The Haunted House

by Hilaire Belloc

  Rackham was gone; hopelessly gone; William had spared his brother the worry of too much detail. He had very generously provided much more, really, than the difference between the rents and the interest could possibly have covered; she had all the papers in due order, and she had brought with her the accountancy document with a mass of other papers, which her sick brother-in-law had neither the energy nor the clearness of mind to follow. He listened patiently as she spoke—yet not despairingly. He still had something of that hopefulness in him which had been at once the curse and the alleviation of his not unhappy but most unfortunate life: for such men trouble rather their descendants than themselves.

  Hilda made the position plain enough. If she had been—what she thanked God she was not—a cold, calculating sort of person, there would have been nothing for it but to sell Rackham; it was not entailed, and even so, she would have lost thousands on the deal. But she was not like that. She assured him she was not like that. She was willing to lose and to take Rackham over as it stood in cancellation of all debts. She was glad to make the sacrifice. She would not dream of disturbing his illness with pressure of any kind. A will of his in her favour was one way. If he disliked that, she wished to be generous; she would make it a purchase. She would accept it against the debt.

  Henry heard her, and he saw no way out.

  “You will do the right thing by the boy,” he said. “He’s the only child. Hilda, you will do the right thing, of course?”

  She assured him of that; but what the right thing meant was left vague, as everything had been left vague in Henry Maple’s life. It mattered little anyhow, she thought; Rackham was hers to dispose of, and there was still long life before her. The right thing by the boy meant, let it be hoped, some regard for his proper up-bringing: then, of course, he would stand somehow vaguely at Rackham, so long as Rackham was their home, as the heir. So let it stand at that.

  * * * * *

  When the end came (it was the foul winter of ’19 that killed him) it came rapidly enough. But just before that end Henry Maple rallied singularly in intelligence and decision. It was like that little return of the flood in certain havens before the final ebb. It was as though he had a task to perform.

  Such men postpone: but now there could be no postponement. He spoke to the boy.

  “John,” he said, “you know that I have been very ill, and you have seen me getting worse.” He looked at the tall boy—the tall young man, he seemed, for the first time, in his father’s eyes; strong in his eighteen years—and understood how true it is that children are a mitigation of the memory of death. Something far stronger than his own youth was there: as tender, but more sturdy, and (he secretly hoped) more obstinate.

  “Yes, Papa,” said John. He took his father’s hand where it lay upon the rug of the invalid chair, as a woman might have done. “But you will get better.”

  Henry Maple slightly shook his head.

  “I have not told you—I have not allowed any of these good people here to tell you—the doctor was quite right; he knew all about it from the beginning, and he tells me that it is coming to the end.”

  For the first time in his young life John Maple felt that shock of emotion which suddenly whitens the face, and he knew that his heart had stopped beating for the moment. He could not prevent a convulsive clutch at his father’s hand. The old man looked at him with all the affection of the past in his eyes.

  “Sometimes, John dear,” he said, “I think I have not given you a fair chance. Then I say to myself that, after all, it was the war, and we were wiser to stay where we were. It has been very happy here.”

  “It has, Papa,” said John.

  “You have not been lonely, boy?”

  “Never,” answered John, truthfully enough. “I like our friends here, and the two Englishmen as much as any. Charles is going to Oxford next term …” Then he stopped abruptly. It was amazing to him that he had forgotten in those few words the blow that had fallen, and suddenly, in spite of himself, he began to cry. His father stroked his hand.

  “It does no harm to cry, boy. It’s all the better. You will feel it less later. It had to come. But I have a great deal to tell you. You know we have become much poorer?”

  “Well, yes, of course, Papa. I don’t know much about these things, but we have lacked nothing.”

  “No, dear boy, but it is not Rackham. Do you remember Rackham well? You must—you were over thirteen, and big for your age, when you left it.”

  “Yes, Papa,” said John, still sobbing. “I remember Rackham!”

  “Well, John, it is very difficult to say, but I will try and say it. Technically—legally—I suppose that is the right word—Rackham is not mine any more.”

  The boy looked bewildered. That Rackham had been their’s, his father’s, and his father’s father’s, and so on, and would be his in his turn, this was a thing he had taken for granted as part of the universe. That idea had no connotation of wealth in his mind. It was the very stuff of his thoughts. The Maples and Rackham were one thing.

  “It could not be helped. I did my best. You know, land went to pieces … Your uncle was very generous; he was, really. We should not have been here, even, but for him. Honestly, John, your Aunt Hilda has been generous too. I can’t deny that.”

  “What do you mean by generous, Papa?” said the young man, a little hardly.

  “Why, my dear,” the other answered, sighing, “I owed her husband, and therefore I owed her, after her husband died, more than I could pay; more than there was anywhere. There was a German investment of your grandfather’s—did you know that?”

  “No, Papa.”

  “Well, it’s gone, of course. I lost it by your uncle’s advice; he said it was as safe as gold; but after all, he could not tell. No one could tell.”

  “Papa,” said John Maple, asking a question of this sort for the first time in his life, prompted by he knew not what odd premonition of the future, “what was the sum owed? How much was the money claimed? How much would be needed to …?”

