Surely something in the place did not agree with Alice! She had grown thin, and pale, and melancholy, and was quite unlike the fresh, if delicate, young bride who had come over in October to take possession of the new home. Yet this was only a fortnight before Christmas, and the change which had been wrought was painfully great and sudden. At last Walter saw the pallor and depression which had stolen like a shadow over the sweet, fair face. Dreamy and abstracted as he was, absorbed in his poetry or his art, it was really a strong proof of love that he noticed anything at all, that he saw any change, short of death itself, in his wife.
It was about a fortnight before Christmas, when the days were at their shortest and darkest. Alice was sitting in the bay of the window, gazing into the garden, and looking across the wide sea, where not a living thing was in sight save the wild birds that wheeled and circled in the waning light, and beat their white wings upon the waters and against the dull background of the heavy clouds. There was neither colour nor savagery enough to make a picture or a poem; it was just a uniform cold grey throughout; and Walter, wearied with the book he had been reading alone in the study, threw it down on the table, and sauntered into the drawing-room where his young wife was sitting, also alone, in the deep bay-window looking over the wild sea.
“My darling! how pale and ill you are looking!” said Walter fondly, as the light fell on her upturned face. His eyes were suddenly opened, as is often the way with unobservant people; and for the first time he noticed what the very servants had seen and commented on for weeks. “Are you ill, Alice?” he continued, drawing her close to him. “What is the matter with you, darling?”
“I don’t know, dear,” she answered, with a heavy sigh; “nothing, so far as I can tell; I only feel weak, and so stupidly nervous! I cannot tell you what a coward I have become, Wally; I could scream if a bird flies suddenly before me, and I am afraid of my own shadow. And then I have such dreadful dreams; or they are scarcely dreams—they are like visions more than dreams, for I seem to myself to be wide awake all the time.”
“What dreams, dear?—you darling little coward! Why, I never imagined you were such a little faint-heart, I am afraid our lonely life is too much for you, dear. If you are going to have all these fancies, I don’t know what I must do with you; send you back to London, I think.” He spoke tenderly for all the lightness of his words, smoothing her fair hair and kissing her forehead at every pause. “Now, come, bring these dark things of yours into the light, darling, and tell me what your dreams are like. There is nothing like telling a thing of this kind to get rid of it. The mind falls into tricks just as the body does, and bad dreams and ghostly visions are its commonest tricks. What is it, my own?”
The girl shuddered, and pressed a little closer to his bosom. “It is of poor papa,” she half whispered. “I have such dreadful dreams or visions—I don’t know what they are—about him, Wally. Night after night he seems to come to my bedside, so pale, and with all the blood streaming from his bead. And he looks at me so sorrowfully; it is the sadness of his face that makes me so wretched, far more than the horror of even the blood about him. And sometimes I see what looks like a woman’s head, with a quantity of fair hair, near him, but I cannot see her face; and sometimes”—here she shivered, and drew her breath, as she sank her voice so low that Walter could hardly hear her,—“I see a man like that Penreath, standing by them, with such a scowl, such a terrible expression on his face! Oh, Walter, dear,” she went on, weeping now, “you know that poor papa was lost in Cornwall when he was quartered at Truro. I do so fear that something bad happened to him—something worse than being drowned, or lost in an old mine, which I remember our friends used to tell poor mamma was the most likely thing. Oh, Walter, what shall I do?—it is killing me!”
“Poor, sweet child! what can I do for you?” said her husband tenderly. “Shall I send you away for a while? No? Shall mamma, then, come and stay with you?”
“Yes, yes!” she cried. “I did not like to ask you, darling, for it looked as if I was discontented, but I should like to see mamma again; and, oh, I should like to have her here! She won’t mind the loneliness and wildness, I am sure, and I shall be so much happier when she is with us again. But, Walter,” and again that shiver passed over her, “she will not see anything, as I do, will she?”
