Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison

by Arthur Morrison

  Suddenly Mdlle. Sagée became very pale and stretched out rigidly in the bed. Her eyes dimmed and her whole appearance became such as to alarm Mdlle. de Wrangel, who asked her hastily if she were worse.

  “No, no,” came the answer, in a slow, feeble, and languid voice.

  The stiffness and paleness continued. Presently looking round, the watcher saw behind her the figure of the sick teacher walking steadily up and down the apartment.

  She was startled, certainly, and a little frightened; but she kept quiet and said nothing. Still the sick woman lay motionless and pale; and still the silent wraith paced to and fro. Mdlle. de Wrangel stuck to her post. After a little time the moving figure became slimmer and dimmer, and at last faded away altogether. Then the stiffness left the limbs of Mdlle. Sagée, the paleness gave way to a healthier tint, the light came to her eyes, and she turned over and looked up like one awakening from sleep. Staying only long enough to ascertain that she was perfectly comfortable and had no consciousness of having undergone any change of condition, Mdlle. de Wrangel came away from the room to calm the agitation she had so long managed to subdue, and which was very visible to her school-fellows, in her pale face.

  Mdlle. Sagée recovered from the influenza and resumed her customary duties; and it was shortly after her return to these that an indubitable manifestation of the phenomenon was witnessed by the entire establishment.

  On the first floor of the school building was a very large room with four French windows looking on to the garden. The whole school was assembled in this room, engaged upon needlework, under the guidance of a teacher who sat at the head of the long table. The day was bright and warm, and in the garden before the windows Mdlle. Sagée was walking about attending to the flowers and occasionally plucking one. Flowers had always been a passion with her, and her every spare moment was spent among them. From the French windows all her movements were distinctly visible to every girl, and these being the only windows the room possessed, most eyes were turned from time to time toward the garden.

  Presently said a girl to the teacher in charge, “Ma’m’selle, I have used my blue silk. Can I have more?”

  There was no more there. “There is some in my own room,” observed the teacher, “which you may get. Stay — I will go myself — you won’t be able to find it.” And she left the room.

  From the garden below Mdlle. Sagée glanced up at the windows. The teacher’s chair was empty.

  The girls above went on with their sewing or idled and chatted as they liked. Suddenly there was a general drawing of breath. There in the chair at the head of the table sat the form of Mdlle. Sagée, while below in the garden, distinctly visible to all, still walked. Mdlle. Sagée herself!

  Her gait was slow and languid, and she feebly extended her arms as if for support, like one who is sleepy or physically exhausted. Then she stopped, supporting herself by a large stucco vase.

  There still sat the silent figure. Mdlle. de Wrangel had become, to some extent, used to seeing it, and, with the boldest of her companions, impelled by curiosity, advanced, and attempted to touch the phantom. The hands of the two girls passed into the figure, but they afterwards affirmed that they felt some slight resistance, not unlike that which might be opposed by a gauze or muslin garment. Some of the pupils, however, particularly the younger girls, were terribly frightened, and made their way toward the door as the teacher in charge of the sewing class returned. She also saw the apparition, which shortly began to fade, and finally disappeared entirely. At the same time, Mdlle. Sagée, in the garden, was seen to leave the vase, and, walking across the garden-path, resume her work among the flowers as before.

  Mdlle. Sagée, who was never conscious of these appearances, excepting by observing the agitation of those about her, afterwards explained that, on looking up and seeing the teacher’s chair empty, she felt anxious lest the girls should lose order and waste their time in the absence of a governess; she was, however, only conscious of immediately afterward going on with her garden work.

  Rumours of these things now began to get abroad and, reaching the parents’ ears, seriously reduced the attendance at the school. Still, the directors were for some time unwilling to dismiss a valuable teacher, whose only fault was an affliction which she was powerless to remedy. But when something like three-quarters of the pupils failed to return after holidays, the removal of the cause of uneasiness became a matter of absolute necessity, and Mdlle. Sagée was told, as delicately as possible, that the directors would be compelled, in the interests of the institution, to dispense with her services.

