I hastened to make some observation upon the exceptional softness of the day, and he answered me in a gentle, mellow voice, which it was almost startling to hear proceed from such bellicose lips.
“This is a very comfortable place,” he presently added.
“I am fond of walking in graveyards,” I rejoined deliberately ; flattering myself that I had struck a vein that might lead to something.
I was encouraged; he turned and fixed me with his duskily glowing eyes. Then very gravely—“Walking, yes. Take all your exercise now. Some day you will have to settle down in a graveyard in a fixed position.”
“Very true,” said I. “But you know there are some people who are said to take exercise even after that day.”
He had been looking at me still; at this he looked away.
“You don’t understand?” I said, gently.
He continued to gaze straight before him.
“Some people, you know, walk about after death,” I went on.
At last he turned, and looked at me more portentously than ever. “You don’t believe that,” he said simply.
“How do you know I don’t?”
“Because you are young and foolish.” This was said without acerbity—even kindly; but in the tone of an old man whose consciousness of his own heavy experience made everything else seem light.
“I am certainly young,” I answered; “but I don’t think that, on the whole, I am foolish. But say I don’t believe in ghosts—most people would be on my side.”
“Most people are fools!” said the old man.
I let the question rest, and talked of other things. My companion seemed on his guard, he eyed me defiantly, and made brief answers to my remarks; but I nevertheless gathered an impression that our meeting was an agreeable thing to him, and even a social incident of some importance. He was evidently a lonely creature, and his opportunities for gossip were rare. He had had troubles, and they had detached him from the world, and driven him back upon himself ; but the social chord in his antiquated soul was not entirely broken, and I was sure he was gratified to find that it could still feebly resound. At last, he began to ask questions himself; he inquired whether I was a student.
“I am a student of divinity,” I answered.
“Of divinity?”
“Of theology. I am studying for the ministry.”
At this he eyed me with peculiar intensity—after which his gaze wandered away again. “There are certain things you ought to know, then,” he said at last.
“I have a great desire for knowledge,” I answered. “What things do you mean?”
He looked at me again awhile, but without heeding my question.
“I like your appearance,” he said. “You seem to me a sober lad.”
“Oh, I am perfectly sober!” I exclaimed—yet departing for a moment from my soberness.
“I think you are fair-minded,” he went on.
“I don’t any longer strike you as foolish, then?” I asked.
“I stick to what I said about people who deny the power of departed spirits to return. They are fools!” And he rapped fiercely with his staff on the earth.
I hesitated a moment, and then, abruptly, “You have seen a ghost!” I said.
He appeared not at all startled.
“You are right, sir!” he answered with great dignity. “With me it’s not a matter of cold theory—I have not had to pry into old books to learn what to believe. I know! With these eyes I have beheld the departed spirit standing before me as near as you are!” And his eyes, as he spoke, certainly looked as if they had rested upon strange things.
I was irresistibly impressed—I was touched with credulity.
“And was it very terrible?” I asked.
“I am an old soldier—I am not afraid!”
“When was it?—where was it?” I asked.
He looked at me mistrustfully, and I saw that I was going too fast.
“Excuse me from going into particulars,” he said. “I am not at liberty to speak more fully. I have told you so much, because I cannot bear to hear this subject spoken of lightly. Remember in future, that you have seen a very honest old man who told you—on his honor—that he had seen a ghost!” And he got up, as if he thought he had said enough. Reserve, shyness, pride, the fear of being laughed at, the memory, possibly, of former strokes of sarcasm—all this, on one side, had its weight with him; but I suspected that on the other, his tongue was loosened by the garrulity of old age, the sense of solitude, and the need of sympathy—and perhaps, also, by the friendliness which he had been so good as to express toward myself. Evidently it would be unwise to press him, but I hoped to see him again.
“To give greater weight to my words,” he added, “let me mention my name—Captain Diamond, sir. I have seen service.”
“I hope I may have the pleasure of meeting you again,” I said.
“The same to you, sir!” And brandishing his stick portentously—though with the friendliest intentions—he marched stiffly away.
