by E. Nesbit
‘It’s all right,’ he heard next. And Verney was bending over him with brandy. ‘You’re quite safe. He’s tied up and locked in the laboratory. No. That’s all right, too.’ For Desmond’s eyes had turned towards the lidless coffin. ‘That was only me. It was the only way I could think of, to save you. Can you walk now? Let me help you, so. I’ve opened the grating. Come.’
Desmond blinked in the sunlight he had never thought to see again. Here he was, back in his wicker chair. He looked at the sundial on the house. The whole thing had taken less than fifty minutes.
‘Tell me,’ said he. And Verney told him in short sentences with pauses between.
‘I tried to warn you,’ he said, ‘you remember, in the window. I really believed in his experiments at first – and – he’d found out something about me – and not told. It was when I was very young. God knows I’ve paid for it. And when you came I’d only just found out what really had happened to the other chaps. That beast Lopez let it out when he was drunk. Inhuman brute! And I had a row with Prior that first night, and he promised me he wouldn’t touch you. And then he did.’
‘You might have told me.’
‘You were in a nice state to be told anything, weren’t you? He promised me he’d send you off as soon as you were well enough. And he had been good to me. But when I heard him begin about the grating and the key I knew – so I just got a sheet and—’
‘But why didn’t you come out before?’
‘I didn’t dare. He could have tackled me easily if he had known what he was tackling. He kept moving about. It had to be done suddenly. I counted on just that moment of weakness when he really thought a dead body had come to life to defend you. Now I’m going to harness the horse and drive you to the police station at Crittenden. And they’ll send and lock him up. Everyone knew he was as mad as a hatter, but somebody had to be nearly killed before anyone would lock him up. The law’s like that, you know.’
‘But you – the police – won’t they—’
‘It’s quite safe,’ said Verney, dully. ‘Nobody knows but the old man, and now nobody will believe anything he says. No, he never posted your letters, of course, and he never wrote to your friend, and he put off the Psychical man. No, I can’t find Lopez; he must know that something’s up. He’s bolted.’
But he had not. They found him, stubbornly dumb, but moaning a little, crouched against the locked grating of the vault when they came, a prudent half-dozen of them, to take the old man away from the Haunted House. The master was dumb as the man. He would not speak. He has never spoken since.
THE SHADOW
This is not an artistically rounded off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be told. You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are like this in these respects – no explanation, no logical coherence. Here is the story.
There were three of us and another, but she had fainted suddenly at the second extra of the Christmas dance, and had been put to bed in the dressing-room next to the room which we three shared. It had been one of those jolly, old-fashioned dances where nearly everybody stays the night, and the big country house is stretched to its utmost containing – guests harbouring on sofas, couches, settles, and even mattresses on floors. Some of the young men actually, I believe, slept on the great dining-table. We had talked of our partners, as girls will, and then the stillness of the manor house, broken only by the whisper of the wind in the cedar branches, and the scraping of their harsh fingers against our window panes, had pricked us to such a luxurious confidence in our surroundings of bright chintz and candle-flame and fire-light, that we had dared to talk of ghosts – in which, we all said, we did not believe one bit. We had told the story of the phantom coach, and the horribly strange bed, and the lady in the sacque, and the house in Berkeley Square.
We none of us believed in ghosts, but my heart, at least, seemed to leap to my throat and choke me there, when a tap came to our door – a tap faint, not to be mistaken.
‘Who’s there?’ said the youngest of us, craning a lean neck towards the door. It opened slowly, and I give you my word the instant of suspense that followed is still reckoned among my life’s least confident moments. Almost at once the door opened fully, and Miss Eastwich, my aunt’s housekeeper, companion, and general stand-by, looked in on us.
We all said ‘Come in’, but she stood there. She was, at all normal hours, the most silent woman I have ever known. She stood and looked at us, and shivered a little. So did we – for in those days corridors were not warmed by hot-water pipes, and the air from the door was keen.
