“I’ve told you where we came from, though it is no business of yours. I never heard of Westerton.”
My Aunt added this a little emphatically, owing to an undefined feeling that a suspicion of having come from Westerton was likely in some mysterious way to prejudice her.
The maid replied nothing, but said a little gruffly, “By your lave, ma’am and pushing by her, she closed the shutters, and drew a great wooden sliding bolt across with a jerk.
My Aunt was so taken by surprise that she lost her time for retorting with effect, as she would have done, but she was so incensed, that from the fireplace she could not forbear saying, “I think you a most impertinent woman.”
To which the maid made no reply, but turned down the bedclothes, and arranged the curtains; and gathering together the tea equipage, carried the tray away, shutting the door.
CHAPTER VII.
AN ACCIDENT BEFALLS THE CANDLE.
MY Aunt Margaret stood for a while with her back to the fire, very erect, and her nose in air, sniffing defiantly toward the door through which that “most impertinent woman” had disappeared. Winnie was nodding profoundly in her chair by the fire. My Aunt with a toss of her head walked off again to the window, jerked back the bolt, and looked once more into the stableyard.
She saw Nell at the wicket-door, the man who had taken his stand there with the dog. Nell seemed to prevail with him, for he whistled back the dog, who had gone out, and locking the door again, he returned across the yard with Nell, who continued talking volubly as they walked side by side, and pointed up at my Aunt’s window. On seeing the shutter again open and my Aunt’s head and shoulders revealed against the light, both maid and man stopped in amaze, and silently gazed at her for some moments. I dare say, as my Aunt observed the evident impression produced upon those mysterious persons, she regretted inwardly the act of defiance which had removed the bolt and replaced her at the window. The woman walked into the house without speaking; the man called the dog, and strolled away towards the stable.
My Aunt closed the shutter, drew the bolt, and coming again to the fire, shook Winnie up from her sleep, and ordered her to say her prayers and get to bed.
These orders were soon complied with, and honest Winnie slept the sleep of a good conscience and a good digestion, sweetened by fatigue, while her mistress, who was cursed with an active mind, sat by the fire, with a well-snuffed candle, and conned over her correspondence and her figures, and prepared for the critical interview with the defaulting tobacconist next day. Then she fell into a reverie with her foot on the fender. I don’t think she dozed; but the fire grew low, and the snuff of the candle waxed long and heavy at top like a fungus, and the room was tenebrose and silent, as indeed was the house, for by this time it was very late.
After a while, my Aunt fancied she heard some one approaching her chamber door very softly. It was the stealthy creaking of the boards that warned her; she could not hear the tread of the foot. She held her breath, sitting straight upon her chair, and gazing at the door with such faint light as her unsnuffed taper afforded her; and I dare say she looked extremely frightened.
She heard some one breathing close outside the door, then a hand softly laid on the door-handle; the door gently opened, and the face of the woman of the high cheek bones, pale and lowering, looked in. Her ill-omened stare encountered my Aunt’s gaze, and each was perhaps unpleasantly surprised.
Both looked on, pale enough, for some time without speaking. At last my Aunt stood up and said sharply— “What’s your business here, pray?”
“’Tis late to be burnin’ candle and fire, missess — halfpast twelve, no less,” said the maid with cool asperity. “We’re an airly house, ma’am, here, and keeps dacent hours. Mebbe it’s what ye’d like supper — there’s cowld corn-beef and bacon,” she added after a pause.
“Not any, thanks; had I wished rapper, I would have rung for it,” said Aunt Margaret, loftily.
“Thrue for you, missess, only there’s no bell,” answered the woman, coolly.
“More shame for you,” retorted my Aunt, with a little flush, glancing along the walls innocent of bell-rope, for this “most impertinent woman” made her feel a little small.
“I seen you lookin’ out again, ma’am, through the windy, I don’t know after who.”
The aplomb of this woman’s attacks deprived my Aunt of breath and presence of mind, and she was amazed afterwards at the perplexed sort of patience with which she submitted to her impertinence.
