Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

by Henry S. Whitehead

  She was, indeed, far too happy to be seasick! She ate every meal with a sound appetite, and she liked everything but the coffee. That was, to her boarding-house nurtured palate, altogether too powerful a drink, and she soon reverted to her more accustomed tea.

  Her attention to the tea leaves diverted her fellow travelers greatly. By long practice she had become accustomed to mixing the tea about with her spoon so that the tea leaves would accumulate on the bottom of the cup, and then, deftly she would drink the remaining tea and set the cup down with a kind of snap and peer at the picture on the bottom. She had acquired great skill in discerning the meanings in these omens! Now for the first time in her life however, the patterns puzzled her. The word ‘bow’ kept turning up with monotonous frequency. Sometimes it would be an arrangement of the tea leaves like a tied ribbon; sometimes the very letters themselves made their appearance. One day she blushed to herself over the implication which she found. A queer little homunculus near the side of the cup bowed grotesquely to the figure of a seated figure at the bottom, and ‘beau’ was inevitable! Miss Abby hastily disarranged this embarrassing scene with her teaspoon lest any prying, neighborly eye should see it too and, perhaps, think her somehow unmaidenly!

  Then, too, the numbers four and seven would get themselves mixed in with the ‘bow’ pictures. Miss Abby went the length of publicity interpreting this to mean, under pressure of onlookers, that when her beau appeared he would be forty-seven years of age. ‘Or,’ said she archly, ‘perhaps it means that I shall be forty-seven when he makes his appearance!’ and she smiled at her fancy to the verge of blushing.

  She enjoyed every minute of that propitious voyage.

  At Gibraltar, she secured, after considerable bargaining with an opal-eyed nondescript, a lace mantilla for her cousin Emmaline in Bellow’s Falls, and this at a price thirty-five cents less than she had planned on for Emmaline’s present.

  This securing of presents for relatives and friends was part of a long-made plan. From Salviati’s in Venice she added largely to her store in the matter of mosaic brooches. In Bavaria she loaded up her luggage with somewhat bulkier gifts for the juvenile nieces and nephews in the shape of wooden toy-animals.

  Nearly every place contributed its quota to this impedimenta, until as the tour neared its end the list at last became complete. Every single present was bought. Everybody had been remembered. The list was checked.

  It was not, indeed, until that tour drew to a triumphant close with what has sometimes been described as ‘Seeing England in Five Days’, that it occurred to Miss Abby that in her concern for the others she had quite forgotten to expend the two dollars and a half which she had mentally set aside for the purchase of something for herself.

  It was three days before the date set for sailing for home when this fact popped into her head. They were in London. The Tower had been viewed en masse. So had St Paul’s Cathedral, The Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey, Poet’s Corner and all! Hampton Court had got a glance. So had several other places of interest, which had passed under the breathless purview of those personally conducted. The next day they were to journey to Limehouse and London Docks. Miss Abby thought of her souvenir at luncheon. They had come back to their hotel direct from Trafalgar Square, the party joker, who had urged the conductor to show them Sherlock Holmes’s house in Baker Street, having failed dismally! She decided that she would skip the regular program for the afternoon, and go shopping instead. It was the first item she had missed, that afternoon’s fly-about.

  At dinner, later, she seemed preoccupied. Bewildered among the riches of London town after a long shopping trip upon which she had looked at many things and had bought nothing, she had at last realized that she was ‘as good as lost’, and had enquired of a policeman the shortest route back to the hotel. He directed her, and the route led through a narrow, dingy street, little more than an alley, connecting two great thoroughfares. She had been much nearer the hotel than she had imagined. She had traversed this short-cut about halfway when she came before a small shop on the corner formed by the intersection of another alleyway. In the shop-window was displayed a miscellaneous collection of merchandise. There were ladies’ watches, paper-cutters, bangles of many kinds, old rings, silver and wooden book-markers, pocketbooks, various set and unset semi-precious stones of dubious appearance, umbrellas, a lone lorgnette which appeared second-hand, and a bead necklace. This last caught Miss Abby’s eye and she stopped to look at it. It was of medium-sized, pinkish beads. It was dusty and badly soiled, but it had a tiny gilt clasp which seemed to Miss Abby to set it off very well, and the beads themselves were well proportioned and nicely graded.