‘I saw your light,’ she said at last, ‘and I thought it was late for you to be up – after all this gaiety. I thought perhaps—’ Her glance turned towards the door of the dressing-room.
‘No,’ I said, ‘she’s fast asleep.’ I should have added goodnight, but the youngest of us forestalled my speech. She did not know Miss Eastwich as we others did; did not know how her persistent silence had built a wall round her – a wall that no one dared to break down with the commonplaces of talk, or the littlenesses of mere human relationship. Miss Eastwich’s silence had taught us to treat her as a machine; and as other than a machine we never dreamed of treating her. But the youngest of us had seen Miss Eastwich for the first time that day. She was young, crude, ill-balanced, subject to blind, calf-like impulses. She was also the heiress of a rich tallow-chandler, but that has nothing to do with this part of the story. She jumped up from the hearth-rug, her unsuitably rich silk lace-trimmed dressing-gown falling back from her thin collar-bones, and ran to the door and put an arm round Miss Eastwich’s prim, lisse-encircled neck. I gasped. I should as soon have dared to embrace Cleopatra’s Needle. ‘Come in,’ said the youngest of us – ‘come in and get warm. There’s lots of cocoa left.’ She drew Miss Eastwich in and shut the door.
The vivid light of pleasure in the housekeeper’s pale eyes went through my heart like a knife. It would have been so easy to put an arm round her neck, if one had only thought she wanted an arm there. But it was not I who had thought that – and indeed, my arm might not have brought the light evoked by the thin arm of the youngest of us.
‘Now,’ the youngest went on eagerly ‘you shall have the very biggest, nicest chair, and the cocoa-pot’s here on the hob as hot as hot – and we’ve all been telling ghost stories, only we don’t believe in them a bit; and when you get warm you ought to tell one too.’
Miss Eastwich – that model of decorum and decently done duties, tell a ghost story!
‘You’re sure I’m not in your way,’ Miss Eastwich said, stretching her hands to the blaze. I wondered whether housekeepers have fires in their rooms even at Christmas time. ‘Not a bit’ – I said it, and I hope I said it as warmly as I felt it. ‘I – Miss Eastwich – I’d have asked you to come in other times – only I didn’t think you’d care for girls’ chatter.’
The third girl, who was really of no account, and that’s why I have not said anything about her before, poured cocoa for our guest. I put my fleecy Madeira shawl round her shoulders. I could not think of anything else to do for her, and I found myself wishing desperately to do something. The smiles she gave us were quite pretty. People can smile prettily at forty or fifty, or even later, though girls don’t realise this. It occurred to me, and this was another knife-thrust, that I had never seen Miss Eastwich smile – a real smile, before. The pale smiles of dutiful acquiescence were not of the same blood as this dimpling, happy, transfiguring look.
‘This is very pleasant,’ she said, and it seemed to me that I had never before heard her real voice. It did not please me to think that at the cost of cocoa, a fire, and my arm round her neck, I might have heard this new voice any time these six years.
‘We’ve been telling ghost stories,’ I said. ‘The worst of it is, we don’t believe in ghosts. No one one knows has ever seen one.’
&n
bsp; ‘It’s always what somebody told somebody, who told somebody you know,’ said the youngest of us, ‘and you can’t believe that, can you?’
‘“What the soldier said, is not evidence,”’ said Miss Eastwich. Will it be believed that the little Dickens quotation pierced one more keenly than the new smile or the new voice?
‘And all the ghost stories are so beautifully rounded off – a murder committed on the spot – or a hidden treasure, or a warning … I think that makes them harder to believe. The most horrid ghost-story I ever heard was one that was quite silly.’
‘Tell it.’
‘I can’t – it doesn’t sound anything to tell. Miss Eastwich ought to tell one.’
‘Oh do,’ said the youngest of us, and her salt cellars loomed dark, as she stretched her neck eagerly and laid an entreating arm on our guest’s knee.
