opened that door! Yes, or no!”
“Well, yes, sir, I did, as I was a-going to tell you, sir,” cried Martha, terrified at Mr. Little’s face, and trying to extricate her arm from his hand. “I beg your pardon, sir, as you’re a-tearing of my sleeve.”
Mr. Little let her go.
“That door—the last door in the peel tower, on the left; a door hidden in the wall; the door of a—room without a window; a room lit from the battlements above!”
“Yes, sir,” answered Martha, beginning to quake all over; “exactly as you says, sir. The topmost door in the peel tower, on the left; a door hidden in the wall. It was all along of opening that, as you says, sir.”
“Then, Martha,” said Mr. Little, solemnly, sitting upright, and fixing his eyes on the old woman’s, “you were sent away from Hotspur Hall for openin
g that door—the door of the secret chamber!”
“Well, sir, it may be called the secret chamber, for all as I know now, and the butler would have had me keep it a secret what I saw there, sure enough—all them bottles of wine as he had hidden away to sell to the ‘Blue Bull’ at Blenkinsop; but of my time there was no one as had a right to call it a secret room, seeing as it was the room as we used to put the drying lines in o’ winter, when it was too damp to dry the clothes out of doors, as maybe it still is, on account of that draught from the skylight in the roof.”
“Enough!” cried Mr. Little. “Woman, not one word more!”
Visitors at Hotspur Hall still continue to look for the secret room, to hang out towels from the windows, and pump the servants, all in vain. Young Harry Hotspur was never known to laugh quite as much as that time that Mr. Little appeared at breakfast in the clothes which he had worn that night on the fell; at least, he rarely laughed except when he chanced to see Mr. Little. As to the marriage question, and the difficulty of reconciling it to the prophecy that so long as the fell was green and the moor purple, and the deer haunted the woods and the seamew the rocks, as long as the secret chamber at Hotspur Hall remained undiscovered, so long would never a Hotspur wed a Blenkinsop, it might be interesting to examine into this incongruity in a serious psychological spirit. Such persons as are destitute of any taste for serious psychology merely answer to any objection of the kind, that the Honorable Cynthia Blenkinsop was possessed not merely of a charming person but of sixty thousand a year; and that a secret chamber inhabited by an unspecified horror, although a very delightful heirloom in an ancient family, is not sufficient capital in these days of ostentatious living and riotous luxury. As regards Mr. Decimus Little, he is at present in Turkey, on a trial trip with his cousin Gwendolen and her mother, which will decide whether or not he shall be married to her next January by the Reverend Esmé St. John.