by A. C. Benson
‘Here we are,’ said Bendyshe. ‘It’s called the Manor-house, but it’s not my idea of a manor-house at all!’
Inside appeared a white-painted, marble-flagged hall, heavily panelled and pillared, with two mahogany doors on each side and a broad balustraded staircase ascending under an arch at the end. It was all a little bare. There were a few portraits and some solid Chippendale chairs. A venerable and portly butler met us.
‘Perhaps you would like to stroll round before you go and dress?’ said Bendyshe. ‘It’s a good thing to get one’s bearings clear at once.’
He showed me first a room to the left of the front door, a small dining-room panelled with dark oak. Here there were more portraits, and a fine Italian bust of a young man in red porphyry, evidently a masterpiece. The next room was a little library almost lined with books, with a big french window which opened on to the garden. ‘This is your room,’ said Bendyshe, ‘and you can have it entirely to yourself to work in. My own study is upstairs.’
The door to the right of the front door led to a smoking-room, a comfortable place with a few red leather arm-chairs and some old dark landscape pictures in oil. ‘This is everybody’s room,’ said Bendyshe. ‘That other door leads to the back regions; but now we’ll have a look at the garden.’
We went out through a door under the stairs. I could not restrain an exclamation of delight. We came out into a portico supported by pillars extending along the whole centre of the house, between two flanking shallow wings; it was paved with black-and-white marble, and furnished with some comfortable oak seats and tables.
The garden was not large, but beautifully designed. On each side it was walled, and shielded from intrusive eyes by a row on either hand of sycamores, fine old trees. The lawn was perfectly plain, but for a fine leaden statue of a youth with clasped hands looking upwards towards the house – a most enchanting piece of work. At the far end, sheltered by a low wall, was a great flower-border, blazing with colour; and as we drew near, I could see that the ground fell rapidly – to a tiny park with clumps of trees on either hand, and beyond, a magnificent view of a great green plain with low wooded ridges and blue shadowy hills to the right, while a mile or two to the left we could see a wide expanse of sea.
I said something feeble about the wonderful beauty of the place, and its magnificence.
‘Well, that’s rather a tall word,’ said Bendyshe. ‘It isn’t a big house really, and the domain extends to about fifty acres. But it is cleverly designed, and makes the best use of every inch of earth and sky.’
‘Has it been long in your family?’ I said.
‘No, indeed,’ said Bendyshe; ‘I bought it just as it stands, furniture and all, from the last member of an old family – the Faulkners – that had come to hopeless grief. It was in an awful state – the house almost ruinous, the park full of weeds and thorn bushes. No one would look at it. But I heard of it by what we call accident, just when I wanted a house, about fifteen years ago, and saw its possibilities. I got it very cheap, and I really have not spent much money upon it. But I have got uncommonly fond of it, and feel as if I had lived here all my life, and a little more.’
The light was beginning to fade as we went back to the house, which I found was all lit by electric light, carefully subdued and shaded. We went upstairs. There was a corridor above the hall, only not so wide, with three doors on either side, and one to the right, close to the head of the stairs; and these I must describe with some particularity.
The first door on the left as we came up – the staircase had turned round to the right, so that we were facing in the direction of the front door – led to two staircases, one going up to the attics and one descending to the offices. The second door on the left led to Bendyshe’s bedroom, a very bare place, with a press or two and a few books; then came a bathroom with a door from the bedroom, and opposite the door, another door led into Bendyshe’s study, which communicated with the corridor by what was the third door on the left. The study was entirely filled with books, had a big table covered with papers, and two very uncompromising oak writing-chairs. A room less luxurious I have seldom seen. It had no ornament but a single picture, a very beautiful portrait of a girl, fair-haired and blue-eyed, with an expression of the most perfect naturalness and simplicity, and full of animation and delight. The room had two windows, one looking out to the church, the other down towards the village.
We went out again into the corridor. The door opposite Bendyshe’s study was my bedroom, one window of which looked towards the church, and the other on the great sycamore by the corner of the house. A little bathroom was attached. The room was furnished with great comfort, and had some fine water-colours. Returning down the corridor, the two other doors opened into the bedrooms similar to mine, each with a bathroom, and at the end, close to the head of the stairs, the remaining door led into another bedroom, which looked out on to the garden. But this room was wholly unfurnished, just a bare-boarded, white-panelled place, with that peculiar and unpleasant staleness that develops in an unventilated sun-baked room.
‘I don’t like this room,’ said Bendyshe. ‘It was the room, to tell you the truth, in which the scoundrel from whose heirs I bought the property came to his miserable end. It’s a squalid story; and as for the room, well, I think there is something sinister about it. What do you feel? Yet it’s a pity not to use it, because it has the finest view in the house!’
‘I don’t know,’ said I; ‘I think that the best way to exorcise disagreeable associations is not to fasten things up, but to let in a new current of pleasant usage.’
‘Yes,’ said Bendyshe; ‘if I had children, I should make this their schoolroom – then it would be all right!’
An hour later we dined – a well-appointed meal, though a simple one, very promptly served.
‘I don’t know what you feel,’ he said to me, ‘but it always seems to me rather uncivilised to dawdle over food.’ He himself ate rapidly, but with appetite, and drank a glass or two of wine. After dinner we withdrew to the smoking-room. Bendyshe was in his familiar mood, full of little anecdotes and reminiscences. When we had established ourselves with coffee and cigars, he said, ‘Now let me first say how glad I am to see you here. I have a notion that we agree, more than perhaps appeared the other night, about that matter we spoke of; and I think you can help me very much, if you are disposed to do so. I think you are a fair-minded man and impartial. Would you mind telling me exactly where you stand? Or perhaps you are tired and would like to defer it? Tomorrow night, I ought to say, the parson, Fortescue by name, is coming to dine, a very interesting and remarkable man, so that if you would like to leave it alone, we must wait till the day after tomorrow – the evening is the only time to talk seriously about things.’
‘I should like to start at once,’ I said. ‘But tell me, what did you mean by saying I could be of use to you?’
‘Why,’ said Bendyshe, ‘living alone, as I do, and with but few people to talk things over with, one gets into a tangle. I generally have a visitor or two here, because solitude unadulterated is not a wholesome thing. But they are not the sort of people I can really talk to; and just now I have got hold of some new material – I am always collecting materials – and it doesn’t seem to fit in with my ideas. But the point is – how much and how little do you believe?’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘my position is a simple one. It’s all just a question of evidence. Any materials ought to be rigidly scrutinised – one mustn’t either accept or dismiss evidence summarily – and then one may begin to draw conclusions.’
‘Yes,’ said Bendyshe; ‘that’s very much what I believe. But it’s uncommonly hard to trace these psychical stories to their source. I have tried to unravel a good many, and it gives one a deplorable opinion of the value of human evidence. But,’ he went on, ‘before we begin, I must tell you in as few words as I can how I came to set to work. I don’t like to talk about it – it’s like tearing open an old wound – but I must make this plain. Some twenty-
five years ago I became engaged to a girl, the daughter of a parson; you saw her picture, perhaps, in my room. You must take it on trust from me that she was a wonderful creature, and gave me not only a new view of life, but something to live for.
‘We arranged everything. We were to have lived in London, and I was actually thinking of standing for Parliament, when just a month before our marriage she caught diphtheria and died within the week. I can’t tell you what an appalling catastrophe it was for me. It had seemed to me that her love was the one thing I had been waiting for all my life, the one thing that had given me a reason for living. You see, I was an only son, entirely trusted and indulged by my parents, and with plenty of money about and no motive for exerting myself.
‘The thing very nearly drove me mad. A week before she had been with me, answering every question I had asked of life, and giving me the very water of life to drink. And now she was gone without a word. The last time I saw her she didn’t even know me. She was in torture and half-unconscious. And there was nothing left, not a glance or a sign or the faintest message to me whom she loved best, or to any other human being – and there were many that loved her. It was so utterly unlike her, and yet there it was. Her parents were what is called “wonderful”. They had a strong religious faith, and it helped them through.’
Bendyshe stopped with a kind of gasp, gripped the arms of his chair, and abandoned himself for a minute to a paroxysm of misery. ‘It all comes over me again,’ he said. ‘Don’t look at me – I shall be all right in a minute.’
Presently he went on in a low voice: ‘I hardly know what I did. I travelled, I did some exploration, I courted death, but it never came near me. But I never had the smallest sense of contact with her, or even of any thought coming from beyond.
‘Then I came back and tried to occupy myself in many ways – what is called social service. But I’m a hopeless individualist, and I don’t care about my fellow-men simply as such, and I was taken in many times.
‘Then I started this work, and it began to seem to me the one thing worth doing – to find out, if I could, whether there was any possible contact with the spirits of the dead, whether they existed at all. I had all kinds of sickening experiences, but could find nothing definite.
‘And I never could cross the threshold, though I came to believe that, under certain obscure conditions, living minds could communicate direct with each other, apart from material agencies. And then the case seemed worse to me than ever, because it all seemed to depend upon material existence as a necessary condition.’
Then after a moment’s pause, he went on slowly and rather wearily:
‘And what makes things even worse is this. There are a good many stories of appearances which seem to have some element of truth about them but most of these are connected with horrible and tragic occurrences – crimes, murders, solitary imprisonments, as if (supposing for a moment the things to be true) it were a punishment of some kind to have to return to the earth and to re-enact the scenes of desperation and wickedness. And even the unhappy victims of such outrages seem condemned to the same fate; as if the only motive force that could bring one back were fear and indelible horror, reconstructing incidents which one would give anything to forget, but cannot.
‘If there were stories of spirits returning to earth to revive gratefully scenes of happiness and love, delightful experiences of youth and friendship and ingenuous aspiration, when the heart was full of hope and joy, it would be different; but no spirits ever seem to think of this. Are they ungrateful? Have they forgotten?’
‘Religious people would perhaps say,’ I said, ‘that the happiness of the farther world was so great, that a blest spirit would never care to return to these half-lit skies, and to the memory of joys that were always shadowed by some fear of loss and separation.’
‘But this is an utterly selfish and indifferent business,’ said Bendyshe. ‘We should despise it in a living human being. And even if it were so, have they no wish to comfort the hearts that ache with the memories of perished happiness? No; if the spirits of even the blest are so drugged and intoxicated with delight that they have no room for remembrance or tenderness, it is a more ghastly business still.’
We sat for a little while in silence. ‘I expect it’s about time to go to bed?’ he said. ‘I ought not to go on soliloquising like this.’ He escorted me to my room and said another friendly word about my visit, adding, ‘Breakfast at nine – please ask for anything you want. Hope you’ll sleep well; and you will find some good bedside-books there if you want them.’
I was soon in bed, and I fell asleep in a mood of pleasurable anticipation. This was going to be a novel experience, I felt sure, and Bendyshe’s theories interested me; and almost immediately, so it seemed, I woke from a dreamless sleep, with old Bartlett the butler in my room, coughing deferentially, and asking if I would have a cup of tea, and whether I would have a hot or cold bath, and if there was anything else I required.
That morning at breakfast I found Bendyshe in a cheerful and eminently commonplace mood. He told me stories about the village and the people and the countryside. I asked some questions about one of the portraits, an old, rugged-looking man with prominent eyes and upstanding hair.
‘“What the dickens!” I call him,’ said Bendyshe, smiling. ‘But we’ll leave all that to the Vicar, who is coming to dinner this evening – he knows far more about the house and the family than I do. He has been here thirty years – in fact his wife, now dead, was connected in some way with the Faulkners.’
After breakfast I went off to do some writing, but I did very little, and my mind ran with curious persistency on what Bendyshe had told me on the previous night. He did not look like a man who had ever had a great shock or passed through tragic experiences; indeed, his preoccupation with psychical matters seemed to me still a little unaccountable, and inconsistent with the fact that he evidently lived a busy and active life, and took a considerable share in local business.
He came and fetched me out about noon, and we strolled to the church and village. He had a word for all the people he met; he called the boys and girls by their Christian names; his hat went off to any woman. We met an old man hobbling along with two sticks.
‘Why, Mr Barry,’ said Bendyshe, ‘I’m glad to see you about again. Feeling better? You look quite your old self again.’
‘Thank you kindly, sir – yes, I’m better, Mr Bendyshe, but feeling powerful giddy at times!’
‘Ah, that’ll soon pass off in the open air,’ said Bendyshe. ‘Now, shall I step in this evening for a bit of gossip, Mr Barry? I always get the news of the place from you. Hartley, this is Mr Barry; I call him the father of the place. He will be a hundred and one years old in January next – isn’t that so?’
Mr Barry chuckled. ‘Don’t you believe Mr Bendyshe, sir,’ he said to me with a smile. ‘He will have his joke; ’tis only eighty-eight I am, last Febbery!’
So Bendyshe went on – but not for a moment did it seem an assumed heartiness, rather the natural overflowing of a neighbourly geniality; while a word of sympathy which he said to an old lady in rusty black was both tender and straightforward. With the children he was entirely delightful, with mysterious jests and allusions.
I said something about this. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘a child likes to share a secret with a grown-up person, a secret which no one else knows. I’m not sure we don’t all like it,’ he added with a smile; ‘a secret’s rather an explosive thing.’ We went to the church, a fine, ancient place which had evidently been carefully restored; one aisle was full of monuments to the Faulkner family, from a knight in armour in a canopied niche to a weeping nymph by Chantrey. ‘Fancy throwing away an inheritance like that,’ he said, as we looked at the old tombs; ‘but the whole history of the family is a steady process of climbing down. I’ll show you the remains of their old mansion, about half a mile away, one of these days. The Vicar thinks it is the doom of sacrilege, but that’s rather too business-like a view for me!’
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I grew more astonished as the day went on to find the polite and solitary diner-out transformed here into so bustling and genial a squire. I could not fit the puzzle together; and still less did he seem to me a man who carried about, hidden in his mind, so strange and haunting an aspiration.
In the afternoon it was very hot; we went round the house and looked at the portraits. They were not particularly good, but the family likeness was strong; and the picture of the last of the Faulkner race, as a boy of sixteen, was a graceful and beautiful thing. It represented him in riding-dress standing beside a pony, slender, blue-eyed and light-haired, with a gentle, rather wistful expression. Next to the picture was one of his mother – a woman of rare beauty and charm – and a rather commonplace portrait on the other side of his father, a burly country squire.
‘It’s all rather an enigma,’ said Bendyshe, looking thoughtfully at the portraits. ‘Up till that time, you see, they had been very ordinary people, moderately prosperous, but not very successful, and quite unadventurous. There doesn’t seem to have been a single instance of a man of any eminence among them, not even a soldier or a bishop. One of them was an M.P., but unseated for bribery. And then just when a strain of beauty comes into the family and a touch of romance, that minute the devil comes too. It looks as if there was something in the old idea of Nemesis, as if the way to be happy was not to attract the attention of the powers above. That pretty woman was an heiress, and the boy was born wealthy; and he was certainly charming, and I believe clever too – the Vicar shall tell us all about him this evening.’