The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  It turned, and led the way to the door, which opened, and we emerged into the corridor. How ghostly, how quiet the old house seemed! only the clank of the phantom’s footsteps disturbing the slumbering echoes. Where was Derrick? I wondered. What would he do if he could see me now, a little white figure flitting along in the wake of the lost Sir Guy. Suppose I should never see him again! Ah! and my poor old dad, what would he ——? a frenzied shriek came to my lips but I stifled it; after all it was my own fault, and I must suffer for my impious rashness.

  We came to the door of the picture-gallery; it opened of its own accord. The gallery was full of light, but, oh Heaven! not the light of the blessed day, nor of the moon; but the phosphorescent glare that comes from the putrescence of a charnel-house. The place seemed alive with misty forms; impalpable shapes, perhaps of the dead and gone Trevalyons, glided past me, and faint whispers and sighs sounded in my ears. Probably they were wondering what reckless mortal was this who dared to brave the spirits of the departed. I glanced at Sir Guy’s portrait—it had disappeared!—only the frame remained.

  The ghost paused at the sliding panel which Derrick had shown me, it flew back; he entered, then beckoned me to follow. I would have given worlds to refuse, to run away, to scream, to do anything that would alarm the household; but I could not. My lips were dumb, and the strong magnetic attraction, impossible to resist, that had dragged me from my bed, now forced me to go on. I stepped into the recess, the panel closed; I was a prisoner!

  Sir Guy advanced to the end of the small room; I saw his hand raised to a portion of the wainscot, it fell back, and presented to my astonished gaze a steep stone staircase. Down we went. It must have been pitch-dark, but we needed no candle; that pale, phosphorescent gleam accompanied us. The stone steps were dank and slippery with slime, whilst noisome creatures that foster in the dark—horrible toads and bats, that filled me with loathing—slunk away at the strange light, and the clank of armour. If only I could have screamed aloud it would have been some relief to my agonized brain, but I was powerless to utter a sound. I counted the steps as we descended. There were three flights of a hundred each.

  At length we came to a huge iron door, bolted and barred. It opened at our approach, and we passed into a kind of vaulted chamber built of great blocks of stone. The ghost laid his hand upon one—it was the centre of the fourth tier—an enormous piece of solid masonry swung back, discovering a smaller room. Here, Sir Guy came to a standstill; he beckoned me nearer, I obeyed him and, looking round, I saw by the light he emitted a pile of gold cups, goblets, drinking vessels of every kind and shape, chalices and crosses set with gleaming jewels. But what was that figure seated by the table on which the treasure was heaped? It was habited as a cavalier, while the remains of a plumed hat hung from the back of a chair.

  As I gazed at it in horrified silence, it raised its bent head from the table, and looked at me. It was a skeleton, the fleshless, grinning skull glaring horribly in the faint obscurity. Then an icy breath seemed to freeze the marrow in my bones, and a voice said, “I have granted your request; see that you fulfil your promise to me, or you will be lost for ever.”

  The ghost turned to me, casting his fiery eyes upon mine, he raised his hand, and laid it upon my arm, just as he had done in the vision. A scorching pain shot through me, and served to loosen my tongue. I gave one awful shriek which rang through the vaulted dungeons; a shriek which did not seem to me like my own voice, and frightened me as much as it did the bats; then the ghostly figures, the golden treasure, all faded away in a thick crimson mist, and I remembered no more.

  V

  When I regained consciousness I was lying at the foot of Sir Guy Trevalyon’s picture; I raised myself on my elbow and looked around; the sickly rays of the cold wintry morning were stealing through the windows. My teeth were chattering—my head throbbed and burned, but I noticed that Sir Guy had returned to his frame, and stood grim and grisly as when I last saw him. Presently there was a sound of voices outside; hasty footsteps ran along the corridor, and my Aunt Beatrice and a couple of frightened maids appeared, looking thoroughly scared and anxious.

  “What is the matter, my dear child?” said my aunt, helping me to rise; “your scream awoke us. Why are you in here? you must surely have been walking in your sleep. Even Derrick, in his distant room, heard you.”

  I looked from one to the other dazed and wondering. How could they have heard my shriek at the bottom of that awful stone staircase, beneath the ground? Then suddenly a fear, a doubt, and a great joy came upon me; I flung myself into my aunt’s arms, and burst into alternate tears and laughter, “I have found the treasure-chamber,” I cried. “Yes, I have found it; there are three flights with a hundred steps in each.”