  Miss Abby had always – all her life – wanted a pink bead necklace. Here was one, modest, commending itself therefore to the taste of a self-respecting spinster a little past the first bloom of youth. This, too, it was probable, would be inexpensive, and that was a strong recommendation for it!

  Miss Abby, always a cautious soul, took rapid stock of the small shop, and decided that it appeared respectable. In this process she glanced at the doorway, which bore the number forty-seven. She smiled, remembering the omen of the tea-leaves. Across the alleyway her swiftly roving eye caught a street sign. It was dingy and the lettering was almost obliterated, but seeing it, Miss Abby came very near to having one of her ‘turns’. For the faded letters spelled BOW LANE!

  She gasped for breath, pressed her hand against her fluttering heart, and entered the shop almost grimly. The proprietor, wiping the crumbs of a tea-cake from his narrow face, and aroused by the tinkle of the little bell which the opening of the door sounded in his back room, emerged from that mysterious recess.

  ‘I’d like to look at that necklace, please,’ said Miss Abby, pointing to it where it hung in the shop-window.

  The shopkeeper detached the necklace from where it hung on a wire, blew upon it to free it from the surface dust, and placed it on the counter. Miss Abby picked it up and looked at it closely. Save that it badly needed a good scouring it was precisely what she wanted.

  ‘How much is it, please?’ she enquired.

  ‘Well now, nobody’s asked to see that there necklace,’ remarked the proprietor, as he poked at it with a soiled forefinger, ‘since I bought this ’ere shop with its stock and fixtures, nineteen year now come Michaelmas. It was one bit of the old stock at that, Miss. I’ll let you ’ave it for – well – say sixteen bob. ’Ow’s that, Miss?’

  Miss Abby did some mental arithmetic. Sixteen shillings! That would be about four dollars – three eighty-four. That was rather more than she had planned to spend on herself. Then she remembered that this was Old England and not New England! Here one was expected to ‘bargain’.

  ‘I’ll give you eight shillings,’ she said, crisply . . .

  They came to an agreement on the sum of twelve shillings, but Miss Abby could not quite bring herself to the point of closing the bargain and walking off with the necklace. She examined it again, the shopkeeper waiting in silence. It was fifty cents, or thereabouts, more than she had planned. Still! . . .

  She bought it at last, counting out the money carefully lest she make a mistake, and walked out with it wrapped up, in her pocket, in whitey-brown paper.

  She went straight to the hotel and took the necklace to her room. There she prepared some warm suds and soaked it. She had to change the water more than once. At last it was clean. She rinsed and dried it thoroughly. It looked much better now. There was a kind of shine to the beads which was very attractive. Then she polished the tiny gilt clasp as well as she could. She laid it away after wrapping it up, when she had it as clean as she could make it, and descended for dinner on the dot. Three days later she was en route for home.

  She took out her necklace several times aboard ship and looked at it. On the last evening aboard, the evening of The Concert, she wore it. No one noticed it, but that did not trouble Miss Abby. She had chosen it chiefly because it was plain and inconspicuous. She declared it with the
rest of her purchases at the value of two dollars and eighty-eight cents. The inspector glanced at her and then took one perfunctory glance at the contents of her grip, now covered with ‘etiquettes’ and pasted his little paster on the end, and she was ‘through’.

  She was well settled into her accustomed routine by Christmas. Her tour had supplied her with culture enough and memories enough to last her for the lifetime of more or less sordid drudgery which was the best she could possibly anticipate for the future. But Miss Abby wasted no time over gloomy anticipations. She accepted all of the few joyful things that came in her way and she sang a little tune as she dressed for the Christmas party in her boarding-house. She put on the necklace last of all, and glanced at it with approval in the glass as it hung gracefully about her slim but by no means unbeautiful neck. Then, almost running, she went through the hallway and downstairs.