I asked two or three persons—selected with discretion—whether they knew anything about Captain Diamond, but they were quite unable to enlighten me. At last, suddenly, I smote my forehead, and, dubbing myself a dolt, remembered that I was neglecting a source of information to which I had never applied in vain. The excellent person at whose table I habitually dined, and who dispensed hospitality to students at so much a week, had a sister as good as herself, and of conversational powers more varied. This sister, who was known as Miss Deborah, was an old maid in all the force of the term. She was deformed, and she never went out of the house; she sat all day at the window, between a bird-cage and a flower-pot, stitching small linen articles—mysterious bands and frills. She wielded, I was assured, an exquisite needle, and her work was highly prized. In spite of her deformity and her confinement, she had a little, fresh, round face, and an imperturbable serenity of spirit. She had also a very quick little wit of her own, she was extremely observant, and she had a high relish for a friendly chat. Nothing pleased her so much as to have you—especially, I think, if you were a young divinity student—move your chair near her sunny window, and settle yourself for twenty minutes’ “talk.” “Well, sir,” she used always to say, “what is the latest monstrosity in Biblical criticism?”—for she used to pretend to be horrified at the rationalistic tendency of the age. But she was an inexorable little philosopher, and I am convinced that she was a keener rationalist than any of us, and that, if she had chosen, she could have propounded questions that would have made the boldest of us wince. Her window commanded the whole town—or rather, the whole country. Knowledge came to her as she sat singing, with her little, cracked voice, in her low rocking-chair. She was the first to learn everything, and the last to forget it. She had the town gossip at her fingers’ ends, and she knew everything about people she had never seen. When I asked her how she had acquired her learning, she said simply—“Oh, I observe!” “Observe closely enough,” she once said, “and it doesn’t matter where you are. You may be in a pitch-dark closet. All you want is something to start with; one thing leads to another, and all things are mixed up. Shut me up in a dark closet and I will observe after a while, that some places in it are darker than others. After that (give me time), and I will tell you what the President of the United States is going to have for dinner.” Once I paid her a compliment. “Your observation,” I said, “is as fine as your needle, and your statements are as true as your stitches.”
Of course Miss Deborah had heard of Captain Diamond. He had been much talked about many years before, but he had survived the scandal that attached to his name.
“What was the scandal?” I asked.
“He killed his daughter.”
“Killed her?” I cried; “How so?”
“Oh, not with a pistol, or a dagger, or a dose of arsenic! With his tongue. Talk of women’s tongues! He cursed her—with some horrible oath—and she died!”
“What had she done?”
“She had received a visit from a young man who loved her, and whom he had forbidden the house.”
“The house,” I said—“ah yes! The house is out in the country, two or three miles from here, on a lonely cross-road.”
Miss Deborah looked sharply at me, as she bit her thread.
“Ah, you know about the house?” she said.
“A little,” I answered; “I have seen it. But I want you to tell me more.”
But here Miss Deborah betrayed an incommunicativeness which was most unusual.
“You wouldn’t call me superstitious, would you?” she asked.
“You?—you are the quintessence of pure reason.”
“Well, every thread has its rotten place, and every needle its grain of rust. I would rather not talk about that house.”
“You have no idea how you excite my curiosity!” I said.
“I can feel for you. But it would make me very nervous.”
“What harm can come to you?” I asked.
“Some harm came to a friend of mine.” And Miss Deborah gave a very positive nod.
“What had your friend done?”
“She had told me Captain Diamond’s secret, which he had told her with a mighty mystery. She had been an old flame of his, and he took her into his confidence. He bade her tell no one, and assured her that if she did, something dreadful would happen to her.”
“And what happened to her?”
“She died.”
“Oh, we are all mortal!” I said. “Had she given him a promise?”
“She had not taken it seriously, she had not believed him. She repeated the story to me, and three days afterward, she was taken with inflammation of the lungs. A month afterward, here where I sit now, I was stitching her grave-clothes. Since then, I have never mentioned what she told me.”
“Was it very strange?”
“It was strange, but it was ridiculous too. It is a thing to make you shudder and to make you laugh, both. But you can’t worry it out of me. I am sure that if I were to tell you, I should immediately break a needle in my finger, and die the next week of lock-jaw.”
I retired, and urged Miss Deborah no further; but every two or three days, after dinner, I came and sat down by her rocking-chair. I made no further allusion to Captain Diamond; I sat silent, clipping tape with her scissors. At last, one day, she told me I was looking poorly. I was pale.
“I am dying of curiosity,” I said. “I have lost my appetite. I have eaten no dinner.”
“Remember Blue Beard’s wife!” said Miss Deborah.
“One may as well perish by the sword as by famine!” I answered.