“Yes: I looked out of the window.”
“We would not like people stoppin’ here that had friends outside,” said the woman, with a searching glance and a sulky wag of her head.
“I don’t know what you mean, woman.”
“Oh, ho! thankee — I know very well what I mane — an’ raebbe you’re not quite sich a fool yourself but what you can make a guess. At any rate it is not a lady’s part to be fur retin’ about the room, an pimpin’ an’ spyin’, ma’am.”
“Leave the room, please,” exclaimed my Aunt.
“An’ mebbe signin’ and beckonin’ out o’ the windies be night. Oh, ho! thankee — I know well enough what belongs to a lady.”
“I repeat, woman, you had better leave the room.”
“Woman, yourself! — I’m not goin’ to be woman’d be you — an’ the big lump iv a woman ye brought widge ye. Who’s that? eh?”
“My housekeeper,” replied my Aunt, with a fierce dignity.
“An’ a strappin’ ould one she is,” retorted the woman, with a hoarse sneer. She was turning over Winnie’s clothes, which lay on a chair.
“Your conduct is intolerable. I shall see the proprietor in the morning.”
“An’ welcome!” said the woman, coolly. “You closed the shutters again, I suppose?” and she walked round the bed to the window, from which my Aunt had made her observations.
I do believe that, if she was enraged, Aunt Margaret was also the least bit in the world cowed by this woman. But observing a little trembling in the bed-curtains, to the far side of which her ugly visitor had passed, my Aunt made a quick step to the side of the bed next her, and drawing the curtain, saw this unpleasant woman at the opposite side with the bedclothes raised in her hand from Winnie’s feet and ankles, which she was inspecting.
“Big feet!” Where’s her boots, ma’am?” said the maid across the bed, eyeing my Aunt aslant, and replacing the bedclothes.
“Boots or shoes, on the floor by the fire, and I wish you’d begone.”
“I’ll take your own, too, ma’am,” answered she.
“Well, yes; that is, I’ll leave them outside the door.”
“As ye plaze: only get to yer bed, at wonst — it s all hours;” and without more preparation, she chucked my Aunt’s mould candle from its socket into the fire, where, lying on its side it blazed up merrily.
“What do you mean? How dare you, huzzy! Fetch a candle this moment.”
“Arra go to yer bed, woman, while ye have light, will ye?” and with these words the attendant withdrew, shutting the door with a clap.
CHAPTER VIII.
OF A FIGURE SEEN BY MY AUNT.
MY Aunt opened the door, very angry. She was about to walk down stairs to insist on trying the delinquent by court-martial before the “Proprietor;” but she recollected that he was probably in his bed and asleep by this time. She contented herself, therefore, by calling after her.
“Rely on it, I’ll complain in the morning — so sure as I live.”
And so she shut the door, and the candle making a glorious blaze in the grate my Aunt thought the chambermaid’s advice worth following, and did get into her bed while there was light I dare say her collision with the chambermaid cost her more than twenty minutes’ sleep. When her anger subsided there remained a different sort of uneasiness, for there was something ill-omened and menacing in the unintelligible ways of this inn and its people. My Aunt Margaret, however, was really tired, and eventually fell into a slumber, deep and dre
amless, from which she awakened with a start.
She fancied that she had been disturbed by a sound as of some heavy weight pulled along the floor close to the room in which she slept The sound had ceased before she was fully awake; but it left her with a most disagreeable sensation of fear and uncertainty, for, undefinably, it was connected in her mind with the idea of mischief designed to herself.
All of a sudden she remembered her trunk, left at the head of the staircase, and the idea rushed upon her, “They are stealing my trunk!” The sound resembled the rumble of it along the floor.
My Aunt had a keen sense of property, and was not wanting in pluck. She jumped out of bed, opened her door softly, and listened. But everything was perfectly quiet “It was in order to confine me to my room that that odious woman deprived me of my candle,” thought my Aunt, although even if she had had it at her bedside she could not have lighted it, for the fire had gone quite out She listened, but there was nothing stirring; and, in extreme déshabille, as she was, my Aunt, full of anxieties, crept out on the lobby, and made her way through the passages to the stairhead.