  It was the usual country party. There were games, and a great deal of high-pitched conversation, and later, a substantial supper. It was long before the supper though that Miss Abby discovered the presence of a young man, a stranger to her, who seemed to glance at her in a certain way. She decided that the proper descriptive adjective was ‘respectful’. He looked at her respectfully, with interest. She was strong-minded and she knew that she was thirty-seven, but when she caught him looking at her for the fourth time, she could feel her heart speed up again slightly, and she said ‘Oh!’ almost out loud!

  For this was a very nice-looking young man, this stranger. He was, she considered, about her own age, perhaps a trifle more mature. He was still young, though! He was dressed quietly, in good taste, and his patent leather shoes gave him, Miss Abby considered, quite an urban touch. There was a suggestion of the man-of-the-world about those shoes – a look of sophistication. Miss Abby found herself cataloguing him. He looked like someone in a bank. He looked as though he might be, on Sunday, a Superintendent of a rather modern kind of Sunday School. That kind of a young man.

  Miss Abby’s heart gave an unmistakable flutter later when she observed the young man, in polite conversation with their hostess, and approaching her where she sat on a sofa, under the guardianship of a tall India-rubber plant.

  ‘Let me make you acquainted with Miss Tucker,’ said the landlady, on her arrival. ‘Miss Tucker, Mr Leverett, of Bellow’s Falls.’

  Mr Leverett of Bellow’s Falls bowed – a very nice bow, Miss Abby thought to herself. She murmured something appropriate to the introduction and Mr Leverett sat down beside her on the sofa and began to talk pleasantly.

  They put each other at ease immediately, without any conscious effort on the part of either. Almost at once the talk fell into a confidential tone, as though each had many things to say to the other – some time! Miss Abby could not help telling herself that Mr Leverett’s still entirely respectful gaze had something else behind it – something much more personal than the weather and the party, which topics had been so far exclusively discussed between them! There was a curious feeling, an indescribable kind of atmosphere, or glow, about those first few minutes of conversation, the kind of glow of which Romance is sometimes happily woven.

  When Mr Leverett switched from the weather and the party and very respectfully enquired if he might ask ‘a personal question’, Miss Abby, while far from surprised, felt her heart give one of those little jumps which by now she had learned to associate with an ‘experience’. She reassured herself with the consideration that there could hardly be any ‘personal question’ of any grave import which could well be asked after five minutes’ conversation on first acquaintance!

  ‘Why, certainly,’ she replied, very brightly, and looked up at him almist quizzically.

  Mr Leverett – he really was, said Miss Abby to herself, afterwards, a very nice young man – blushed, positively blushed.

  ‘I thought, perhaps, you wouldn’t mind my asking where you got that necklace you are wearing,’ said Mr Leverett, without more than two stammers. ‘You see, I’m in the jewelry business over at Bellow’s Falls, and I’m very much interested in anything like that. It’s rather odd, that necklace.’

  Miss Abby, such is the human heart, was at once relieved and vaguely disappointed.

  ‘It’s only a little thing I bought last Summer in London,’ she replied, taking it off and laying it, warm from her pretty throat, in Mr Leverett’s hand. ‘It’s pretty, I think,’ she continued as he looked closely at the necklace, ‘but it was very inexpensive. It’s only a trifle.’

  ‘Hm!’ remarked Mr Leverett, still looking closely at the necklace, ‘do you happen to know what the beads are made of?’

  ‘Why, really, I don’t think I ever noticed exactly. But I’ve always supposed they were a kind of good imitation of coral, or perhaps of carnelian. I’ve thought several times I got a pretty good bargain, don’t you?’

  ‘I think they are something else. The beads are of a different texture from either coral or carnelian. I’d certainly like to look at them under a magnifying-glass. Would you, er – mind – ah – telling me . . . O please forgive me! You see I’m a jeweler, and I’m so much interested! I was actually going to ask you how much . . . ’

  Again Mr Leverett blushed.

  ‘That’s all right,’ reassured Miss Abby, in an even tone. ‘It’s a perfectly proper question, I’m sure. I paid twelve shillings for them, about two dollars and eighty-eight cents.’