  The poor governess broke down and wept. “Oh, it is the nineteenth time! There is no peace for me in the world. Again, and the nineteenth time! It is cruel, it is cruel!”

  Then she confessed that she had already held appointments at eighteen different schools, and had had to leave each one because of the haunting figure of herself which attended her everywhere. She had never found any difficulty in procuring fresh engagements, as her testimonials as to abilities and conduct had always been excellent, but she could never keep one. She knew nothing of the wraith but what had been told her, had never seen it, and could in no way account for its appearance.

  She went to her sister-in-law’s house, and it was there that she was last heard of; when her little nephews and nieces would often say that they “saw two aunt Emélies.”

  THE HAUNTING OF WILLIAM MOIR

  ON the coast of Banffshire, Scotland, between the town of Banff itself and Portsoy, lies the parish of Boyndie. It is about a mile west of the fishing village of Whitehills, which, in its turn, is about two miles and a half west of Banff. In the parish of Boyndie stands the farmhouse of Upper Dallachy, the situation of grieve, or overseer, upon which became vacant in the early part of 1868.

  It was about the middle of February when the new grieve arrived. He was an Aberdeenshire man, from Monymusk; his name was William Moir, he was 31 years of age, and he brought with him a smiling young wife from his own parish. Boyndie and its district were quite strange to the Moirs, neither having left Aberdeenshire before taking up residence at Upper Dallachy.

  William Moir was a good farmer, and things went well. Barley, oats, and potatoes the soil took very kindly to, and the crops were satisfactory. Intelligent, hard-working, and steady, the young grieve had the good opinion of everybody, and for some years nothing occurred to disturb his simple content at Dallachy. Had it been remembered that a mysterious murder had been committed fifty years ago at Moir’s house, and, indeed, in the very room in which he now slept, the superstitious fancies of the neighbours would, no doubt, have conjured up something to agitate his mind or that of his wife. But the population of the district was sparse, and the affair of half a century ago had faded from the minds of most of its inhabitants. It was, nevertheless, a fact, and the victim was a man named Elder.

  One night during Whit week in 1871, however, William Moir had what he described as a very forcible dream. At the outer boundary of the farm the ground sloped away to the seaside, and upon this sloping ground, about five or six yards from high water mark, was a small mound three yards in diameter, enclosed by a circle of stones. It was, in fact, the site and remains of a kiln used for burning seaweed to make kelp. There were other similar places in different parts of the beach. Kelp manufacture had less than a hundred years back been a flourishing industry in the neighbourhood, but since the discovery of processes of producing soda from salt it had declined, and the last kiln in the vicinity had been abandoned fifty years before.

  William Moir’s dream was this. He was walking from the farm grounds down toward the beach, passing near this mound, as he had done hundreds of times before. But now, as the mound came in sight, he saw lying upon it the body of a man, bareheaded, although clothed in other respects, with a face covered with blood. This dream left an unusual impression upon Moir’s mind; he was very little in the habit of dreaming, as a rule, and when he did dream he very seldom remembered the subject matter of the illusion; bu
t on this occasion in his waking hours the recollection of his sleeping fancy took a strong hold on him which he could in no way shake off. The mere coming into his bedroom would bring on, with what seemed increasing force each time, the remembrance of the dead man lying on the mound, and in passing the mound itself it was impossible for him to keep the dream out of his head.

  Soon his state of mind became positively painful. The sight of the dead body upon the beach slope was ever in his mind’s eye, and do what he would he could never exclude it from his thoughts. Most of his nights were wakeful, and what little sleep he did get was characterised by the most vivid recurrences of the vision. During the day he shunned his bed-room as much as possible, for, although the haunting thought of that dead body with its blood-stained face was now ever with him, it became doubly heightened and intensified whenever he entered that room, even more so than when he passed the mound.

  This state of things had lasted, and had become gradually more and more intolerable, for a few months, when a singular coincidence occurred. It was toward the end of July that an unfortunate lunatic, escaping from the custody of his keepers, at the county asylum at Ladysbridge, wandered toward the sea and there either committed suicide or was accidentally drowned.