  “Good Heaven!” exclaimed my aunt seriously alarmed; “the child is raving. We must get her to bed; she is evidently very ill. Sarah, ask Mr. Derrick to ride off at once for the doctor—at once, mind.”

  “I am not ill,” I gasped, “I have found the treasure;” but I could say no more, a sudden feeling of utter horror and fear of what I had endured overcame me and choked my utterance. I remember but little of what followed; I was carried to my room and put to bed.

  When the doctor came he said I must have had some very severe shock, and considered my condition serious, with grave symptoms of brain fever. I think I must have told them all my story in my delirium. For three days I was a raving lunatic, and terrified those about me with my piteous appeals to them to save me from Sir Guy Trevalyon. But, thank God! I pulled through; and when I was well enough to be moved into another room, Derrick himself carried me in his strong arms into aunt’s cosy boudoir, and there I told them the story I have endeavoured to relate here, from my mesmeric trance on board the Victoria to the discovery of the hidden gold.

  “I am afraid you don’t believe me,” I said as I ended, and I noticed that Aunt Eleanor looked at me anxiously, with an incredulous expression on her gentle face; she evidently thought I was still wandering. But Derrick knelt down beside me. “My little darling,” he said, tenderly, seriously, “I believe everything you tell me; and I will go at once and prove the truth of your words.”

  “You can’t go alone,” I entreated. “Wait till to-morrow, and get Gerald Trevor to accompany you. I will send him a note at once, and Lord Ruthlyn shall come too.”

  He did so; and the next morning Gerald arrived with his father. When Derrick explained why he required their presence they were tremendously excited and curious.

  We accompanied them to the picture gallery; they opened the sliding panel and entered the tiny recess. I pointed out the spot which Sir Guy’s finger had pressed. There was a moment of breathless suspense—then incredulity turned to awe, for the partition flew out as I had told them, and disclosed the stone staircase.

  I gave one glance at it; then, shivering with horror, I hid my face on my aunt’s shoulder, and she and Bee led me away.

  My story is told. They found everything exactly as I had related, but they could not unclose the iron door which Sir Guy had opened with a touch. Two locksmiths had to be summoned from the town, and it was accomplished at last; the solid masonry in the stone chamber swung back, as I described, and disclosed the long-lost treasure that Sir Guy had brought from Spain, and which probably caused his ruin. The figure seated at the table was doubtless that of the missing knight, who had been caught a prisoner in this secret chamber by the untoward closing of the aperture, which opened by a spring from the outside. It is needless to say that his remains were carefully collected, and interred with full honours in the Church of Tregarthlyn, and later on I had a brass inserted in the ancient pavement to the memory of the Phantom Knight. Besides, did I not owe him a debt of gratitude for his kindly conduct to myself?—and I was so horribly afraid of his visiting me again.

  Amongst the treasure were found many Spanish doubloons, and broad gold pieces; enough, thank God! to free Tregarthlyn from the mortgages and debts encumbering it, and to enable my Derrick to hold
up his head amongst the greatest in the land.

  That summer he and I sailed for India for our honeymoon, my dear father coming over to England to give me to him.

  Whether I ever did descend those awful stairs with the ghost of Sir Guy Trevalyon, or whether, under the influence of some powerful supernatural influence, I evolved what I have related from my inner consciousness, I know not; but it is a singular fact that I still bear upon my arm the print of those four skeleton fingers; and, what is more, my two little children have also the sign manual of the ghost of the Treasure-Chamber.

  Theo Gift

  NUMBER TWO, MELROSE SQUARE

  First published anonymously in two weekly parts on December 6 and 13, 1880 in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round, the story’s­ authorship was revealed in 1889 when it was reprinted in Theo Gift’s volume of weird tales Not for the Night-time. “Theo Gift” was in fact the pseudonym of Dora Havers (1847-1923), who is also remembered for having collaborated with E. Nesbit in writing stories for children. One of the most accomplished and effective tales in this volume, it serves as a warning to be wary of underpriced rental properties, particularly those with sinister servants.

