The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  “Going back, and to-day! What for? Why, Godfrey will never forgive you!”

  “I can’t help it, I dare say it is very foolish, but you know the uncomfortable circumstances under which I came; you must have seen how distressed I have been for the last four-and-twenty hours; there is still no letter for me, and I cannot, after what I went through last night, endure this uncertainty any longer. Something has happened, or will happen, if I don’t return at once.”

  “Gone through! And what have you gone through?”

  “Why, such a night as I trust I may never pass again!”

  Then, as the best means of explaining my reasons for leaving, I detailed my sensations, and the revelation of the mirror, adding my conviction that, dream or reality, it was a warning which I could not neglect.

  As she listened, a shade gradually fell over her sunny countenance, and she gazed at me as earnestly as if she would catch the sense of my words before they fell from my lips. When I spoke of the widows’ weeds, she sank half-fainting on a chair. A moment afterwards, raising herself with an effort, and looking up, with eyes full of a dreary abstraction, she said—

  “Have no fear, my friend, have no fear. Do not leave us!—it is not, it is—not to you—but—no!—no! You never saw this, you dreamed it! Your heart was filled with thoughts of your wife—you fancied—you knew not what! You are not well. I have read that this” . . . . Then checking herself, she continued, “But why should you go? Pray do not leave us now.”

  I was moved beyond expression by the piteous sadness of her face, but still with the horror of the night fresh in my mind, I felt that depart I must.

  It was with a choked utterance that I repeated my decision, adding, “I know the trains run to-day as on Sundays, and I shall have time to catch the parliamentary. Say anything for me you will, make any excuse you like, tell Godfrey that I have lost my senses, tell him what I have seen.”

  “Tell Godfrey!” she almost screamed, springing to her feet, and seizing my arm. “Tell him! no, not for worlds!” And her face flushed with excitement, and her eyes gleamed. “Breathe not a word of this either to him, should you see him before you start, or to any living soul. Give any reason for your departure rather than this; if friendship is not a mere word, promise me not to speak of it. Oh! promise me, promise me!”

  The extraordinary vehemence and agony of her manner caused a strange revulsion of feeling in me. Why did she so earnestly implore silence? Promise! of course I would, but still I was determined to return home.

  “God bless you, dear Lady Sequin,” I said; “I would do all and everything for you and Godfrey, but, my wife, I must satisfy myself that no harm has come to her. Good-bye at once, good-bye, or I shall be too late.” Leaving her with her face buried in her hands, I hastened out of the room.

  An hour afterwards, without having seen Godfrey, or any of the guests, I was steaming towards London, my heart and mind busy with bewildering conjectures. How strange that my narration should so have affected my old friend’s wife! Why should it have moved her so strongly? And what an agonized look she gave as she saw me drive away! The features reflected in the mirror were plainly those of Maria; to me, and mine alone, could there have been any meaning in what I had seen. How was it all to be accounted for? I knew not what to think, and it was only when I afterwards became acquainted with the legend attached to the steel mirror that the mystery was solved.

  Occupied by conflicting thoughts, and giddy with suspense, I at last reached town after the terrible delays attending upon a slow parliamentary train, and it was late ere I rattled through the quiet streets of Bloomsbury, in the dusky twilight of the winter afternoon.

  The relief which followed the surprised but reassuring words uttered by the servant, as she let me into my house, was perhaps the most pleasurable sensation I have ever experienced in my life.

  “Nothing the matter?” No, of course not. Everything remained as I had left it; if there was a change, my wife was a little better, but startled beyond expression at seeing me. A few words explained all. Certainly Maria had written, not on the day I left, but the day after, that is yesterday, and I ought to have received her letter this morning, the morning of this identical Christmas-day. The servant had posted it in good time, had she not? No, that was just what she had not done, for, upon inquiry, she admitted that it might have been a little past six before she got to the post-office.

