by E. Nesbit
I kissed her and was turning to go, when she flung her arms round my neck and held me very closely. I stroked her hair.
‘Come, Pussy, you’re over-tired. The housework has been too much for you.’
She loosened her clasp a little and drew a deep breath.
‘No. We’ve been very happy today, Jack, haven’t we? Don’t stay out too long.’
‘I won’t, Puss cat,’ I said.
I strolled out of the front door, leaving it unlatched. What a night it was! The jagged masses of heavy, dark cloud were rolling at intervals from horizon to horizon, and thin, white wreaths covered the stars. Through all the rush of the cloud river, the moon swam, breasting the waves and disappearing again in the darkness. When, now and again, her light reached the woodlands, they seemed to be slowly and noiselessly waving in time to the clouds above them. There was a strange, grey light over all the earth; the fields had that shadowy bloom over them which only comes from the marriage of dew and moonshine, or frost and starlight.
I walked up and down, drinking in the beauty of the quiet earth and changing sky. The night was absolutely silent. Nothing seemed to be abroad. There was no scurrying of rabbits, or twitter of half-asleep birds. And though the clouds went sailing across the sky, the wind that drove them never came low enough to rustle the dead leaves in the woodland paths. Across the meadow, I could see the church tower standing out black and grey against the sky. I walked there, thinking over our three months of happiness, and of my wife – her dear eyes, her pretty ways. Oh, my girl! my own little girl; what a vision came to me then of a long, glad life for you and me together!
I heard a bell-beat from the church. Eleven already! I turned to go in, but the night held me. I could not go back into our little warm rooms yet. I would go right on up to the church. I felt vaguely that it would be good to carry my love and thankfulness to the sanctuary, whither so many loads of sorrow and gladness had been borne by men and women dead long since.
I looked in at the low window as I went by. Laura was half lying on her chair in front of the fire. I could not see her face, only her head showed dark against the pale blue wall. She was quite still. Asleep no doubt. My heart reached out to her, as I went on. There must be a God, I thought, and a God that was good. How otherwise could anything so sweet and dear as she ever have been imagined?
I walked slowly along the edge of the wood. A sound broke the stillness of the night. I stopped and listened. The sound stopped too. I went on, and now distinctly I heard another step than mine answer mine like an echo. It was a poacher or a wood-stealer, most likely, for these were not unknown in our Arcadia. But, whoever it was, he was a fool not to step more lightly. I turned into the wood, and now the footstep seemed to come from the path I had just left. It must be an echo, I thought. The wood lay lovely in the moonlight. The large, dying ferns and the brushwood showed where, through thinning foliage, the pale light came down. The tree trunks stood up like Gothic columns all around me. They reminded me of the church, and I turned into the bier-balk and passed through the corpse-gate between the graves to the low porch. I paused for a moment on the stone seat where Laura and I had last night watched the fading landscape. Then I noticed that the door of the church was open, and I blamed myself for having left it unlatched the other night. We were the only people who ever cared to come to the church except on Sundays, and I was vexed to think that through our carelessness the damp autumn airs had had a chance of getting in and injuring the old fabric. I went in. It will seem strange perhaps that I should have gone half-way up the aisle before I remembered – with a sudden chill, followed by as sudden a rush of self-contempt – that this was the very day and hour when, according to tradition, the ‘shapes drawed out man-size in marble’, began to walk.
Having thus remembered the legend, and remembered it with a shiver of which I was ashamed, I could not do otherwise than walk up towards the altar, just to look at the figures – as I said to myself; really what I wanted was to assure myself, first, that I did not believe the legend, and, secondly, that it was not true. I was rather glad that I had come. I thought that now I could tell Mrs Dorman how vain her fancies were, and how peacefully the marble figures slept on through the ghostly hour. With my hands in my pockets, I passed up the aisle. In the grey, dim light, the eastern end of the church looked larger than usual, and the arches above the tombs looked larger too. The moon came out and showed me the reason. I stopped short, my heart gave a great leap that nearly choked me, and then sank sickeningly.