  There was attached to the farm at Upper Dallachy a large old boat, which the men servants occasionally used by way of pastime, rowing to different parts of the coast — usually to Lea — and there fishing. Moir’s fits of brooding had so impressed his wife that she one day insisted on his having an afternoon’s holiday and taking the old boat out for a little fishing, thinking to provide some diversion for his extraordinarily depressed spirits. Accordingly, with little heart in the proceedings, and more by way of pleasing his wife than otherwise, he took the boat, with one of the hands as companion, and pulled off to Lea. Returning just before evening, the two men observed, tossing about a little way from the shore, the dead body of the drowned lunatic. Pulling toward it, Moir reached over and attached the corpse to the stern of the boat, then pulling ashore. It was now getting rapidly dusk as the two men picked up the corpse between them to carry it up to Whitehills. They carried it up the beach, when suddenly there came upon the consciousness of Moir, with redoubled force, the remembrance of the dream; and looking down, he found himself walking over the very spot on which his sleeping fancy had pictured the dead man’s body. This, it struck him, almost in the manner of a physical blow, was the interpretation of his dream; and, as if to complete the parallel, his companion behind stumbled over one of the stones, and letting go his hold of the body, in a moment it was lying exactly as Moir had seen the corpse of his dream lie; more — on taking a further look at the face, there was a broad stain of blood covering one side of the forehead, the eye, and part of the cheek on that side.

  Although the face and the dress of the corpse were not altogether those of the dead man in his dream, Moir had no doubt that here, at last, he had arrived at the interpretation. It was a singular thing, this dream, he thought, to be so closely paralleled by fact; but now that he seemed to have got to the end of the matter he was glad; for now, he thought, he might reasonably expect that the haunting presence of the dream would leave him, and his spirits rose accordingly.

  The body of the poor lunatic was left at Whitehills, and Moir, with a feeling of hope — though only a vague one — that the incubus might now be lifted from his brain, returned to Dallachy. For some little time he was comparatively cheerful, and Mrs. Moir noted with inward satisfaction the improvement in his spirits. But he had scarcely entered the bedroom when the thought of the dream came again before him with even more than its old impressiveness. All that night he tossed and tumbled in his bed, and to his disordered imagination there seemed a bloody-faced corpse in every corner of the dark room and it was not the bloody-faced corpse which he had that day carried to Whitehills, but that of his dream.

  He began to fear — to more than fear — some failure of reason. What was this vision of a dead man that would not leave him? He had wronged no dead man, and why this affliction? Deeper and deeper grew his belief that insanity was creeping upon him. He grew dull, abstracted, and sullen; he no longer seemed the same man. Gradually through the months the circumstances surrounding the subject of his dream became vaguely present in his overwrought mind. He was conscious of an indistinct feeling, as though he were, or had been, himself implicated in, or a witness to, the murder which had laid that gory clay lifeless upon its back. The bedroom began to wear a look of strange familiarity which was not the ordinary familiarity of a man’s nightly sleeping apartment, but more as the shadow of another bygone and misty acquaintanceship of unremembered days. He had never in his life, he knew, been to Boyndie, or, indeed, any part of Banffshire, before coming to the farm; still, in addition to the ordinary familiarity which a man has with his house and which he himself had long ere this completely acquired, there now grew upon him a misty conviction of a stranger and earlier familiarity.

  Now and again his spirits would be freed from the incubus for some hours together, just as physical pain will leave a sick man for a time and then return. These blessed intervals, however, became fewer and fewer, and were enjoyed as a day’s liberty would be enjoyed by a prisoner condemned to incarceration for life. But the mere entry into his bed-room or the sight of the mound was always sufficient to put an end to any such relief, and bring again the dreadful fancies in all their fullness.

  Every expedient which suggested itself to his wife she tried in order to win him from his broodings, but all were unsuccessful. What oppressed him he would never tell her nor anybody else — why, he could never have said — he only felt himself powerless to impart his secret to others — he simply could not. There seemed an indefinite horror in the idea of revealing to others the story of that gory corpse. So for a long while nobody knew the reason of William Moir’s depression but himself.