Still she said nothing, and at last I rose with a melodramatic sigh and departed. As I reached the door she called me and pointed to the chair I had vacated. “I never was hard-hearted,” she said. “Sit down, and if we are to perish, may we at least perish together.” And then, in very few words, she communicated what she knew of Captain Diamond’s secret. “He was a very high-tempered old man, and though he was very fond of his daughter, his will was law. He had picked out a husband for her, and given her due notice. Her mother was dead, and they lived alone together. The house had been Mrs. Diamond’s own marriage portion; the Captain, I believe, hadn’t a penny. After his marriage they had come to live there, and he had begun to work the farm. The poor girl’s lover was a young man with whiskers from Boston. The Captain came in one evening and found them together; he collared the young man, and hurled a terrible curse at the poor girl. The young man cried that she was his wife, and he asked her if it was true. She said, No! Thereupon Captain Diamond, his fury growing fiercer, repeated his imprecation, ordered her out of the house, and disowned her forever. She swooned away, but her father went raging off and left her. Several hours later, he came back and found the house empty. On the table was a note from the young man telling him that he had killed his daughter, repeating the assurance that she was his own wife, and declaring that he himself claimed the sole right to commit her remains to earth. He had carried the body away in a gig! Captain Diamond wrote him a dreadful note in answer, saying that he didn’t believe his daughter was dead, but that, whether or no, she was dead to him. A week later, in the middle of the night, he saw her ghost. Then, I suppose, he was convinced. The ghost re-appeared several times, and finally began regularly to haunt the house. It made the old man very uncomfortable, for little by little his passion had passed away, and he was given up to grief. He determined at last to leave the place, and tried to sell it or rent it; but meanwhile the story had gone abroad, the ghost had been seen by other persons, the house had a bad name, and it was impossible to dispose of it. With the farm, it was the old man’s only property, and his only means of subsistence; if he could neither live in it nor rent it he was beggared. But the ghost had no mercy, as he had had none. He struggled for six months, and at last he broke down. He put on his old blue cloak and took up his staff, and prepared to wander away and beg his bread. Then the ghost relented, and proposed a compromise. ‘Leave the house to me!’ it said; ‘I have marked it for my own. Go off and live elsewhere. But to enable you to live, I will be your tenant, since you can find no other. I will hire the house of you and pay you a certain rent.’ And the ghost named a sum. The old man consented, and he goes every quarter to collect his rent!”
I laughed at this recital, but I confess I shuddered too, for my own observation had exactly confirmed it. Had I not been witness of one of the Captain’s quarterly visits, had I not all but seen him sit watching his spectral tenant count out the rent-money, and when he trudged away in the dark, had he not a little bag of strangely gotten coin hidden in the folds of his old blue cloak? I imparted none of these reflections to Miss Deborah, for I was determined that my observations should have a sequel, and I promised myself the pleasure of treating her to my story in its full maturity. “Captain Diamond,” I asked, “has no other known means of subsistence?”
“None whatever. He toils not, neither does he spin—his ghost supports him. A haunted house is valuable property !”
“And in what coin does the ghost pay?”
“In good American gold and silver. It has only this peculiarity—that the pieces are all dated before the young girl’s death. It’s a strange mixture of matter and spirit!”
“And does the ghost do things handsomely; is the rent large?”
“The old man, I believe, lives decently, and has his pipe and his glass. He took a little house down by the river; the door is sidewise to the street, and there is a little garden before it. There he spends his days, and has an old colored woman to do for him. Some years ago, he used to wander about a good deal, he was a familiar figure in the town, and most people knew his legend. But of late he has drawn back into his shell; he sits over his fire, and curiosity has forgotten him. I suppose he is falling into his dotage. But I am sure, I trust,” said Miss Deborah in conclusion, “that he won’t outlive his faculties or his powers of locomotion, for, if I remember rightly, it was part of the bargain that he should come in person to collect his rent.”
We neither of us seemed likely to suffer any especial penalty for Miss Deborah’s indiscretion; I found her, day after day, singing over her work, neither more nor less active than usual. For myself, I boldly pursued my observations. I went again, more than once, to the great graveyard, but I was disappointed in my hope of finding Captain Diamond there. I had a prospect, however, which afforded me compensation. I shrewdly inferred that the old man’s quarterly pilgrimages were made upon the last day of the old quarter. My first sight of him had been on the 31st of December, and it was probable that he would return to his haunted home on the last day of March. This was near at hand; at last it arrived. I betook myself late in the afternoon to the old house on the cross-road, supposing that the hour of twilight was the appointed season. I was not wrong. I had been hovering about for a short time, feeling very much like a restless ghost myself, when he appeared in the same manner as before, and wearing the same costume. I again conc
ealed myself, and saw him enter the house with the ceremonial which he had used on the former occasion. A light appeared successively in the crevice of each pair of shutters, and I opened the window which had yielded to my importunity before. Again I saw the great shadow on the wall, motionless and solemn. But I saw nothing else. The old man re-appeared at last, made his fantastic salaam before the house, and crept away into the dusk.
One day, more than a month after this, I met him again at Mount Auburn. The air was full of the voice of spring; the birds had come back and were twittering over their winter’s travels, and a mild west wind was making a thin murmur in the raw verdure. He was seated on a bench in the sun, still muffled in his enormous mantle, and he recognized me as soon as I approached him. He nodded at me as if he were an old Bashaw giving the signal for my decapitation, but it was apparent that he was pleased to see me.
“I have looked for you here more than once,” I said. “You don’t come often.”
Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves And Ghosts - 25 Classic Stories Of The Supernatural Page 21