The ‘bodies drawed out man-size’ were gone, and their marble slabs lay wide and bare in the vague moonlight that slanted through the west window.
Were they really gone? or was I mad? Clenching my nerves, I stooped and passed my hand over the smooth slabs and felt their flat unbroken surface. Had someone taken the things away? Was it some vile practical joke? I would make sure, anyway. In an instant I had made a torch of a newspaper which happened to be in my pocket, and lighting it held it high above my head. Its yellow glare illumined the dark arches and those slabs. The figures were gone. And I was alone in the church; or was I alone?
And then a horror seized me, a horror indefinable and indescribable – an overwhelming certainty of supreme and accomplished calamity. I flung down the torch and tore along the aisle and out through the door, biting my lips as I ran to keep myself from shrieking aloud. Was I mad – or what was this that possessed me? I leaped the churchyard wall and took the straight cut across the fields, led by the light from our windows. Just as I got over the first stile, a dark figure seemed to spring out of the ground. Mad still with the certainty of misfortune, I made for the thing that stood in my path, shouting ‘Get out of the way, can’t you?’
But my push met with a very vigorous resistance. My arms were caught just above the elbow and held as in a vice, and the raw-boned Irish doctor actually shook me.
‘Would ye?’ he cried in his own unmistakable accents – ‘would ye, then?’
‘Let me go, you fool,’ I gasped. ‘The marble figures have gone from the church; I tell you they’ve gone.’
He broke into a ringing laugh. ‘I’ll have to give ye a draught tomorrow, I see. Ye’ve been smoking too much and listening to old wives’ tales.’
‘I’ll tell you I’ve seen the bare slabs.’
‘Well, come back with me. I’m going up to old Palmer’s – his daughter’s ill – it’s only hysteria, but it’s as bad as it can be; we’ll look in at the church and let me see the bare slabs.’
‘You go if you like,’ I said, a little less frantic for his laughter, ‘I’m going home to my wife.’
‘Rubbish, man,’ said he; ‘D’ye think I’ll permit of that? Are ye to go saying all yer life that ye’ve seen solid marble endowed with vitality, and me to go all my life saying ye were a coward? No, sir – ye shan’t do ut!’
The night – a human voice – and I think also the physical contact with this six feet of solid common sense, brought me back a little to my ordinary self, and the word ‘coward’ was a shower-bath.
‘Come on, then,’ I said sullenly, ‘perhaps you’re right.’
He still held my arm tightly. We got over the stile and back to the church. All was still as death. The place smelt very damp and earthy. We walked up the aisle. I am not ashamed to confess I shut my eyes; I knew the figures would not be there, I heard Kelly strike a match.
‘Here they are, ye see, right enough; ye’ve been dreaming or drinking, asking yer pardon for the imputation.’
I opened my eyes. By Kelly’s expiring vesta I saw two shapes lying ‘in their marble’ on their slabs. I drew a deep breath and caught his hand.
‘I’m awfully indebted to you,’ I said. ‘It must have been some trick of the light, or I have been working rather hard, perhaps that’s it. Do you know, I was quite convinced they were gone.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ he answered rather grimly; ‘ye’ll have to be careful of that brain of yours, my friend, I assure you.’
&n
bsp; He was leaning over and looking at the right-hand figure, whose stone face was the most villainous and deadly in expression. He struck another match.
‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘something has been going on here – this hand is broken.’
And so it was. I was certain that it had been perfect the last time Laura and I had been there.
‘Perhaps someone has tried to remove them,’ said the young doctor.
‘That won’t account for my impression,’ I objected.
‘Too much painting and tobacco will account for what you call your impression,’ he said.
‘Come along,’ I said, ‘or my wife will be getting anxious. You’ll come in and have a drop of whisky, and drink confusion to ghosts and better sense to me.’
