The Haunted House

by Hilaire Belloc

  The Coalition Government rewarded such great services to the country with a grant of £20,000. It was paid over at once, and the honoured recipient was on the point of retiring from his arduous academic duties, when the unexpected fall of the mark destroyed his prospects. For though Lord Hambourne had accurately read the thoughts of those who had determined to preserve the German currency, he had never thought of tapping one master mind in New York, whence alone he would have received more accurate information on the future of his securities.

  As his very just estimate of the German character had led him to put the whole of a grateful nation’s offering into the German domestic loans, he found himself, long before the date of Hilda Maple’s party at Rackham, possessed of Bonds to Bearer Series 2 Nos. 555201—598237 of the first German internal 5 per cent, guaranteed reimbursable Peace Loan, worth anything between 5¾d. and 6d. the lot.

  But though thus denuded of material goods, he had acquired all the special qualifications of his profession, and even a first-rate academic manner with a strong stammer, a habit of saying, “Quate! Quate!” at the ends of most of his sentences, a nickname among the undergraduates, and a sheaf of stories about him, the subtle humour of which missed fire outside the University.

  * * * * *

  Lord Hambourne, then, was coming to Rackham on the Saturday early; he was coming in time for lunch and (being poor) by train.

  He was a very sensible man. He kept very careful accounts. He calculated that the free lunch at Rackham almost exactly paid for the return ticket from Oxford (a week-end third)—though, of course, it did not cover the ticket from London down to Sussex. He took a single for that journey, on the chance that one of the guests would motor him back to town on the Monday. In his letter he had told his hostess how eager he was to be in her county again, and what a pleasure it was to get off from Oxford and the associations of so much hard work. For Lord Hambourne had to lecture on psychology for one hour on two days a week by statute, and very often added a third lecture freely and of his own accord for a reasonable fee. And, like all dons, he only had six months’ holiday in the year. To such men in our strenuous University life the free air and repose of a week-end make all the difference. He was to be excused, then, for taking that morning train. And as it trundled him up to Paddington, and he further trundled on from Victoria (there was an hour between the two, and that saved him the expense of a cab) he was thinking how many paragraphs Rackham would account for in his social column. He decided that a house of that calibre was not good for more than two, and just possibly they might even cut out one of those. The first he had already begun to scribble in the train:

  “I ran down to Rackham Catchings this week-end, Mrs. Hilda Maple’s charming place in Sussex. It is a fifteenth-century house, quite unspoiled, a rare thing nowadays. Mrs. Hilda Maple is, of course, the widow of Mr. William Maple, and she was famous some years ago in London during her distinguished husband’s lifetime for her salons to which all the great lights of the day had the entrée.…”

  and so on. There were about twenty lines of it. If anything happened he would work in a second paragraph. He hoped, with a doubtful hope, that something would happen, though it was difficult to see what could happen with a dull woman like Hilda Maple and a Yankee lord and a war profiteer (for he had been told who was coming). Still, he hoped—and his hope was rewarded. A good deal did happen.

  Yet another thought was at the back of the noble Professor’s mind as he travelled. He wanted to make quite sure that there really was nothing old—at least, nothing older than the eighteenth century—in Rackham Catchings. He suspected as much, but he wasn’t certain. He liked to know those things. It gave him a hold over people. One never knew when it might turn up useful.

  Lord Hambourne, like most of the academic tribe, had real knowledge in one matter outside his own subject. He did understand old wood, from adzed chamfered beams to Misericordes. As for psychology, he knew by this time as much about it as any other man, for it was now many years since that rich cousin of his, then in the Ministry, had terrified the Turtle Eaters Company into founding the Chair. It was quite a new subject in those days, the last years of Queen Victoria; but he had kept pace with it, and braced himself to read the duller and nastier books of our own time.

  I have told how, during the war, he had enjoyed the one brief period of good pay he had ever known, had ended with a little fortune and had lost it.