  Mr Leverett peered at the necklace closely, with a kind of professional squint as though he were looking at the works of a watch.

  ‘If it were not too preposterous,’ he said, slowly, ‘I’d say they were something like pearls, a very finely-made imitation of pearls, and colored, of course, artificially with that peculiar shade of pink which you naturally associated with coral or carnelian. Yes – very well made, indeed. You certainly got a tremendous bargain.’

  ‘How much should you say they might be worth?’ It was Miss Abby who blushed this time.

  Mr Leverett cogitated this question, rolling the extended string of beads over and over in his hands.

  ‘It’s very hard to put a price on anything like these,’ he remarked at last, judicially, ‘as you can easily see. They are very fine workmanship, almost “ancient”, I should say. Beautiful work – beautiful! It is real jewelers’ handwork of the best quality. The clasp, and the metal string, and the exact piercing all show fine work. To get a set like these, made today, you would certainly have to pay – um – let me see! Well, I should be inclined to think, about five hundred dollars.’ Then, as she exclaimed, ‘I’ll tell you what to do Miss Tucker. Why not take them to Boston and have them properly valued? You could take them into one of the great jewelry stores like Muffen’s, where they would be in a position to give you a proper estimate; to look at them with good glasses and all that. You see, these might be worth even more than five hundred dollars. I only made a very rough guess.’

  Miss Abby could hardly compose herself to sleep that night. Just suppose! Five hundred dollars! The complete expenses of her trip! It wouldn’t be right; it would not be fair to the man in the little shop there in Bow Lane, London! Miss Abby had a New England conscience – an old-fashioned one, in good working-order! Still, she was no fool. If they were of some considerable value, it was just the man’s sheer carelessness that had not found it out. He had confessed to having the beads for nineteen years!

  It occurred to her that she had several days before school started up again, and a little money in hand. She was not saving nowadays for a Europe Fund! It doesn’t cost such a terrible lot of money to get to Boston, and she could stay with her sister in Medford. She made up her mind to go abruptly, and with this anticipated adventure clasped close, she fell quickly asleeep.

  The next afternoon Miss Abby was asking for an interview with a member of the firm at Muffen’s jewelry store in Boston. She was received by a gentleman named Mr Hay. He listened gravely to her story, took the necklace, and requested her to return the next morning at eleven.

  She was promptly on h
and and found Mr Hay wearing an expression of restrained enthusiasm. He was very cordial, and received her as though he had known her for some time! Miss Abby sat, tight-lipped, awaiting the verdict.

  ‘I have made a very careful examination of your necklace,’ said Mr Hay, with some deliberation. ‘Two of our men in the store have also examined it at my request. We are at one in our conclusion. The necklace is of pink pearls, and these are among the most valuable of pearls when in perfect condition. A further and more exhaustive examination would have to be made, doubtless. But, as you said yesterday, you managed to get a real “bargain”. I think I may tell you at once that we are prepared, in case you wish to dispose of the pearls, to give you our cheque for six thousand dollars.’

  Miss Abby uttered a little gasp. Her eyes were shining. But she was careful, even in that overwhelming moment, not to interrupt Mr Hay, who had only paused, and seemed about to continue.

  ‘At the same time,’ he added, ‘we feel unwilling to take any undue advantage of our comparative ignorance of the true value of the necklace. We therefore feel that we should advise you, definitely, to take this course – ’ Mr Hay paused again, and continued.

  ‘We suggest that you allow our offer to stand. We are ready to carry through that arrangement at any time. But we suggest to you that you take the necklace first to New York, to Dufane’s, where Dr Schwartz, the pearl-expert is employed. Show the pearls to him and get his valuation. We do not imagine that it will be less than ours; it may very likely be more. In that case, it will be to your advantage to sell them elsewhere.’

  Mr Hay bowed Miss Abby politely out, and she emerged upon the street walking on air. She wasted no time. This was sound advice and she knew it. The next morning she bade her relatives goodbye and took the early train to New York.