‘The only thing that I ever knew of was – was hearsay,’ she said slowly, ‘till just the end.’
I knew she would tell her story, and I knew she had never before told it, and I knew she was only telling it now because she was proud, and this seemed the only way to pay for the fire and the cocoa, and the laying of that arm round her neck.
‘Don’t tell it,’ I said suddenly. ‘I know you’d rather not.’
‘I daresay it would bore you,’ she said meekly, and the youngest of us, who, after all, did not understand everything, glared resentfully at me.
‘We should just love it,’ she said. ‘Do tell us. Never mind if it isn’t a real, proper, fixed up story. I’m certain anything you think ghostly would be quite too beautifully horrid for anything.’
Miss Eastwich finished her cocoa and reached up to set the cup on the mantelpiece.
‘It can’t do any harm,’ she said half to herself, ‘they don’t believe in ghosts, and it wasn’t exactly a ghost either. And they’re all over twenty – they’re not babies.’
There was a breathing time of hush and expectancy. The fire crackled and the gas suddenly glared higher because the billiard lights had been put out. We heard the steps and voices of the men going along the corridors.
‘It is really hardly worth telling,’ Miss Eastwich said doubtfully, shading her faded face from the fire with her thin hand.
We all said, ‘Go on – oh, go on – do!’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘twenty years ago – and more than that – I had two friends, and I loved them more than anything in the world. And they married each other—’
She paused, and I knew just in what way she had loved each of them. The youngest of us said:
‘How awfully nice for you. Do go on.’
She patted the youngest’s shoulder, and I was glad that I had understood, and that the youngest of all hadn’t. She went on.
‘Well, after they were married, I did not see much of them for a year or two; and then he wrote and asked me to come and stay, because his wife was ill, and I should cheer her up, and cheer him up as well; for it was a gloomy house, and he himself was growing gloomy too.’
I knew, as she spoke, that she had every line of that letter by heart.
‘Well, I went. The address was in Lee, near London; in those days there were streets and streets of new villa-houses growing up round old brick mansions standing in their own grounds, with red walls round, you know, and a sort of flavour of coaching days, and post chaises, and Blackheath highwaymen about them. He had said the house was gloomy, and it was called The Firs, and I imagined my cab going through a dark, winding shrubbery, and drawing up in front of one of these sedate, old, square houses. Instead, we drew up in front of a large, smart villa, with iron railings, gay encaustic tiles leading from the iron gate to the stained glass-panelled door, and for shrubbery only a few stunted cypresses and aucubas in the tiny front garden. But inside it was all warm and welcoming. He met me at the door.’
She was gazing into the fire, and I knew she had forgotten us. But the youngest girl of all still thought it was to us she was telling her story.
‘He met me at the door,’ she said again, ‘and thanked me for coming, and asked me to forgive the past.’
‘What past?’ said that high priestess of the inàpropos, the youngest of all.
‘Oh – I suppose he meant because they hadn’t invited me before, or something,’ said Miss Eastwich worriedly, ‘but it’s a very dull story, I find, after all, and—’
‘Do go on,’ I said – then kicked the youngest of us, and got up to rearrange Miss Eastwich’s shawl, and said in blatant dumb show, over the shawled shoulder: ‘Shut up, you little idiot—’
After another silence, the housekeeper’s new voice went on.
‘They were very glad to see me, and I was very glad to be there. You girls, now, have such troops of friends, but these two were all I had – all I had ever had. Mabel wasn’t exactly ill, only weak and excitable. I thought he seemed more ill than she did. She went to bed early and before she went, she asked me to keep him company through his last pipe, so we went into the dining-room and sat in the two armchairs on each side of the fireplace. They were covered with green leather I remember. There were bronze groups of horses and a black marble clock on the mantelpiece – all wedding presents. He poured out some whisky for himself, but he hardly touched it. He sat looking into the fire. At last I said:
‘“What’s wrong? Mabel looks as well as you could expect.”
