He wanted something or someone to puff him into notoriety—a brother at Court—a lord’s leg to mend—a rich wife to give him prestige in Society; and in his absence of this something or someone, he had grown grey-haired and faint-hearted while labouring for a world which utterly despises its most obsequious servants.
“Clatter along the streets with a pair of fine horses, snub the middle classes, and drive over the commonalty—that is the way to compass wealth and popularity in England,” said Hertford O’Donnell, bitterly; and as the man desired wealth and popularity, he sat before his fire, with a foot on each hob, and a short pipe in his mouth, considering how he might best obtain the means to clatter along the streets in his carriage, and splash plebeians with mud from his wheels like the best.
In Dublin he could, by means of his name and connection, have done well; but then he was not in Dublin, neither did he want to be. The bitterest memories of his life were inseparable from the very name of the Green Island, and he had no desire to return to it.
Besides, in Dublin, heiresses are not quite so plentiful as in London; and an heiress, Hertford O’Donnell had decided, would do more for him than years of steady work.
A rich wife could clear him of debt, introduce him to fashionable practice, afford him that measure of social respectability which a medical bachelor invariably lacks, deliver him from the loneliness of Gerrard Street, and the domination of Mr. and Mrs. Coles.
To most men, deliberately bartering away their independence for money seems so prosaic a business that they strive to gloss it over even to themselves, and to assign every reason for their choice, save that which is really the influencing one.
Not so, however, with Hertford O’Donnell. He sat beside the fire scoffing over his proposed bargain—thinking of the lady’s age, her money bags, her desirable house in town, her seat in the country, her snobbishness, her folly.
“It could be a fitting ending,” he sneered, “and why I did not settle the matter tonight passes my comprehension. I am not a fool, to be frightened with old women’s tales; and yet I must have turned white. I felt I did, and she asked me whether I were ill. And then to think of my being such an idiot as to ask her if she had heard anything like a cry, as though she would be likely to hear that, she with her poor parvenu blood, which I often imagine must have been mixed with some of her father’s strong pickling vinegar. What a deuce could I have been dreaming about? I wonder what it really was.” And Hertford O’Donnell pushed his hair back off his forehead, and took another draught from the too familiar tumbler, which was placed conveniently on the chimney-piece.
“After expressly making up my mind to propose, too!” he mentally continued. “Could it have been conscience—that myth, which somebody, who knew nothing about the matter, said, ‘Makes cowards of us all’? I don’t believe in conscience; and even if there be such a thing capable of being developed by sentiment and cultivation, why should it trouble me? I have no intention of wronging Miss Janice Price Ingot, not the least. Honestly and fairly I shall marry her; honestly and fairly I shall act by her. An old wife is not exactly an ornamental article of furniture in a man’s house; and I do not know that the fact of her being well gilded makes her look any handsomer. But she shall have no cause for complaint; and I will go and dine with her tomorrow, and settle the matter.”
Having arrived at which resolution, Mr. O’Donnell arose, kicked down the fire—burning hollow—with the heel of his boot, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, emptied his tumbler, and bethought him it was time to go to bed. He was not in the habit of taking his rest so early as a quarter to twelve o’clock; but he felt unusually weary—tired mentally and bodily—and lonely beyond all power of expression.
“The fair Janet would be better than this,” he said, half aloud; and then, with a start and a shiver, and a blanched face, he turned sharply round, whilst a low, sobbing, wailing cry echoed mournfully through the room. No form of words could give an idea of the sound. The plaintiveness of the Aeolian harp—that plaintiveness which so soon affects and lowers the highest spirits—would have seemed wildly gay in comparison with the sadness of the cry which seemed floating in the air. As the summer wind comes and goes amongst the trees, so that mournful wail came and went—came and went. It came in a rush of sound, like a gradual crescendo managed by a skilful musician, and died away in a lingering note, so gently that the listener could scarcely tell the exact moment when it faded into utter silence.