There stood the old hair trunk on its end, with its rows of dim brass nails, plain enough in the faint light from the lobby window. My Aunt was relieved. She would have been very glad to pull it into her room; but the distance was considerable, and the noise would have brought the people about her, and she was in no state to receive company.
Having stood affectionately and anxiously by the friendly trunk for a minute or two, irresolute, she began to find it too cold to stay longer; so, with an easier mind, she groped her way back again.
It was easier to find the lobby than to discover in the dark her own bedroom door. She groped along the passages; she had counted the steps, but now was not quite sure whether it was thirty-five, or forty-five; she stopped now and then to listen in her groping return, and began to grow rather confused; and wished, as active-minded persons not unfrequently do, that she had remained quietly as she was.
In fact, she was precisely in the situation to lose her way, and step into a wrong bedroom, and was extremely uncomfortable in mind and cold in body; and very nervous beside, lest any one should chance to come that way with a candle, and discover the nakedness of the land.
In this state my Aunt’s deliberations were of the very fussiest sort, and her exertions great; but I doubt if she could hare recovered her room, at least at the first venture, without light. Light, however, did come, and this was the manner of its arrival On a sudden a door opened below stairs — near the foot of the staircase it must have been, she heard so clearly; and voices, before inaudible, now reached her ear.
A female was weeping loudly, and uttering broken sentences through her sobs.
“They’ve killed him — he’s murdered — they’ve murdered him!” and similar ejaculations came rapidly tumbling one over the other in her ululation.
“Arra, ma’am, go back again, and stay where ye wor. We’ll be even wid them yet, for it is murdher, the villians! said a voice, which my Aunt had no difficulty in recognising as that of the Irish chambermaid. “Bud don’t be rousin’ the people — it must be done quiet.”
There was more sobbing, and more talk, and the weeping female gave way, and was again shut into her room, and a gleam of an approaching candle sent an angular shadow on the ceiling at the end of the passage in which my Aunt stood Extremely frightened, she crouched down close to the ground, and the forbidding-looking woman, with the high cheek bones, walked stealthily in from the stairhead passage, and stood, as pale as death, with her shoes off, and a candle in her hand, listening, as it seemed, at the far end of the gallery. She looked over her shoulder, and said, in a hard whisper —
“Stop there, wid their heavy shoes.” She had a hammer in her hand, and looked unspeakably repulsive in her pallor. She lifted the candle above her head and listened. My Aunt was staring full at her from her place of semi-concealment, in a recess of one of the doors, with her face close to the ground.
If the woman saw her, she had presence of mind to make no sign; but with the hand in which the hammer was, she drew her dress up a little to enable her to step more freely, and, with a light, soft tread, passed across the entrance of the gallery.
CHAPTER IX.
THE FUNERAL VISITATION.
MY Aunt was impressed with the most dismal and terrific ideas of what was going forward. She was quite unnerved. She saw, sometimes the shadow of this woman, and sometimes the full light of the candle, still thrown upon the floor and walls at the end of the lobby, and dared not move.
Quickly the woman returned. She had now the hammer under the arm which bore the candlestick, and whispered —
“Barney!”
Then she raised in her other hand a long, rather slender, steel blade, as it appeared to my aunt, quite straight, and whispered —
“That’s the thing — betther nor the hammer; there’s no one awake but herself — for the life o’ ye, make no noise.”
She was crossing the far end of the passage as she said this, and she and the light of her candle quickly disappeared.
The last gleam threw the shadow of a pair of shoes from outside a bedroom door, along the floor, towards my Aunt The door was next that in which she was crouched, and was a little open. She was now sure that she had discovered her room.
The moment the light had quite disappeared, she entered, and shut the door softly, and groped her way to the bed, and got in at her own side; and, being very cold, lay close to her companion for warmth. My Aunt envied Winnie her sound sleep. She vainly tried to compose herself, wildly conjecturing about unknown horrors, and longing for morning, and an escape from this suspected and mysterious house.