  CHAPTER I

  I am asked to state as clearly as possible why I gave up the house in Melrose Square, Bloomsbury, as suddenly as I did, and what happened there. The landlord says that I have given it a bad name, and prevented him (owing to certain paragraphs which have lately appeared in one of the daily papers) from letting it to another tenant. That is why I have been called upon to make this statement, and I will do so accordingly as briefly and exactly as possible. If the landlord be further hurt by it, I cannot help it. Had I been allowed I would far rather have avoided ever saying or thinking anything more on the subject. To me it is still an inexpressibly painful one.

  I first entered Number Two, Melrose Square, rather late in the afternoon of November 15, 1878; that is, just about a year ago. It was a furnished house taken for me by a friend who was slightly acquainted with the landlord. She had also, on his recommendation, engaged for me a temporary servant, and it was this woman who opened the door for me as I alighted from the cab at it.

  She was not a pleasant looking person; and I remember my first impression of the house was that it looked dark and cheerless, and not so inviting by any means as my friend had described it to me. She, however, had seen it on a bright morning in October, when the sun was shining and the leaves were still ruddy on the trees, while I was entering it under the treble disadvantages of twilight, soaking rain, and a sky low and dense, and sooty enough to suggest its being compounded of nothing but exhalations from the river of black mud which lined the streets and made the pavements foul and slippery on every side. No house could look pleasant under such circumstances, and I had not come to London for pleasure, but for hard practical work. I had undertaken the translation of a book which necessitated my constant vicinity to the British Museum for at least six months, and the house in Melrose Square was at once so convenient for the purpose, and so exceedingly—I had almost said ridiculously—low rented that it seemed as though it had been left empty specially for my accommodation. It would have required something more than a little outward dreariness to damp my spirits on my first arrival.

  Inside it was rather more cheerful. The entrance hall, it is true, was dark and narrow; but Mrs. Cathers, the servant, had lighted a bright fire in the dining-room, and the tea-things were already set out on the table. I began to think that the woman’s face belied her character, and that I should not have to suffer from want of attention at any rate; altogether I sat down to tea in very good spirits, and afterwards wrote a letter to brother John, with whom I had been staying ever since I let the cottage after our mother’s death. It had been a long visit—not too long for him, I hope; but Mrs. John was fussy in her kindness, would make a visitor of me, and fidget if I shut myself up for an hour with my writing. On the whole I had rather looked forward to being my own mistress again. This evening I did not mean to do anything, however. The journey from the north had been as long and tiring as such journeys always are, and I hardly felt equal to getting out any occupation; while in the room where I was sitting there was certainly nothing to interest me or amuse my thoughts.

  It was a medium sized apartment, with a rather dingy red Turkey carpet, furniture in the orthodox brown leather and mahogany, and a wall-paper of dull orange striped with maroon. There were one or two very bad oil-paintings, and an engraving, not at all bad, representing Judas casting down the thirty pieces of silver in the Temple; a bookcase in one corner, but locked and with no key in it; and over the chimney-piece a mirror covered with yellow gauze. I have a particular objection to gilding covered up with yellow gauze anywhere or at any time; but in this case the glass was covered as well—a precaution as senseless as it was hideous; and I made up my mind to remove the eye-sore on the morrow. For that night I was too lazy, and about nine o’clock rang for Mrs. Cathers to bring me my candle that I might go to bed. She went upstairs with me. It was rather a winding staircase, and my bedroom was on the second floor. I had to pass the drawing-room landing, and a window a little way above just where the stairs took a curve. I remember looking through this window and trying to discover what view it had, and being disappointed because the gloomy blackness of the night without only gave me back a vision of myself reflected in the glass with Mrs. Cathers’s decidedly unprepossessing features a little in my rear. For the moment, indeed, I fancied there were two Mrs. Cathers, or rather a second head a little below hers; but of course that was only a flaw in the glass, and I laughed at myself for the momentary idea that this second head had been more like an old man than my middle-aged servant woman. That is all I recollect of the first night; for after unpacking my trunks I made haste to bed, and slept so soundly that it required more than one knock at my door to arouse me in the morning.