“My dear!” he said, in a deprecating voice, “what would become of the world if we were all as sensitive and imaginative as you? No; I should think that mamma would sleep quietly enough, and not have the same bad dreams as her restless little daughter.”
“But why do I dream so much, and so continually the same thing?” persisted Alice. “Oh, Walter, if you could only see him—poor, dear, handsome papa—with that great wound in his head, and that sad, sad face! And he looks at me so pitifully! and then the woman’s yellow hair seems to fall across his breast, and that dreadful man’s face comes in, oh, so horrible, so fierce! Walter!” she cried, her passion rising and overmastering her caution, “I am sure he has had a hand in something bad! I am sure he has done something wrong to papa. Oh!” she shrieked, clinging to her husband nervously, as a heavy step ground on the gravel walk before the windows, and Jem Penreath, in a red cap and jersey, stood dark against the dusky sky, holding in his hand a batch of fish, which was his excuse for his evening’s visit to the house.
Walter dashed out, and for the first time spoke to him angrily, and ordered him out of the garden.
“What business had he,” said the young man haughtily, “to come before the drawing-room windows in that rude manner? Did he think the place was his own, that he had so little respect for any one in it?” with more to the same purpose, angrily, intemperately said.
Jem made no answer. It would have been better, perhaps, if he had; for even Walter was startled, and for an instant almost terrified, at the sudden savageness, the fiendish fury that came into his face. He compressed his lips as if with an effort, then in a hoarse voice, but a quiet manner, said, “I brought un these fish, mayster. Fish do be scarce just now, and I thought as the young mistress ud like un.”
But Walter, though a trifle scared, was not to be “got over,” and went on rating him as young men will when they have a grievance, and the offender is beneath them in social circumstances.
To all of which Jem Penreath answered not a word, but stood with his eyes bent to the ground; once, and once only, lifting them, as he said, with a forced voice of patience, and a terrible look to belie it, “Then, may be, the young mistress do not want the fish, and I be losing my time, and yours, mayster?”
And when he had said this he turned away, and disappeared behind the rocks.
“Yes, Alice is right,” thought Walter, as he went back into the house. “That Penreath is a dangerous fellow. I wonder I never saw it before!”
Of course Mrs. Mackenzie accepted the invitation to that wild Cornish home, where her darling daughter was, as she termed it, “buried alive;” and a few days saw her safely housed, too happy in her girl’s society to feel at first the full force of the wildness, the desolateness of the scene, and entering into all the small domestic details of household arrangements as only a mother can.
Among other things—it was only a trivial matter, perhaps—she urged on Alice to make a laundry of a certain outhouse not far from the kitchen, and which at present was a mere stick and lumber place. “The washing” was one of the grievances of the young wife’s life as it stood, and a good laundry would make this little hitch run smooth. So mamma proposed, and Alice requested, and Walter gave the order, that the outhouse should be cleared and set to rights, and made into a laundry with all despatch. They sent over to the nearest town for the proper workmen to see to the copper, the flue, the ironing-board, and all fit appliances; but first the place had to be cleared, and some of the men in the fishing hamlet—times being bad, and neither fish nor wrecks on hand—volunteered to help the town workmen, and save their time and the master’s by clearing the place for them.
Since his fall-out w
ith the master, Jem Penreath had been less than usual about the place, so that he did not quite know what was going on; and when he heard down in the village that the young master of Beach House was going to fit up a fine new wash-house out of the stack-house at the back, even his mates were astonished at the ferocity with which he swore he should not do it.
“A fool!” he said, with an oath; “a wandering, idle fool! Can he not let un alone?—if he can’t he must learn, and I be the one for to teach him!”
On saying which he strode out of the beer-shop where he was sitting, and darted off to Beach House as if life and death depended on his speed.
“Where’s the young master?” he asked, as he flung himself into the kitchen.