She was miserably cold, too. The night was sharp, and the fire long out. The bedclothes were insufficient, and Winnie also as cold as stone.
My Aunt had been in this state-freezing and listening, and awfully frightened for some ten minutes, perhaps, when she distinctly heard breathing near her door, and the muffled tread of shoeless feet, and then a whispering.
The door opened, and two men came in, carrying a coffin, on the lid of which a kitchen candle was burning dimly; and the ugly woman, Nell, between whom and my Aunt there had grown up, so fast, an unaccountable antipathy, followed, carrying in her hand the steel instrument which Aunt Margaret had observed before with so unpleasant a suspicion, and which was, in fact, a turnscrew.
The whole of this funereal pageant of a dream. The men paused for a moment, while the woman placed the candle on a chest of drawers, and slid the coffin-lid off, leaning it against the wall. They drew near; and as they laid their awful burthen lengthways on the bed by her side, one of the two men said —
“I’ll go to the feet, and do you go to the head.”
Upon this my Aunt, almost beside herself with terror, bounced up in the bed; and, instead of despatching her as she had expected, with a horrid roar and a screech, the men and woman fled from the room, and along the passage, leaving the coffin on the bed beside her.
“Winnie, Winnie — what is it?” cried my Aunt But no Winnie was there. In her stead lay a dead man, with a white-fringed cap on, and a black, stubbed beard, the growth of some three or four days, and a little line of the white of one eye shining between its half-closed lids.
It was now; my Aunt’s turn, and with a loud yell, and overturning the coffin, she jumped out of the bed, and ran screaming along the gallery, where she fell, and fainted on the floor.
When she came to herself, she was in her own room and bed once more, with Winnie beside her: and she exclaimed, so soon as recollection quite returned —
“Oh, save me, Winnie, save me.”
“You’re quite safe, ma’am, dear.”
“Where are we?”
“In the inn, ma’am.”
“Bolt the door, Winnie; bolt the door, and lock it — they’re all murderers.”
“Drink some water, ma’am.”
“Lock the door, you fool! We shall be murde
red.”
“The maid was here, ma’am, very sorry you were so frightened; but you went into the wrong room, and they could not help it.”
CHAPTER X.
HOW IT ALL HAPPENED.
GRADUALLY the facts came to light, though not fully for a long time afterward.
“The Good Woman” was one of those inns pleasantly known to our great-grandfathers. The old London road had run by its steps; and the wheels of old stagecoaches, postchaises, and waggons, had dustied its windows once. But unluckily for “The Good Woman, she stood upon the apex of a curve of that great channel of traffic which modern reform and a county presentment cut off; and the London road, henceforward running in a straight line from Dwiddleston to Huxbridge — fifteen miles — leaves “The Good Woman” full three miles on one side.
With the opening of the new line, and the “Crottworthy Arms,” the halcyon days of the old inn ended. Its gabled frontage, steep roofs, and capacious premises — a world too wide for its shrunk business — fell gradually to decay. The old proprietor retired to his farm in Cheshire; and his nephew succeeded, got desperately into debt, was sued in all directions, and judgments wielded by exasperated creditors glimmered terribly through the storm, threatening to dash him to pieces. At this crisis, the ill-starred innkeeper, having ventured by night to Maryston — all his excursions of late had been in the dark — took cold, and died of a catarrh in three days.
The inn, nearly reduced to a state of siege; the innkeeper himself having Ions been an invisible and intangible substance, hid away from warrants, arrests, and other personal dangers, among the dilapidated lumber rooms and garrets of the old house; the people thinking more of a moonlit flitting than of improving the traffic of the forlorn “Good Woman when the proprietor died, that procedure upon his part was kept as secret as every other of late had been, and not altogether without cause, for there were those among his incensed creditors who were by no means incapable of the legal barbarity of arresting his corpse.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 846