I say faded, for it disappeared as the coast line disappears in the twilight, and there was total stillness in the apartment.
Then, for the first time, Hertford O’Donnell looked at his dog, and beholding the creature crouched into a corner beside the fireplace, called upon him to come out.
His voice sounded strange even to himself, and apparently the dog thought so too, for he made no effort to obey the summons.
“Come here, sir,” his master repeated, and then the animal came crawling reluctantly forward with his hair on end, his eyes almost starting from his head, trembling violently, as the surgeon, who caressed him, felt.
“So you heard it, Brian?” he said to the dog. “And so your ears are sharper than Miss Ingot’s, old fellow. It’s a mighty queer thing to think of, being favoured with a visit from a Banshee in Gerrard Street; and as the lady has travelled so far, I only wish I knew whether there is any sort of refreshment she would like to take after her long journey.”
He spoke loudly, and with a certain mocking defiance, seeming to think the phantom he addressed would reply; but when he stopped at the end of his sentence, no sound came through the stillness. There was a dead silence in the room—a silence broken only by the falling of cinders on the hearth and the breathing of his dog.
“If my visitor would tell me,” he proceeded, “for whom this lamentation is being made, whether for myself, or for some member of my illustrious family, I should feel immensely obliged. It seems too much honour for a poor surgeon to have such attention paid him. Good Heavens! What is that?” he exclaimed, as a ring, loud and peremptory, woke all the echoes in the house, and brought his housekeeper, in a state of distressing dishabille, “out of her warm bed”, as she subsequently stated, to the head of the staircase.
Across the hall Hertford O’Donnell strode, relieved at the prospect of speaking to any living being. He took no precaution of putting up the chain, but flung the door wide. A dozen burglars would have proved welcome in comparison with that ghostly intruder he had been interviewing; therefore, as has been said, he threw the door wide, admitting a rush of wet, cold air, which made poor Mrs. Coles’ few remaining teeth chatter in her head.
“Who is there? What do you want?” asked the surgeon, seeing no person, and hearing no voice. “Who is there? Why the devil can’t you speak?”
When even this polite exhortation failed to elicit an answer, he passed out into the night and looked up the street and down the street, to see nothing but the driving rain and the blinking lights.
“If this goes on much longer I shall soon think I must be either mad or drunk,” he muttered, as he re-entered the house and locked and bolted the door once more.
“Lord’s sake! What is the matter, sir?” asked Mrs. Coles, from the upper flight, careful only to reveal the borders of her night-cap to Mr. O’Donnell’s admiring gaze. “Is anybody killed? Have you to go out, sir?”
“It was only a run-away ring,” he answered, trying to reassure himself with an explanation he did not in his heart believe.
“Run-away—I’d run away them!” murmured Mrs. Coles, as she retired to the conjugal couch, where Coles was, to quote her own expression, “snoring like a pig through it all”.
Almost immediately afterwards she heard her master ascend the stairs and close his bedroom door.
“Madam will surely be too much of a gentlewoman to intrude here,” thought the surgeon, scoffing even at his
own fears; but when he lay down he did not put out his light, and made Brian leap up and crouch on the coverlet beside him.
The man was fairly frightened, and would have thought it no discredit to his manhood to acknowledge as much. He was not afraid of death, he was not afraid of trouble, he was not afraid of danger; but he was afraid of the Banshee; and as he lay with his hand on the dog’s head, he recalled the many stories he had been told concerning this family retainer in the days of his youth.
He had not thought about her for years and years. Never before had he heard her voice himself. When his brother died she had not thought it necessary to travel up to Dublin and give him notice of the impending catastrophe. “If she had, I would have gone down to Calgillan, and perhaps saved his life,” considered the surgeon. “I wonder who this is for? If for me, that will settle my debts and my marriage. If I could be quite certain it was either of the old people, I would start tomorrow.”