  Now the war was over and he was back again at the old grind, and though an intelligent man, had become so provincial through long residence at the University as to imagine that no one guessed his little supplementary journalistic income as “Behind the Scenes” in Lord Toronto’s paper The Howl.

  He was favourably impressed with the motor-car which met him. He was delighted to see, as Rackham burst upon his gaze, that all the antique part of the front was quite new, and that the old part was not very old. He sized it up at once for what it was. But he still had fears that there might lurk within it some mediæval stuff: for, after all, it was church loot. He had got that from a brother don whose Churchism was so high that he had gone deep blue. He even knew that the particular monks from whom it had been grabbed were Pre-mon-stra-tentians—a term which meant nothing to him, and which he always got wrong when he tried to spell it.

  His hostess greeted him with an enthusiasm to which his poverty was unaccustomed, and which he rightly put down (for was he not a Professsor of Psychology?) to her slight acquaintance with lords. She had within five minutes (by way of comparison with Rackham) deftly alluded to his own ancestral home. It was a subject he detested, because he had not been able to repair it, and the people who had taken it stoutly refused to spend a penny on it—let alone badgering him half a dozen times a year about gutters, pipes and drains. He lost by the ancestral home. And Lord Hambourne was a man in whose mind subjects connected with the loss of even small sums of money are very painful. Then he suddenly thought that since she had looked up the name of his place in some book, and had shown some faint interest in it, he might use her later for selling it. He had never been able to find a purchaser yet.

  The ancestral home having been put into its corner, Mrs. Maple all during lunch rubbed Rackham into the mind of her distinguished guest. And as lie after lie proceeded from her spate of local history and personal reminiscence, he deftly plucked out the truths like plums and pigeon-holed them in his mind.

  Enormous as her information had been, she kept a wad or two back for those who were to come.

  And the Hellups arrived first. They came (“of course,” as Lord Hambourne would have said in his column), by car, and a very good car it was; not showy, but exactly suited to its purposes as a car: elastic, silent and shockless. Hellup was a man who thought comfort out, and thought it out rightly.

  In one detail only had he not realised his thinking out. And that was through love of his daughter. For Lovey-Lad had come down with them, with horrid menace in his eye, all the way from London. He had had to waste his ferocity upon the landscape; but he looked up to any mischief as he came in bow-legged, growling, formidable, but reduced to conventions by a nice smack on the nose from his adoring mistress, just to make him understand that he was among friends. It would never have done if he had dug his teeth into the well - displayed and most sufficient flesh-coloured calves of Aunt Hilda. It was the only thing that might have caused trouble between her father and herself.

  Now with the appearance of this father and daughter the air changed, as it does change when, known only privately to pairs, but subtly influencing others, affection comes under a roof. It was an affection real upon the part of that crisp, humorous and successful, contented trans - Atlantic man, sincerely received by his hostess. In Bo I cannot tell you how freshly intense was affection, nor in John how profoundly sincere. Alas! that with four such currents of mutual attraction crossing in the Hall of Rackham, only Lord Hambourne should have failed to polarise. But, Professor of Psychology though he was, he tumbled to nothing. Nor, cer
tainly, did Aunt Hilda tumble to John and Bo. And as for those two young people, they had an intellectual knowledge of the charming friendship between their elders, but of real appreciation thereon nothing whatever. They had something better to think of.

  However, as I have—said, affection mellowed things, and the air was kindly when in half an hour after the Hellups an enormous machine, the size of a cottage, driven by a gentleman whose uniform vaguely recalled the General Officers of Central American States, and having by his side yet another uniformed gentleman of a more moderate type, purred, roared, halted and panted grandly before the door.

  Therein, through large spaces of glass could be seen a huge bunch of hot-house flowers, set in a silver sconce. It faced in its gay opulence the owner of the splendid conveyance, Lord Mere de Beaurivage himself. His considerable though not elongated form was protected from the inclemencies of the weather by a fur coat and, as to his legs at least, by the mounted skin of a very fine African lion, the head of which drooped, fierce, towards his feet, while the hinder quarters performed the same office of comfort for his wife, who sat upon his left.