  His father looked at him with a long look.

  “You’re thinking of getting Rackham back?”

  “Oh, no, Papa,” he said, startled. He had no conception of such powers. He could not even imagine himself earning. “I only wondered.”

  “Well, well,” said Henry Maple, falling back into his vagueness, “your aunt will do the right thing. When I am gone, John, go straight back to her … You want to know … what the sum was?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said John. But something fierce in his voice belied the words.

  “My dear boy, it is easily told. The first sum, you know, the actual sum, I don’t mean the interest—was £10,000. One bit after another … it began during those bad years … I saw corn sold at Lewes market for 10s. a sack … Anyhow, your uncle was really generous. He was, indeed. He never pressed and the interest ran, without his ever saying a word about it … And then, at the end, when what with that, and some expenses or other …” he hesitated, as though his memory was working ill … “oh, yes, on the church, you know. Well, it wasn’t £20,000 … But your uncle was generous, boy, do believe it. He gave me the balance making it up to £20,000. That is what we have had over and above some of the rentals since we have been here … There will be £300 or £400 for you to take in the bank when …” He would not say the words.

  “It was £20,000 altogether?” said John.

  “Yes,” said his father. “But, you know, when your aunt came she had all the papers in order, and there’s no denying she had a right to a lot more than that.”

  The son was silent: he was growing older with every moment of this.

  “She was just, too, John, believe me. They kept the place very well. It looked twice what it had been, though a little strange … when I went back there … Anyhow, it’s hers now.”

  “Hers?” said John. “Oh, don’t bother, Papa. Don’t trouble. I ought not to have asked you.”

  “Yes, dear boy; it had to be. Strictly
, she could have made me sell. But in her odd way she’s generous too, I think. Though I can’t pretend that I ever … “He would not complete the sentence. But from that moment the boy had an unpleasing image of the woman in his heart.

  “It was her right, John, and she’ll do the right thing by you. She has no children, and it’s bound to come to you. And, you know, you are to go to Oriel? She’ll see to that. I make no doubt she’ll see to that. Settle it with her. And your allowance, my dear boy … and …”

  He ceased, under a sudden spasm of extreme fatigue.

  “I must stop now, boy.”

  His son kissed him upon the forehead, and thought it oddly cold.

  “It’s late,” the father added, almost in a whisper. “Tell Marie to come up. I’ll get to bed.”

  And next morning young John Maple, waking late, alarmed that his father had not rung, went to his door, and knocked, and heard no answer. That father was dead.

  * * * * *

  The English friends in the place told the lonely boy what he should do, but he was already almost competent to act. Cut off though he had been from the life of his kind, he had a singularly mature power of decision, and it was nerved now by a strange, tenacious feeling in which, as in a composite picture, were inextricably entwined the beloved memory of the face which he would never see again for ever (every detail of the funeral remained vivid all his life)—a profound sense of wrong done him, and a vague, quite formless, but astonishingly strong intention of action—what action he knew not, nor how it should be performed, nor where. Even in one so young, sudden and overwhelming grief adds to the vividness of life intolerably. By so much as he dwelt—more than in real experience itself—upon his father’s voice, gesture, everything—by so much was he acutely, violently sensitive to harsh alien things.

  His aunt had not come out for the funeral. She seemed to show an intolerable indifference. Bad as the immediate post-war conditions were, it was inexcusable. The letter he had received from her struck him like ice; though that woman had never written unkindly in her life, yet also she had never written kindly. The journey home in those strange, interrupted days of the spring of ’19, with the delays and the broken glass in the carriages and the sleepless nights, felt like an approach to some doom. What would it be like? What would Rackham be like? What would it have become? He had a fairly clear memory of the place, though he had not seen it since he was a child—for five-and-a-half years. His father had told him very vaguely and in a few sentences that it “looked twice what it had been”; but he evidently did not like to dwell on any description. He had pictured to himself one or two consolations—meeting again with Corton, the old butler, and the rest of them—he supposed they were all still there—the familiar odd disjointed front of the house, half brick, half timber; the rank grass, the neglected field beyond the rusty iron palings, the ill-kept lawn which were for him not decay, but Home.

  His first shock was at the station.

  It was not the old brougham that met him, the old horse that he remembered; it was a car, too smart for such a place; and the driver, of all things in the world, a Frenchman, demobilised and (by some strange snobbery of his aunt’s) smuggled in: imported by the favour of some Parliamentarian friend of hers.

  The drive was too short. The old ramshackle lodge was gone, and there was, in its place, a Queen Anne cottage of the worst type. The drive was twice as broad as in the old days. The gravel of it clean and new. Then, at a turn, in a moment—the evening still light—he saw Rackham.

  But was it Rackham? The front was all timber now. And no one could say whether it was all new or all old. It seemed new, made falsely old. The windows were old-new, anyhow; for they were criss-cross lattice. It made him think of the few times he had seen stage scenery, when he had gone with his father into Berne to the play.