  This went on for several months — in fact, till the latter part of January, 1872. That he bore up against the fearful conviction of impending insanity so long is in itself some testimony to the strength of Moir’s mental faculties.

  On Wednesday, 24th January, while working in a remote part of the farm, the trouble, which had by this assumed the character of an actual and perceptible presence, temporarily left him — the first relief he had experienced for a long time. In the evening, however, on his approaching the bed-room, it, as usual, returned, if possible with greater force than before. The next morning, while off the farm premises, he experienced another slight relief. After dinner, he was walking away from the house in the opposite direction to the sea-shore, when, with a shock as of a blow upon the head, back came the fearful idea, this time more an actual presence than ever, and with a sort of mesmeric power over him that compelled him to at once retrace his steps to the house. He entered, and, without speaking to or seeing anybody in the place, took a spade, and went toward the mound. He loosened the turf at the surface, and then drove the spade well in and levered up a large spadeful of earth. Out of this spadeful of earth there fell a human skull.

  This did not disturb or surprise him in the least. In his then state of mind it seemed the most natural thing possible — in fact, just what he had expected. He dug again.

  First a lower jawbone; then shoulder-blades and ribs with many loose vertebrae; then the humerus of an arm and, after that, the radius and ulna and all the bones of a hand. He was digging up a skeleton.

  Moir went to a hillock a little distance off and called to Lorimer, his cattle-man, who was pulling turnips in the next field. Lorimer came to him, and in his presence the grieve proceeded to dig. The other arm, the pelvis, the leg-bones, and those of the feet were turned up, none covered by more than eighteen or twenty inches of soil, and there lay the skeleton complete. They covered it loosely with earth, and Moir set out for Whitehills to consult With Mr. Taylor, a tradesman of that village, in whose judgment he felt he could trust as to what should be done in the matter.

  He had scarcely begun his story whe
n Police-inspector McGregor came into the shop. To him Moir described his discovery of the skeleton, and with him returned to where it lay. The inspector examined some of the bones, and, as night was falling, had them covered up. Next morning (Friday) he returned, and had the whole taken up and carried away to be dealt with by the police authorities.

  Dr. Hirschfeld and Dr. Mawson examined the skeleton, which was much decomposed, by direction of the police, and came to the conclusion that it must have lain buried for more than forty years. Now it was nearly fifty years ago that Elder was murdered, and collateral circumstances left no doubt that the remains were his.

  Moir’s mental troubles left him immediately after the removal of the bones, but their effects remained. He could never view the mound without a spasm of horror; and in twenty months from the discovery he died — died of the results of the shock and agitation of the system which he had endured.

  The case affords matter for much speculation. What was the cause of Moir’s feeling of past familiarity with the scenes of the murder of Elder, twenty years before his own birth? Believers in the metempsychosis would, of course, say that in a former life he had been a party to, or a witness of, the tragedy, and every circumstance would bear out the theory. His dream of the corpse as a result of sleeping in the room may well have been induced by that hypnotic influence of the dead man’s mind to which reference has already been made in connection with other manifestations. The coincidence, also, of the placing by Moir of another body upon the same spot is another singular feature, and perhaps not one without its meaning, if these things were to be understood.

  CURIOUS INCIDENT AT BEAUMARIS

  THERE formerly stood at the corner of Castle Street and Rating Row, Beaumaris, a draper’s shop, in the occupation of a Mr. Owen. Both Mr. and Mrs. Owen were very sharp disciplinarians, and of rather short temper. Consequently, their assistants were as a rule, particularly careful to avoid their displeasure, and made punctuality as much a characteristic of their service as possible. Mr. R. P. Roberts of Cheetham, Manchester, was, some years ago, an apprentice in this establishment. Among the inflexible rules to which he was bound one was that he must leave for his dinner at twelve o’clock noon, each day, and be again in the shop exactly as the clock showed half an hour later. Mr. Roberts was unusually anxious to please his employer, and was never guilty of unpunctuality.