‘He said, “Yes – but I don’t know from one day to another that she won’t begin to notice something wrong. That’s why I wanted you to come. You were always so sensible and strong-minded, and Mabel’s like a little bird on a flower.”
‘I said yes, of course, and waited for him to go on. I thought he must be in debt, or in trouble of some sort. So I just waited. Presently he said:
‘“Margaret, this is a very peculiar house—” He always called me Margaret. You see we’d been such old friends. I told him I thought the house was very pretty, and fresh, and homelike – only a little too new – but that fault would mend with time. He said:
‘“It is new: that’s just it. We’re the first people who’ve ever lived in it. If it were an old house, Margaret, I should think it was haunted.”
‘I asked if he had seen anything. “No,” he said “not yet.”
‘“Heard then?” said I.
‘“No – not heard either,” he said “but there’s a sort of feeling: I can’t describe it – I’ve seen nothing and I’ve heard nothing, but I’ve been so near to seeing and hearing, just near, that’s all. And something follows me about – only when I turn round, there’s never anything, only my shadow. And I always feel that I shall see the thing next minute – but I never do – not quite – it’s always just not visible.’
‘I thought he’d been working rather hard – and tried to cheer him up by making light of all this. It was just nerves, I said. Then he said he had thought I could help him, and did I think anyone he had wronged could have laid a curse on him and did I believe in curses. I said I didn’t – and the only person anyone could have said he had wronged forgave him freely, I knew, if there was anything to forgive. So I told him this too.’
It was I, not the youngest of us, who knew the name of that person, wronged and forgiving.
‘So then I said he ought to take Mabel away from the house and have a complete change. But he said No; Mabel had got everything in order, and he could never manage to get her away just now without explaining everything – “and, above all,” he said, “she mustn’t guess there’s anything wrong. I daresay I shan’t feel quite such a lunatic now you’re here.”
‘So we said goodnight.’
‘Is that all the story!’ said the third girl, striving to convey that even as it stood it was a good story.
‘That’s only the beginning,’ said Miss Eastwich. ‘Whenever I was alone with him he used to tell me the same thing over and over again, and at first when I began to notice things, I tried to think that it was his talk that had upset my nerves. The odd thing was that it wasn’t only at nigh
t – but in broad daylight – and particularly on the stairs and passages. On the staircase the feeling used to be so awful that I have had to bite my lips till they bled to keep myself from running upstairs at full speed. Only I knew if I did I should go mad at the top. There was always something behind me – exactly as he had said – something that one could just not see. And a sound that one could just not hear. There was a long corridor at the top of the house. I have sometimes almost seen something – you know how one sees things without looking – but if I turned round, it seemed as if the thing drooped and melted into my shadow. There was a little window at the end of the corridor.
‘Downstairs there was another corridor, something like it, with a cupboard at one end and the kitchen at the other. One night I went down into the kitchen to heat some milk for Mabel. The servants had gone to bed. As I stood by the fire, waiting for the milk to boil, I glanced through the open door and along the passage. I never could keep my eyes on what I was doing in that house. The cupboard door was partly open; they used to keep empty boxes and things in it. And, as I looked, I knew that now it was not going to be “almost” anymore. Yet I said, “Mabel?” not because I thought it could be Mabel who was crouching down there, half in and half out of the cupboard. The thing was grey at first, and then it was black. And when I whispered, “Mabel”, it seemed to sink down till it lay like a pool of ink on the floor, and then its edges drew in, and it seemed to flow, like ink when you tilt up the paper you have spilt it on, and it flowed into the cupboard till it was all gathered into the shadow there. I saw it go quite plainly. The gas was full on in the kitchen. I screamed aloud, but even then, I’m thankful to say, I had enough sense to upset the boiling milk, so that when he came downstairs three steps at a time, I had the excuse for my scream of a scalded hand. The explanation satisfied Mabel, but next night he said: