by Mark Hansom
“Will you have something to drink?” I interrupted, asking the question not because I thought there was the least likelihood of his accepting, but because I was curiously thrilled by his manner and felt the need of something to steady my pulses. Makepeace had suddenly been transformed from the old servant — “scratching about trying to make ends meet,” as my cousin had put it only the day before — into a voice from the dead past.
“If the liberty will be excused,” he said. “This is a great day, Mister Martin; and if it weren’t for the fact that a young soul has been cut off suddenly, I would — ”
He did not finish the sentence, but I knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to say that he would throw his hat into the air and dance a jig.
And at the same time I understood what he had meant when he said, on my first coming into the flat that night, that he had hoped to be the one to tell me the news. And I understood the meaning of the lighted hall. To Makepeace the affairs of my family were the breath of life; and the fact that I had come into the whole of the estates and fortune was to him, who had watched disputes being carried on through generations, enough to make this a day among days, a day when history was being made, a day for unrestrained rejoicing — even a day on which he might drink with the master.
I went to the sideboard (my sitting-room and dining-room were one and the same) and brought forward a tray. Makepeace was for doing this, but I made him keep his seat.
Nevertheless, he did stand up — with a glass in his hand.
“To the Family!” he said, in rather a shaky voice. “To the return of its glory, and to the end of strife!”
We clinked glasses.
At first I was conscious of a feeling of awkwardness, as though this were a pretty piece of sentimental make-believe that I would be ashamed to be caught in. But my old servant’s moist eyes and his voice that was shaky with emotion and sincerity caught me all of a sudden; and when I had drunk I set down my glass and clasped his hand in both of mine.
And after a while, when we were seated again, I told him that I had, that very day, become unofficially engaged to Miss Sylvia Vernon. And he knew all about Miss Sylvia Vernon, though he had never set eyes upon her — that is to say, he knew who her parents were, and who her uncles and aunts were, and in what distant way she was related to this nobleman and the other nobleman, and so on.
His congratulation occupied a good few minutes.
“And the family of Strange,” he concluded, “will fairly come back to its old glory . . . You’ll have sons — Heaven grant that you may have sons! — so that there’ll never be lacking an heir. And as you’re making such a fair start of it — building up a new family, as you might say — maybe you’ll lay the ghost as well.”
“Lay the ghost!” I echoed, suddenly brought back to the affairs of the moment.
“Well, well!” he said, with, I thought, a glint of amusement in his eye. “There’s been talk of a ghost; but there’s hardly a family of any age that hasn’t had a ghost of some sort, if you believe all you hear. And the family of Strange have certainly had enough trouble one way and another to make anybody think they had more than one ghost stumping about. . .. But I was speaking about Mister Michael’s grandfather — Sir Osmond Garway.”
I settled myself to listen, and as the recital proceeded I became more and more intensely interested, for I began to suspect that the facts had a very direct bearing on my own experiences.
“When I was a lad,” Makepeace went on, “I went into your family’s service. (I’m speaking of sixty to sixty-five years ago.) Your grandfather, Abraham Strange, was the head of the house then. He was a young man, about your own age — maybe a bit older — and he and his mother lived, of course, in Hampshire, at Bolton Towers. Now Abraham had a friend, this Sir Osmond Garway, that he had picked up at college. Though why he wanted to pick up such a thoroughgoing bad lot I could never fathom, for Abraham, your grandfather, was one of the quietest men I ever seen — always reading, he was, and studying and what not.
“Anyway, young Sir Osmond was often down at Bolton Towers, and the two of them seemed to hit it off uncommonly well, all things considered. It was when the girl came on the scene that things began to shape somewhat different.
“This girl was called Cecilia, and a regular highflyer she was. Abraham brought her along — I don’t know where he found her; but before very long she was a regular visitor. And everybody, of course, thought that she was to be the mistress of Bolton Towers, though she wasn’t the sort that you would expect Abraham to marry — any more than you would think Abraham would make a friend of Sir Osmond. But there you are.
“Well, he didn’t marry her. Sir Osmond married her, which was more in keeping, as you might say. But it hurt Abraham, I know that, for she was a pretty slip of a thing for all her high-flying ways and her rampageous temper.
“Sir Osmond and his lady used to come about the place pretty much as before, and Abraham never gave a sign but what he was perfectly satisfied with the way things had panned out.
“Then he got married — Abraham, I mean. And everybody thought that it was as well that he had waited, for the girl he picked was exactly the girl you would imagine would suit him — and so she did and she made him a good wife.
“And in the meantime Sir Osmond and Lady Garway weren’t hitting it off none too grand. And Lady Garway had a daughter, when Sir Osmond wanted a son, and they had a row over that — as though such things aren’t in the hands of Providence. But it was only that they had got out of patience with each other, and there’s no reasonableness when people are out of patience with each other.
“Well, the upshot of that was that Lady Garway took it into her head to live abroad for the best part of the year, and Sir Osmond used to come down to Bolton Towers for week-ends just as he used to do in the old days before Cecilia came on the scene.
“But Abraham, even though he had such a wonderfully pleasant wife, used to spend the most of his time in the library; and so it came about that Sir Osmond — that crawling snake in the grass — began to take particular notice of the mistress. And then the thing happened.
“I might never have known anything about it — and I would have had a happier life if I hadn’t — but for one of the tenants calling one evening after the dinner was over. This tenant wanted to see the master about something or other and wouldn’t be put off. He was the dangdest determined fellow you ever see, by name Marston, but that’s got nothing to do with it, except that to keep the man quiet I went to tell the master.
“I couldn’t find the master. But this Marston fellow said that I must find the master and that he wouldn’t move from those front steps until I did find him. So off I went again, and I searched all the inside of the house; and when I found that he wasn’t in any of the public rooms and wasn’t in his own suite, I started on the outside, for it was a middling fine night, I remember, and I thought as maybe the master was having a stroll about the grounds.
“And sure enough I did come across him, down yonder by the shrubbery — where you, sir, and Mister Michael and that red-headed rascal of the steward’s used to play cricket and quarrel all the time. It was there, under the trees, that I found him — him and Sir Osmond, as I could see by the moon’s light.
“I was going a step at a time along the edge of the lawn, wondering whether I ought to worry him or not; and when I got close enough I could hear that the two of them were having high words. I stopped and turned tail, thinking to myself that Marston could go hang and wait on the steps for the rest of the night if he felt like it. I wasn’t going to risk being sworn at for none of the tenants, however urgent their business might be.
“But I didn’t go far. I’m as curious as the next one about other folk’s affairs, and I could hear that the words were flying pretty thick. So I stopped and crept back, and got by the end of that clump of rhododendrons by the wall of the orchard. You know where I mean. It was the same then as it is now.
“I heard Sir Osmond say, ‘Oh, ho
! So you think I kissed her, do you? Perhaps she told you that! You wouldn’t care to admit that she told you that?’
“Abraham didn’t answer for a minute, and I could see that Sir Osmond was strutting about as though he had said something that had fairly stumped the master. Then he stopped his strutting about and leaned against a tree, as careless as you like, so that I myself, though I didn’t know anything about it, could have stepped out and knocked him down.
“ ‘So, so!’ says he. ‘You can’t say that it was she who told you, which means that it was somebody else. It’s wrong of you to listen to tales, Abraham,’ he says, ‘especially to tales that don’t do credit to your own wife. Must I teach you the rules of common trustfulness?’ he says with a sneer. ‘Don’t you think your wife would have told you if I had attempted to kiss her? And why ask me to leave this charming place because of a mere rumour?’
“I saw the master take a step towards his one-time friend; and Sir Osmond straightened himself — I thought, rather quickly. ‘Nobody told me,’ cried the master. ‘I saw you with my own eyes — out here, before dinner. I know what I’m talking about,’ he says, ‘and I tell you to leave here to-night.’
“ ‘But you mustn’t say such things,’ said the other fellow, beginning again with his strutting about. ‘Think of the position. What will people say?’
“ ‘I don’t care what they say,’ says the master.
“Then Sir Osmond stopped. He was smiling now, so far as I could make out.
“ ‘Shall I tell you what they’ll say?’ he asked. ‘They’ll say that the young fellow Strange is making a sad fist at it — that he lost his first sweetheart and now he’s nearly lost his first wife.’
“At that the master fairly flew at him, and if his fist had landed where it was meant to land, Sir Osmond wouldn’t have had much to say for the rest of that night. But the master hadn’t any skill in that line, and all he did was to swing himself off his balance and send himself sprawling.
“I was ready then to run out and help him, but Sir Osmond simply stood still and watched the master pick himself up, and then he turned and walked towards the house. And in a minute the master followed him, running a few steps and then stopping, as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do.
“Nothing more was said that I could hear, and they both went into the house through the conservatory. And when I went into the drawing-room a few minutes later to say that this tenant fellow was waiting on the doorstep, the two of them were with the other guests and acting as if nothing had happened.
“That night Sir Osmond Garway was killed.
“His room was in the West Tower, just over the study — sixty feet up, as near as you might judge; and in the morning they found him lying on the gravel just outside the big dining-room. And to this day nobody knows what happened.
“There were stories going about, of course. Some said it was suicide on account of his wife being such a tartar, and some said that he must have been walking in his sleep and that his window happened to be wide open because of the mild weather and that he had scrambled through it in mistake. And it came out then that quite a lot of folks suspected something about his goings on with the master’s wife, and put two and two together.
“But I’m as sure that the master had nothing to do with it as I’m sure that there’s a God in heaven, for I knew the master as well as I knew myself, and he couldn’t do such a thing.
“He was real upset over it. He broke down before me the next day and cried like a baby. ‘Makepeace,’ says he, ‘I hated that man. May God forgive me I If I had known that this would happen maybe I should have had greater charity towards him.’
“I remember the very words, and I remember the way he cried. And I knew, anyway, that there was no evil in the master. But it wasn’t everybody who knew him as well as I knew him, and a heap was said that needn’t have been said.
“I never told a soul what I had heard; but now that you’re the master — ”
The rest of Makepeace’s words trailed away out of my consciousness. I could see that he was still speaking, because his lips were moving and his expression was changing with the current of his thoughts, but of what he was saying I knew nothing.
Then his expression became strangely fixed. He was looking steadily at me.
“What’s the matter, sir?” I heard him say then, and I saw him rise to his feet and come towards me.
“Nothing!” I protested, jumping up at the same time.
But almost immediately I collapsed into my chair again and sat, I suppose, dazedly, while Makepeace fussed about me.
My former periods of horror had been nothing to this. I had given to tragic events a grim enough significance, in all conscience, but at the back of my mind there had always existed a desire to account for the mysterious deaths by purely material explanations. I had tried to tell myself that coincidence might have played a large part in the affairs, that Christopher Knight might have been murdered by a panic-stricken burglar, and that my cousin had suddenly become insane and jumped to his death. And though these explanations did not in the least satisfy me — for feeling as well as reason made me look for explanations deeper than these — they were nevertheless present, and afforded some promise of escape from sheer insane horror. But Makepeace’s story destroyed once and for all any hope that I might ever have had of the relief that a commonplace elucidation of the mysteries would have brought me. The power that was active in my case was the same — I could not doubt it — as the power that had destroyed the enemy of my ancestor, Abraham Strange.
I told Makepeace just what had happened. He, of all men, was the safest confidant I could have. I told him about Christopher, and how I had desired his death for the few moments when I was under the influence of overwhelming jealousy, and how the death had taken place that same night. And I told him about Mick, and how he had taunted me and threatened to steal Sylvia, and how he had died the same night.
And the face of Makepeace grew whiter and whiter; and when I had finished and was sitting with my head in my hands, trying to grasp the fearful extent of all this, and wondering, I suppose, why I should be singled out from my fellows and set apart into a world of dark mystery, Makepeace came over and put his hand on my shoulder, his fingers clutching me and working nervously the while.
“Then it’s true!” he said, half to himself. “May God have mercy on us!”
“What is true?” I asked, looking up.
“The curse, or the ghost, or whatever it is that has caused so many queer things to happen in the family’s history. I used to think they were only old stories, but . . .”
Looking back on that night I wonder how I had the courage to go to bed. But I did go to bed eventually, compromising with my feelings by keeping the light in my bedroom burning all night. Yet even that did little to soothe my intensely sensitive imagination, and I lay awake for hours, reading in every slightest creak of a board the immediate manifestation of some lurking unseen presence.
Morning found me unrefreshed; and it was morning, with its mock relief of daylight, that made me realize that I should never be free of this haunting terror. Sixty years ago, and six months ago, and two days ago the power had asserted itself. It might spring again to-night or in twenty years’ time. I could never tell. And never being able to tell was, I thought, the most refined kind of mental torture.
But why should I be terror-stricken? I asked myself the question when I was in the midst of dressing and when the morning sun and the sounds of human activity had indeed pushed back the terrors of the night, I was almost a normal reasoning being again. At any rate, I was able to recollect that the unseen forces were working in my favour and that had nothing to be afraid of.
Pitiful attempt at self-deceit! As though the fact that my thoughts were being read by a ghostly presence was nothing to be afraid of!
CHAPTER IX
A Suspect
I
t was two or three mornings later that I found myself walking across the P
ark towards Lady Somerton’s residence.
I had taken to walking wherever I wanted to go. The uneasiness of my mind seemed to be relieved by exercise, and to tire myself out physically was the only way by which I could then ensure myself a night’s sleep. And even in those few days I was already benefiting from the unusual exercise: my thoughts were less morbid, and there was less of that atmosphere of horror with which my mind had invested even the common things of life.
And I thought: “It is a question of not dwelling upon the significance of all that has happened. A healthy body predisposes towards a healthy mind. How much greater will be the effect of the exercise of a strong will! My fears spring from my thoughts, and my thoughts are subject to my will. I can force myself to set morbid thoughts aside.”
It was then that I met the Professor.
He was coming over, he said, to see me. I told him that I was honoured, then he went on:
“I haven’t seen you since your cousin died, and I wanted to offer my sympathy. An ordinary death in a family is bad enough, but tragedy makes it so much worse. Were you surprised at the verdict?”
The Professor’s question took me on the hop. The truth was that I had not made myself acquainted with the result of the inquest. My mind had been so fully engaged on matters that were far beyond the scope of coroners that I had not even thought about the inquest. The inquest had been to me merely a formal affair, as the funeral would be merely a formal affair. It could have no bearing on the real cause that lay behind the death.
“No,” I said, ashamed of my ignorance and hoping to be able to cover it up, for no one who did not know the truth but would think it inhumanly callous of me not even to buy a newspaper to see what had happened. The fact was that I had not seen a newspaper for days. “But it’s very good of you, Professor,” I went on hurriedly, “to think of coming over to see me. I appreciate it very much.”