  And what a wife!

  Her dress, though the afternoon was yet young, seemed compounded of a material wherein there entered no small proportion of gold. The hair upon her head, cut very short (and upon her ample neck even shaved) was more than sufficient in its amount, and excellently blended, crowning a large, determined face, in fine contrast with the somewhat more exhausted but equally expansive visage of her lord.

  As she thus swept up, throned, the stern look of mastery which befits the mistress of such great possessions still dignified her glance, yet it dissolved into delighted smiles and half-closed elongated eyes of joy as she caught sight of dear Hilda unconventionally rushing out to meet her upon the very threshold.

  John Maple (and his aunt was grateful to him) helped her down from the car.

  “Darling Hilda!”

  “Oh! Darling Amathea!”

  The two women were clasped in each other’s arms.

  Lord Mere de Beaurivage alighted with more circumspection, considerably aided by the second of his two dependants, the one in the lesser uniform, and set foot upon the sacred soil of England with a grunt, followed by a heavy breathing. For the exertion of such a man in leaving a vehicle is even more trying to him than his exertion in mounting one. The lion skin lay deserted upon the floor of the car. The lion’s master followed his wife hobbling into Rackham Catchings.

  Aunt Hilda gave them time to recover from the enormous fatigues of the journey, solacing them with tea, impressing them with the dignified figure of Corton. Then only, when she had gathered them together (making at the same time certain signs to John with uplifted eyebrows and sharp glances), did she take them round in a herd, to put a climax to their rivalry for the house by filling it with history.

  She was a determined woman. The thing had to be done some time, and the sooner the better, as a foundation for all that had to be wound up by way of business in a brief week-end. The Esthonian in his character of Mr. Rupert de Vere of Jermyn Street was upon her: he would not wait.

  And John followed the flock, looking up with sagacious vacuity at picture and carving and beam as each was mentioned, and down, as each was mentioned, at table and at chair and at bric and at brac: and feeling as he had felt on but one other occasion of his life, when Bo had insisted on his joining a horrible clot of tourists who were doing the Tower. It was a delightful thought that this trial would not last so long; for after all Rackham, though more beloved, was not as large as the Tower. He was glad of that.

  He got what amusement he could out of information startlingly new to him. He learned more than he thought could be known about Rackham—let alone the Catchings. He learned that the Hall (where he so vividly remembered the rabbit hutches, the plaster and the bicycle) dated in part from the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, but with later additions under James I. He learned that the great beam running across it from the staircase to the fire-place had upon it the date 1487, and was probably the oldest dated object in the house. He learned that a little chair which his father had bought for him when a tiny child because he had fallen in love with it himself during a visit to London had been a chair belonging to Queen Anne’s nursery, and given to one of his forbears by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. He learned that the damned panelling was made from one of the ships of the Spanish Armada. These things he learned, and many more.

  The Fury of Destruction rose in his heart and was struggling with the Comic Spirit, when, towards the close of the lecture, as they were waddling back to the drawing-room again, through the dining-room, and had just heard startling things about the oak table and Ben Jonson—as Lord Mere de Bruvvish was giving signs of distress—it was a good long walk for him—as Darling Amathea’s admiring exclamations were growing a trifle conventional, and as even Lord Hellup’s thirst for facts, dates and measurements was getting satiated, there came something he might have expected, for he had heard it before: but now, since that suggestion Bo had made in London, it struck with unexpected force. That something was the Ghost.

  It was as they were passing the Ancestor. The regular phrases had come out, how he was Sir Harry Murtenshaw, how he was by Holbein; how he combined all the qualities of the great Elizabethans, sea-faring, patriotism and, above all, prosperity. How (this was carefully insisted upon) he was not a direct male Ancestor. How the name alone was enough to show that. How it was his daughter who had brought the property into the family of Maple—all that, all the regular stuff. Then, as Aunt Hilda led them back towards the drawing-room, she added:

  “And it is that man, you know, who was the father of the Ghost.” Bo and her lover shot quick glances at each other. Things were going well.

  Not till those few weeks ago had John heard of that Ghost: and quite certain was John that Aunt Hilda had not heard of it either. It had come in with the Ancestor. But I must confess that the Ghost bred in her nephew, now that it was taking shape, some admiration for Aunt Hilda. He did not know she had it in her! And he had to confess that so long as it remained but a story it did put up the value …

  He was astonished at her power of fiction; for she held them all really interested in their various ways, with the story of the unfortunate boy who had been beheaded by the first James, and but for whose premature cutting off—in the fullest sense of that term—his sister would not have inherited and the Maples would never have possessed the broad mud-fields and the rather stunted oaks of Rackham.

  It seems that the poor lad—he was hardly past his twentieth year—got mixed up in one of the plots in favour of Mary Stuart, and was therefore executed in 1613. And now, added Aunt Hilda, lowering her voice by four and a half notes and a bittock, and glancing at the jewellery upon her fingers, upon that day of the year people say that they see him, all in a dark cloak, and in the great ruff of the day—but without a head. “It’s in one of the bedrooms,” she imprudently volunteered. Then to correct that error she hurriedly added, “But really it’s great nonsense. Servants’ talk, and the gossip of the more ignorant old people on the farms. They like that sort of thing,” she concluded with a short laugh—well knowing that other people liked the old country house ghost—as a legend—besides servants and old people on farms; and among those others were affectionate American business men and new war millionaires.

  John Maple wondered whether he would be appealed to in corroboration. Had she so appealed to him, he would have been torn between his disgust at her so raising the value of the place to these competing purchasers, the instinct of treating his aunt with courtesy before her guests, and the absolute necessity of following Bo’s plan. Luckily she did not risk it. She was contented to answer the various questions which were put to her with real interest by Lord Hambourne, who took a professional interest in such flamboyant lying. He knew enough history to have spotted the Holbein already and to appreciate that boys do not have their heads cut off under James I. for plots connected with trying to sa
ve his mother’s life before they were born.

  Lord Hellup was more avid of details, including measurements; he wanted to know the exact height of the ghost—up to the neck—the exact day of the year, the exact spot where he appeared, the exact hour of the night, and all that; but on these, alas! Aunt Hilda could be of no service.

  Amathea, delighted to find an added glory to a possession which she already half felt to be hers, expressed her historic imagination without restraint, “Lordy!” she said, and “Help!” and “You make me come over all creepy like!” and further, “Well now, I don’t know what an’ all!” to the accompaniment of raised hands and of rounded eyes. Her husband looked as pleased as the fatigue of his recent perambulations would allow; and pleased he was, for after all, if one was to have an old family place, one might as well have an old family ghost with it. Only he was a little anxious about what it would add to the price.

  But to John and Bo there came another and a very different thought. They must get to work.

  And get to work they did.

  Chapter IX

  On Sunday mornings Lord and Lady Mere de Beaurivage went to church. They attended Divine Service. In town it was as often as not the afternoon (they were hardly of the generation for fasting communion), but in the country (and people of this exalted rank spend most Sundays in the country) they received the consolations of religion from eleven o’clock till close on lunch. They still felt a certain novelty about the Church of England, for what we begin after our fortieth year always has a certain novelty about it for the rest of our lives.

  As luck would have it, her ladyship was delighted with the parson. He had a Cockney accent; he preached no mysterious doctrine; he insisted on the plain duties we owe to our fellow-men, especially the duty of charity, and more particularly the wickedness of class hatred.

  But, as luck would have it, his lordship was not quite so sympathetic. For one thing, he didn’t like the allusion to antagonism between the East End of London and the West; for he thought (quite justly) that that was all rubbish; and he guessed that the parson, in spite of his honest accent, must have lived somewhere in the middle. There he was wrong. The parson came from Ealing.