Then vaguely his mind wandered on to think of every Banshee story he had ever heard in his life. About the beautiful lady with the wreath of flowers, who sat on the rocks below Red Castle, in the County Antrim, crying till one of the sons died for love of her; about the Round Chamber at Dunluce, which was swept clean by the Banshee every night; about the bed in a certain great house in Ireland, which was slept in constantly, although no human being ever passed in or out after dark; about that General Officer who, the night before Waterloo, said to a friend, “I have heard the Banshee, and shall not come off the field alive tomorrow; break the news gently to poor Carry”; and who, nevertheless, coming safe off the field, had subsequently news about poor Carry broken tenderly and pitifully to him; about the lad, who, aloft in the rigging, hearing through the night a sobbing and wailing coming over the waters, went down to the captain and told him he was afraid they were somehow out of their reckoning, just in time to save the ship, which, when morning broke, they found but for his warning would have been on the rocks. It was blowing great guns, and the sea was all in a fret and turmoil, and they could sometimes see in the trough of the waves, as down a valley, the cruel black reefs they had escaped.
On deck the captain stood speaking to the boy who had saved them, and asking how he knew of their danger; and when the lad told him, the captain laughed, and said her ladyship had been outwitted that time.
But the boy answered, with a grave shake of his head, that the warning was either for him or his, and that if he got safe to port there would be bad tidings waiting for him from home; whereupon the captain bade him go below, and get some brandy and lie down.
He got the brandy, and he lay down, but he never rose again; and when the storm abated—when a great calm succeeded to the previous tempest—there was a very solemn funeral at sea; and on their arrival at Liverpool the captain took a journey to Ireland to tell a widowed mother how her only son died, and to bear his few effects to the poor desolate soul.
And Hertford O’Donnell thought again about his own father riding full-chase across country, and hearing, as he galloped by a clump of plantation, something like a sobbing and wailing. The hounds were in full cry, but he still felt, as he afterwards expressed it, that there was something among those trees he could not pass; and so he jumped off his horse, and hung the reins over the branch of a Scotch fir, and beat the cover well, but not a thing could he find in it.
Then, for the first time in his life, Miles O’Donnell turned his horse’s head from the hunt, and, within a mile of Calgillan, met a man running to tell him his brother’s gun had burst, and injured him mortally.
And he remembered the story also, of how Mary O’Donnell, his great aunt, being married to a young Englishman, heard the Banshee as she sat one evening waiting for his return; and of how she, thinking the bridge by which he often came home unsafe for horse and man, went out in a great panic, to meet and entreat him to go round by the main road for her sake. Sir Edward was riding along in the moonlight, making straight for the bridge, when he beheld a figure dressed all in white crossing it. Then there was a crash, and the figure disappeared.
The lady was rescued and brought back to the hall; but next morning there were two dead bodies within its walls—those of Lady Eyreton and her still-born son.
Quicker than I write them, these memories chased one another through Hertford O’Donnell’s brain; and there was one more terrible memory than any, which would recur to him, concerning an Irish nobleman who, seated alone in his great town-house in London, heard the Banshee, and rushed out to get rid of the phantom, which wailed in his ear, nevertheless, as he strode down Piccadilly. And then the surgeon remembered how that nobleman went with a friend to the Opera, feeling sure that there no Banshee, unless she had a box, could find admittance, until suddenly he heard her singing up amongst the highest part of the scenery, with a terrible mournfulness, and a pathos which made the primadonna’s tenderest notes seem harsh by comparison.
As he came out, some quarrel arose between him and a famous fire-eater, against whom he stumbled; and the result was that the next afternoon there was a new Lord—vice Lord—, killed in a duel with Captain Bravo.
Memories like these are not the most enlivening possible; they are apt to make a man fanciful, and nervous, and wakeful; but as time ran on, Hertford O’Donnell fell asleep, with his candle still burning, and Brian’s cold nose pressed against his hand.