‘I ought to go up to Palmer’s, but it’s so late now, I’d best leave it till the morning,’ he replied. ‘I was kept late at the Union, and I’ve had to see a lot of people since. All right, I’ll come back with ye.’
I think he fancied I needed him more than did Palmer’s girl, so, discussing how such an illusion could have been possible, and deducing from this experience large generalities concerning ghostly apparitions, we saw, as we walked up the garden path, that bright light streamed out of the front door, and presently saw that the parlour door was open too. Had she gone out?
‘Come in,’ I said, and Dr Kelly followed me into the parlour. It was all ablaze with candles, not only the wax ones, but at least a dozen guttering, glaring, tallow dips, stuck in vases and ornaments in unlikely places. Light, I knew, was Laura’s remedy for nervousness. Poor child! Why had I left her? Brute that I was.
We glanced round the room, and at first we did not see her. The window was open and the draught set all the candles flaring one way. Her chair was empty, and her handkerchief and book lay on the floor. I turned to the window. There, in the recess of the window, I saw her. Oh, my child, my love, had she gone to that window to watch for me? And what had come into the room behind her? To what had she turned with that look of frantic fear and horror? Had she thought that it was my step she heard and turned to meet – what?
She had fallen back against a table in the window, and her body lay half on it and half on the window-seat, and her head hung down over the table, the brown hair loosened and fallen to the carpet. Her lips were drawn back and her eyes wide, wide open. They saw nothing now. What had they last seen?
The doctor moved towards her. But I pushed him aside and sprang to her; caught her in my arms, and cried:
‘It’s all right, Laura! I’ve got you safe, dear!’
She fell into my arms in a heap. I clasped her and kissed her, and called her by all her pet names, but I think I knew all the time that she was dead. Her hands were tightly clenched. In one of them she held something fast. When I was quite sure that she was dead, and that nothing mattered at all any more, I let him open her hand to see what she held.
It was a grey marble finger.
UNCLE ABRAHAM’S ROMANCE
‘No, my dear,’ my Uncle Abraham answered me, ‘no – nothing romantic ever happened to me – unless – but no; that wasn’t romantic either—’
I was. To me, I being eighteen, romance was the world. My Uncle Abraham was old and lame. I followed the gaze of his faded eyes, and my own rested on a miniature that hung at his elbow-chair’s right hand, a portrait of a woman, whose loveliness even the miniature painter’s art had been powerless to disguise – a woman with large eyes that shone, and face of that alluring oval which one hardly sees nowadays.
I rose to look at it. I had looked at it a hundred times. Often enough in my baby days I had asked, ‘Who’s that, uncle?’ and always the answer was the same: ‘A lady who died long ago, my dear.’
As I looked again at this picture, I asked, ‘Was she like this?’
‘Who?’
‘Your – your romance!’
Uncle Abraham looked hard at me. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Very – very like.’
I sat down on the floor by him. ‘Won’t you tell me about her?’
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘I think it was fancy mostly, and folly; but it’s the realest thing in my life, my dear.’
A long pause. I kept silent. You should always give people time, especially old people.
‘I remember,’ he said in the dreamy tone always promising so well to the ear that loves a story – ‘I remember, when I was a young man, I was very lonely indeed. I never had a sweetheart. I was always lame, my dear, from quite a boy; and the girls used to laugh at me.’
Silence again. Presently he went on:
‘And so I got into the way of mooning off by myself in lonely places, and one of my favourite walks was up through our churchyard, which was set on a hill in the middle of the marsh country. I liked that because I never met anyone there. It’s all over, years ago. I was a silly lad; but I couldn’t bear of a summer evening to hear a rustle and a whisper from the other side of the hedge, or maybe a kiss, as I went by.
‘Well, I used to go and sit all by myself in the churchyard, which was always sweet with the thyme and quite light (on account of its being so high) long after the marshes were dark. I used to watch the bats flitting about in the red light, and wonder why God didn’t make everyone’s legs straight and strong, and wicked follies like that. But by the time the light was gone I had always worked it off, so to speak, and could go home quietly, and say my prayers without bitterness.