  Corton was there when the door opened. And for the first time in so many days he rejoiced a moment in the warmth of the old man’s greeting—but in what surroundings!

  The old hall had gone; the next room had been knocked into it. He could have believed it the lounge of an hotel for its garishness. There were strange beams, artificially rough and artificially darkened. There were pictures on the wall which he had never known. All looked new, most abominably aping age.

  He was in an ill mood by the time his aunt received him. But that first evening things went quietly enough. She did her best—it was a poor best, but she could do no better. She was precise, she was worldly, she could not bear things to be casual and unfixed; and she was (wrongly) convinced that the boy before her was but a repetition of his father—of whose goodness she had felt nothing, for whose vagueness and slackness she had had all the contempt of her kind.

  I say, it was a poor best; and for a week—she thought it well to allow a little time before any business should be talked—the tension grew.

  The breaking-point came one evening after dinner in the drawing-room—furnished after some antique fashion which John could not understand and hated—when Hilda Maple, in a tone which seemed to him rather like the commands of an official than converse with one’s kind, began to give him her plans for his future. He was to have so much—not an insufficient allowance—paid thus and thus; he must account for it. She had seen the authorities at Oriel and the rooms he would have. She approved of the rooms. Perhaps she would have preferred Christ Church, but it was his poor, dear father’s wish (she said that as though his father’s wish was necessarily less worthy than her own-—after all, poor Henry had been at Oriel, hadn’t he?).

  John made no answer. He listened with increasing anger in his heart.

  “They wanted you to read history,” she said, “but I said you would rather read law. You would, I know. Your uncle would have said that. He always said that he wished he had read law himself at the University. He said that it would have saved him three years. And you know, John, you will have to have a profession.”

  John sat up in his chair and leaned forward slowly towards the April fire.

  “I shall not go to Oxford. I shall find some trade,” he said, in a slow, determined voice.

  “What do you mean?” answered his aunt sharply.

  “What I say,” answered her nephew.

  It was not a courteous beginning in her ears, for she felt she was being enormously kind. After all, she owed him nothing; it was the other way round; she had lost by him and his.

  “What you say?” she cried, almost angrily. “What you say? I don’t understand you!”

  “I have got £352 left, Aunt Hilda,” he said, still refusing to meet her eyes and looking straight into the fire.

  “Well?” said she.

  “It’s enough to turn round on,” he continued.

  “Good heavens, boy! Do you understand that you’re not yet nineteen. D’you think you are of age? What can one do with three … really, I don’t understand what you mean!”

  But in that young mind a very firm determination was growing up. He knew nothing whatever of the world. But he was prepared to learn it, and to learn it alone, as soon as might be. He said no more. She questioned; she spoke so strongly that with a woman less careful of herself there would have been a storm. But she got no more out of him.

  There followed two days in which neither said much. Hilda Maple did not reproach herself, but she was a little anxious. She thought herself capable of any situation: but this was new. On the third day John told her of his determination.

  He was going to London. He would give her his address the moment he had one; he begged her to let him be. He was sure of himself.

  There passed rapidly through his aunt’s mind the alternatives before her, and before him. She saw them clearly, as was her talent, and she made the decision, which was perhaps the only one she could have made.

  He might go. She would not oppose his going. She was still determined to do her duty in so far as he would meet her—she had a strong sense of that—there was nothing petulant about the woman, nor any danger of sudden moods; she ha
d the virtues of the worldly, and their kind of strength. It was a simple issue—either to use the law—which would be odious, and would mean a permanent breach in little more than two years’ time (for she rightly guessed the obstinacy of that deep-voiced, clear-cut, sturdy figure) or simply to let him run the length of his tether. She prophesied no disaster; she had the judgment to think that upon the whole there would be none; though there was a hidden sneer in her mind as she thought of what occupations this pig-headedness might drive him to. She told him there would always be a home there when he needed it; at heart she felt relieved of a burden.

  John, on his side, felt a weight lifted too. And young as he was, he moderated.

  “I certainly don’t want to quarrel, Aunt Hilda,” he said. “And I cannot help telling you that I am grateful to you. You see, when I have made up my mind—he talked like one ten years older, and anyone with a better sense of humour than Hilda Maple could hardly have helped smiling—“when I have made up my mind—I can’t even think of myself as changing.”

  So it was settled. They agreed for a fortnight’s interval in which he should meet his father’s friends of the neighbourhood, and take some advice as to where he might get rooms in town—as to what he should look for then.

  John Maple saw and heard and learnt much in that fortnight; and all he saw and learnt and heard further hardened him in his anger and his resolve.

  For one thing, he discovered the odious word Catchings. It seems that Rackham had been re-baptised “Rackham Catchings.” Disgusting black-letter buffoonery!

  He had first come across it in the village shop, where the young man with whom he had played as a boy was all obsequiousness to the heir of such wealth, and had said, bowing and smirking, over a parcel, “Shall I send it up to the Catchings?”

  “To what?” John had said sharply.

  “To the Catchings, sir—Rackham Catchings? Your house, sir; leastways, Mrs. Maple’s house.”