“Law, Jem, an’ you do skear me!” cried the servant, letting the jug she was carrying fall from her hands. “Master?—he be out,” she answered after a pause, during which Jem’s roving blood-shot eyes seemed, as she said afterwards, “like swords.”
“And the young mistress?” said Jem, in his hoarse harsh voice, that had almost the effect of an animal’s growl.
“She?—she be in the drawing-room,” replied the girl.
And Jem Penreath, without another word, passed through the kitchen and shouldered his way to the drawing-room where Alice and her mother were sitting.
He knocked at the door, perhaps a little roughly, and a startled voice said, “Come in,” with an accent of terror that was almost a scream.
Jem opened the door, and came forward.
“Ye be a-thinking of that stack-house?” he said, touching his cap, which he kept on his head.
“We are clearing it out,” Alice answered with a visible shudder, as the man pressed forward.
“Ye do foolishly,” Jem said; “I know the place, and ye do know nothing of it. That stack-house, it will tumble down about your heads if ye do touch it. It is all rot—beam and rafter. Be warned by me, miss, and leave un alone.”
“I do not interfere in my husband’s arrangements,” Alice answered, with a fair amount of dignity. “If you have any advice to give about the house you had better give it to him.”
“But the boys are at work in it now, miss; and I must speak to you, because I do not know where the young master be; and you would be skeared, and more than skeared, if you heard the place a-banging down like a cannon-ball about un’s head; and it will, I tell ye. Be warned, I do say to you again!”
In his eagerness, Jem pressed still nearer to the table by which the two ladies were sitting. In the middle was a large painted miniature of her husband, the handsome captain, which poor Mrs. Mackenzie always carried about with her. It was her fancy to have this beloved face for ever before her, and she had brought it with her to Beach House, where it stood on Alice’s table as she had remembered it, for more than ten years now, standing always on the table at home. It had been taken just before Captain Mackenzie had gone into Cornwall—that fatal sojourn from which he had never returned; and it was a wonderful likeness. It caught Jem Penreath’s eye; and Alice’s blood froze in her veins at the strange, only half-checked, groan, mingled with a curse, which the man uttered as his eyes fell on it.
“Who’s he?” he said abruptly, and he touched the picture with his hand.
The girl snatched it up and pressed it to her bosom, as if to protect it.
“My father!” she cried, standing up, white and trembling, but meeting Jem’s fierce look with the courage of desperation.
“My husband!” broke out the poor widow, laying her hand on the man’s arm. “Did you know him? Can you tell me anything of him?”
“I didn’t know him, and I cannot tell you of him,” said Jem, speaking slowly and as if with difficulty; but by this time he had restrained himself, and had lowered his eyes to the ground.
Then he said no more, but, still never raising his eyes, turned round and left the room, and they heard his heavy tread echo through the passage.
A sudden fear possessed Alice. “Where is Walter?” she cried. “Mamma! come with me! that man will kill Walter! I saw it in his eyes; he means to kill him as he killed papa!”
“My child—Alice—you are raving, darling!” said her mother, soothingly; but she too was trembling.
The whole scene, strange, unintelligible, harrowing as it was, had shaken her nerves, and while trying to restrain, even to support, her daughter, she needed comfort for herself.
“I know what I am saying, mamma—come with me! come!” Her voice had risen now to a shrill scream, as she caught her mother by the arm and dragged her with her through the passage to the kitchen, and so on to the stack-house which the men were clearing.
It was a wild dark evening, and the wind was sobbing round the house in fitful gusts that told of a rising storm for the morrow. Yet to-morrow would be Christmas Day,—that day of joy to thousands, of peace, and love, and pleasant knitting-up of home-ties, of tender regrets for the past, though dead not buried nor yet forgotten, of loveliest hopes for the future,—that day associated with all that is best in the heart and the life of England,—the first Christmas Day that Alice had ever spent away from her mother’s home. But what a Christmas Eve was this! Dread and nameless anguish within doors—without, gloom, desolation, and the awful signs of a coming storm. The wind was moaning across the tossing stretch of waters; the sea-birds wheeled low, and shrieked and screamed as if in pain; the wild waves dashed against the sounding beach, and tore down the shingles as they were sucked back into the vast world of seething waters; the heavy sky hung low and lowering—ah! it was, indeed, a threatening Christmas Eve on that wild Cornish coast, and even the hardy fishermen themselves felt the foreboding influences, and were saddened though they did not tremble.
Within the stack-house the men were working by the fitful light of a few lanterns set on the floor, and the candles which, miner-like, some carried in their caps. There were three sturdy fellows from the hamlet; the master workman from the neighbouring town, come to take measurements when the place should be cleared; and Jem Penreath, haggard, anxious, desperate-looking, facing Walter Garwood who stood with his hands in the pockets of his shooting-jacket looking on, every now and then pausing in his work to gaze full at the young master, with something in his face not pleasant to behold. He had tried to persuade him to leave the work alone, but Walter would not, and all the more because the man was so strange and so persistent. It was noticed at the time, and spoken much of afterwards, how Jem stood doggedly to one side of the house where the heaviest stakes were:—why did he look so often at Walter, balancing that heavy club across his palm, and with a kind of speculation in his eyes, a kind of preparatory spring in his feet?—and how he wrought there, not so diligently as noisily, moving about the logs and stakes and brushwood piled up in that corner with a great show of exertion, but doing so little that the other men had turned out all the rest whilst his part was still unfinished. And it was noticed too, how fierce he looked towards the young master, and how, once or twice, still balancing that heavy stake across his palm, he had edged a step or two nearer. And yet, what ill had the young man done? and what cause had they to be afraid that Jem would do him a mischief? But one of them, somehow or another, always managed to get between Walter and Penreath; and just as they came up to his side of the place, and began to clear away the rubbish thence, Alice, wild and white, stood in the doorway, and calling his name aloud, rushed forward to her husband.
He turned at the beat of her hurrying feet, at the sound of her frightened voice, and the turn saved him; for as he stepped aside, a heavy beam came down on the very spot where he had stood, and at the same moment a loud exclamation broke from one of the men. A loose board had rotted, and the heavy fall of the beam broke through the crumbling wood—broke through on to a battered mass of earth, which it stirred and scattered, showing the handle of something that looked like a cutlass, and a stiffened end of darkened cloth—some parts a lightish grey, others a blackened red.
“Why, what’s this?” said the master workman from the town, st
ooping down.
“Leave un alone,” hissed Jem, laying his broad hand on the man’s shoulder; “leave un alone, I say, or it may be the worse for ye!”
“Hey, man! what’s this ye say? It do look like knowing more about a dark job than ought to be,” answered the townsman, thrusting him back, while at the same time he pulled at the handle, and brought out a rusty cutlass, with one deep hack in the blade. “There’s more where that came from,” he shouted; for he was excited, and the find was suggestive.
“Lower the lights, men, and work away!” cried Walter. “Mother, look to Alice,” he added, he too pressing forward with the rest.
But Alice was not to be kept back. Her eyes wild, her lips apart, her young face blanched, and strangely stiffened in all her limbs, she stood close by Jem Penreath, despite her horror of the man, holding her mother by the wrist, and forcing her to look too. Spadeful by spadeful they uncovered what was lying under the earth—slowly as it seemed to those who, excited, strained, half-maddened, according to their degree, waited for that which was to be revealed. And then they uncovered—what? The crumbling bodies of a man with short, dark, curly locks, and of a woman down to whose waist fell a mass of golden hair. Across the man’s breast hung a thick gold chain of a peculiar pattern, to which was attached a locket that had been forced open, and the locket held the miniature likeness of Mrs. Mackenzie, and on the fleshless hand glittered a diamond ring.
The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories Page 19