‘Well, one hot night in August, when I had watched the sunset fade and the crescent moon grow golden, I was just stepping over the low stone wall of the churchyard when I heard a rustle behind me. I turned round, expecting it to be a rabbit or a bird. It was a woman.’
He looked at the portrait. So did I.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that was her very face. I was a bit scared and said something – I don’t know what – she laughed and said, did I think she was a ghost? and I answered back; and I stayed talking to her over the churchyard wall till ’twas quite dark, and the glow-worms were out in the wet grass all along the way home.
‘Next night, I saw her again; and the next, and the next. Always at twilight time; and if I passed any lovers leaning on the stiles in the marshes it was nothing to me now.’
Again my uncle paused. ‘It was very long ago,’ he said shyly, ‘and I’m an old man; but I know what youth means, and happiness, though I was always lame, and the girls used to laugh at me. I don’t know how long it went on – you don’t measure time in dreams – but at last your grandfather said I looked as if I had one foot in the grave, and he would be sending me to stay with our kin at Bath, and take the waters. I had to go. I could not tell my father why I would rather die than go.’
‘What was her name, uncle?’ I asked.
‘She never would tell me her name, and why should she? I had names enough in my heart to call her by. Marriage? My dear, even then I knew marriage was not for me. But I met her night after night, always in our churchyard where the yew trees were, and the old crooked gravestones so thick in the grass. It was there we always met and always parted. The last time was the night before I went away. She was very sad, and dearer than life itself. And she said:
‘“If you come back before the new moon, I shall meet you here just as usual. But if the new moon shines on this grave and you are not here – you will never see me again any more.”
‘She laid her hand on the tomb against which we had been leaning. It was an old, lichened weather-worn stone, and its inscription was just
SUSANNAH KINGSNORTH,
Ob. 1723.
‘“I shall be here,” I said.
‘“I mean it,” she said, very seriously and slowly, “it is no fancy. You will be here when the new moon shines?”
‘I promised, and after a while we parted.
‘I had been with my kinsfolk at Bath for nearly a month. I was to go home on the next day when, turning over a case in the parlour, I came upon that miniature. I could not speak for a minute. At last I said, w
ith dry tongue, and heart beating to the tune of heaven and hell:
‘“Who is this?”
‘“That?” said my aunt. “Oh! she was betrothed to one of our family years ago, but she died before the wedding. They say she was a bit of witch. A handsome one, wasn’t she?”
‘I looked again at the face, the lips, the eyes of my dear lovely love, whom I was to meet tomorrow night when the new moon shone on that tomb in our churchyard.
‘“Did you say she was dead?” I asked, and I hardly knew my own voice.
‘“Years and years ago! Her name’s on the back – ‘Susannah Kingsnorth, Ob. 1723.’”
‘That was in 1823.’ My uncle stopped short.
‘What happened?’ I asked breathlessly.
‘I believe I had a fit,’ my uncle answered slowly, ‘at any rate, I was very ill.’
‘And you missed the new moon on the grave?’
‘I missed the new moon on the grave.’
‘And you never saw her again?’
‘I never saw her again—’
‘But, uncle, do you really believe? Can the dead – was she – did you—’
My uncle took out his pipe and filled it.
‘It’s a long time ago,’ he said, ‘a many, many years. Old man’s tales, my dear! Old man’s tales. Don’t you take any notice of them.’
He lighted the pipe, and puffed silently a moment or two before he said: ‘But I know what youth means, and love and happiness, though I was always lame, and the girls used to laugh at me.’
FROM THE DEAD
I
‘But true or not true, your brother is a scoundrel. No man – no decent man – tells such things.’
‘He did not tell me. How dare you suppose it? I found the letter in his desk; and since she was my friend and your sweetheart, I never thought there could be any harm in my reading anything she might write to my brother. Give me back the letter. I was a fool to tell you.’