  I spent the whole of the next day at the Museum, only returning at dusk to a late dinner. It was still raining then, and the house looked as dreary as it had done on the previous evening. It did not face the square itself—which, indeed, hardly deserved the name, being only a narrow oblong enclosure where a score or so of melancholy trees shook down their last yellow leaves on a wilderness of tall grass and rank weeds, and round which all the house seemed to have acquired an air of damp and gloom. It opened into a little narrow street turning out of one end of the square, and cut off by iron posts and chains from being a thoroughfare to anywhere; and on that side it was divided from the next house by an archway leading down a long entry to some mews in the rear. The house on the other side, that looking into the square, was empty. So was the one immediately in front, and the big, gaunt letters, “To Let,” stared me whitely in the face from the dingy window above and below. It was not a cheerful place; but, as my friend wrote me, when I asked her to find me nice apartments near the Museum, a furnished house in a square, and with a servant included, for positively less money than you would pay for three rooms in anything like a decent street, was a thing to be grasped at, not despised; especially as I could be so much more my own mistress than in the latter place, and could ask Tom and Hester up from their barrack quarters to spend Christmas with me. So I tried to shut my eyes to the exterior look of things and went inside. Here there was one improvement at least—the yellow gauze was gone. I had stripped it off the mirror the last thing before leaving the house in the morning, as also from the glass in the drawing-room, which, though the gilding of the frame was decidedly shabby, was to my great amusement as carefully guarded as the other.

  I went up to the latter apartment after dinner. Mrs. Cathers had suggested that “Of course I would not do so, as the dinin’-parlour were so much more cosy;” but I did not agree with Mrs. Cathers. That orange paper with its maroon stripes, and the grim old engraving of Judas, with the horrible expression of the traitor and the sinister, leering faces of the high priests and elders, were depressing to my spirits. The very force and realism of the picture made me feel a
s if the room were one in which it would be possible to plot a crime. Besides, a house in which a drawing-room is unused, except for company, is never a cosy or homelike one to me; and I knew that Hester felt still more strongly on the subject. I was determined that she should find me and my work-basket and books established there as a matter of course when she came.

  Neither books nor work were much called into requisition on the present evening, however. There was a pleasant fire burning in the grate, and two candles on the little round table by the sofa, where the last number of the Cornhill, with a new novel, lay awaiting my perusal; but a day’s continuous writing and my dinner combined had made me sleepy; and after reading a few pages and finding that I was getting into a dreamy state, and mixing up the crackling of the fire with the roar of surf on a sunny beach, and my own position on the sofa with that of the Scottish heroine in a fast-flying cutter, I gave it up, blew out the candles, and composed myself for a nap till tea-time.

  Do these details appear irrelevant to you? They are not so in reality. I mention them to show you that nothing of what I may afterwards relate can be accounted for (as has been falsely suggested) by my being in an excited, overwrought state, worked up by loneliness or the writing and reading of sensational romances. I was in perfect health. I had lived alone for weeks, and sometimes months, when my dear mother was visiting her married children. I had been simply following my regular profession, which this day lay in the translating a number of dry, scientific rigidly matter-of-fact letters, had walked home, eaten a plain dinner, and read myself comfortably to sleep with one of our healthiest and most-bracing English writer’s descriptions of sea-coast scenery. Bear this in mind as I wish you to do, and then listen to what follows.

  I woke from my nap with a start, caused by the falling of a coal into the fender. How long I had slept I could not tell; but I had that instinctive consciousness, which I daresay most people have experienced, that it was a long time, much longer than I had intended; and this opinion was confirmed by the sight of the tea-things standing on the table, where Mrs. Cathers had evidently placed them without rousing me, and also by the fact that when I touched the teapot I found it was almost stone-cold. Vexed with myself I rose quickly to my feet and began putting the fire together; for it had got so low and dead that the room was almost dark. Indeed, I feared at first that there was not sufficient vitality in it to light a candle, and so enable me to see what time it was, and whether it was worth while beginning any occupation; but a few skilful touches with the poker soon dispelled this idea and produced a bright, wavering flame; and I stood up again, meaning to get a spill from the mantel-piece and light it at it. As I did so my glance naturally fell on my own face in the mirror before me, and I said to myself aloud, and smiling as one sometimes will when alone: “Well, Miss Mary Liddell, you have made your head into a furze-bush! It’s a mercy Mrs. John isn’t here to see you, or——” My voice broke off suddenly at that word; for in the act of uttering it, and smiling to myself at my dishevelledness, as I have said, I saw that I was not alone in the room.