  Mightily rallied was I by madame and her daughters for a dear superstitious old idiot; for remembering my promise to Lady Sequin, I did not tell them the cause which had mainly induced my return. I could simply attribute it to the want of news, and general apprehension of evil which possessed me. I spent a most unlooked-for, but not exactly merry Christmas evening, for great as was my relief, I found it impossible quite to recover myself, or banish from my mind the remembrance of the extraordinary effect my narration, and consequent departure, had had upon Lady Sequin. Poor Godfrey, too, how disappointed he would be—disappointed in the very thing upon which he had set his heart and pinned his faith. Unaccustomed, likewise, to ghostly influences, I felt it would take a day or two to shake them off. Ay, indeed, I might well think so, for even now I doubt whether they can ever disappear.

  On Saturday, the third morning after my return, whilst looking for an answer to a note which I had despatched to Godfrey immediately on my reaching home, stating how groundless I found my fears to have been, and proposing to retrieve my lost character by again going down to the Bower, a letter in the handwriting which I knew to be that of one of our great friends, a never-failing Christmas guest of the Sequins, was put into my hands. Its place is here:—

  “The Bower, Dankborough, Dec. 27.

  “I have undertaken to break to you, as gently as may be, the details of affairs here since you so suddenly and unexpectedly left us on Christmas-day. Our good host could not recover your absence, and inveighed strongly against what he called your extraordinary and inexplicable behaviour. Throughout the day he harped upon it, and not having been quite himself lately, as I think we may all have observed, he did not take it so easily as he otherwise would. At dinner, too, he was more strong on the point than ever. There were a lot of our usual friends here, and whilst talking of you, he suddenly began to count their number, exclaiming, ‘Why, bless my heart, if his absence does not make us thirteen at table!’ And from that moment all semblance of good spirits deserted him.

  “Lady Sequin likewise seemed affected by some mysterious influence, and was far from well. The result was the most dismal Christmas-day I have ever known in this house. Prepare yourself, my dear fellow, to bear up against what I know will be a terrible shock to you. The following day poor Godfrey, with some half dozen of us, rode over to Dankborough. Coming home, it was proposed that we should make a short cut across country; and off we went, rather glad of something to stir us up, and make a brisk finish of it.

  “The speed and our spirits gradually increased, one or two raspers were taken with great success by Sequin, on a hunter he was trying for the first time. The brute had gone well so far, but in coming to a double post and rail, a rather narrow in-and-out, in taking his second rise, either missing his distance, or landing awkwardly, no one knows exactly how, he fell, rolling over we all suppose, upon Godfrey, for when we went back to the place, the horse was standing shivering with fear, and Godfrey lay stretched motionless on the ground—never, alas! to move again! We carried him home, and then—his poor wife! But I know that your eyes will be as dim, when you come to this part of my letter, as mine are now whilst I write.”

  Lady Sequin never recovered the shock. Her brain became partially affected. She had intervals, however, of perfect sanity. In one of these, and shortly before her death, she sent for me. Our interview was the most painful I have ever gone through. The result of it was a communication she made to me, and the purport of which ends my tale.

  It appeared that only a few days before this fatal Christmas, she and her poor husband had come upon some hitherto un
discovered papers in the secret drawer of an old cabinet. Amongst several anecdotes and records of the Sequin family there was one which they read together, and which took great hold of the imagination of both.

  The story ran, that such a vision as I had seen in the steel mirror, the ghostly reflection of a widowed woman, only appeared when a violent death threatened the head of the Sequin house. Its last coming was in 1746, when it had been immediately followed by the death of the first Sir Godfrey on the battle-field of Culloden. Many previous instances were also recorded of its appearance, always with the same result.

  Anonymous

  WHITE SATIN

  This story, anonymously published in the London Society Christmas Number in 1875, takes place around Christmas time against the backdrop of the Jacobite Rising (or Rebellion) of 1715, a failed attempt to restore the Catholic House of Stuart to the British throne. At the Battle of Preston in November 1715, the Jacobites were defeated, and many were taken prisoner and sentenced to death for treason. “White Satin” opens in December of that year, just after the Jacobite defeat, with Sir James Lisle, a Catholic linked to the Jaco­bite conspiracy, fleeing arrest. But the ultimate fate of Sir James and his family will turn on the intervention of a ghost.