He dreamt of his mother’s family—the Hertfords of Artingbury, Yorkshire, far-off relatives of Lord Hertford—so far off that even Mrs. O’Donnell held no clue to the genealogical maze.
He thought he was at Artingbury, fishing; that it was a misty summer morning, and the fish rising beautifully. In his dreams he hooked one after another, and the boy who was with him threw them into the basket.
At last there was one more difficult to land than the others; and the boy, in his eagerness to watch the sport, drew nearer and nearer to the brink, while the fisher, intent on his prey, failed to notice his companion’s danger.
Suddenly there was a cry, a splash, and the boy disappeared from sight.
Next instance he rose again, however, and then, for the first time, Hertford O’Donnell saw his face.
It was one he knew well.
In a moment he plunged into the water, and struck out for the lad. He had him by the hair, he was turning to bring him back to land, when the stream suddenly changed into a wide, wild, shoreless sea, where the billows were chasing one another with a mad demoniac mirth.
For a while O’Donnell kept the lad and himself afloat. They were swept under the waves, and came up again, only to see larger waves rushing towards them; but through all, the surgeon never loosened his hold, until a tremendous billow, engulfing them both, tore the boy from his grasp.
With the horror of his dream upon him he awoke, to hear a voice quite distinctly:
“Go to the hospital—go at once!”
The surgeon started up in bed, rubbing his eyes, and looked around. The candle was flickering faintly in its socket. Brian, with his ears pricked forward, had raised his head at his master’s sudden movement.
Everything was quiet, but still those words were ringing m his ear:
“Go to the hospital—go at once!
The tremendous peal of the bell over night, and this sentence, seemed to be simultaneous.
That he was wanted at Guy’s—wanted imperatively—came to O’Donnell like an inspiration. Neither sense nor reason had anything to do with the conviction that roused him out of bed, and made him dress as speedily as possible, and grope his way down the staircase, Brian following.
He opened the front door, and passed out into the darkness. The rain was over, and the stars were shining as he pursued his way down Newport Market, and thence, winding in and out in a south-easterly direction, through Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Old Square to Chancery Lane, whence he proceeded to St. Paul’s.
Along the de
serted streets he resolutely continued his walk. He did not know what he was going to Guy’s for. Some instinct was urging him on, and he neither strove to combat nor control it. Only once did the thought of turning back cross his mind, and that was the archway leading into Old Square. There he had paused for a moment, asking himself whether he were not gone stark, staring mad; but Guy’s seemed preferable to the haunted house in Gerrard Street, and he walked resolutely on, determined to say, if any surprise were expressed at his appearance, that he had been sent for.
Sent for?—yea, truly; but by whom?
On through Cannon Street; on over London Bridge, where the lights flickered in the river, and the sullen splash of the water flowing beneath the arches, washing the stone piers, could be heard, now the human din was hushed and lulled to sleep. On, thinking of many things: of the days of his youth; of his dead brother; of his father’s heavily-encumbered estate; of the fortune his mother had vowed she would leave to some charity rather than to him, if he refused to marry according to her choice; of his wild life in London; of the terrible cry he had heard over-night—that unearthly wail which he could not drive from his memory even when he entered Guy’s, and confronted the porter, who said:
“You have been sent for, sir; did you meet the messenger?”
Like one in a dream, Hertford O’Donnell heard him; like one in a dream, also, he asked what was the matter.
“Bad accident, sir; fire; fell off a balcony—unsafe—old building. Mother and child—a son; child with compound fracture of thigh.”
This, the joint information of porter and house-surgeon, mingled together, and made a boom in Mr. O’Donnell’s ears like the sound of the sea breaking on a shingly shore.
Only one sentence he understood properly—“Immediate amputation necessary.” At this point he grew cool; he was the careful, cautious, successful surgeon, in a moment.
The Fifth Ghost Story Megapack 25 Classic Haunts Page 34