  CHAPTER I

  ROXLEY HALL

  Every old house has a story of its own, though it may remain untold, and perish with the crumbling walls that witnessed it. I know one that seems to me worth telling before it is forgotten, which it soon will be in a wonderful change of associations.

  The Lisles of Roxley are not the first people who have been smoked out of their old home, but it was a shock to every one who knew the place to hear of its being let out in lodgings for miners.

  To be sure there are black chimneys in the park and all round the place; and it would have cost a good deal to build cottages; and no doubt this arrangement is very saving and prudent. And there may be something absurd in the clinging to old associations, the reverence for fallen grandeur, which makes one feel that a visit to Roxley Hall now—squalid, crowded, noisy, dirty, with its stately rooms partitioned, whitewashed, hacked about, and its black, trampled garden—would be the saddest of pilgrimages. Still, I wish the house had been pulled down, and a red brick village built where it stands; for I mean no reproach to the miners when I say there is a place for everybody, as well as a time for everything.

  It was on a spring day that I last saw Roxley; the house was empty then, but an old servant of the family lived at the gate and took care of it. The road runs, as it always did, through the middle of the place—a quiet road with wide grass margins, where the young Lisles used to canter their ponies. We drove up between the high, solid red walls of the house and yards, and an immense yew hedge, like a great green wall opposite, behind which were the kitchen gardens; walked under an arched gateway into a large square stable-yard, paved with round stones, and through another old ivy-covered gateway into the garden in front of the house. Part of this side was half timbered; the projecting windows in the gables looked down on a still, sad, pretty scene—a lawn with long grass growing, an empty fountain, a moss-grown sundial; then, beyond a sunk fence, the park sloping away in gentle undulations to the west, oaks and elms in all their varied tints of gold and green; the sun shining softly, reflected in the shallow water of an old fishpond down below, a lonely peacock sitting on the stone balustrade.

  We entered the porch of black carved woodwork, and went through a small outer room into the hall. All the old furniture was still there—tapestry and carving and gilding of our great-great-grandfathers’ days—and the Lisle portraits were hanging on the walls. Sir Henry had taken away all the modern appendages of the place; he only came down now and then to see that it did not fall quite to ruin. I think at that time he had some idea of letting it, if he could have found a tenant; but we were told that the whole air was poisoned sometimes by the smoke which rose up from the valley, and people are not tempted to settle themselves in such an atmosphere as that.

  The library at Roxley was a long, dark room, divided into a number of recesses by screens full of books, as one sees them in a college library. One set of shelves in the bookcase opened with a spring, books and all, and showed a secret staircase in the wall behind it. The Lisles always used to make a mystery of that staircase, in a way which struck one as rather odd in these open-hearted modern days; but they have lost all interest in their old home now, and the secret has passed out of their hands. In the innermost recess of the library, opposite these movable shelves, there hung a full-length portrait of a lady in white satin, a Vandyck they say. I do not know what Sir Henry has done with it now, but I hope it hangs in a better light. Even in that twilight corner of the gloomy old library one could see how beautifully it was painted; the dark eyes looked down with a sweet solemnity, the pearls gleamed on hair and neck, there was a soft shadowy gloss on the stiffly-cut satin gown. And nobody knows who she was, this lady of Stuart days; but she must have been one of the family, for the old servant told us in a smothered voice, as we stood looking at her, that whenever any great misfortune came upon the Lisles—and they had often been very near ruin from various causes—this lady was to be seen walking about the house, carrying a large roll of papers in her hands; and as soon as she was seen, the misfortune was averted and the family regained its prosperity. Now nobody believes ghost stories, and I am not going to tell one; but this legend of the amiable Roxley lady—I wish we all had such an ancestress—was built upon a foundation of fact, on an event in the Lisle family; and as well authenticated, I assure you, as some stories you may have read when you were young in the History of England.

  CHAPTER II

  SIR JAMES

  One snowy night in the month of December, 1715, Lady Lisle was sitting by the fire in the winter parlour—a long, low room in the south gable—working at her frame. Two candles were lighted on the high mantelpiece, but all the room was full of firelight; and there she sat in the glow in her handsome brocaded gown, with her powdered hair drawn back from a bright young face, full of thought and spirit, often pausing between the stitches, and sitting upright and very still, as if she were listening for an arrival. Presently it came: there was a little distant bustle in the house, and somebody in riding-boots came clanking hastily along the passage. Lady Lisle pushed her frame away, and ran out to meet him.

  “Oh, my dear James, you are covered with snow!” cried she, as, after the first affectionate greetings, they came in hand-in-hand and stood before the fire.

  “No matter, Kate; it will soon melt in this hot room of yours,” said Sir James; and he looked down at her rather sadly, and pressed her hand tight between his own. He was a tall, rather heavy-­looking man, sixteen years older than his wife, with a grave, deliberate, unexcited manner; she seldom saw him so much moved as he was that night, and as she gazed up into his face her own began to grow pale and anxious.

  “Ah!” she said, “you have brought some bad news! Pray tell me at once. Richard is dead?”

  “No; but he is in prison, and will be tried shortly with the rest. If he escapes it will be by a miracle,” said Sir James, and he sighed. “These headstrong fellows pull their friends after them into the ditch. I suppose the name is enough. I have ridden pretty hard, for I left London at three o’clock this morning. There is a warrant out against me.”

  “Oh!” said Lady Lisle; and for a moment she drew closer to her husband, and laid her head against his wet shoulder. “But how dare they!—what does it matter? You have done nothing.”

  “I am on the wrong side—and a Catholic. And even if I were not myself at Preston, my brother was there.”

  “But against your wishes. I can tell them that. Oh! forgive me for taking his part! What are you going to do?”

  “I must get away to-night, and as quickly as possible put the sea between me and them. Woolner will have a warrant to occupy the house, and to search for evidence of treason.”

  “To-morrow?”

  “Scarcely to-morrow. In two
or three days’ time.”

  “I hate Mr. Woolner! And little Harry and I—shall we come away with you to-night?”

  “The child would die on the journey. No; but you will be taken care of.”

  “By the Saints?” said Lady Lisle.

  “No,” he answered, rather absently. “Yes, the Saints, if you please—and old Baldwin. I can trust him. He will hide you for the present, and carry you, as soon as it is safe, to your aunt in Derbyshire.”

  “But, James! I cannot be left here. I must come with you.”

  “No,” said Sir James, in his quiet, matter-of-fact way, stooping forward to warm his hands at the blaze. “You will do your duty, Kate; and that is to stay where I bid you. Dear, you have always been brave and wise; you will not change your nature now!”

  He was not at all aware of the flood of self-reproach which, more than anything else just then, brought the tears to his wife’s eyes, making the bright fire swim and dazzle before them. How often had she joined with his wild young brother in laughing at his goodness and gentleness! Well, she could make no amends now: he must ride off to exile across the snowy, desolate country, and she must submit to stay behind; there was nothing for it but obedience.

  “You are mistaken,” she said; “I am a foolish coward. But of course I must do as you bid me. Though, indeed, I thought it was a wife’s business to follow her husband and share in his dangers.”

  “You will have no lack of danger,” said Sir James. “Baldwin will warn you when these fellows are coming. But there is something for you to do here first. There are papers in this house that may well cost us all our heads—Dick’s letters, and those of his friends, which should have been destroyed as soon as read. The careless rascal has left them all over the house, he tells me; there are three special letters from my Lord Derwentwater which must at all hazards be found and destroyed. Dick’s letters to me are in the secret drawer of my table in the library; they also must be destroyed. And remember, Kate, you must not leave the house without those deeds which are in the chest in the hall, and those which are in the leather box in the fireplace cupboard in my room. If Woolner lays hands on them, I would not give much for young Harry’s chance of succeeding his father here.”